The wreckage of a French submarine that sank in 1968 with 52 crew members onboard has been found in the Mediterranean, the authorities said, ending a five-decade mystery over a vessel that was once one of the jewels of the French fleet.
“It’s a success, a relief and a technical feat,” Florence Parly, the French armed forces minister, wrote on Twitter, announcing the discovery of the vessel, the Minerve, on Sunday. “I am thinking of the families who have waited for so long for this moment.”
The wreckage was found by the Norwegian-flagged research vessel Seabed Constructor, 28 miles from the southern French port city of Toulon — and about 7,800 feet underwater. The Seabed Constructor, operated by the American ocean-mapping company Ocean Infinity, is the same craft that in November found the San Juan submarine that had gone missing in 2017 off Argentina’s coast with 44 sailors onboard.
Three parts of the Minerve were found, spread across 330 yards, said Stanislas Gentien, a spokesman for the Mediterranean’s Maritime Prefecture, in Toulon. The first four letters of the vessel’s name — MINE, written in red — were visible on the main piece of wreckage, leaving little doubt about the submarine’s identity, he said.
Although the cause of the Minerve’s sinking was never determined, Gentien said that the wreckage would not be lifted back to the surface, and that the research would probably stop there.
“The most important thing was to locate the Minerve to help families grieve,” he said. “We won’t try to understand how it sank.”
He said that a ceremony commemorating the lost crew members would probably be held at sea, above where the wreckage was found, in late summer or early fall.
The Minerve was engaged in an exercise with a military aircraft when it disappeared in the early hours of Jan 27, 1968 — a year that became notorious for the number of submarines that went missing.
Just two days before the French navy lost track of the Minerve, the Israeli submarine Dakar also disappeared in the Mediterranean. That March, the Soviet Union lost the ballistic-missile submarine K-129 in the Pacific, and the United States lost the nuclear-powered attack submarine Scorpion in the Atlantic that May.
The loss of the Minerve with 52 sailors onboard shocked the French navy, as the vessel was known to be one of the most sophisticated of the French fleet. “It left the families and marine officers traumatised,” Rear Adm. Dominique Salles, the president of an organisation that represents submarine crews, said in a telephone interview.
“La Minerve was a discreet and fast sub, capable of going at significant depth,” he added. “For the 1960s, it was the quintessence of the French modern submarine.”
For the families, the loss has remained a deep wound. “I perfectly remember that morning of this Sunday, Jan. 28,” Hervé Fauve, the son of Lt. André Fauve, who was commanding the Minerve, wrote on a blog dedicated to the sinking. After two navy officers gave the news of the vessel’s loss in the family’s living room, Fauve recalled, his mother turned to him and said in tears: “Your daddy is dead. His submarine has sunk.”
In the days that followed the submarine’s disappearance, a search was conducted by around 20 boats, helicopters and aircraft, as well as a diving vessel of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Yet their efforts were fruitless, according to Salles, because the technical capabilities for a search at such a depth were insufficient.
Further searches were conducted from 1968 to 1970, but they were abandoned, leaving the crew members’ relatives without answers. When the families gathered in Toulon in January 2018 for the 50th anniversary of the sinking, they urged the French government to conduct new searches.
“The ceremony brought the memory of the sailors back to life — the families were not lost anymore,” said Salles, who participated in the commemoration.
A new preliminary search was conducted this February, and resumed this month. Last week, the Seabed Constructor joined a search operation conducted by French vessels and, using autonomous underwater vehicles, made the Minerve discovery Sunday evening.
Jean-Marc Meunier, brother of François, who was quartermaster on the Minerve, told Le Monde newspaper that he had grown confident about the latest operation after learning that the vessel that found the San Juan submarine would participate.
“It’s the end of a long wait and many questions,” Meunier said.
