La Provence (ship)
 Painting by Antonio Jacobsen (1911)
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The La Provence was a transatlantic passenger steamer put into service in 1906 by the French shipping company Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT). With a tonnage of 13,753 GRT, she was the largest ship of the CGT until then and the largest civilian ship under the French flag until 1912. From 1914 it served as a troop transport under the name Provence II in the Mediterranean until it was sunk by the German submarine U 35 on February 26, 1916 off Cape Matapan on the southern tip of the Greek Peloponnese peninsula . Around 1,000 French soldiers and sailors were killed.
Passenger ship
The steamship La Provence was built at the Chantiers & Ateliers de Penhoët shipyard in Saint-Nazaire and was 183.85 meters long and 19.81 meters wide. It was propelled by two four-cylinder triple expansion steam engines that developed 30,000 hp and allowed a top speed of 22 knots. The steamer could carry 422 passengers in first class, 132 in second class and 808 in third class. She was built to complement the two sister ships La Lorraine and La Savoie for the express service from Le Havre to New York .
The ship had two masts , two funnels and two propellers and was the first passenger steamer in the CGT fleet with a tonnage of over 13,000 GRT. They were only surpassed in size by France (24,666 GRT), which was commissioned in 1912 . The La Provence surpassed all previous French passenger ships in size, speed and luxury. She was also the first ship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique to be equipped with a wireless radio device.
La Provence was launched on March 21, 1905, and on April 21, 1906, she sailed from Le Havre on her maiden voyage to New York. On the return voyage of her second Atlantic crossing, La Provence fought a race with the HAPAG steamer Germany , which she won by four hours. She made the crossing in six days, three hours and 22 minutes at a top speed of 21.71 knots. In the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, La Provence received one of the first distress signals from the sinking Titanic . However, she was too far away to be of any help. On June 6, 1914, she took off on her last trip in peacetime.
Troop transport
On August 2, 1914, the La Provence in Le Havre was requested by the French Navy as a troop transport and renamed Provence II , as there was already a French battleship called Provence . The ship was armed with five 140 mm cannons, two 57 mm cannons and four 47 mm cannons. For the remainder of the year she patrolled the waters around Sicily . In April 1915, they brought troops and equipment to the Dardanelles for the upcoming Battle of Gallipoli . From October 1915 she transported soldiers to Greece .
On February 23, 1916, ran Provence II in Toulon for a further troop trip to Thessaloniki from. In addition to the crew, soldiers of the 3e Régiment Colonial and the 372ème Régiment Principalement were on board. The command was the 50-year-old frigate captain ( capitaine de frégate ) Marie Henri Vesco, a bearer of the Officer's Cross of the Legion of Honor . Three days later, on February 26, 1916, Provence II was torpedoed 65 nautical miles southwest of the cape Matapan headland on the southern tip of the Greek Peloponnese peninsula by the German submarine U 35 under the command of Lieutenant Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière . The large ship sank within 17 minutes, killing most of the people on board. The survivors were rescued by the Compagnie Cyprien Fabre's Canada .
Both the death toll and the total number of people on board vary across sources. The number of deaths is given as 830, 990, 1059 and even up to 3100, even if the latter figure seems rather unlikely. Most sources assume a total of 1700 people, of whom about 1000 perished in the sinking, including Captain Vesco. After the French Gallia (14,966 GRT), the La Provence was the second largest ship sunk by U 35s and is also among the 25 largest ships sunk by German submarines in the First World War.