Sinking of the cruiser Kléber

On the morning of 27 June 1917 the French armoured cruiser Kléber struck a mine on the approach to Brest and sank in less than an hour. The British chronology of the war states that she was sunk by a submarine. This was true only indirectly. The ship was not torpedoed but ran into a minefield laid on the approaches to the base by the German submarine minelayer UC-61 under Kapitänleutnant Georg Gerth.

Kléber, launched in 1902 at the Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde yard near Bordeaux, was one of the three ships of the Dupleix class. She displaced about 7,700 tons and carried eight 164.7 mm guns. At the beginning of the war she guarded the English Channel, in 1915 she supported operations at the Dardanelles and took part in a raid on the Bulgarian coast, and from the summer of 1916 she was the flagship of the division at Dakar, whose task was to protect shipping from German raiders. In May 1917 the division was reduced to recover sailors for patrol vessels. The old cruiser was to return to Brest and pass into reserve. On 16 June she left Dakar, escorting the transport Phrygie with about 1,150 soldiers to the coast of Morocco. After a stop in the bay of Agadir she sailed on alone, far from the coast, avoiding the areas where submarines were expected.

At about 5.50 a.m. Kléber was two miles south of the Pierres Noires lighthouse and took a local pilot on board. A few minutes later lookouts spotted a mine floating on the surface off the port bow. The captain, Capitaine de frégate Lagorio, took it for a drifting mine and began to turn, intending to avoid it and sink it with gunfire. At that moment the ship struck another, submerged mine with her starboard side. The explosion occurred abaft the bridge, abreast the forward boiler rooms. Water quickly flooded the forward boiler room, the lights went out, and the telephones and the electric steering stopped working. The engineers managed to keep up pressure in the remaining boilers for about twenty minutes. Lagorio considered beaching the ship near Le Conquet, but judged that the bulkheads would not hold. The gunboat Inconstant tried to take the cruiser in tow, but the stern was already too high out of the water. At about 6.45 a.m. the captain ordered the ship abandoned, and a few minutes later Kléber capsized and sank.

The weather was calm and there were many vessels nearby. Men were picked up out of the water by Inconstant, torpedo boats, trawlers, the pilot cutter, fishing boats and the British steamer Highland Star, which came to the scene of the disaster of her own accord. Lagorio was washed off the bridge by a wave as the ship capsized. He was rescued shortly afterwards. Thirty-eight men of the roughly 570 on board were killed, although some lists give 42 victims. Some of them died at once in the flooded boiler room, others when the wireless aerial crashed down on the boats. Among the dead were the executive officer and the ship’s doctor. A court martial later cleared the captain, and in 1919 the crew was mentioned in army orders of the day for its calm and discipline to the very last moment. The wreck of Kléber lies at a depth of about 45–48 metres, not far from the Pierres Noires lighthouse, south of the island of Molène. UC-61 outlived her by only a month. On 26 July 1917 she ran aground at Wissant near Calais, and her crew scuttled her and surrendered to the French.