Sinking of the battleship Suffren

On the morning of 26 November 1916, in the Atlantic west of Lisbon, the German submarine U-52 fired a torpedo at the French battleship Suffren, which was sailing alone. The torpedo most probably detonated the ammunition in one of the magazines. The ship was torn apart by the explosion and went to the bottom within a few seconds. No one was saved. 648 sailors were killed. The British chronology of the war places the sinking in the Bay of Biscay, but Suffren sank far to the south of it, off the coast of Portugal. Sources differ on the distance from land: some give about 50 nautical miles, others about 90 miles. The uboat.net website, based on German records, dates the attack to 25 November, but French sources and most accounts give 26 November.

Suffren, named after the eighteenth-century admiral Pierre André de Suffren, was a pre-dreadnought of about 12,700 tons’ displacement, built at the Brest arsenal and commissioned in 1904. For most of her career she was a flagship in the Mediterranean squadron. From the first days of the war with Turkey she fought at the entrance to the Dardanelles, and in the great fleet attack of 18 March 1915 she took more than a dozen hits. Burning debris then fell into the magazine of one of her guns and started a fire, and the magazine had to be flooded at once to stop the ship blowing up. On the same day her boat rescued several dozen survivors of the battleship Bouvet. After repairs at Toulon she supported the troops on the Gallipoli peninsula with her guns until the evacuation. In 1916 she belonged to the French squadron watching that Greece did not obstruct the Allies at Salonika. In October she was among the battleships that entered the Bay of Eleusis when the Entente demanded the surrender of the Greek fleet.

The damage suffered in the Dardanelles was making itself felt, and the ship needed a thorough refit. She was originally to undergo it at Bizerte, but in the end she was sent to the dockyard at Lorient in Brittany. On 15 November Suffren, commanded by Capitaine de vaisseau Rodolphe Guépin, left Greek waters, coaled at Bizerte and at Gibraltar, and on 24 November put out into the Atlantic. She sailed without an escort. According to French sources her worn engines allowed her to make at most about 10 knots, and in bad weather she went even more slowly. Some of them add that besides the crew there were also sailors on board going on leave to France.

Kapitänleutnant Hans Walther’s U-52 was on her way from Germany across the Atlantic to the Austro-Hungarian base at Cattaro, where she was to reinforce the German submarines in the Mediterranean. The same boat had sunk the British cruiser Nottingham in the North Sea in August. After the attack on Suffren the German sailors searched the site of the sinking but found no one alive. According to some accounts they even believed they had sunk a British ship.

Suffren was the first French battleship sunk by a submarine (a month later the battleship Gaulois met the same fate in the Aegean) and one of the heaviest single losses of the French navy (Marine nationale) in this war. Her sinking was a reminder of how dangerous solitary voyages without a destroyer screen had become for old, slow ships, even in waters far from the main theatres of the war. The ship was twice mentioned in army orders of the day, which earned the right to a fourragère in the colours of the Croix de Guerre.