French warships and the threat of Sea Lion

After another refit, Revenge supplied boarding parties to seize French vessels while her guns remained deliberately unready, reducing the chance that a misunderstanding would become a firefight. Keeping those ships from Vichy control mattered because the Marine Nationale could have delivered Germany its largest single increase in surface firepower. Germany could not sustain a balanced navy while the army and Luftwaffe held higher industrial priority. Revenge then served under Western Command against Operation Sea Lion. In this assessment, even one old battleship would have posed a devastating problem for improvised German invasion shipping and the pre-dreadnought hulks proposed to protect it.