Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "Anti-Slavery Patrols - The West Africa Squadron" video.

@alganhar1 Which is why post-WW1 it was was primarily the under-equipped French and Italian navies that incorporated ex-German ships into their fleets. In 1918, both of their navies had a grand total of zero light cruisers, so they used seized German ones until they could build their own. They were both absolutely planning to incorporate any modern battleships and battlecruisers they could obtain from the High Seas Fleet into their navies as well, if not for Admiral Reuter taking that option away from them. (Though it turns out that Italy could barely afford to operate even the battleships they already had.) The complexity and expense of refitting foreign ships in the modern era is why we didn't see an "HMS Baden" in Royal Navy service through WW2, even though SMS Baden was clearly superior to the R-class battleships and even had some advantages over the Queen Elizabeth-class. I suspect that the way France would've dealt with this if they'd managed to seize all the German ships they wanted in 1918 would've been...just standardizing on German equipment. Given the aforementioned complete lack of light cruisers and the superiority of the König, Derfflinger, and Bayern classes to France's Bretagne-class, the captured German ships would've been staying in service longer than the existing French-built ones.
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