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.
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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
Battlecruiser, Dreadnought, Super-dreadnought, Fast Battleship
The pre-dreadnought and the armored cruiser dominated the naval landscape in the years preceding the construction of Dreadnought. The ship types were relatively close in size Both fleets at Tsushima had examples of each, and most major navies kept both in the line. Tsushima helped demonstrate the pre-dreadnought’s advantages over the armored cruiser, although naval architects in the United States and elsewhere had already begun to notice shortcomings of the type.
In any case, HMS Dreadnought and HMS Invincible made both pre-dreadnoughts and armored cruisers obsolete. This inaugurated two types of capital ship: the dreadnought and the battlecruiser. Dreadnoughts would compose the line of battle fleet, while battlecruisers would use their greater speed to act as fleet scouts and to perform other necessary duties.
The dreadnought was soon superseded by the super-dreadnought, which essentially cleaned up all the architectural problems with the earliest modern battleship. Reciprocating engines and wing turrets were out; super-dreadnoughts took advantage of superfiring weapons, and rationalized the armor scheme. They largely kept the same speed as dreadnoughts, meaning that the battleship/battlecruiser distinction remained useful. Even among battlecruisers, however, second-generation ships (super-dreadnought battlecruisers, essentially) were distinctly different, better balanced than their earlier sisters.
And then came the fast battleships. The first real fast battleship was probably HMS Hood, which was classified as a battlecruiser but much more heavily armored than earlier ships. The Japanese followed up Hood with HIJMS Nagato, which could make 26 knots. They also reconstructed the Kongo class ships in an effort to bring them up to battleship standards. The first post-treaty fast battleships were the Dunkerques, which combined high speed, heavy armament, and heavy armor. The battleships of the Second World War were distinctly superior to their predecessors, both because of more optimized armor and armament schemes, but also because they effectively combined the characteristics of dreadnought and battlecruiser.
II
The World War I Era
HMS Dreadnought
Laid Down: 1905
Launched: 1906
Completed: December, 1906
Displacement: 18,200 tons
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