Sinking of the cruiser Châteaurenault

On the morning of 14 December 1917 in the Ionian Sea, at the entrance to the strait between the islands of Lefkada and Kefalonia, the German submarine UC-38 torpedoed the French cruiser Châteaurenault, which was carrying troops from Taranto to Greece. The ship sank slowly, and almost all the men were transferred in time to the destroyers escorting her. These in turn tracked down the attacker and sank her. The British official history of the war at sea notes that this was the first submarine destroyed in the Mediterranean since 24 May and one of only two sunk there in the whole of 1917. The success was, however, as it put it, “not encouraging”, because it had been bought with the loss of a large ship.

Châteaurenault, launched in 1898 at La Seyne-sur-Mer near Toulon and commissioned in 1902, was an unusual ship. She was designed according to the theories of the French Jeune École, which, instead of a costly battleship race with the British, proposed raiding their merchant shipping. This protected cruiser of about 8,000 tons displacement was to reach 24 knots and sail far without recoaling, and four evenly spaced funnels made her look like a large passenger liner. Her armament, eight medium-calibre guns, was on the other hand weak for a ship of that size. At the start of the war she patrolled Atlantic waters, in 1915 she moved to the Mediterranean, and in 1916 she searched in vain from Dakar for the German raider Möwe. She was then converted to carry troops.

From the autumn of 1917 the Allies were shortening the dangerous sea route to the Salonika front. Soldiers sailed from Taranto across the Ionian Sea to Itea on the Gulf of Corinth, from where they travelled by lorry to Bralo, and on by rail to Salonika. On the evening of 13 December Châteaurenault left Taranto with French troops, together with a second transport, escorted by the destroyers Mameluk and Lansquenet. Sources give different numbers of men on board. According to some the cruiser carried 985 soldiers, according to others more than 1,100, or even nearly 1,400 people, were taken off from the water and the deck in all. Among the passengers was the British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross, who had discovered the role of mosquitoes in transmitting malaria and was travelling to Salonika as a War Office consultant to fight malaria in the army.

In the morning, as the ship was zigzagging into the strait, a torpedo struck her on the starboard side abreast the boiler room. The cruiser stopped but did not sink quickly. The destroyers came alongside and began taking off the soldiers, and French trawlers and British drifters came to help. The commander of UC-38, Oberleutnant zur See Hans Hermann Wendlandt, returned to periscope depth and fired a second torpedo, after which Châteaurenault sank quickly. The times of the two hits differ in the sources by nearly an hour. By then most of the men were already on the destroyers. Ross recalled that as he stepped down onto the deck of Mameluk, still looking in his cabin for a lost gold watch, he “never even thought of the second torpedo”. The only men killed were from the engine room, killed by the first explosion. According to French figures cited in the literature they were 12 members of the crew.

Now the destroyers went after the submarine. Depth charges from Lansquenet and Mameluk damaged UC-38 and forced her to surface. Ross saw the German sailors jumping into the water “like frogs” before the destroyers’ guns sank the boat. A French soldier began handing out pistols to shoot at the survivors, but the destroyer’s commander immediately put a stop to it. About twenty men of UC-38’s crew were rescued. According to uboat.net nine were killed, according to the French inquiry five. The submarine had several dozen ships to her credit. Only a month earlier, on 11 November, during the Third Battle of Gaza, she had sunk the British monitor M15 and the destroyer Staunch off the coast of Palestine, and on 5 December a French trawler sank on a mine she had laid in the Gulf of Patras. Wendlandt, to whom Ross handed a glass of rum after a meal in the destroyer’s cramped wardroom, was put ashore as a prisoner at Patras. The rescued soldiers landed at Itea that same evening.