Following the defection of French forces in the region to the Allied side, the French attempted to have the ship completed in the United States. They submitted proposals to complete the vessel to modified designs, including one with as many as thirty-four /38 caliber dual-purpose guns for use as an anti-aircraft battleship, but the requests came to nothing as the US Navy had no interest in the project. By that stage of the war, the American and British fleets had a more than sufficient number of modern battleships for their purposes, and the American shipyards available would not have been able to manufacture the necessary parts. "Jean Bart" was accordingly repaired as much as possible in Casablanca, though this work was hampered by the fact that French shipyards were either still under German occupation or had been wrecked during the war. Nevertheless, shipyard workers had repaired her hull damage by September 1943, and she spent the rest of the war as a training ship in the Mediterranean Sea.