Aininian battleship Bonaventure (73)

File:Battleship Richelieu.jpg Bonaventure in the harbour of Port Harold, Concordia, in 1978
History
File:Anavy.pngAinin
Name:	Bonaventure
Namesake:	General Henri Bonaventure, Aininian Revolution hero
Ordered:	18 September 1933
Builder:	Aininian Southern Yards
Laid down:	8 June 1936
Launched:	2 May 1939
Commissioned:	2 February 1940
Decommissioned:	2 May 1983
Struck:	19 August 1990
Honours and awards:	Second Great War Home Islands x 1 West Notasia x 1 East Namor Sea x 1 Chorea x 1 Pacification of Notasia St. Martin x 1 Mont-Samuel x 1 Notasian War of Independence Iberville x 1 Damienville x 1 Concordian War Defence of Concordia x 1 Notasian Sea x 1 Western Campaign x 1
Status:	Museum ship in Iberville
Notes:	Last battleship to be retired in the Aininian Navy
General characteristics
Class and type:	Marlane-la-Prairie-class battleship
Displacement:	35,000 tons
Length:	253.2 m
Beam:	33 m
Draught:	9.8 m
Propulsion:	195,000 hp
Speed:	30 knots
Range:	8,700 km
Complement:	1,850 crew 180 Naval Fusiliers
Sensors and processing systems:	Second Great War: Mk. 3 Radar Concordian War: "Ark" C12 PESA radar Chaff launchers Sonar decoy emitter Temporary flare launchers
Electronic warfare & decoys:	CWA-2(3) electronic countermeasures suite
Armament:	8 x 356mm Mk. 21 naval gun 9 × 152 mm Mk. 30 light naval gun 10 x 100 mm anti-aircraft artillery (removed in 1955) 10 x 100 mm naval gun (after 1955) 48 x 40 mm anti-aircraft artillery (removed by 1966) 60 x 20 mm anti-aircraft artillery (reduced to 20 by 1962) 22 x FMS-2 anti-ship/aircraft missile launchers (after 1962)
Armour:	Belt: 330 mm Decks: An average of 90 mm Turrets: 450 mm
Aircraft carried:	4 x SAE B22 flying boats (until 1949) 2 x ACHS-11 anti-submarine helicopters (after 1966)
Aviation facilities:	Aircraft catapult (removed 1951) and hangar

Bonaventure is an Aininian Navy Marlane-la-Prairie-class battleship, and the last Aininian battleship to be retired. Along with its sisters ships Marlane-la-Prairie, Péladreau, Jean des Bois and Descieux, it provided the Aininian Navy with its most potent firepower platform, on the hull of one of the largest warships in history. It was originally designed as a flagship for major fleet engagements, but found itself engaged mostly in naval gunfire support as it grew increasingly obsolescent for its originally intended task due to the rise of the aircraft carrier-focused postwar navy.

Ordered in 1931 by the Aininian Navy Supreme Command in response to the perceived threat of Chorean naval supremacy in the Great Esquarian Ocean, the Bonaventure was designed with heavy firepower. Its large size and lack of aft main guns made it a very unconventional design at the time. After the Second Great War broke out in 1939, the battleship was assigned to escort merchant ships to deter action by the combatants. The Huimont incident in 1941 led to Ainin's entry into the war, and the Bonaventure was assigned to the Aininian Home Fleet and engaged in several major confrontations with the Chorean Navy. It was reassigned to the Aininian Southern Fleet in 1943, when it provided fire support while Aininian troops invaded the collaborationist Sultanate of West Nautarya in order to curb the oil supply to Chorea in the West Nautaryan Campaign. For the rest of the war, it played minor support roles in small-scale landings, and ended the war patrolling the East Namor Sea.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Bonaventure went through extensive refits, removing many of the 1930s-era equipment and replacing them with modern electronics and cruise missiles. It engaged in several international tours but was not involved in any armed conflicts. In 1965, after the Nautaryan Revolution, it provided fire support to the defenders of Desert Bay from attacking revolutionaries. The city and the peninsula of Concordia were retained by Ainin after the brief conflict, but irredentist elements in the First Nautaryan Republic resolved to invade Concordia in 1969, crossing the Radisson Line separating Aininian Concordia and Nautarya. The ship provided fire support during the Forest Evacuation, when over 2,000 soldiers of the local garrison were evacuated by small boat after Concordia fell to an overwhelming Nautaryan surprise attack. Over the course of the next year, the ship was part of a major task force that destroyed the Nautaryan Navy in the Battle of the Nautaryan Sea and then continued providing fire support in many battles, including landings at Port-Harold and Desert Bay.

The Bonaventure was retired in 1983, due to the increasingly old ship's rapidly rising maintenance costs that the Aininian government could ill-afford in the aftermath of the Recession of 1980. The decision was controversial and marked the final end of the battleship era for Ainin.

History

Concept and early career

Bonaventure was born out of discussions at the Aininian Navy Supreme Command in 1930 and 31 as the Chorean Navy increased in size and technology significantly and its irredentist claims over Namor became of major concern to Ainin. The Marlane-la-Prairie-class battleship was created to match the strongest Chorean battleships in terms of firepower and provided a major weapon for use in achieving victory in a "decisive naval battle" advocated by many of the leading naval officers of the time. Ordered in 1933, the ship was built over the next years and was commissioned in February of 1940, just as the war in Namor was escalating and Aininian-Chorean relations collapsed after a string of warship attacks against neutral Aininian shipping.

A Chorean torpedo boat similar to the one that damaged Bonaventure in 1942

Second Great War

On 21 September 1941, a Chorean submarine sunk the destroyer Huimont with all hands in the Forestia Incident that finally tipped the scales in the National Assembly of Ainin towards the pro-war side. The battleship was assigned to the Home Fleet's Northern Sea Squadron, where it hunted for Chorean ships and submarines for most of the winter of 1942. It sunk an auxiliary cruiser and a small barge in February in quick engagements, and was involved in tracking a Chorean battlecruiser that sunk several Allied merchant convoys during the past season. In March of 1942, a Chorean torpedo boat, No. 3411, scored a hit on the Bonaventure after it erred too close to the Namorese coast. No casualties were reported onboard, but the ship had to go to port for repairs to a boiler room for a month.

During this time, the Bonaventure missed the major Battle of the Western Approaches, in which the Home Fleet won a major victory against a Chorean force attempting to head west towards the Central Ocean. The battle, as well as two smaller engagements later in the year during the Action of 8 June and the Battle of the Strait of Peitoa, in which battleships performed very ineffectively against carrier air groups. The major Battle of the Daniel Trench in October 1942 sealed the fate of battleships and battlecruisers in Ainin's naval doctrine, and by January 1943, Bonaventure had been relegated to air defence duties in the Home Islands. She miraculously ended 1942 without any significant damage and no casualties amongst her crew, even as two of her sister ships and four other battleships and battlecruisers were sunk or severely damaged during the year.

The Bonaventure participating in the Battle of the Strait of Peitoa

On February 6, 1943, the Parliament of Ainin declared war on the Sultanate of West Nautarya due to its continued sale of petroleum products to Chorea and its harbouring of enemy spies and saboteurs. The Bonaventure was transferred to the Southern Fleet, where she became the flagship of Admiral Jean-Pierre Desjardins and led a large armada in bombarding shore targets in the country and blockading it to prevent further Chorean supplies from passing through. The Sultanate surrendered on October 22, 1943, and was annexed by the Aininian Republic as the territorial collectivity of Lesser Notasia (later West Notasia).

The Bonaventure spent the rest of the war as an air defence and convoy-hunting platform. With the advent of carrier warfare and an end to the golden era of battleships, she played no further role in any of the decisive naval battles of the war. In 1944, while serving as a floating anti-aircraft platform off Hibourg, Ponant, she came under attack by a Chorean submarine, No. 221, but the torpedoes all missed and the submarine was sunk by the warship's 100mm anti-aircraft fire. This was the only submarine to be sunk by a battleship in recorded history.

Modernisation and refit

After the end of the Second Great War, the Bonaventure was sent to Saint-Martin, capital of the Aininian province of East Notasia, in response to bread riots that developed over the fall of 1945 due to a bad harvest and the continued use of wartime powers to expropriate farmers' crops for use in Metropolitan Ainin. These riots, fuelled by a sense of injustice and mistreatment, soon escalated into a full-blown rebellion in the shantytowns of Saint-Martin by January 1946. After clashes with the Aininian Army left several dozen dead, the provincial army commander ordered the Bonaventure to shell the restless neighbourhoods on 23 January 1946, now known as Red Wednesday. The warship's high-explosive shells were very effective against the armed gunmen, but also caused immense collateral damage and fuelled fires that ravaged the straw, paper and mud houses of the city's districts, killing over 2,500, largely poor black citizens, by 28 January when the flames were brought under control.

The heavy-handed acts sent outrage through the province and by February 8, 21 of the province's 67 prefectures were under control of armed rebels of the Nautaryan Liberation Front (NLF) and 13 more, including the capital, saw gunfights between rebels and police forces backed by soldiers. In the resulting Notasian Desert War, the Bonaventure continued providing fire support to Aininian and colonial troops as they retook the cities from the rebels. The NLF surrendered on May 9, 1948, after a prolonged rebellion that caused immense destruction in East Notasia and over 44,000 deaths.

The Bonaventure went on several international goodwill cruises during the late 1940s and early 50s, and went into dry-dock in 1952 for an extensive upgrade that saw the removal of a lot of SGW-era equipment and the installation of modern electronics and more potent weapons systems. Constant revision of the design by the Navy and politicians led to the ship being stuck in port until 1958, when works were finally complete on a new radar and fire director and a complete overhaul of the ship's armaments. The ship was equipped with early cruise missiles in 1962 and had its electronics entirely upgraded in 1966 and 1967.

In 1965, a wave of youth anger in both East and West Notasia emerged and spread "like wildfire". Protesters filled the streets in all but 11 of the 107 prefectures in Aininian Notasia. On 2 May 1965, a gunman attacked the Independence Day parade with an automatic rifle, killing 5 soldiers and causing a massive city-wide manhunt for the killer and a curfew to be declared. The protesters, mostly peaceful so far, refused to obey the curfew and clashed with riot police into the night. The protesters across the two Aininian regions stormed into armouries and government offices, taking them over. On 1 June 1965, protest leader Bashir Rawleh declared independence from Ainin and the protesters took up arms against Aininian forces. By October of the year, government forces only held the major coastal cities and the interior was under the firm control of the rebels.

On 9 December 1965, a group of 150 rebels sneaked past the Aininian lines into Iberville and broke into the Iberville Arsenal, hoping to cause major damage to the Aininian military forces by destroying the supply lines into the city. Expecting little resistance, they instead found the Bonaventure docked in port. The warship's crew used its heavy anti-aircraft guns to rout the attackers. After a three-minute battle, 62 attackers were dead and the rest captured, at the cost of a tugboat accidentally sunk by ricocheting artillery shells with no casualties onboard.

File:Richelieu 2.jpg

The Bonaventure off Fort-Henri shortly after the town's liberation

The battleship then shelled enemy positions in Damienville to prevent the local garrison, besieged and cut off, from being overrun, and thwarted several attempts by rebel torpedo boats to attack it. However, it was in vain as the next day, the city's garrison surrendered. The ship's deployment in Nautarya ended in December when the Aininian government signed a peace treaty with the Nautaryans. Iberville and Concordia remained in Aininian hands, while the rest of the Nautaryas became the Republic of Nautarya.

Concordian War

The tenuous peace reached after the Nautaryan Revolution did not last. The Nautaryan government referred to Concordia and Iberville as the "lost provinces" and maintained an irredentist policy that advocated reunification of the "last vestiges of Aininian imperialism" with Nautarya. On 7 March 1969, Nautaryan troops crossed into Concordia and garrisons in the territory quickly fell in rapid succession.

Description

The aft anti-aircraft armaments on the Bonaventure as they appeared in 1944

Commanders

Capt. Samuel Enstate 1940-1943
Lt. (Acting Capt.) Alexander Johnson Lewis 1943-1945
Capt. Henri Matiz 1945-1946
Capt. Marc de Finistère 1946-1952
Capt. Frédéric Cézanne 1952-1966
Capt. Markus Alessandro 1966-1970
Lt. (Acting Capt.) Vincent Clément 1970
Capt. Markus Alessandro 1970-1973
Capt. Georges Phillippe Ras 1973-1979
Capt. Luc Sayd 1979-1983

Proposals for Recommissioning

The retirement of the Bonaventure, the most potent naval artillery platform in the Aininian arsenal, has been controversial. Many of its defenders point to the fact that there lacks an adequate platform for shore bombardment in the Aininian Navy, while critics point out that cruise missiles have replaced naval artillery as the main fire support weapon, and that a renovated Bonaventure would be financially crippling. A report by the University of Tourres estimated that the cost of recommissioning, refurbishing and modernising the warship would be in the billions and that maintenance would cause a recommissioned Bonaventure to cost more than the operation of an entire carrier battle group within a decade. The far-right National Alliance has made it a key policy component to recommission the Bonaventure and controversially plans on using it to patrol the Nautaryan Sea in order to intercept the illegal immigrants coming from Nautasia.

Recommissioning the ship has occasionally resurfaced as a political issue, but nothing has ever come out of it. A 2013 survey showed that over 65% of Aininians believe that battleships were no longer relevant in the 21st century and that less than 10% of people support recommissioning the ship.