Читать книгу The Battleship Book - Robert M. Farley - Страница 8

Danton

Laid Down: 1906

Launched: 1909

Completed: July, 1911

Displacement: 18,750 tons

Main Armament: four 12” guns (two twin turrets)

Secondary Armament: twelve 9.5” guns (six twin turrets)

Speed: 19.5 knots

Major Actions: None

Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty

Fate: Sunk by German U-boat, March 19, 1917

The Dantons were the last pre-dreadnoughts constructed by the French Navy. They were also the only pre-dreadnoughts to employ turbines, and the only twentieth-century battleships to have five funnels. In addition to her main armament of 12” guns, Danton carried a very heavy secondary armament of 9.5” guns arrayed in twin turrets, rather than in casemates. The French believed that Tsushima demonstrated the decisiveness of a large secondary armament, but no other major battleship builder shared this view. The speed and armament made the ships a good match for the Austro-Hungarian Radetzkys, which were about a knot faster but carried reciprocating machinery. Danton was named for Georges Danton, first President of the Committee of Public Safety. At the time, French battleships were named after major figures from French history, and the Dantons came into service at a moment in which the Revolution was held in high esteem.

Danton. Brassey’s Naval Annual 1915.

The Dantons were excellent specimens of the pre-dreadnoughts, but suffered all of the basic limitations of the type. The biggest problem with the six ships of the Danton class was that they occupied the main French building slips for about two years each, meaning that France lost critical time in the dreadnought race. It is commonly argued that they were obsolete prior to completion; in fact, despite their heavy armament and good speed, they were obsolete prior to being laid down. Dreadnought was larger, faster, and carried more guns and heavier armor. The Courbets (the first French dreadnoughts) were not competitive with the second generation American, British, or German designs when they entered service in 1913 and 1914.

Georges Jacques Danton.

Danton’s World War I career was largely uneventful. The French Navy had come to a pre-war agreement with the Royal Navy to concentrate in the Mediterranean, while the British managed the North Sea. Danton and the other French battleships spent most of their time protecting convoys traveling to and from North Africa. Especially in the early part of the war, the French were concerned that the Austro-Hungarian Navy would sally forth and attack the convoys. No such operation ever materialized, however.

Danton. Histoire de la Marine française illustrée, Marius Bar.

Danton also helped guard the Dardanelles in order to prevent a sortie by Yavuz Sultan Selim, the former German battlecruiser Goeben . She did not, however, participate in the naval campaign to force the straits, which used a large number of old French and British battleships. On the afternoon of March 19, 1917, Danton cruised into the patrol area (just south of Sardinia) of U-64, a German submarine operating from Austria-Hungary. Danton would become one of U-64′s forty-six victims; 296 men would sink with her. Danton was one of several pre-dreadnought battleships lost to submarines in World War I, all in French and British service. Curiously, no dreadnoughts were lost until World War II. U-64 was herself destroyed on June 17, 1918.

[no image in epub file]

Danton, torpedoed March 19, 1917 by U-64. Le Miroir

During surveys for a trans-Mediterranean pipeline, the wreck of Danton was discovered in an excellent state of preservation. Although the ship apparently rolled over several times on her way down, she landed upright, and retains many of her guns and superstructure. Plans for the pipeline were moved by about 300 meters at the request of the French government, which views the wreck of Danton as a war grave.

Author’s Note

In retrospect, the decision to go with an all-big-gun armament seems obvious. Mixed armaments required different types of ammunition, created problems with training and fire control, and reduced a battleship’s overall “punch.” At the time, however, the immaturity of armor and fire control schemes made a mixed armament plausible. The high rate of fire of the smaller weapons appealed to many officers, who believed that the destruction of the unarmored superstructure of enemy ships would leave them helpless. As battleship protection became optimized around heavy calibers, however, the utility of large secondary armaments declined.

Related Entries:

Contemporary of… HMS Dreadnought

Preceded… Bretagne

Shared a fate with… HMS Barham