The Eurydice (S 644) was a French submarine of the Daphne class , 11 boats for from that in the 1950s and 1960s total French Navy were built. The boat was lost on March 4, 1970 in the Mediterranean after an explosion. All 57 men on board were killed.
The boat was in July 1958 at the DCNS (DCNS) in Cherbourg on down Kiel , expired on 19 June 1962 from the pile and was placed on 26 September 1964 in service and the first submarine flotilla allocated. It was 57.75 m long and 6.74 m wide and when surfaced it had a draft of 5.25 m . Its water displacement was 869 t above water and 1043 t submerged. Two electric motors enabled a top speed under water of 16 knots with two screws ; over water two diesel engines gave a speed of 13.5 knots. The maximum diving depth was 575 m and the boat could stay at sea for up to 30 days. It had 12 torpedo tubes and a crew of 6 officers and 44 men.
fate
On the morning of March 4, 1970, under the command of Lieutenant de vaisseau Bernard de Truchis de Lays , the boat undertook diving exercises in calm seas off Cap Camarat , 35 nautical miles east of Toulon , as a seismograph in Nice at 7:28 am, an underwater explosion in about 600 m depth. The Eurydice stopped answering , and French and Italian ships found only one oil stain and a few pieces of wreckage, one of which was labeled Eurydice . Large parts of the wreck the Eurydice were American US from the on April 22, 1970 deepwater - research vessel T-AGOR-11 south-east of Saint-Tropez ( 43 ° 9 '36 " N , 6 ° 48' 0" O ) at a depth discovered and photographed from 750 m.
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The cause of the explosion could never be clarified. There are two hypotheses:
The most likely collision at very shallow depths with a Tunisian cargo ship, the Tabarka , with traces of fresh scratches on the hull .
After the resumption of the search for the Minerve , whose sinking could be due to a failure of the rudder, the same cause comes into consideration as an explanation for the sinking of the Eurydice .