Sinking of the cruiser Amiral Charner

On the morning of 8 February 1916 the German submarine U-21 of Kapitänleutnant Otto Hersing torpedoed the French armoured cruiser Amiral Charner off the coast of Syria, level with present-day Lebanon. The ship was sailing from the island of Ruad to Port Said. She sank within a few minutes, before the boats could be lowered. Of her entire crew only one sailor survived.

Amiral Charner was an old ship. She was launched in 1893 at the Rochefort arsenal as the first of a class of four small armoured cruisers of about 4,700 tons displacement. Before the war she served, among other places, off Crete and in China, and then lay for a long time in reserve at Toulon. In 1914 she returned to service and joined the French 3rd Squadron, which guarded the Suez Canal and blockaded the coast of Syria and Palestine. In September 1915 she took part in the evacuation of the Armenians from Musa Dagh, and in December in the occupation of the island of Kastellorizo (Megisti). She was commanded by Capitaine de frégate (commander) Charles Causse.

Hersing, who in 1915 had sunk the battleship Triumph off Gallipoli, left the base at Pola on 22 January with orders to hunt shipping in the eastern Mediterranean. For several days he had no luck, and when an engine failure reduced the boat’s surface speed, he decided to depart from his orders and look for warships off the coast of Syria. According to his log he torpedoed the cruiser while submerged and watched through the periscope as she sank in four minutes. French sources speak of two minutes. The torpedo struck between the bridge and the forward funnel. Sources describe the ship’s position at the moment of the attack differently: as about 15 nautical miles west of Beirut, or as a point closer to Tyre. 427 men were killed, among them the ship’s commander.

The sole survivor, the gunner’s mate (quartier-maître canonnier) Cariou from Clohars-Carnoët in Brittany, later told his story to journalists. After being hit the ship dug in her bow and capsized almost at once. Cariou came to the surface and clung to wreckage, and then reached a makeshift raft on which fourteen castaways had gathered, without water or food. Over the following days his companions died one after another from exhaustion or threw themselves into the sea in delirium. Cariou survived the last two days alone. On Sunday 13 February, five days after the cruiser sank, he was spotted and picked up from the raft by the French auxiliary Laborieux from Ruad. He was awarded the Médaille militaire, and in the spring of 1916 the French illustrated press described his return home.

After U-21 returned to Kotor, the German naval command pointed out to the submarine commanders from Pola that they were spending too much time hunting warships. It reminded them that their main task was to sink merchant ships, because these did the most harm to Britain. The French press reported the sinking of the cruiser in mid-February. The loss of Amiral Charner showed that German submarines were dangerous even to the patrols guarding the distant coast of the Levant.