French WW1 battleship found

[Vympel]

The Danton

A French battleship sunk in 1917 by a German submarine has been discovered in remarkable condition on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Danton, with many of its gun turrets still intact, is sitting upright in over 1,000m of water.

It was found by the Fugro geosciences company during a survey for a gas pipeline between Algeria and Italy.

The Danton, which sank with 296 sailors still onboard, lies 35km southwest of the island of Corsica.

Naval historians record that the Danton's Captain Delage stood on the bridge with his officers and made no attempt to leave the ship as it went down.

The French government is now keen to see that the site is protected.

"Its condition is extraordinary," said Rob Hawkins, project director with Fugro GeoConsulting Limited.

"After it was hit by the torpedoes, the Danton clearly turned turtle and rotated several times. You can see where it dropped some infrastructure on the way down and then impacted on the seabed.

"You can see where it slid along the seabed before coming to a rest," he told BBC News.

A comparison with the original plans for the battleship - in particular, the position of its 240mm guns - confirms the wreck's identity.

The final resting place is a few kilometres from where people have traditionally thought the ship met its end.

"The French Admiralty did argue with us for a while that it should have been several nautical miles away, but we reminded them that modern GPS methods are more accurate than the sextants they used in those days," said Mr Hawkins.

Details of the discovery were released on Thursday at a press conference at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan.

The pipeline is being built by the Galsi (Gasdotto Algeria Sardegna Italia) consortium and will be the deepest underwater conduit for gas ever constructed when it becomes operational in 2012.

Finding a safe route for it was extremely challenging, said Mr Hawkins.

About 20% of the course lies on the abyssal plain in water depths of about 2,850m. There are also steep descents from the continental shelf.

Fugro deployed its Autonomous Underwater Vehicle to gather bathymetric (depth) and geophysical data.

It also used Remotely Operated Vehicles to make more detailed surveys of particular locations, such as where sediment conditions were uncertain or the route crossed known submarine telecommunications cables.

The discovery of the Danton, named after the French revolutionary Georges Danton, requires the gas feed must take a slight detour to avoid the war grave.

The ship was one of the most advanced in the French Navy at the time of its loss, although it was already outclassed by the newer HMS Dreadnought design being introduced by the British.

The 19,000-tonne, 150m-long vessel was carrying over 1,000 men when it was attacked by Germany's U-64 submarine at 1317 on 18 March, 1917. Patrol boats and a destroyer managed to save most of those onboard.

The Danton was travelling between Toulon and Corfu, where it was due to meet up with other vessels in the French fleet. Many of those making the trip were actually crewmembers for the other ships at Corfu.

[Kanastrous]

Never really understood the whole go down with your ship ethos. Not only is your navy deprived of the ship you just lost; you're depriving them of your training and experience as a senior officer, too.

[Kitsune]

One item is that they are less likely to drag your name through the mud (honored dead kind of thing) and less likely for your family to take it in the shorts

[Sea Skimmer]

WW1 is the war that largely killed off that tradition. It stemmed from a harsher yet simpler time when basically going into the water after your ship sank was near certain death anyway. Sailors traditionally didn’t learn to swim (it was thought to be bad luck, WW1 killed that too) they didn’t have life jackets that worked, and very rarely any lifeboats at all. No radio, no air sea rescue services. You’d most likely just die of thirst climbing to a piece of wood. Now combined that with the loss of the ship being largely the captains fault, and completely the captains reasonability and it just made sense to die quick drowning to protect your honor, should anyone survive to tell the tale of it. Honor used to mean an awful lot. Mind you, people also used to execute admirals for failing to show sufficient aggression in the face of superior enemy numbers.

WW1 however really started showing that with modern weapons, a ship might be lost when really nothing could have avoided it and that war was so deadly already that factors like preserving trained officers actually mattered. The world saw no really great naval war between 1814 and 1914, with only the US civil war and Russo Japanese war having any real scale, so traditions were really still locked in an 18th century outlook. If there had been more combat in the latter 19th century when everything was getting more ‘enlightened’ I’d imagine going down with your ship would have fallen out of fashion sooner.

Course, captains are still court marshaled for loss of ship, and the trials are often complete farces against them which ruin them for life, so sometimes, you’ve got to think maybe the old idea wasn’t so bad.

[Gil Hamilton]

There is a case, documented by no less than the French Romantic painter Gericault in the painting "The Raft of the Medusa" which lends alot of credence to that. The incident happened to the French frigate, the Medusa in 1816, where it was part of a convoy sent to Africa to oversea a change in colonial status of a country in some spat between the French and British. Unfortunately for the crew, her captain was an incompetant noble jackass, being a political appointment by the French monarchy, pulled ahead of the convoy in order because it was too slow going for his taste, lost sight of them, and managed to wreck his ship on a sandbar. Out of nearly 400 people, it only had boats for 250. The remaining crew built a raft and set off hoping to be found by the rest of the convoy, but sat adrift for two weeks. By the time they were rescued by a member of their convoy, all but 15 out nearly 150 men were dead, the rest dehydrated and mad, having eaten some of their dead crewmates to survive.

The disaster was an ENORMOUS scandal for the French monarchy, which had just reformed after Napoleon. The captain in question was chosen entirely because he was anti-Napoleon and a friend of the monarchy, and his incompetence doomed over 150 men, who died at sea due to fighting, dehydration, and suicide. It was only serendipity that the last 15 men were found. Back in that era, that's what being stranded at sea meant.

[CaptHawkeye]

I'd like to get an idea of French Pre-Dreadnought design prior to the war so I can get a background on Danton and her design lineage. Their doesn't seem to be too much printed about them of course. If your ship isn't American, British, Japanese, or German, don't expect to find too much work published on it.

I'm actually pretty surprised on what i've read so far about French ships. Despite have minimal industry and a mostly ground-based mindset on war preparation, French ships weren't all that bad. They couldn't keep up with the development race so ultimately many of their designs were "too late". Though the basic lineage of design is certainly nice. They were developing like any other navy albeit slower.

[Thanas]

I'd like to get an idea of French Pre-Dreadnought design prior to the war so I can get a background on Danton and her design lineage. Their doesn't seem to be too much printed about them of course. If your ship isn't American, British, Japanese, or German, don't expect to find too much work published on it.

I'm actually pretty surprised on what i've read so far about French ships. Despite have minimal industry and a mostly ground-based mindset on war preparation, French ships weren't all that bad. They couldn't keep up with the development race so ultimately many of their designs were "too late". Though the basic lineage of design is certainly nice. They were developing like any other navy albeit slower.

Can you read/write french or german fluently?

[CaptHawkeye]

Nope. In a fit of irony I bet there's even tons of material on those ships simply in languages I don't know.

[Thanas]

The french ships are very well documented...the problem is that as with almost all french material, it is published only in french. But I have seen linedrawings, plans, essays etc. in french on their predreadnoughts.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

A systematic listing which is a very good start is Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860 - 1905, of which I am enormously proud to have a copy, detailing basically every single ship of war in the French Navy in its two incarnations between 1860 and 1905 (the Imperial and Republican navies).

[Kitsune]

Unfortunately, the book is only around $250 on Amazon....

I browse for affordable military history books.....Have to see if Janes Fighting Ships of WW1 gives any information

You this has some pictures and line drawings
Link

As well, there is the wayback version of Warships1
Link

Edit: Sorry, not right link, I linked to the main page

[CJvR]

French navy in WWI.

http://www.naval-history.net/WW1NavyFrench.htm