The Hard fighting 13th
85 years ago this week.
30 November 1940, Scotland. Officers and NCOs of the Free French Navy submarine Minerve (P26), seen while the boat was refitting for further service. She was not alone.
Note the 3″/35 M1928 deck gun. Réf. : LONDRES R-12-206 Photographe inconnu/ECPAD/Défense
At least the 13th warship with the name under the French flag, going back to 1757, Minerve was commissioned on 5 September 1936 under the pennant number Q185.
The leader of her class of 223-foot coastal submarines, she hit the scales at 870 tons submerged and could make 14 knots on the surface.
Her armament was varied, including a 3″/35 M1928 deck gun, two 13.2mm HMGs, six 21.7-inch internal torpedo tubes (four bow, two stern), each with a single reload. Outside of her pressure hull, she had three smaller yet trainable 15.7-inch tubes with no reloads.
Refitting in FFN service with a new pennant number on the sail. Note that her three external tubes are rotated out
In the early days of WWII, she carried out a surveillance of the Canary Islands for German blockade runners and then rode escort on seven convoys between Gibraltar and Liverpool. Towed out of Brest to avoid being captured by the Germans during the Fall of France in June 1940, she was seized by the British, then commissioned under the pennant number P26 in the Free French Navy with a new crew in January 1941 and soon took part in the chase of the German battleship Bismarck.
De Gaulle seen leaving the Free French submarine sisters, Junon and Minerve, in late 1940. Note Minerve’s win 13.2mm AAA mount. Photo by Harold William John Hamlin, IWM A 2173
Surviving the war, though heavily damaged in a blue-on-blue attack by British aircraft, she was wrecked in September 1945 while being towed back to France.
Of her six boat class, only two others survived the war.
A 14th Minerve (S647), a Daphné-class submarine, was lost in 1968 with a crew of 52 in the Gulf of Lion, one of four modern submarines mysteriously lost that year.