The Unfortunate Battleship Liberté (1908-1911)

A proud Liberté visits the United States soon after her commissioning in 1908. The Liberté class was an an up-gunned repeat of the preceding République class, designed by Émile Bertin, and no handsomer battleships ever sailed under the Tricolor. These 6 ships were competitive with the British fleet of 10 years earlier, but already obsolescent when they appeared a few years after the Dreadnought debuted.

Liberté's specifications: Dimensions: 439'x 79'7" x 27'6" (134m x 24.25m x 8.4m). Displacement: 14,850 tons. Armament: (4) 12", (10) 7.6" (10x1) guns; (5) 450 mm (18") torpedo tubes. Krupps Cemented (KC) armor: 11" belt, 12'6" width (7'6" above waterline); 14" turret; 12" conning tower; 2.75" deck. Double armored deck/splinter deck with cellular layer between. Bunkerage: 900 tons of coal. Propulsion: 22 coal-fired boilers, (3) inverted vertical triple expansion steam engines developing 20,500 HP, shafted to triple screw. Maximum speed: 19.4 kts. Endurance: 8000 nm @ 12kts. Crew: 740. Cost: 42 million gold francs.

Liberté's magazines explode accidentally on Sept. 25, 1911, destroying the 3-year-old ship and showering her neighbors in Toulon Harbor (including République - below) with twisted, smoldering debris. The chain-reaction detonation of the magazines followed some moments of frantic firefighting on board after spontaneous combustion erupted in a forward magazine.This explosion followed the similar loss of the battleship Iéna by only 4 years. Nitrocellulose gel, the preferred propellant of the French Navy, was prone to spontaneous combustion; it was implicated in both tragedies. Article

Sections of the Liberté's armor plate were hurled outwards with such force they were embedded in the République anchored nearby. You can see how the waterline armor belt held up to the assault, while the unprotected upper deck crumpled helplessly. She was only one of the recipients of the Liberté's "tough love"; more than 100 sailors were killed on ships anchored nearby. France's dockpyards toiled many a long and dispiriting hour to repair the damage all through the fall and winter.

The ship was a total loss. The violence of the explosion amidships tossed the upper decks up and aft, curled back like the top of a sardine can. When the smoke cleared, the ship had been transsformed to a pile of contorted wreckage. A battered but still recognizable forward end sat on the bottom, abruptly ending in a huge, scorched crater abaft the #1 funnel, while everthing aft became a great heap of random steel, great girders and tiny fragments all thrown together; a far more chaotic scene than this tidy diagram suggests. The Liberté was utterly demolished. 200 of her people were killed in the disaster, and a further hundred French sailors on neighboring ships.

A 7.6" single turret is folded under the curled-back section of the weather deck adjoining the explosion's focus of devastation. The grisly anatomy of the disaster was clearly visible at low tide and an early focus for "disaster tourism." The wreck was left in place until 1925, when it was raised and scrapped.

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