Vita Brevis:
The Short Life and Sudden End of the
French Battleship Danton (1909 - 1917)
The Danton in the Mediterranean. The panels of the ship's armor belt stand out clearly in this postcard photo, in part because of the retouch artist's attentions. Click here to enlarge picture.
The Danton in the Mediterranean. The panels of the ship's armor belt stand out clearly in this postcard photo, in part because of the retouch artist's attentions. Click here to enlarge picture.
In all the long history of the French Navy to 1913, no mighter warship sailed under the Tricolor than the Danton. The largest battleship in the French fleet -- by a wide margin -- when built, she boasted eight big gun turrets, five funnels, and state-of-the-art turbine engines. With her 923-man crew and commodious coal bunkers, she had a cruising radius of 3,370 nautical miles at 10 kts, while her advanced water-tube boilers and four Parsons-type turbines could maintain a top speed of 19.2 knots. Greater speeds might have been attained had the ship been less well-protected, but a prodigious armor coat made her a far heavier mass to move. Her Krupp Cemented (KC) type armor averaged between 270-300 mm in thickness (10.7"-12") on hull, bridge, and turrets. Over all, the 146.6-meter vessel displaced 18,310 tons in standard trim.
For an enlarged plan, click here.
Specifications for the Danton:
Dimensions: 481' x 84'6" x 27'6" (146.6m x 25.8m x 8.2m) Displacement: 18,310 tons std; 19,763 deep-laden. Armament: (4) 12"/45 cal. (305mm), (12) 9.4"/45 (250mm), (16) 3"/65 (75mm), and (10) 2" (47mm) guns; (2) 18" (450mm) torpedo tubes. KC Armor: 200-270mm (8"-10.7") belt, 320mm (12.64") turret faces, 225mm (9") 9.4" turrets, 280mm (11") barbettes, 300mm (12") conning tower, 75mm (3") deck, 45mm splinter deck. Propulsion: (26) Belleville water-tube boilers. (4) FC Med (Parsons type) turbine engines, 22,500 SHP, shafted to quad screw; 19 kts. Endurance: 3,370 nm at 10 kts (5800 km @ 185 km/hr). Crew: 923.
Ships in Class: Danton · Condorcet · Diderot · Mirabeau · Vergniaud · Voltaire
Dimensions: 481' x 84'6" x 27'6" (146.6m x 25.8m x 8.2m) Displacement: 18,310 tons std; 19,763 deep-laden. Armament: (4) 12"/45 cal. (305mm), (12) 9.4"/45 (250mm), (16) 3"/65 (75mm), and (10) 2" (47mm) guns; (2) 18" (450mm) torpedo tubes. KC Armor: 200-270mm (8"-10.7") belt, 320mm (12.64") turret faces, 225mm (9") 9.4" turrets, 280mm (11") barbettes, 300mm (12") conning tower, 75mm (3") deck, 45mm splinter deck. Propulsion: (26) Belleville water-tube boilers. (4) FC Med (Parsons type) turbine engines, 22,500 SHP, shafted to quad screw; 19 kts. Endurance: 3,370 nm at 10 kts (5800 km @ 185 km/hr). Crew: 923.
Ships in Class: Danton · Condorcet · Diderot · Mirabeau · Vergniaud · Voltaire
Statistically, this ship was comparable to HMS Dreadnought of 1906 in every respect but one: armament. Like most battleships since the late 1880s, Danton carried only four 305mm (12in) guns, whereas the Dreadnought mounted ten. Danton took a less radical approach, bristling with large numbers of secondary guns instead of increasing the 12in arsenal. Nonetheless, she marked a huge technological leap for the somewhat backward French navy. Her sides were studded with 9.4in guns, twelve of them in 6 twin turrets. Ships with this type of mixed armament were called "semi-dreadnoughts" in their brief heyday (roughly 1902-1912). In fact, although they were hard-hitting combatants during the Great War, semi-dreadnoughts were already considered an evolutionary dead end before hostilities broke out. The world's navies voted with their cheque books, and they voted overwhelmingly for dreadnoughts (at right, a British dreadnought squadron on patrol in the North Sea). The French admiralty had bet heavily on the semi-dreadnoughts, tying up all of its available building facilities with Danton and her five sister ships at precisely the time dreadnought fever swept Europe, 1908-1912. France therefore did not commission her first dreadnought until 1913 -- seven years after the British prototype debuted. It was no coincidence that this was also 4 years after Danton's launch, for it took the French almost exactly 4 years to construct a battleship at this time, a marked improvement over the typical 6-to-10-year build times of French yards in the preceding 25 years. (British yards of 1900 could turn one out in 2-3 years although, to prove a point, the Dreadnought was completed in a year and a day.)
But to return to Danton. The ship was named for Georges-Jacques Danton, a leading radical in the French Revolution, an orator who swayed the crowds with his fiery speeches, and who became one of the all-powerful Committee on Safety during the Terror. He was among the last of the inner circle to be accused of treason and sent the guillotine as the Left revolution imploded. As its leading lights were extinguished one by one, the far-Left faction was discredited, paving the way for counterrevolution and the Right dictatorship of Napoléon. But the French Republic was more firmly established by the time the Danton was laid down in 1908 at l'Arsenal de Brest. In 1909 the scheduled launch was disrupted by protesting socialists; however the hull was safely committed to the waves on July 4, 1909. Danton was commissioned in 1911, the lead ship of her class of 6.
A week after she was completed, Danton was sent to represent France at the coronation of George V in Great Britain. Feelings between the two countries had warmed considerably, thanks in part to the personal diplomacy of the late King Edward VII, and in part to the common fear of Germany which had made them alliance partners. Upon her return to France, Danton was assigned to the First Battleship Squadron, France's strongest naval force, along with her sister ships. While cruising off Hyères in the Mediterranean in 1913, Danton suffered an explosion in one of her gun turrets, killing three and wounding several more. As war clouds loomed over the Continent, the dreadnoughts Courbet and Jean Bart joined the Escadre at Toulon, the French navy's principal base, located just southeast of Marseille on the Mediterranean.
Danton served in World War I in the French Mediterranean Fleet, escorting French troop and supply ships crossing from Algeria to Marseille. The main threat of attack came from the well-equipped Austro-Hungarian navy. Danton and her sisters also served as a deterrant to the ex-German battlecruiser Yavuz (ex-Goeben), now based at Constantinople. Although the Allies were staging their biggest amphibious operation of the entire war at nearby Gallipoli, the mighty ex-German made only one brief foray into the eastern Mediterranean after August 1914, though interestingly it was airplanes, not warships, that drove her back into the Dardanelles on that occasion (January 1918). Meanwhile, in a seldom-remembered episode, France forced the pro-German government of Greece from power and brought Greece in on the side of the Allies. Four of the Dantons led by the super-dreadnought Provence appeared off Athens in December 1916 in a demonstration of power, threatening to bombard the city and actually seizing the Greek fleet, whose vessels were commissioned temporarily in the French navy for antisubmarine work. They reverted to Greek control in 1918 and operated with the Allies during the closing phase of the Great War and the foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War. Greek cruisers operated with British, French, and White units in the Black Sea theatre until the Whites were driven out in the fall of 1919.
One of the major tasks of the French Navy in WWI was to keep the Austro-Hungarian war fleet bottled up in the Adriatic, where their bases dotted the rocky western shore all the way to Trieste at the sea's northern limit. A severe coal shortage accomplished much of this task for the Allies, but diesel-burning submarines were unaffected by the coal shortage and attempted to slip in and out until the very end of the conflict. The Austrians had a base at Durazzo (Durrës), 114 mi north of the straits (175 km) in Albania, and their main U-boat base was at Cattaro (Kotor), another 75 mi (135 km) up the Adriatic. In addition, Austria provided basing for German U-boats at Cattaro and Pola, their main naval base. The Central Powers' submarines compiled an impressive record of kills in the Med, including the French armored cruisers Léon Gambetta and Amiral Charner and the pre-dreadnought battleships Gaulois and Suffren, all from torpedo attacks. They seriously damaged the dreadnought Jean Bart by the same means, but the ship made port and later emerged to fight again.
The Otranto Straits were too deep, their tides too powerful to rig permanent submarine nets across the entire opening. The Allies attempted to block passage by means of the Otranto Barrage. A massive belt of minefields, nets, and hundreds of small anchored vessels (one line of destroyers and two of North Sea and Canadian drift-net trawlers commandeered for wartime duty), the barrage stretched clear across the 62-mile strait between Otranto and Corfu (a width equivalent to 100 km). As in the British blockade of France during the Napoleonic Wars, the crewmen remained on station month in, month out, sometimes in the most appalling conditions. Although the barrage was effective against surface craft, submarines routinely broke through the obstructions to prowl the Mediterranean.
France's forward base for the watch on the Otranto straits was on the Greek island of Corfu at the barrage's eastern end. The war had ground on for 2¼ long, dispiriting years when the Danton was ordered to refit at Toulon during the winter of 1916-17.
Renewed and refurbished, she was despatched back to Corfu for another tour of duty in March 1917. More than 150 fresh crewmen destined for the other French ships at Corfu were embarked for the three-day voyage out, so the battleship was packed with 1,102 seamen. As in all wartime passages, the ship and her escort -- the destroyer Masue ("Cudgel") -- were blacked out and steering a zigzag course to confound any shadowing submarines. Just after noon on March 19, 1917, they reached the end of the southward leg, roughly 22 miles off Cape Spartivento, at the southwest corner of Sardinia. At 1 p.m. they altered course eastward to steer for Cape Passero at the tip of Sicily. From there they would jog northwards for Corfu. Danton was about one-third of the way to her destination. But already she was being shadowed by the German submarine U-64.
No periscope was sighted by the French ships. Their first warning was the lookout's hail announcing incoming torpedoes, two of which struck the Danton's port bow at 1305 hours. At first Danton maintained course, her men held at battle stations; but as the battleship assumed a heavy list to port, Capt. Delage ordered her starboard turrets trained outboard to counterbalance the water rushing in on the other side and delay the sinking. Meanwhile, immediately after the torpedoing, the Masue sighted their assailant when U-64 momentarily lost her trim and pitched her bow through the surface. The destroyer mounted a furious depth-charge attack, but Kapitänleutnant Robert Morah quickly regained control of his vessel, crash-dived and beat a safe retreat; whereupon Masue returned to evacuate people from the sloping decks of the Danton. Italian patrol boats, too, were hurrying to the scene to assist in the rescue.
Statistically, this ship was comparable to HMS Dreadnought of 1906 in every respect but one: armament. Like most battleships since the late 1880s, Danton carried only four 305mm (12in) guns, whereas the Dreadnought mounted ten. Danton took a less radical approach, bristling with large numbers of secondary guns instead of increasing the 12in arsenal. Nonetheless, she marked a huge technological leap for the somewhat backward French navy. Her sides were studded with 9.4in guns, twelve of them in 6 twin turrets. Ships with this type of mixed armament were called "semi-dreadnoughts" in their brief heyday (roughly 1902-1912). In fact, although they were hard-hitting combatants during the Great War, semi-dreadnoughts were already considered an evolutionary dead end before hostilities broke out. The world's navies voted with their cheque books, and they voted overwhelmingly for dreadnoughts (at right, a British dreadnought squadron on patrol in the North Sea). The French admiralty had bet heavily on the semi-dreadnoughts, tying up all of its available building facilities with Danton and her five sister ships at precisely the time dreadnought fever swept Europe, 1908-1912. France therefore did not commission her first dreadnought until 1913 -- seven years after the British prototype debuted. It was no coincidence that this was also 4 years after Danton's launch, for it took the French almost exactly 4 years to construct a battleship at this time, a marked improvement over the typical 6-to-10-year build times of French yards in the preceding 25 years. (British yards of 1900 could turn one out in 2-3 years although, to prove a point, the Dreadnought was completed in a year and a day.)But to return to Danton. The ship was named for Georges-Jacques Danton, a leading radical in the French Revolution, an orator who swayed the crowds with his fiery speeches, and who became one of the all-powerful Committee on Safety during the Terror. He was among the last of the inner circle to be accused of treason and sent the guillotine as the Left revolution imploded. As its leading lights were extinguished one by one, the far-Left faction was discredited, paving the way for counterrevolution and the Right dictatorship of Napoléon. But the French Republic was more firmly established by the time the Danton was laid down in 1908 at l'Arsenal de Brest. In 1909 the scheduled launch was disrupted by protesting socialists; however the hull was safely committed to the waves on July 4, 1909. Danton was commissioned in 1911, the lead ship of her class of 6.A week after she was completed, Danton was sent to represent France at the coronation of George V in Great Britain. Feelings between the two countries had warmed considerably, thanks in part to the personal diplomacy of the late King Edward VII, and in part to the common fear of Germany which had made them alliance partners. Upon her return to France, Danton was assigned to the First Battleship Squadron, France's strongest naval force, along with her sister ships. While cruising off Hyères in the Mediterranean in 1913, Danton suffered an explosion in one of her gun turrets, killing three and wounding several more. As war clouds loomed over the Continent, the dreadnoughts Courbet and Jean Bart joined the Escadre at Toulon, the French navy's principal base, located just southeast of Marseille on the Mediterranean.
Danton served in World War I in the French Mediterranean Fleet, escorting French troop and supply ships crossing from Algeria to Marseille. The main threat of attack came from the well-equipped Austro-Hungarian navy. Danton and her sisters also served as a deterrant to the ex-German battlecruiser Yavuz (ex-Goeben), now based at Constantinople. Although the Allies were staging their biggest amphibious operation of the entire war at nearby Gallipoli, the mighty ex-German made only one brief foray into the eastern Mediterranean after August 1914, though interestingly it was airplanes, not warships, that drove her back into the Dardanelles on that occasion (January 1918). Meanwhile, in a seldom-remembered episode, France forced the pro-German government of Greece from power and brought Greece in on the side of the Allies. Four of the Dantons led by the super-dreadnought Provence appeared off Athens in December 1916 in a demonstration of power, threatening to bombard the city and actually seizing the Greek fleet, whose vessels were commissioned temporarily in the French navy for antisubmarine work. They reverted to Greek control in 1918 and operated with the Allies during the closing phase of the Great War and the foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War. Greek cruisers operated with British, French, and White units in the Black Sea theatre until the Whites were driven out in the fall of 1919.One of the major tasks of the French Navy in WWI was to keep the Austro-Hungarian war fleet bottled up in the Adriatic, where their bases dotted the rocky western shore all the way to Trieste at the sea's northern limit. A severe coal shortage accomplished much of this task for the Allies, but diesel-burning submarines were unaffected by the coal shortage and attempted to slip in and out until the very end of the conflict. The Austrians had a base at Durazzo (Durrës), 114 mi north of the straits (175 km) in Albania, and their main U-boat base was at Cattaro (Kotor), another 75 mi (135 km) up the Adriatic. In addition, Austria provided basing for German U-boats at Cattaro and Pola, their main naval base. The Central Powers' submarines compiled an impressive record of kills in the Med, including the French armored cruisers Léon Gambetta and Amiral Charner and the pre-dreadnought battleships Gaulois and Suffren, all from torpedo attacks. They seriously damaged the dreadnought Jean Bart by the same means, but the ship made port and later emerged to fight again.The Otranto Straits were too deep, their tides too powerful to rig permanent submarine nets across the entire opening. The Allies attempted to block passage by means of the Otranto Barrage. A massive belt of minefields, nets, and hundreds of small anchored vessels (one line of destroyers and two of North Sea and Canadian drift-net trawlers commandeered for wartime duty), the barrage stretched clear across the 62-mile strait between Otranto and Corfu (a width equivalent to 100 km). As in the British blockade of France during the Napoleonic Wars, the crewmen remained on station month in, month out, sometimes in the most appalling conditions. Although the barrage was effective against surface craft, submarines routinely broke through the obstructions to prowl the Mediterranean.
France's forward base for the watch on the Otranto straits was on the Greek island of Corfu at the barrage's eastern end. The war had ground on for 2¼ long, dispiriting years when the Danton was ordered to refit at Toulon during the winter of 1916-17.
Renewed and refurbished, she was despatched back to Corfu for another tour of duty in March 1917. More than 150 fresh crewmen destined for the other French ships at Corfu were embarked for the three-day voyage out, so the battleship was packed with 1,102 seamen. As in all wartime passages, the ship and her escort -- the destroyer Masue ("Cudgel") -- were blacked out and steering a zigzag course to confound any shadowing submarines. Just after noon on March 19, 1917, they reached the end of the southward leg, roughly 22 miles off Cape Spartivento, at the southwest corner of Sardinia. At 1 p.m. they altered course eastward to steer for Cape Passero at the tip of Sicily. From there they would jog northwards for Corfu. Danton was about one-third of the way to her destination. But already she was being shadowed by the German submarine U-64.No periscope was sighted by the French ships. Their first warning was the lookout's hail announcing incoming torpedoes, two of which struck the Danton's port bow at 1305 hours. At first Danton maintained course, her men held at battle stations; but as the battleship assumed a heavy list to port, Capt. Delage ordered her starboard turrets trained outboard to counterbalance the water rushing in on the other side and delay the sinking. Meanwhile, immediately after the torpedoing, the Masue sighted their assailant when U-64 momentarily lost her trim and pitched her bow through the surface. The destroyer mounted a furious depth-charge attack, but Kapitänleutnant Robert Morah quickly regained control of his vessel, crash-dived and beat a safe retreat; whereupon Masue returned to evacuate people from the sloping decks of the Danton. Italian patrol boats, too, were hurrying to the scene to assist in the rescue.
This photo of Danton listing was snapped from the Masue at 1320. She took another 30 minutes to founder.
In the end 806 sailors were taken off in the 45 minutes before Danton capsized and plunged to the bottom. Survivors clung to the keel and the ship's rudder and stationary screws were visible as the huge hull wallowed upside-down on the surface. Then the ship plunged stern first, her distictive bow angling above the surface for a few moments before sliding down and disappearing in a welter of foam and spray as trapped air jetted out of the hull under high pressure. Capt. Delage and a number of his officers went down with the ship, directing the evacuation to the last. As the wreck planed toward the sea-bed, only scattered wreckage and bobbing heads marked the site where, half an hour before, the pride of the Marine Nationale Française had floated. It was 1350. The calm sea undulated under a light winter overcast. In all, 296 were killed in the incident. As soon as the turbulence caused by the sinking subsided, the rescue ships hurried back and resumed pulling sailors and bodies from the brine. Survivors were landed at Cagliari.
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Evidently the ship rolled over twice on its way to the bottom, losing funnels, turrets, and bits of superstructure. Remarkably, the wreck remained in one piece, sliding some hundred yards along the mud bottom after impact and coming to rest upright with three of the 9.4" gun turrets still in place. And from that day to this, she has remained in that mudbank nearly a mile deep. The starboard turrets are still trained outboard, mutely attesting to the last-minute efforts of seamanship that saved so many lives in the ship's final hour. The wreck's coordinates are 38°45'35"N 8°3'30"E, some 20 km from the reported contact with U-64 and a few klicks from the reported position of the sinking,leading to an initial huffy denial from the French Admiralty when the find was reported. There can be no doubt, however, when one looks at the sonar pictures and compares them with the ship's plans. No other comparably laid-out battleship was lost in the Mediterranean in either world war.
The wreck was discovered in late 2007, just over 90 years after it sank. A Dutch-based contractor surveying the sea-bed for Galsi's new Algeria-to-Italy pipeline, originally located the wreck with detailed sonar scans, but delayed the announcement until February 2009. Galsi has relocated the pipeline 300 m further from the wreck to avoid disturbing this war grave. But, to keep this tragedy in perspective, nearly 75% over the ship's people survived thanks to a combination of easy weather, prompt and skilled action by the ship's commander, availability of rescue craft nearby, and good fortune. Without in any way minmizing the sacrifice of those who died on the Danton, it is prudent to note that in many battleship sinkings during the Great War and later, an entire ship's company would perish, perhaps with a handful of survivors. The Bouvet took every soul aboard with her when she sank in the Dardanelles; so did the German battleship Pommern, destroyed by torpedoes at the Battle of Jutland. The battlecruiser HMS Invincible blew up in the same battle, leaving 6 survivors of a crew of over 1,000, and two other battlecruisers exploded at Jutland with a similarly sobering "butcher's bill". Viewed in this perspective, Danton's demise could have been far worse.
When news of the discovery broke on Feb. 2, 2009, whom did CNN.com, Fox, and MSNBC contact for photos of the ship in its prime? That's right, folks: Big, Bad Battleships (dot) Com, the Web's leading pictorial resource on armored warships, 1860-1918. You'll find more info on the Danton class elsewhere in this site; plenty more about the history of the French Navy too. To browse all our content on the history of the steam battleship, visit Global Site Nav. À bientôt!
Some Pertinent Weblinks
- Link to video - courtesy of BBC
- News Story on the Find - From CNN.com (so you'll know I'm not lyin'!)
- The Danton Class - Overview with Photos
- Semi-Dreadnought Battleships
- Submarine Warfare in World War I
- Photographs of the U-Boat War and WWI Anti-Submarine Warfare
- The Otranto Barrage - from Wikipedia
- The Otranto Barrage - Peter Sinfield's essay, emphasizing the Australian rôle
- The May 1917 Battle of the Otranto Straits
- Paul G. Halpern's Battle of the Otranto Straits (Indiana Univ. Press, 2004)
- Big Bad Battleships' Dossier on the Austrian Navy
Consacré à la Memoire du Cuirassé d'Escadre Galant
Click here to enlarge picture, and here for a color version.
