page_title: French cruiser Léon Gambetta
section_title: World War I
hierarchical_section_title: French cruiser Léon Gambetta / Construction and career / World War I
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Le torpillage du croiseur cuirassé Léon Gambetta en 1915 vu par une carte postale allemande, pour une image du peintre marine germano-autrichienne, Alexander (Alex) Kircher. English: The sinking of the battleship-cruiser Léon Gambetta in 1915 saw a German postcard, after a picture of the German-Austrian painter, Alexander (Alex) Kircher. Italiano: L'affondamento del incrociatore da battaglia Léon Gambetta visto nel 1915 da una cartolina tedesca, per l'immagine del pittore di marine tedesco-austriaco, Alexander (Alex) Kircher.
context_page_description: Léon Gambetta was the lead ship of her class of three armored cruisers built for the French Navy in the first decade of the 20th century. Armed with four 194-millimeter guns, the ships were much larger and more powerfully armed than their predecessors. Completed in 1905, she was initially assigned to the Northern Squadron where she served as a flagship. The ship was transferred to the Mediterranean Squadron in 1910 and remained there for the rest of her career.
  During World War I, Léon Gambetta escorted convoys as well as the capital ships of the French fleet. She participated in the blockade of the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic Sea. The ship was sunk by the Austro-Hungarian U-boat U-5 in April 1915 with heavy loss of life.
context_section_description: When Imperial Germany declared war on France on 3 August 1914, the ship was the flagship of Rear Admiral Victor-Baptistin Senès. The following day the 2nd DL was part of the escorting force for a troop convoy from Algiers, French Algeria to Metropolitan France. On 13 August Vice Admiral Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère, commander of the Allied forces in the Central Mediterranean, was ordered to begin offensive operations against the Austro-Hungarian fleet in the Adriatic. He decided to break the Austro-Hungarian blockade of the port of Antivari, Montenegro, and to engage any ships operating out of nearby Cattaro. He split his available forces into two groups with the armored cruisers following the Albanian coast and the battleships tracing the Italian coast before cutting across the Adriatic to rendezvous at Antivari on the morning of the 16th. The latter sank the protected cruiser SMS Zenta that morning in the Battle of Antivari as the armored cruisers were coming up from the south. 
  At the end of the month, the French began intermittently escorting single cargo ships to Antivari, usually escorted by the armored cruisers and covered by the main battlefleet. The first of these was on 31 September when four armored cruisers escorted the steamer SS Liamone while the battleships bombarded the defenses of Cattaro. The 2nd DL escorted the cargo ship SS Henri Fraissinet as it brought long-range artillery pieces to Antivari on 18–19 September. On the return voyage, they took advantage of the fog to bombard Cattaro before they were forced to withdraw by the heavy return fire. The 2nd DL participated in the next sortie into the Adriatic on 17 October, but it was uneventful. During the following mission, begun at the end of October, the 2nd DL raided the island of Lastovo on 2 November and Jules Ferry was narrowly missed by U-5, an Austro-Hungarian U-boat, on the return voyage the following day. The torpedoing of the dreadnought battleship Jean Bart on 21 December brought an end to the sorties into the Adriatic by the battlefleet; henceforth the supply ships were escorted by the armored cruisers or smaller ships. The French also responded by moving their patrol line further south to a line north of the Greek island of Corfu.
  On 10 January 1915 Boué de Lapeyrère was informed that the Austro-Hungarian battlefeet was headed south; he put to sea with Léon Gambetta and the armored cruisers Ernest Renan, Waldeck-Rousseau and Jules Michelet patrolling off Corfu while the battleships cruised further south. This proved to be a false alarm. On 24 January Léon Gambetta ferried the Montenegrin Foreign Minister to the port of Medua, Albania, with a cargo of clothing and shoes for the Montenegrin Army, but it proved impossible to unload the cargo and the cruiser returned with it still aboard. There was another false alarm on 4 April, during which U-5 had spotted the cruiser off the island of Paxos, but was not able to maneuver into an attack position; the submarine was not spotted by the French ship. Léon Gambetta escorted the French freighter SS Whitehead to Medua on 5 April.
   
  Italy signed the Treaty of London on 26 April, agreeing to declare war on Austro-Hungary. Boué de Lapeyrère, concerned about a possible pre-emptive attack on the southern Italian ports, temporarily moved all of his armored cruisers closer to the Strait of Otranto that day. Unbeknownst to Léon Gambetta, she had been stalked for a day and a half by Korvettenkapitän (Lieutenant Commander) Georg Ritter von Trapp, the new commander of U-5, when the submarine was finally able to make her attack at 00:40 on 27 April, roughly 15 nautical miles (28 km; 17 mi) south of Santa Maria di Leuca (the south-eastern tip of Italy in the Ionian Sea).
caption: A German postcard with an artist's depiction of the sinking of Léon Gambetta
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