boilers disabled. The ship transferred three of her 75 mm AA guns to the naval base in June. She may have also transferred her forward 155 mm guns to the base around this time. The Vichy Government ordered that the ships in the Antilles be sabotaged on 5 May, but Robert procrastinated following the order, despite reiterations on 12 and 19 May. That day the carrier was run aground near the entrance to the port; one compartment flooded when the hull was pierced by wreckage. On 15 June, Béarn was reduced to special reserve. Robert ordered her propulsion machinery compartments flooded on 3 July as a further act of sabotage, but this likely would have caused her to capsize so the turbines and boilers were filled half-full of seawater. When her aircraft were surveyed in June, 27 Stinsons and 10 Curtis Hawks were still serviceable for service in North Africa. The French Antilles joined the Free French when the destroyer arrived in Martinique on 14 July. Béarn was refloated on 8 September, after she had been pillaged of equipment by the other units based in Martinique, although one dynamo and a steering motor were refurbished to facilitate her tow to Puerto Rico that began on 27 September and ended three days later when she arrived at Ensenada Honda. The next several months were spent refurbishing her propulsion machinery and electrical equipment. The carrier began post-refit trials on 17 November, but they were unsuccessful as she had to be towed back to the dockyard. After repairs and further testing, Béarn steamed to the Todd Shipyards facility in New Orleans, Louisiana, arriving on 3 December. Given her age and limitations, the French did not wish to begin a long and costly conversion into an escort carrier, but settled for a faster and cheaper conversion into an aircraft transport. Shortages of materials, skilled labor and the difficulties of working with French equipment caused the conversion to take much longer than expected. By May virtually all of the propulsion and auxiliary machinery had been removed to be overhauled with the shipyard expecting all of the work to be completed by 1 September 1944. The did not believe that estimate; its concerns were borne out when a more realistic estimate of 15 December was made on 20 June. Even that date was missed by several weeks as work finally ceased on 30 December. One of