Service History
While Patrie was still conducting sea trials on 29 May 1907, a condenser pipe in one of her boilers burst. Several stokers were scalded, and the ship had to return to Toulon to have the condenser pipe replaced. After entering service, she was assigned to the 1st Division of the Mediterranean Fleet, along with her sister République and Suffren, the divisional flagship. She was present for the annual summer maneuvers in June–July of that year, where she acted with several other battleships as a hostile force. While in a drydock on 3 July 1907, the battleship Iéna suffered a catastrophic magazine explosion that destroyed the ship; Patrie was moored nearby. Her commanding officer attempted to flood the dock to put out the inferno by firing one of Patrie's secondary guns at the dock gate, but the shell bounced off and did not penetrate it. The dock was finally flooded when Ensign de Vaisseau Roux (who was killed shortly afterward by fragments from the ship) managed to open the sluice gates.
During the 1910 gunnery training exercises, Patrie suffered mechanical problems with her sighting equipment that disabled one of her main battery turrets. In 1910 the battleship again was in an accident; while on maneuvers in the Gulf of Jouan, Patrie launched a torpedo that inadvertently struck her sister République. Her hull was damaged, and she was forced to put into Toulon for repairs.
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Patrie was assigned to the 1st Division of the 2nd Squadron in the Mediterranean, along with République and the flagship, Vérité; this was the main battle fleet of the French Navy. The French fleet was initially used to cover the movement of French troops—the XIX Corps—from Algeria to metropolitan France. As a result, the fleet was far out of position to catch the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben. For the majority of the war, the French used their main fleet to keep the Austro-Hungarian fleet bottled up in the Adriatic Sea. In 1914 she participated in the Battle of Antivari, where the battle line caught the Austro-Hungarian cruiser SMS Zenta by surprise and sank her. The French battleships then bombarded Austrian fortifications at Cattaro in an attempt to draw out the Austro-Hungarian fleet, which refused to take the bait.
The French operations in the area were hampered by a lack of a suitable base close to the mouth of the Adriatic; the British had given the French free access to Malta, but it was hundreds of miles away. The Austrians also possessed several submarines, one of which torpedoed the dreadnought Jean Bart in December 1914. The threat from underwater weapons greatly limited French naval activities in the Adriatic. As the war progressed, the French eventually settled on Corfu as their primary naval base in the area. In 1916 the ships supported Allied operations in Salonica and also detached landing parties to support the Allied attempt to force Greek acquiescence for those operations in Athens on 1 December. They spent the rest of the war at Salonica and Athens. Patrie became flagship of the French squadron at Salonica in 1918. During the war, four of Patrie's 3-pounder guns were converted into anti-aircraft guns with new high-angle mounts. The six casemate-mounted 164 mm guns were removed and landed at Salonica for use ashore. While off Salonica on 5 May 1916, Patrie's anti-aircraft gunners shot down a German zeppelin. Patrie was retained in the French Navy's inventory and served as a training ship in Toulon for mechanics and torpedomen until 1927. The following year, she stricken from the naval register and sold for scrap.
Read more about this topic: French Battleship Patrie (1903)
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