Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger
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Warship Wednesday, April 23, 2025: The Seas are Alive…with the sound of Torpedoes
Above we see le croiseur cuirasse Leon Gambetta.
She was a beautifully obsolete ship that intersected history in several unusual ways and was lost to an infamous Austrian submarine skipper some 110 years ago this week.
French armored cruiser Amore
The French invented the concept of the true armored cruiser when Dupuy de Lome was ordered in 1888. A 6,300-ton steel-clad iron-hulled steamer, Dupuy de Lome could make 20 knots on her 11 Amirauté fire-tube boilers and three engines and had no auxiliary sail scheme.
The French armored cruiser Dupuy de Lome
Swathed in as much as 5 inches of plate armor, she carried eight large (7.6 and 6.4-inch guns) as well as 18 smaller pieces (37mm, 47mm, and 65mm) while also carrying four small (17.7-inch) torpedo tubes.
Able to operate alone and far from home if needed (Dupuy de Lome could steam at 12.5 knots for 4,000 nm), she was capable of defeating anything smaller than a genuine battleship, which she could outrun.
The concept ship was followed by the four-ship Amiral Charner class, the one-off cruisers Pothuau and Jeanne d’Arc, the trio of Gueydon-class cruisers, the three ships of the Dupleix class, and the five-unit Gloire-class. In all, in the 13 years between 1888 and 1901, the French had ordered 18 armored cruisers, with each class learning from the preceding one.
The result, the Gloire and her sisters, ran 9,996 tons, had an amazing 28 boilers (!) to drive three engines to obtain a 21-knot speed, and could steam 6,500 miles ecumenically. They carried 10 large guns (2x 7.64″/40, 8x 6.5″/45) as well as six 3.9″/50s, 18 x 45mm guns, and 4 x 37mm guns, plus five 17.7-inch torpedo tubes. All of this was protected by as much as 6.9 inches of armor.
Gloire-class armored cruiser Conde is pictured at Arsenal de Brest, c1918. A true floating castle with four funnels and a curious mix of armor and armament.
The three follow-on Gambetta class armored cruisers (class leader Leon Gambetta and Jules Ferry, followed by half-sister Victor Hugo) were up-sized Gloires, displacing 11,959 tons on a hull some 30 feet longer (489 feet vs 458 feet) and four feet beamier.
All three ships used different boiler arrangements (Gambetta 28 Niclausse boilers, Ferry 20 Guyot du Temple boilers, and Hugo 28 Belleville boilers) with triple engines that produced roughly 28,500 shp to make about 22 knots and steam 6,600nm at 10 knots.
Armament on the Gambettas was a repeat of the Gloires, albeit with two fewer 6.5-inch guns and a third more 47mm mounts (24 up from 18). Likewise, they only had two torpedo tubes. The armor plan was also similar to that of the Gloire.
To speed things up, the trio was laid down at three different naval yards, with Gambetta constructed at Brest, Ferry at Cherbourg, and Hugo at Lorient, with all constructed between January 1901 and April 1907.
A heavier update to the class with more guns and armor, the 13,000-ton Jules Michelet, was constructed soon after joining the fleet in 1908.
French cruiser Jules Michilet, American cruiser USS Huron, and Japanese Cruiser Yakumo in the Whangpoo River, Shanghai, 1925
Naval architect Emile Bertin kept tinkering with the Gambetta design to produce the 13,644-ton cruiser Ernest Renan in 1909 and her half-sisters Edgar Quinet and Waldeck-Rousseau, which were the most powerful (and last) armored cruisers built in France, commissioned in 1911.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Meet Gambetta
Our subject is the first French warship named after the 1870s political and cultural juggernaut, Leon Gambetta, who was key to the formation of the Third Republic and served at various times as the country’s minister of the interior, Président du Conseil, and Président de la Chambre des deputes before his young death at age 44 in 1882. Something like 200 towns have a Rue Gambetta in France to this day, and his likeness remains borne in numerous statues throughout the Republic.
Odds are, if you have been to France in the past 140 years, you have either walked upon a street named for Leon Gambetta or gazed on his face. He is right up there with Leclerc, Ferry, Foch, and Clemenceau.
The armored cruiser ordered in his honor was laid down at Arsenal de Brest on 15 January 1901.
Lead ship, Armoured Cruiser Léon Gambetta, construction at Arsenal de Brest, 1901
She was launched into the waters of the Bay of Biscay on 26 October 1902.
Brest. Launching of the armoured cruiser Leon Gambetta.
Lancement du croiseur cuirassé Léon Gambetta Petit Journal 10 novembre 1901
While on sea trials in February 1904, she ran aground in the fog and required dry docking for another six months, then promptly ran aground a second time, sending her back to the yard for further repair.
Gambetta, Brassey’s Naval Annual 1905
She finally finished her trials and was accepted and commissioned on 21 July 1905, with her cumulative construction cost hitting 29,248,500 francs.
Made the flagship of VADM Camille Gigon’s (later VADM Horace Jaureguiberry’s) 1re Division de croiseur as part of the Northern Squadron, she immediately sailed to Portsmouth in August 1905 for the Anglo-French naval review to celebrate the historic Entente Cordiale, which ended centuries of tension between London and Paris and helped set the stage for the Great War.
Entente Cordiale: The French squadron in Portsmouth Harbor – from the French magazine Le Petit Journal, August 13, 1905.
The French ships were reviewed by King Edward VII and hosted in a variety of events ashore for the Gallic visitors throughout the week, including a garden party in Victoria Park.
Remaining a ship of state, she carried President Clement Armand Fallieres to England in May 1908 for an official visit and, later that summer, represented France at the Quebec Tercentenary.
French cruiser Léon Gambetta at the Quebec Tercentenary 1908 LAC 336185
Gambetta and HMS Minotaur at the Quebec Tercentenary 1908 LAC
Quebec Tercentenary, HMS Minotaur, Leon Gambetta, Don de Dieu, and HMS Indomitable
Quebec Tercentenary Illumination of Indomitable, Minotaur, Leon Gambetta and the Chateau Frontenac
By 1911, the three Gambetta sisters would make up the 1re Division legere in the French Mediterranean fleet with RADM Louis Dartige du Fournet hoisting his flag on our subject.
War!
Carrying the flag of RADM Victor-Baptistin Senes, Gambetta entered the Great War at the head of the 2e Division legere out of Toulon and was soon busy escorting troopships moving colonial troops from French North Africa to the Republic proper.
Then came orders to join the force of ADM Augustin Boue de Lapeyrere’s fleet of two dozen battlewagons and cruisers blockading the Austro-Hungarian coast along the Adriatic. This included several sharp skirmishes with Austrian ships, tracking the neutral Italians, supporting the Serbian and Montenegrin armies ashore, and escorting troop ships through U-boat-infested waters.
Speaking of the latter, on 26 April 1915, she was found at sea by SM U-5 of the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine. A humble 105-foot gasoline-electric submarine designed by Electric Boat of Connecticut to the same plans as used by the U.S. Navy’s C-class, U-5 only carried four 17.7-inch Whitehead torpedoes to be fired from her two forward tubes.
Kuk S.M. U 5
The tiny boat, good only for 10 knots under the best sea conditions, her new skipper, Linienschiffsleutnant Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp, had only assumed command nine days prior. Von Trapp, from a noble family and husband to Agathe Whitehead, granddaughter of the torpedo godfather, had joined the Austrian fleet at age 14 in 1894 and had served in China during the Boxer Rebellion with the surface fleet before switching to submarines in 1908.
SM U-5 of the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine and her commander, Linienschiffsleutnant Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp, at the joint Austro-German U-Boat base in the northern Adriatic in the Brioni (Brijuni) islands off Pula in Croatia during the War.
Von Trapp, in his tiny a risky little boat, continued to stalk Gambetta in the Ionian Sea off Italy’s Cape Santa Maria di Leuca into the night and, closing to within 500 yards, fired both tubes at point blank range just after midnight on 27 April.
With hits against the massive target inevitable, both fish exploded and created havoc on Gambetta, which soon began settling in the water, her boilers knocked out. Ten minutes later, it was all over, and the proud cruiser was on the bottom, taking every single one of her officers and the bulk of her 800-man crew with her.
Escorted by Italian destroyers who had only entered the war that week, they rescued 137 waterlogged survivors from the lost French cruisers.
Von Trapp made history that pre-dawn morning, conducting the first-ever underwater nighttime (and only the second) submarine attack on a vessel in the region. Gambetta remained one of the largest ships hit by a U-boat during the war.
For the feat, he would eventually earn the coveted Militär-Maria-Theresien-Orden, the highest military honor of the old Habsburg monarchy, and he would become a household name in both Austria and Germany.
Propagandists on both sides took advantage of the loss to show how brave French sailors met Poseidon without fear and how, for the Central Powers, the U-boat was a modern marvel of war, commanded by a brave modern-day knight of the sea
Engraving from the Petit Journal of May 5, 1915: “How French sailors know how to die.” Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France
French armoured cruiser Leon Gambetta, sinking SMS U-5. 2
German propaganda art of Gambetta sinking by Alexander Kircher
Sinking of the French armoured cruiser Léon Gambetta on 27 April 1915, by German artist August von Ramberg
Torpedoed and sunk by the Austro-Hungarian Submarine U-5 on 27 April 1915. Austrian War Art painting. NH 60194
As for Von Trapp, just three months after sending Gambetta to the bottom, he sank the Italian submarine Nereide on 5 August 1915, just off Pelagosa (Palagruza) Island. He followed that up with capturing the Greek steamer Cefalonia three weeks later. Before the end of the war, Von Trapp would add 11 more steamers to his tally sheet, surviving 19 war patrols.
Epilogue
Little remains of Gambetta topside that I can find.
Her sisters, Jules Ferry and Victor Hugo, survived the war and, after overseas service policing French colonies in the Far East, were retired and scrapped in the late 1920s.
French armored cruiser Jules Ferry at sea, around 1905-1911, Gambetta class
Léon Gambetta-class cruiser Victor Hugo Melbourne 1923
Von Trapp, left without either a navy or a sovereign when Austrian Emperor Karl left the throne in November 1918, had to fall back on his personal inherited fortune. Left a widower with seven children in 1922 upon the passing of his wife due to scarlet fever, he hired one Maria Augusta Kutschera, a young novice from the nearby nunnery, as a live-in tutor, and the old sea dog later married her in 1927 despite the 25-year age difference, and had three further children.
The Von Trapp family then drifted into a singing career, and the rest is history.
Von Trapp, exiled from Austria in 1938, later settled in the U.S., where he passed in 1947, aged 67. He is buried in Stowe, Vermont.
Christopher Plummer portrayed him in the 1965 movie, The Sound of Music, which was very loosely based on the family’s story in the 1920s and 30s.
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
***
Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.
***
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