Navies
Union and USNÂ Monitors
The distinction for participating in the first ironclad-to-ironclad clash must go to the Ericsson turret armorclad USS Monitor, the world’s first mastless ironclad. At the Battle of Hampton Roads (8 March 1862), Monitor faced off Confederate ironclad battery CSS Virginia in one of the very few naval battles fought before a large audience, lining the Virginia shore. It is popularly…
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Dreadnought Survival and Renaissance
The Renown class comprised a pair of battlecruisers built during the First World War for the Royal Navy, the Renown and Repulse. The pace of Dreadnought construction among the naval powers continued for much of the First World War. Some were abandoned when it was decided to divert the materials…
Sea-Power in the Seventeenth Century I
Changes in the distribution of sea-power among the states of Europe affected large areas outside Europe more directly than ever before. For Europe’s sea communications had encompassed the world. Besides the regular trans-Atlantic routes, little-frequented ones went across the Pacific to the Philippines and from the East Indies to Macao,…
Sea-Power in the Seventeenth Century II
But the local balance of maritime trade had changed long before the mid-seventeenth century. In the long period of official truce between Spain and the Turks after 1580, Dutch and English ships entered the Mediterranean in increasing numbers. They not only dominated the trade between the Mediterranean and north-west Europe,…
The National Fleets of the Spanish American War
By the end of 1865 the United States had perhaps become the world’s foremost naval power with its unmatched fleet of arÂmored monitors, but after the Civil War had ceased to maintain it. By 1874 the US had sold, dismantled, or retired nearly the enÂtire fleet. Some lamented that hardly…
IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY “Kaigun.” Part I
From the late 19th century to the cusp of World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) cleaved to an idĂ©e fixe that the defense of Japan was principally its task, rather than the Army’s. For most of the period IJN leaders also clung to the idea that defense was…
IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY “Kaigun.” Part II
From 1942 the Japanese floated several large new fleet carriers and built the world’s largest carrier – the IJN Shinano – utilizing the hull of an unfinished superbattleship. It would be sunk by a USN submarine while still in harbor. Deeper into the war the IJN concentrated on nine seaplane…