On September 25, 1911, the French battleship, Liberté, joined the long, sad list of ships that managed to sink themselves without the benefit of an enemy to blame when she blew up while moored at Toulon harbor in the South of France.
Digging Deeper
Liberté was a pre-Dreadnaught type battleship, built in 1902 to 1908, already obsolete at her 1908 commissioning because of the revolutionary appearance of the British battleship HMS Dreadnaught in 1906. Still, the Liberté was an impressive ship with a displacement of nearly 15,000 tons and a length of 439 feet. Capable of 19 knots top speed, she was armed with a main battery of 4 X 12 inch (305 mm) guns and a secondary armament of 10 X 7.6 inch (194 mm) guns, as well as various other smaller weapons. Liberté boasted a pair of torpedo tubes, and armor as thick as 13 inches. With a crew of 769 men, Liberté could take on all but the latest Dreadnaught type battleships.
