Vergniaud |
|
| Career (France) | |
|---|---|
| Commissioned: | 1911 |
| Decommissioned: | 1921 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Danton-class battleship |
| Displacement: | 18,318 tonnes standard, 19,763 tonnes full load |
| Length: | 144.9 m |
| Beam: | 25.8 m |
| Draught: | 9.2 m |
| Propulsion: | 22,500 hp: 4 shaft Parsons turbines; 26 Niclausse coal-fired boilers. |
| Speed: | 19.25 knots |
| Complement: | Up to 923 |
| Armament: |
4 × 305mm/45 Modèle 1906 guns in twin mounts |
| Armour: |
270 mm Belt |
The Vergniaud was a battleship of the French Navy from 1911 to 1921.
Contents |
The Vergniaud was commissioned on 22 September 1911 and served throughout World War I.[1] The ship was the last of the Danton-class of battleships to be commissioned, and as such she was the last pre-dreadnought naval vessel to be produced by France.[2] The body of the ship was built on the dockyard of the Gironde Works in the province of Bordeaux[1] and was named for Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud, Bordeaux's most famous statesman of the French Revolution.
The frame was laid down in July 1908 and the first launch was made on 12 April 1910.[3] The speed of her production was considerably delayed, but on 22 September 1911 she was commissioned after acceptance trials off Toulon.[4]
The completed battleship carried a main battery of four 12-inch guns and a secondary battery of twelve 9.4-inch guns. Ringed by a tertiary battery of smaller arms, she also wielded two torpedo tubes.
In appearance, the Vergniaud was distinguishable in part for having large single caps on her funnels, rather than the double-capped funnels of the rest of her class.[5] Like her sister ships Diderot and Condorcet, she was made with new Niclausse boilers, which French naval engineers hoped would show improvement over the existing Delaunay-Belleville model.[6] The ship had a designed maximum speed of 19.25 knots.[1]
The six Danton-class battleships, along with the capital ships Courbet and Jean-Bart, formed the French Navy's Premier Escadron (First Squadron) in the Mediterranean Sea.[7] Led by Vice Admiral Paul Chocheprat, the squadron moved early to seek action against the Austro-Hungarian navy,[8] and took part in the Battle of Antivari in the Adriatic Sea in August 1914. The rest of the Vergniaud's wartime activity consisted largely of patrolling the Allied sealanes in the eastern Mediterranean.
After the war's end, the Vergniaud was among the ships stationed off Sevastopol as an Allied deterrent to Soviet forces who were encroaching on the city during the Russian civil war. Despite Allied support, the city's White Russian forces were in a seemingly hopeless position, and in April 1919 the French naval high command ordered the ships to evacuate. Rejecting this, the commander of Second Squadron, Vice-Admiral Jean-François-Charles Amet, attempted to have his forces intervene in the fighting, only to have a mutiny erupt on several of his ships. War-weary sailors demanded to return home and the ensuing standoff culminated in a mass shooting of sailor demonstrators. Fifteen people were wounded, but only one died, and that unique victim happened to be a sailor from the Vergniaud. The battleship's crew had thus far remained neutral in the conflict but quickly joined the ranks of the most radical mutineers, unfurling red banners in support of the Bolshevik forces. The four-day stalemate ended in a victory for the sailors: the ships withdrew from the Black Sea and the Vergniaud returned safely to France.[9]
The Danton-class ships performed soundly in their wartime roles, but by the end of the war they had long been surpassed technologically. The Vergniaud remained moored in port until she was decommissioned in 1921. She was later relegated to use as a target ship, and her hull was broken up for scrap in 1928.
A monument to the French mutineers of 1919 was erected by the Soviets in Sevastopol, at Morskaïa Square where the killing of the Vergniaud sailor took place.[9]
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