French aircraft carrier Arromanches
1943 Colossus-class light aircraft carrier
Arromanches (French pronunciation: [aʁɔmɑ̃ʃ]; R95) was an aircraft carrier of the French Navy, which served from 1946 to 1974. She was previously HMS Colossus (15) of the Royal Navy. She was the name-ship of the Colossus class of light carriers. She was commissioned in 1944, but did not see any action in World War II. She served with the British Pacific Fleet in 1945–46, as an aircraft transport and repatriation ship.
In 1946, she was loaned to the French Navy, and renamed Arromanches; she was bought by the French in 1951.
Arromanches participated in the First Indochina War in four campaigns from 1948 to 1954, and the Suez Crisis of 1956. In 1968 she was converted to an anti-submarine warfare (ASW) carrier. She was decommissioned in 1974, and broken up in 1978.
Design and construction
The Colossus class was designed to meet the Royal Navy's wartime need for more carriers as cheaply as possible. They were built to mercantile standards, with no armour, no heavy AA guns, and only 25 kn (46 km/h) speed.
The public source identifies “French aircraft carrier Arromanches” as 1943 Colossus-class light aircraft carrier. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around French, aircraft and carrier.
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This entry incorporates text from “French aircraft carrier Arromanches” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.