The World 26 August 2000
Thirty years later, two sinking submarines
français remain unexplained :
The Russian navy is not alone in hiding its failures, as it showed with the disappearance of the Kursk. Thirty-two years after the loss of the Minerve, then the Eurydice in the Mediterranean, France has still not made public the results of its investigations into these two shipwrecks which caused the death of a total of 109 submariners. , including a Pakistani officer.
Unless a government decision to open the archives before the hour, it will be necessary to wait until 2018, that is to say fifty years after the loss of the Minerve, on January 27, 1968, off the coast of Toulon, to know the reasons for this disappearance followed. , on March 4, 1970, by that of the Eurydice, a twin submarine in all respects of the first.
Within the French Navy, the Minerve and the Eurydice were then part of a series of eleven submarines of the so-called "Daphne" class, that is to say buildings of 1,040 tons in diving which were designed, in the 1960s and 1970s, for anti-submarine warfare and which were inspired by the technology of the German “U Boot” of the last world war. At the time, General de Gaulle's France was proud to have recovered its autonomy from NATO and to field classic medium-tonnage submarines with high maneuverability, high endurance in diving and recognized for their discretion. immersion acoustics.
Alas! In the western Mediterranean, the Minerve sank 1,000 meters deep in 1968, probably imploding at some 500 meters, well beyond the safety limits, and the Eurydice sank in 1970, after allowing General de Gaulle, Head of State, to pay tribute, during a spectacular forty-minute dive in February 1968, to the crew of the first submarine.
The wreckage of the Minerve has never been precisely located. That of the Eurydice, no more, even if we photographed some debris at a depth of 700 meters.
OPAQUE SILENCE
The French Navy then surrounded this double shipwreck with an opaque silence, which still lasts. Reason of state prevailed. On the grounds - not officially admitted - that the "Daphne" class submarines, in addition to equipping France pending the commissioning of other submersibles of the "Narval" and then "Agosta" models, before the appearance of future nuclear attack submarines of the "Rubis" type, have experienced unexpected commercial successes in exports. The "Daphne" were adopted by Portugal (four copies), South Africa (three), Pakistan (four) and Spain (four) between 1965 and 1975. He was unwelcome, commenting on the shipwrecks of Minerva and Eurydice, to decry the product. Mission successful, since Pakistan and Spain remained faithful to French technology by continuing to buy, in the 1980s, respectively 4 and 4 “Agosta” submarines. While waiting for the opening of the archives, we are reduced, for want of the French navy to play fair, to hypotheses on the tragic avatars of the Minerva and the Eurydice. As for the Russian Navy. The scenarios are likely to be all the more believable if they are based on the misadventure that occurred to another submarine in the same series, the Flora, without having such disastrous consequences.
At the time, the incident did not make the front page of the press, except that we were able to learn, through late indiscretions, that the hectic navigation of the submarine had given rise, between the captain and his second , to a serious confrontation that the naval staff thought it clever to want to settle as a family.
CONSTRUCTION DEFECT
In 1970, in fact, the crew of the Flore almost suffered a mock shipwreck during an exercise in the Mediterranean. Except that the submarine managed to return to the surface, thanks to the control of its crew. It was what we would today call a technical bug, some say a construction defect. Not only, an expert thinks he can remember after the fact, there was a malfunction of the snorkel valves (the tube which is responsible for sucking in fresh air and evacuating exhaust gases when diving) to the point of let the water rush in. What was not new on such a submarine. But, he believes he can add, the dive bars unexpectedly jammed, making the steering of the boat uncontrollable and pulling it towards the bottom like "an iron".
Other incidents illustrated the life of two submarines of the same category, the Galatea and the Psyche. During all this time, France kept - and still keeps - a cautious silence, without ceasing to sell submarines abroad. Russia has also encountered, since 1968, the year in which it lost no less than two nuclear submersibles in the Atlantic, then in the Pacific, serious problems of diving safety. In 1970, a third shipwrecked in the Atlantic. Experts wonder whether or not the disappearance of the Kursk will have a direct impact on Moscow's submarine exports. The precedent of the French "Daphne", during these same two years, tends to believe that it is rather unlikely.
Jacques Isnard
