Sinking of the battleship Danton

In the early afternoon of 19 March 1917 the German submarine U-64 torpedoed the French battleship Danton, on passage from Toulon to Corfu. The attack took place south-west of Sardinia. According to the German records on which the uboat.net website relies, it was about 30 nautical miles south-west of the island of San Pietro. The ship sank in about half an hour, and 296 men were killed. It was the third French battleship sunk by German submarines in less than four months, after Suffren in November and Gaulois in December 1916.

Danton was the first ship of the Danton class, six battleships that entered service in 1911. They displaced over 18,000 tons and were the first French capital ships with turbine propulsion. Armed with four 305 mm and twelve 240 mm guns, they were nevertheless pre-dreadnoughts, obsolete even before they entered service, because while they were being built the British had already completed Dreadnought, the first capital ship of the new generation. During the war Danton served in the 1st Squadron of the French fleet in the Mediterranean. She covered troop transports from North Africa and then watched the exit from the Adriatic, where the French and British kept the Austro-Hungarian fleet bottled up. In March 1917 she was returning after a refit at Toulon to the base at Corfu, from which Allied ships watched the Strait of Otranto. There were more men aboard than usual, because in addition to her crew of 946 she was carrying, according to French sources, 155 sailors who were to join other ships in Greece.

The battleship was zigzagging, as regulations required, escorted by a single destroyer, Massue. This did not deter the commander of U-64, Kapitänleutnant Robert Moraht. According to the British official history of the war at sea, the submarine hit Danton with two torpedoes. According to French sources, they struck the bow and amidships. The battleship listed to port. Damage to the electrical system made it hard to lower the lifeboats. Danton capsized and sank. The British official history speaks of three-quarters of an hour, French accounts of about 30 minutes. The captain, Capitaine de vaisseau Joseph Delage, and many officers stayed on board and went down with the ship.

Massue sighted U-64’s periscope, gave chase and dropped depth charges, but the submarine dived deep and escaped unharmed. The destroyer and the minesweeper Louise-Marguerite then set about rescuing the survivors. Some spent as long as seven hours in the water. 806 men were saved and 296 died. U-64 then moved to the western Mediterranean, where off Sicily she sank another two British steamers and three Italian sailing vessels before returning to the Austro-Hungarian base at Cattaro. During the war Moraht sank several dozen ships and was awarded the Pour le Mérite.

The sinking of Danton came at a time when German submarines were reaping a rich harvest in the Mediterranean. According to the British official history, in February 1917 they sank 50 ships there with a total tonnage of 101,000 tons, and in March 36 ships of 72,000 tons. The protection of shipping was divided between the French, British and Italian fleets, each in its own zone, and dangerous misunderstandings occurred where the zones met. The Allies therefore decided to meet at a naval conference in Corfu, set for the end of April. The wreck of Danton was found by chance only in 2007, and identified in 2009, during a survey of the seabed before the construction of a gas pipeline from Algeria to Italy. She lies upright at a depth of over a thousand metres, a few kilometres from the position given in French documents.