Sinking of the battleship Gaulois

On the morning of 27 December 1916 the German submarine UB-47 torpedoed the French battleship Gaulois, which according to French sources was on passage from Corfu to Salonika. The attack took place south of the Peloponnese, according to French and German records about 30 nautical miles east of the island of Kythira (Cerigo), at the entrance to the Aegean Sea. The ship sank, but almost the whole crew was saved. It was the second French battleship sunk by a submarine within a month, after Suffren, which went down with all hands off the coast of Portugal on 26 November.

Gaulois was a pre-dreadnought of the Charlemagne class. Built at the Brest arsenal, she entered service at the beginning of 1899 and displaced about 11,000 tons. In 1915 she fought at the Dardanelles in Admiral Guépratte’s squadron. In the great fleet attack of 18 March a Turkish shell pierced her armour below the waterline in the bow. The ship took on so much water that her captain had to beach her by one of the islets near Tenedos. After repairs at Toulon she returned to the Dardanelles area and in January 1916 covered the evacuation of the troops from the Gallipoli peninsula. In the summer she went to Brest for a refit, and at the end of November she was ordered back to the eastern Mediterranean.

The battleship was escorted by the destroyer Dard and two armed trawlers. UB-47, commanded by Wolfgang Steinbauer and operating from the Austro-Hungarian base at Kotor, nevertheless managed to slip through the screen and fire a torpedo at close range. It struck abaft the mainmast and caused a leak that could not be controlled. The ship heeled over, capsized and went to the bottom. Sources differ on how long she stayed afloat: according to the French sailors’ memorial she sank after 25 minutes, according to studies based on the French naval archives after about an hour.

The explosion of the torpedo killed two or three sailors, and one or two drowned while abandoning ship. All sources agree that four men died. The rest, according to the French memorial 631 sailors, were picked up by the escort vessels, above all the trawler Rochebonne. Such small losses in the sinking of a large ship were exceptional. It helped that the ship sank relatively slowly and that the escorts were close at hand, unlike the case of Suffren, which had been sailing alone.

The loss of Gaulois showed, however, that even escorted battleships were not safe in the waters through which supplies passed to the Allied army at Salonika. The waters south of Greece, where the routes from the western Mediterranean to Salonika, Mudros and Egypt converged, became one of the favourite hunting grounds of the German submarines from Kotor. Only five days later, not far away off Cape Matapan, UB-47 sank the British troopship Ivernia, which was carrying soldiers from Marseille to Egypt.