Laid down at Castellamare in 1877 and launched in
1880, Italia took Brin’s revolutionary design of Duilio (1876) to an extreme.
While France and Britain laid down successors to the Gloire
and Warrior, following their own different patterns, other European nations
joined in. Two of the first were the rival powers of Austria and newly-united
Italy. Indeed Italy ordered two small ironclads from France before the first
Italian Parliament sat in March 1861, and that year she also ordered two larger
vessels of the size and style of the Gloire-type from a New York shipyard.
Similarly Austria started with two small ironclad corvettes, and in 1861 began
three larger ‘Gloire’ ironclads. Russia ordered a 3,300-ton ironclad, with a
projecting ram bow, from the Warrior’s builders in 1861, and another the
following year, meanwhile converting two timber frigates; Ottoman Turkey
ordered three 6,400-ton ironclads also from England, and Spain started building
against the US Navy with a home-grown 6,200-tonner, at the same time ordering a
rather larger vessel from France; other minor naval powers followed suit.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic, two strange deviant types
were being hammered together in the more urgent conditions of the American
Civil War. The secessionist southern states, inferior to the northern states in
ships, shipbuilding and engineering capacity, had started the competition. The
secretary of their small navy claimed: ‘Inequality of numbers may be
compensated by invulnerability . . . a new and formidable type must
be created.’1 The screw frigate Merrimack had fallen into their hands at the
occupation of Norfolk, Virginia, with lower hull timbers sound and engines
capable of repair, so they cut her down to the waterline and built upon the
lower body an armoured battery or casemate. This occupied some two-thirds of
the hull length, and was built of 20-inch pine sloping inwards from the waterline
at about 45 degrees; 4-inches of oak was laid over this and then two layers of
railway irons rolled down to plates 8-inches wide by 2-inches thick. This
casemate was pierced all round with 14 ports for 10 guns, four of which were
6-inch or 7-inch calibre rifles, six 9-inch smooth-bores; a single funnel
projected through the top. There were no masts or sails.
This craft, which had a cast-iron ram attached to her bow,
was only an extemporized floating battery which would have been overwhelmed by
even moderate seas; nevertheless reports of her construction caused a little
concern in the North, turning by degrees into a great scare which allowed a
Swedish engineer inventor named John Ericsson to gain approval in September
1861 for a novel ironclad, the outlines of which had been maturing in his mind
for some 20 years, despite repeated rebuffs. His idea was an ‘impregnable fort’
in the shape of a revolving armoured turret ‘in the plain cylindrical form in
order that attack from all quarters of the compass may be resisted with equal
certainty’ . . . mounted upon a wide armoured deck whose sides would
be carried below the waterline and overhang a narrow raft hull, containing the
machinery, by such a margin that any shot would have to ‘pass through 20 feet
of water’ to strike the hull, while the propeller and rudder on the centreline
would be ‘absolutely protected’—this last feature Ericsson considered ‘perhaps
the most important’.2
As built the ‘impregnable fort’ of this craft, named
Monitor, was a drum 20 feet in diameter by 9 feet high, formed of eight layers
of 1-inch plating, inside which were mounted two 11-inch smooth bore guns each
firing 166lb balls at a very slow rate, something like one aimed round every
seven minutes. The 1-inch thick iron deck on which this turret turned floated
some 2-feet above waterlevel with armoured sides extending down to 3-feet below
the water. This was the weakest part of the design; as the volunteer crew found
when they sailed her out of the sheltered waters of New York, open seas swept
over the deck and leaked through between it and the turret and down the
openings for two collapsible funnels and two ventilators abaft the turret,
besides juddering up under the armoured overhang as if to tear it from the
hull. She was not in any sense a sea-going ironclad; in this and in her
laminated armour, inferior to the thinner but homogenous plates of the European
ironclads, she resembled the Merrimack. Neither could have lived with the
Gloire or the Warrior. They enter the story, not because they were an advance
or a lesson, only because they were the first ironclads in action against
ships.
By freak chance the two vessels were completed within days
of one another, and when on the morning of Saturday, 8 March 1862, the
Merrimack, renamed Virginia, steamed unsteadily out from Norfolk to give battle
to a Federal blockading force in Hampton Roads, the Monitor, two days out from
New York, was struggling down the East coast just 10 hours away. These 10 hours
were important though; they gave the Virginia time to prove in action de Lôme’s
forecast about a lion amongst a flock of sheep, also Paixhans’ suggestion that
the simple management of steam batteries would cancel enemy advantages in
seamanship. For while the Federal force was composed of three fine frigates and
a sloop manned by American sailors renowned for skill and panache, the
Virginia’s crew was made up largely of Confederate soldiers with only a few
days’ training aboard.
So the battery steamed slowly across bright water to where
the timber sloop Cumberland and the veteran frigate Congress lay at anchor in a
shoal channel near Newport News. Both thought so little of the danger that they
remained at anchor and simply waited at their guns while ‘the thing’ they had
been hearing so much about, swung its ugly battery towards them. When the
Cumberland judged it within range, she fired her broadside of 9-inch smooth
bores; soon the Congress joined in with a few 8-inch and her main battery of
32-pounders, and shore guns added to the flying round shot, but any balls which
hit simply bounced off the sloping iron, neither making any impression nor
diverting the battery’s progress towards the Cumberland which she eventually
rammed below the fore channels. The sloop listed as water rushed in, and half an
hour later she was gone, the first victim of ramming since the days of the
galley. The Congress, meanwhile, realizing how irresistible was this opponent,
set topsails and jib, slipped cable and making towards Newport News ran
aground; the Virginia followed, took up a raking position off her stern and,
silencing her, forced her to strike and set her on fire.
That evening the Monitor—directed by the supreme
dramatist—arrived in the Roads; the Virginia’s crew made her out by the glow of
the burning frigate. News of impending conflict between the two armoured craft
spread quickly along both shores, and the next morning, which again dawned
bright, spectators were out in crowds to watch the joust. The Virginia did not
disappoint them. She steamed out at 8 o’clock, making for one of the grounded
wooden frigates expecting the Monitor to interpose, as she did, and there
developed a ponderous, close duel which proved mightily indecisive. Neither had
the weapons to pierce the other’s armour as the Virginia was firing shell or
grape, the Monitor cast iron balls which shattered on impact. Besides this her
turret, which was turned away from the enemy during the seven minutes’ loading
interval to prevent any accident to the gun port stoppers, developed the faults
of all prototypes; the turning engine was hard to start and still harder to
stop and the crew took to firing on the swing as the target appeared briefly
through the ports. The Virginia directed volleys of musketry towards the
swinging ports with as little effect as her shells against the armour, then
decided to make for her original prey, the grounded frigate Minnesota. The
Monitor followed and a ramming duel developed. This too was indecisive as the
Monitor failed in her clumsy passes while the Virginia, which succeeded once,
had lost her ram in the affair of the previous day and so made no impression.
As the vessels came together the Monitor fired one of her great pieces with the
muzzle almost touching the Virginia’s casemate, but although a section was
crushed in, it was not pierced. The southern commander, for his part, called
away the boarders, but before they could scramble over the vessels had drifted
apart. So it continued until the vessels finally parted after some four hours
with some casualties and a little damage to both sides, but no lives lost. The
result was a draw, although the Monitor could claim to have prevented further
damage to the Federal timber ships.
The Virginia was repaired, given more armour below her
vulnerable waterline, and sallied out again in April, capturing some merchant
vessels; the Monitor failed to meet her, so this time the southern vessel could
claim to have achieved her purpose. Then, before she could put into operation a
plan to capture the Monitor by boarding and driving in wedges between her
turret and deck, Federal troops forced the Confederates to evacuate Norfolk,
and she was burned by her crew to keep her from enemy hands. As for the Monitor
she foundered later on a voyage around the coast.
However both these famous prototypes were followed by
descendants which took part in the naval struggle along the rivers and bays of
the southern states, and provided material for later naval thinkers to ponder
as they searched for lessons which might help to clarify the new naval warfare.
For instance a Southern floating battery named the Albemarle, laid down in a
cornfield up the Roanoke river and armoured on the style of the Virginia with
iron worked into shape over an open forge, made another successful ramming
attack under fire in 1864. And this same vessel was later the victim of a
daring torpedo boat attack. The boat, commanded by a young lieutenant named
Cushing, had to drive at and over a barrier of logs which surrounded the
ironclad, so that the torpedo, a case of gunpowder held out on a spar over the
bow, could be brought into contact with the target and then fired with a pull
on a line attached to its detonator. Cushing accomplished this extraordinary
feat in the dark and under fire with so much presence of mind that he was able
to sink the Albemarle and afterwards escape by swimming down the river.
A contemporary lithograph of Manhattan at sea
Later there was the famous episode at Mobile Bay when
Admiral Faragut, crying ‘Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead!’ steamed the Northern
fleet under his command close under the guns of the Confederate Fort Mogan and
through a double line of mines (then known as torpedoes) into the Bay,
miraculously losing only one vessel and her crew as he did so. This unfortunate
vessel was the Tecumseh, an enlarged ‘monitor’. There were three other monitors
with Farragut and one of these, the Manhattan, which carried two huge 15-inch
smooth-bores in her 10-inch armoured turret, was responsible for putting paid
to the most powerful Southern descendant of the Virginia, the Tennessee which
came out to do battle with Farragut’s entire fleet.
These and other events of the Civil War were analysed in
works on naval warfare, naval gunnery and tactics for many years following, as
there was little other modern action proof to go on. But really the armaments
revolution was moving too fast for the ‘lessons’ to be of value, and the
Southern ships and weapons were too extemporized to be considered as much more
than the desperate essays of an agricultural community: the most effective of
the ‘torpedoes’ which Farragut charged over were made of lager kegs
waterproofed with pitch; the armour of the floating batteries, while ingenious,
was too sectional; the guns were not designed for armour-piercing. The ironclad
actions were fought in sheltered waters, and there were few conclusions to be
drawn for open sea. Perhaps most instructive was the cruise of the Southern
commerce raider, Alabama, which destroyed a number of northern merchant vessels
and evaded capture for almost two years before USS Kearsage finally sank her.
This lesson was not lost on the French, nor on the British whose merchant
marine was particularly exposed to such a form of warfare.
