Liberation cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_23 october 2000

In France also submarines have been shipwrecked in complete opacity

Fatalimmersion

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The French Navy has never made public its conclusions on the disappearance at sea of “La Minerve”. Top secret. Thirty-two years later, testimonies establish that the submarine sank because of a design error.

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It is one o'clock in the morning in the port of Toulon. It's winter. In the bay of Les Vignettes, the cold water laps against the black hull of the Minerve, while Lieutenant Merlo disembarks. The officer leaves the edge of the submarine, his training mission completed. He leaves behind him fifty-two crewmen who will hardly sleep that night. Their last night. On January 28, 1968, the Minerve immediately returned to its exercise area, off Toulon. A few hours later, the sub will disappear. We never found him.

Long before the sinking of the Kursk, the French Navy also experienced the tragedy that awaits all the "submarinades" in the world. And no more than the Russian Fleet, it practiced transparency. Why did this state-of-the-art 1960s submarine sink? Thirty-two years after the tragedy, it is still a defense secret. The Navy has never made the results of its investigations public. The reports of the time, which sleep on the shelves of the historical service of the Navy, will not be accessible before 2018, fifty years after the facts. As for the remains of the submersible, never really located, they still lie at a depth of 2,000 meters.

Thanks to the testimonies of former submariners, we can now reconstruct the facts and conclude that the accident was caused by an error in the design of the submarine. One of these sailors, René Autret, died last May. Former of the Minerve, returned to civilian life, he kept in a small satchel all the documents on the case. An archive that would have remained confidential had it not been for his son Jean-Alain's decision to create a site on the Internet(1)and which corroborates other accounts made under cover of confidentiality.

Leaving the harbor that night, the Minerve steered south-southeast. The great depths begin immediately. This is a peculiarity of the Mediterranean coast in this place: the almost total absence of a continental shelf. No sooner had we passed Cape Sicié than the boats found themselves with 1,000 meters of water under their keels. Where La Minerve goes, 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) from the cape, the bottom is already at least 2,000 meters.

7:15 a.m., anti-submarine exercise

When day breaks, it is very bad. The mistral blows from the northwest with gusts of 100 km per hour. La Minerve is diving. In heavy seas (force 5 to 6), it's more comfortable for the crew. On the surface, an 800 ton submarine tends to behave like a bottleneck. Nothing to do with the giant submarines of today, like the Kursk, which are twenty times heavier.

La Minerve has an appointment with an aircraft for an anti-submarine warfare exercise. A Bréguet Atlantic, which took off from the Nîmes-Garons naval air base, arrived in the area around 7:15 a.m. First radio contact between the plane and the submarine was established at 7:19 a.m. La Minerve was in periscopic immersion . That is to say, he sails close enough to the surface for him to take out his periscope, his radio antennas and his snorkel, a tube which allows the evacuation of exhaust gases and the arrival of fresh air(2).

Its antenna is constantly wet by the waves. Very quickly, there is a frying on the line and, on board the Atlantic, the radionavigator warns his chief, Lieutenant Queinnec that he is having difficulty keeping in touch. At 7:37 a.m., the submarine confirms that its transmission difficulties are caused by the sea state. Eight minutes later, the plane returns and announces that it will even cancel its last radar check. It is 7:55 a.m. when the submarine replies: “I understand that you are canceling this verification. Did you hear me?”"I heard you," replies the Atlantic. La Minerve will never be heard again.

At the moment, nobody cares. For about ten minutes, the Atlantic tries to reach the boat. Without success. He then set sail for Nîmes, convinced that the submarine simply could no longer maintain periscopic immersion because of the storm. Ordinary. At 11 a.m., at the time of the change of watch at the command of the submarines in the Mediterranean, in the port of Toulon, a message is sent to La Minerve: “Cancellation of the exercises due to the weather. You regain your freedom of maneuver. No answer. But still no worries. Transmission difficulties in heavy weather do not surprise anyone. The technology then is closer to that of the German U-boats of 1939-45 than to today's submersibles.

Valve blocked

We are expecting La Minerve in Toulon for 9 p.m. But that's the custom the captain has a latitude of more or less four hours to return to port. At midnight, no boat. At one o'clock, the time limit has passed. At the first squadron, Lieutenant Vinot informed his commander. It took 2:15 a.m. on January 28 for the “Search for a submarine” procedure to be triggered. Since the last radio contact with the Minerve, eighteen hours and twenty minutes have passed.

What happened in the early morning of January 28? Commander Fauve“shave the daisies”maintaining its building in periscopic immersion. The waves, which drown the radio antenna, also cover the snorkel. To prevent seawater from entering the submarine, a "head valve" automatically closes the air tube whenever a wave comes in. An ingenious system which works thanks to electrodes, but very unpleasant for the ears of the crew. Because these incessant closures cause variations in the atmospheric pressure on board. Overpressure, depression: the eardrums suffer. But this time, in addition, the system is malfunctioning."It's a common damage"aboard Minerve-type submarines, says a sailor. The water rushes into the tube and descends directly into the “auxiliary hold”. A pump is then started to pump the water. Nothing serious, provided that we manage to close the air tube. The maneuver is classic: a petty officer, the "power station master", pulls on a lever to close the dome. That's what the instructions say. What they don't say is what to do if the water flow is too high and the pressure prevents the dome from being closed manually. Or that a piece of floating wood, for example, gets stuck under the dome.

It will be necessary to wait for a similar accident this time narrowly avoided on board a submarine of the same type, the Flore on February 19, 1971, for the Navy to decide to install a protective grid on the head valve and above all a hydropneumatic system making it possible to close the cupola, where the muscles of the crew were obviously not enough. The cause of the accident is identified and confirmed by a new problem with the closure of the dome on the Venus. Since then, no more snorkeling incidents have been reported on Daphne-type submarines, such as the Minerve. These submarines suffered from another design problem, related to the pressure in the dive bar in the event of a leak. This is what allows the submersible to dive and above all to resurface. The Navy knew this and the modifications were also planned. But too late for Minerva...

“They accepted the sacrifice in advance”

It only remains to imagine the water invading the holds and reaching the rest of the boat. Because in these little submarines, there are no watertight doors to stop the flow. The crew trying to "hunt" everything they can. Very quickly, the submarine became heavy and probably sank astern. We drop the safety seals, but the descent accelerates. Around 300 meters, the hull begins to leak: on each square centimeter, the pressure is 30 kg. At 600 meters, the water has probably completely invaded La Minerve. The fifty-two men will not hear the last cracks, when the hull finally implodes. Despite their young age, the crew will leave behind seventeen widows and twenty-eight orphans. And fifty-two grieving families.

The crew: in the last photo taken on board a few days before the tragedy (see page the crew), we see a bunch of kids, aged 20 to 25, huddled together to get into the lens. Seaman Coustal, an electrician from Narbonne, put on sunglasses and threw back his beret. At his side, the quartermaster engineer Lambert laughs. In front of him, Quartermaster Helmer, one of the three radios on board, stands with his chin pensive. No doubt, he thinks of his young wife in Moselle. They are all volunteers to serve in the submarines, the Navy's elite. Many do their military service. René Autret is not in the photo, he has changed assignments. Edmond Rabussier is not in the photo either. But he embarks at the last moment to replace a sailor. It was his first dive.

Launched on January 28 at 2:15 a.m., the search was suspended on the morning of February 2. Only one hydrocarbon slick is spotted in the area. It was not until the 1980s that American detectors managed to locate pieces of a ship lying in two thousand meters of water and spread over several square kilometres. It could beMinerva.

In Toulon, the Navy organizes a great military and religious ceremony in memory of the crew. General de Gaulle moves. His speech is chilling:Sailors have died at sea. They were volunteers. That is to say, they had accepted the sacrifice in advance.» Circulate! At the time, no one flinched. Today, former sailors denounce "the lead screed", the "intellectual blockage"..“Our submarines were said to be perfectly safe to dive. Even when the Minerve disappeared, this confidence was not shaken”, notes one of them.

Impossible in Gaullist France to question such an armament program, "Grandeur" obliges. The Daphne-class submarines allowed the Navy to do without the old German U-Boats with which it had been equipped since the Liberation. With eleven boats, the Daphné then formed the backbone of spearfishing and sold like hotcakes abroad (Portugal, Spain, Pakistan, South Africa). Moreover, at the end of the ceremony in homage to the crew of the Minerve, General de Gaulle embarked on board a submarine of the same type and went to dive opposite Toulon. The building that hosts the Head of State is the Eurydice. It will in turn disappear off Saint-Tropez on March 4, 1970. As with La Minerve, the causes of this accident are still not officially known.

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(1) (http://s647.infos.st/)

(2) The snorkel is in use when submarines use their diesel engines. In deep diving, propulsion is provided by electric batteries.

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Jean-Dominique Merchet