French battleship Vergniaud

Vergniaud
History
France
Name	Vergniaud
Namesake	Pierre Vergniaud
Cost	55,247,307 francs
Laid down	November 1907
Launched	12 April 1910
Completed	18 December 1911
Decommissioned	June 1921
Stricken	27 October 1921
Fate	Sold for scrap, 27 November 1928
General characteristics
Class and type	Danton-class semi-dreadnought battleship
Displacement	18,754 t (18,458 long tons) (normal)
Length	146.6 m (481 ft) (o/a)
Beam	25.8 m (84 ft 8 in)
Draft	8.44 m (27 ft 8 in)
Installed power	26 Belleville boilers 22,500 PS (16,500 kW)
Propulsion	4 shafts; 4 steam turbines
Speed	19.25 knots (35.7 km/h; 22.2 mph)
Complement	25 officers and 831 enlisted men
Armament	2 × twin 305 mm (12 in) guns 6 × twin 240 mm (9.4 in) guns 16 × single 75 mm (3 in) guns 8 × single 47 mm (1.9 in) guns 2 × 450 mm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes
Armor	Belt: 180–250 mm (7.1–9.8 in) Turrets: 260–340 mm (10.2–13.4 in) Conning tower: 266 mm (10.5 in)

Vergniaud was one of the six Danton-class semi-dreadnought battleships built for the French Navy between 1907 and 1911. When World War I began in August 1914, she unsuccessfully searched for the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the light cruiser SMS Breslau in the Western Mediterranean and escorted convoys. Later that month, the ship participated in the Battle of Antivari in the Adriatic Sea and helped to sink an Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser. Vergniaud spent most of the rest of the war blockading the Straits of Otranto and the Dardanelles to prevent German, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish warships from breaking out into the Mediterranean.

She briefly participated in the occupation of Constantinople after the end of the war and was deployed in the Black Sea in early 1919 during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The ship's crew mutinied after one of its members was killed when a protest against intervention against the Bolsheviks was bloodily suppressed. Vergniaud returned to France and was later placed in reserve after a brief deployment in the Eastern Mediterranean. She was condemned in 1921 and used as a target ship until 1926. The ship was sold for scrap two years later.