Arago (ship, 1914)

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The Arago

The Arago was an originally British cable lay called Transmitter , built in 1913 , bought in 1931 by the French PTT ministry (Ministère des Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones) and put into service under the name Arago . It was named after the French astronomer , physicist and politician Dominique François Jean Arago (1786-1853). In the first year of the Second World War , the ship served in the French Navy as an auxiliary cruiser or guard ship, then until 1950 as a rescue ship .

British transmitter

The Eastern Telegraph's submarine cable network, 1901

The ship was launched on August 7, 1913 with the hull number 152 in Goole Shipbuilding and Repairing Company in Goole ( Yorkshire ) from the stack and was established in January 1914 by the founded in 1872 Eastern Telegraph Company of London named transmitters as submarine cables -Reparaturschiff into service posed. The single-screw steamer was 63.5 m long and 9.7 m wide and had a draft of 5.9 m when fully loaded . It was measured with 901 GRT and 388 NRT. A triple expansion engine from Richardson, Wesgarth & Co. gave the ship a top speed of 11 knots . The transmitter was then used intensively in the maintenance of the extensive submarine cable network of the Eastern Telegraph, in the 1920s especially in the South Atlantic.

French arago

On May 1, 1931, the French PTT Ministry bought the ship, which had previously been stationed in Bissau , renamed it Arago and stationed it in Dakar ( Senegal ). A cable depot with two tanks was set up there. Two submarine cable depots already existed in Brest and Pointe-Noire in what was then French Equatorial Africa , and Dakar thus became the center of the Brest-Pointe Noire connection. The main task of the ship was the laying and maintenance of submarine cable connections in French West and Equatorial Africa, in particular between Grand-Bassam ( Ivory Coast ) and Cotonou ( Dahomey / Benin ) and between Lomé ( Togo ) and Douala ( Cameroon ). The ship's crew came after some time mostly from Senegal, from the Cape Verde Islands and from Mali .

In 1939 the Arago was to be replaced at its Dakar location by the new Alsace built in Rouen . It was also planned that their crew would change to the Alsace in La Seyne-sur-Mer in April 1940 . The outbreak of World War II prevented this. As early as September 1939, the Arago - like the other cable layers - was requisitioned by the French Navy. She was armed and put into service as an auxiliary cruiser with the registration X82. During the so-called seat war until the beginning of the German campaign in the west in May 1940, the ships continued to perform their duties as cable ships. In the autumn of 1939, the Arago laid a cable from Marseille to Oran and then went to La Seyne-sur-Mer, where the change of crew to the new Alsace was to take place before it left for Dakar. The rapid advance of the Wehrmacht through northern France ruined this plan. Shortly before the Wehrmacht took Brest, the Alsace left there on June 17, 1940, went to the Azores to repair a cable and then ran on to Dakar to await further orders. The Arago first ran to Toulon . On the night of June 11th to 12th 1940, with the escort of the 1st Destroyer Division (the destroyers Palme , Mars and Tempête ), she destroyed the submarine cable between Rome and Barcelona (Operation "Cabo"). She then took refuge in Port-Vendres before joining a convoy going to Great Britain to go to Oran and from there to Mostaganem , where she subsequently performed port security services.

The Alsace , still in Dakar, survived the battle of Dakar on September 23, 1940 , the attack by Forces françaises libres (FFL) and the British on Dakar. For fear of losing her, the submarine cable management ordered her to Casablanca . On November 8, 1942, during the British-American invasion of French North Africa ( Operation Torch ), the Alsace was supposed to return to Dakar, but the British prevented that and she had to move to Gibraltar , where she spent Christmas. It was not until March 3, 1943 that the crews from Arago and Alsace were exchanged in Casablanca. The Arago then went back to La Seyne-sur-Mer, where it was disarmed.

After the end of the war, the Arago was sold to the French Navy in 1946, after the cable network in the Mediterranean had been restored, which used the ship as a sea rescue ship. The old ship was scrapped in La Seyne-sur-Mer in 1950.

Footnotes

  1. ^ The Engineering Index Annual for 1915, The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1915, p. 206
  2. ↑ http://www.netmarine.net/bat/hydro/arago/ancien.htm
  3. ↑ The Arago was the French government's third cable ship after the Ampère 1 had been replaced by the Émile Baudot in 1917 and the Charente by the Ampère 2 in 1930 .
  4. ↑ Aminata Ballo: L'Africaine émigration in La Seyne sur Mer ; in: Association des Amis des Câbles Sous-Marins: Bulletin N ° 49, June 2014, p. 27
  5. ↑ Aminata Ballo: L'Africaine émigration in La Seyne sur Mer ; in: Association des Amis des Câbles Sous-Marins: Bulletin N ° 49, June 2014, p. 27
  6. ↑ Aminata Ballo: L'Africaine émigration in La Seyne sur Mer ; in: Association des Amis des Câbles Sous-Marins: Bulletin N ° 49, June 2014, p. 28
  7. ↑ Les bâtiments ayant porté le nom d'Arago , at www.netmarine.net
  8. ↑ Michel Bertrand: La marine française au combat, 1939-1945: Des combats de l'Atlantique aux FNFL C. Lavauzelle, Limoges, 1982, ISBN 978-2-7025-0002-6 , p. 103
  9. ↑ Aminata Ballo: L'Africaine émigration in La Seyne sur Mer ; in: Association des Amis des Câbles Sous-Marins: Bulletin N ° 49, June 2014, p. 28
  10. ↑ Aminata Ballo: L'Africaine émigration in La Seyne sur Mer ; in: Association des Amis des Câbles Sous-Marins: Bulletin N ° 49, June 2014, p. 46
  11. ↑ http://www.netmarine.net/bat/hydro/arago/ancien.htm