damage to the unarmored superstructures of the Russian warships. As a result, the navy decided to adopt a heavier secondary battery than the preceding Libertés, but decided against following many other major navies then building "all-big-gun" battleships. The naval command determined that replacing the planned guns with single 305 mm guns would have increased displacement over the limit and reduced the rate of fire. The navy did introduce a new, longer 45-cal. version of the 305 mm gun, the Modèle 1906 type. Pressure from Parliament to keep technological pace with foreign navies led the designers to adopt steam turbines, the first time they were used in French capital ships. The navy had initially intended to build three ships as the first stage of the program, but delays during the design process led to the authorization of six ships to account for the slowdown. After entering service in 1911, all six ships were assigned to the 1st Battle Squadron, where they remained until the outbreak of World War I. Like the rest of the fleet, they escorted convoys from North Africa at the start of the war and then went to the Adriatic, seeing action at the Battle of Antivari, with the exception of , which was being refitted in Toulon at the time. The six Dantons remained based at Corfu and Malta for much of the war to blockade the Austro-Hungarian fleet. During this period, portions of the ships' crews were stripped to provide men for anti-submarine warships to combat the German and Austro-Hungarian U-boats; combined with coal shortages that curtailed operations, the reduction in crews led to crippling morale problems for the fleet. In March 1917, was sunk by a German U-boat. After the war, the surviving ships participated in the intervention in Russia in 1919 and Mirabeau was damaged after running aground off the Crimea; she was never repaired and was eventually broken up. The other vessels were modernized in the early 1920s, with the exception of , which was in poor condition. They continued on in secondary roles into the 1930s, and remained in use as a depot ship until 1942, when she was captured by German forces in Toulon, ultimately being bombed and sunk in 1944. Dreadnought battleships Courbet class The French naval command had become convinced by 1909 that the so-called dreadnought battleships were superior to the mixed-battery ships like the Dantons, and so the