![]() Vergniaud
| |
History | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Name | Vergniaud |
Namesake | Pierre Vergniaud |
Cost | 55,247,307 francs |
Laid down | November 1907 |
Launched | 12 April 1910 |
Completed | 18 December 1911 |
Decommissioned | June 1921 |
Stricken | 27 October 1921 |
Fate | Sold for scrap, 27 November 1928 |
General characteristics | |
Class and type | Danton-class semi-dreadnought battleship |
Displacement | 18,754 t (18,458 long tons) (normal) |
Length | 146.6 m (481 ft) (o/a) |
Beam | 25.8 m (84 ft 8 in) |
Draft | 8.44 m (27 ft 8 in) |
Installed power |
|
Propulsion | 4 shafts; 4 steam turbines |
Speed | 19.25 knots (35.7 km/h; 22.2 mph) |
Complement | 25 officers and 831 enlisted men |
Armament |
|
Armor |
|
Vergniaud was one of the six Danton-class semi-dreadnought battleships built for the French Navy between 1907 and 1911. When World War I began in August 1914, she unsuccessfully searched for the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the light cruiser SMS Breslau in the Western Mediterranean and escorted convoys. Later that month, the ship participated in the Battle of Antivari in the Adriatic Sea and helped to sink an Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser. Vergniaud spent most of the rest of the war blockading the Straits of Otranto and the Dardanelles to prevent German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish warships from breaking out into the Mediterranean.
She briefly participated in the occupation of Constantinople after the end of the war and was deployed in the Black Sea in early 1919 during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The ship's crew mutinied after one of its members was killed when a protest against intervention against the Bolsheviks was bloodily suppressed. Vergniaud returned to France and was later placed in reserve after a brief deployment in the Eastern Mediterranean. She was condemned in 1921 and used as a target ship until 1926. The ship was sold for scrap two years later.