- Related Topics:
- submarine
- landing craft
- cruiser
- aircraft carrier
- warship
The use of larger guns with more penetrating power and explosive shells made armour plating imperative. Among early experiments were floating armoured batteries built for the Crimean War. Heavy wrought-iron plates over a thick wooden backing gave these flat-bottomed vessels outstanding protection as they carried large-shell guns close inshore.
Other developments followed swiftly. The British soon built the first iron-hulled floating batteries. The French followed in 1860 with the Gloire, the first seagoing armoured warship, protected throughout her entire length by a wrought-iron belt of 4.3- to 4.7-inch (10.9- to 11.9-cm) armour backed by 26 inches (66 cm) of wood. Displacing 5,617 tons, she mounted 36 large shell guns and could steam at 13.5 knots; a three-masted sailing rig supplemented the engines. Gloire was the first of a series of ironclads laid down by Napoleon III; 13 similar ships soon followed, then two-decker armoured rams. In 1861 Great Britain countered with the Warrior, the first iron-hulled, seagoing, armoured man-of-war. Much larger than the Gloire, she displaced 9,210 tons, mounted 28 seven-inch (18-cm) shell guns, had slightly lighter armour, carried sails, and was one knot faster.
These first ironclads were commissioned on the eve of the American Civil War, in which ironclads were destined to take a decisive part. The war itself produced several spectacular developments, including pioneer submarines, the first aircraft carriers (to handle balloons for observation), and the torpedo boat, one of several means the Confederates explored in trying to break the blockade. These little craft had weak steam engines and mounted a torpedo lashed to a spar projecting from the bow. Called Davids, they were weak but definite forerunners of the torpedo boat and the versatile destroyer.
Ironclad warships were crucial, perhaps decisive, in the North’s victory over the South. Partial ironclads appeared early on the western rivers and spearheaded Union general Ulysses Grant’s victories in 1862. River and coastal ironclads (ultimately, mostly monitors) dominated the war against the South in attacks from the sea and in decisive support of land operations from the Mississippi system to the Chesapeake Bay and James River. Most memorable of the combats was the duel between the Monitor and Virginia (better known as the Merrimack). When the Federal forces lost Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, in April 1861, they burned several warships, including the heavy steam frigate Merrimack. The Confederates raised the Merrimack, installed a ram and slanting casemates made from railroad track over thick wooden backing, as had been done in the Gloire, and renamed it Virginia. Mounting 10 guns, including four rifled ones, the Virginia, with yard workers still on board finishing up, sailed on March 8, 1862, for its trial run. Defying concentrated fire of ship and shore batteries, it sank two ships of the Union’s wooden blockading fleet before retiring with the ebbing tide. In this dramatic moment John Ericsson’s Monitor arrived from New York during the middle of the night. Displacing fewer than 1,000 tons, less than one-third of the Virginia, the Monitor had a boxlike iron hull supporting an iron-plated wooden raft on which revolved the turret. The 172-foot- (52-metre-) long vessel had little freeboard except for the thickly armoured rotating turret within which were mounted two 11-inch (28-cm) smoothbores.
The Monitor had many deficiencies. Not really a seagoing warship, it had nearly sunk on its voyage down from New York and did sink on its next sea voyage. Yet it proved the equal of its rival in their duel on March 9. The battle ended in a draw with neither ship seriously injured, but the repercussions of this first duel between completely ironclad warships swept the world.
On April 4, scarcely more time than required for a ship to cross the Atlantic, Great Britain ordered the 131-gun ship of the line, the Royal Sovereign, to be cut down, armoured, and fitted with turrets. Only three and a half weeks later Great Britain laid down the Prince Albert, the Royal Navy’s first iron-hulled turret ship, mounting four turrets.
The Union Navy ordered 66 coastal and river monitors; these were low freeboard ships that were unsuitable for high-seas action and rarely suitable for long voyages. Many were not completed in time for war service. Besides the Virginia, the Confederates began a number of other ironclads. Several of these rendered valuable service and probably lengthened the war, but most had to be destroyed before completion. Out of a combination of characteristics of the Monitor and Virginia types evolved the battleship, which was next to rule the sea.
Toward the battleship
The later 19th century continued to be a time of great flux in warship design. European nations tried numerous arrangements of guns and armour, such as centreline turrets, a central armoured citadel with large guns on turntables at each corner, lightly armoured big guns topside in barbettes (open-top breastworks), torpedoes in even the largest vessels, and substitution of high speed for armour.
For a time even the ancient ram was revived. When the Austrians won the Battle of Lissa from the Italians in 1866 by ramming, its value for the future seemed confirmed. Hence for years most large ships carried rams, which proved to be more dangerous to friend than foe when ships were sunk in peacetime collisions.
This period also saw a fundamental advance in underwater weaponry with the invention of the locomotive torpedo. After being presented with the idea by an Austrian naval captain in 1864, a British engineer named Robert Whitehead produced a projectile that was driven by compressed air and was designed to strike a ship’s unprotected hull below the waterline. The Whitehead torpedo, as it was quickly adapted by the European navies, was about 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter and had a range of about 1,000 yards (914 metres) at approximately seven knots.
Engines for all the types of warships steadily improved as stronger metals made possible higher steam pressures and weight reduction. In the 1870s a third cylinder was added onto the two-stage compound steam engine to make the triple expansion engine, and in the 1890s a fourth cylinder was added. These improvements on the traditional reciprocating steam engine provided a marked increase in speed that was surpassed only by the radical innovation of the steam turbine at the end of the century.
Ships
A trend toward the centreline-turret, big-gun battleship finally became clear. In it were combined the seagoing hull, armour, and habitability of the Virginia, Gloire, and Warrior with the revolving turret and big guns of the Monitor.
HMS Monarch, 8,300 tons, mounting four 12-inch (30-cm) guns in two turrets, and commissioned in 1869, was perhaps the first true seagoing turret warship. HMS Devastation, 9,330 tons, four 12-inch (30-cm) guns in two turrets, and massively armoured, was completed four years later without sail and was a next step toward the ultimate 20th-century battleship, a ship with an armoured citadel around the propulsion plant, powder magazines, and handling rooms. Rising out of it, protecting big guns and crews, were barbettes and turrets. The main battery shrank to a few powerful guns, but these took the place of many in broadside because of their great size and ability to fire through a wide arc of bearings.
The change was vividly illustrated by the “new navy” the United States began building in the 1880s, consisting not of improved monitors but of powerful seagoing capital ships with mixed-calibre main batteries. Displacing 11,700 tons, these vessels had 18-inch (46-cm) belt armour and a speed of 15 knots and mounted four 13-inch (33-cm) guns in two turrets. They also mounted eight eight-inch guns in four turrets, smaller guns for defense against torpedo boats, and six torpedo tubes. The plan was, as in other navies, to employ the heavy guns against an enemy ship’s armour-protected machinery and magazines while the faster-firing eight-inch guns attacked its relatively unprotected superstructure.
The armoured cruiser was developed in this period as a large, fast vessel armed with intermediate-calibre guns and protected by armoured deck and medium-weight belt armour. Designed for commerce protection and raiding, as well as to cooperate with the battle line in fleet action, it was considered powerful enough and sufficiently protected to fight any ship capable of catching it and able to outrun battleships. Some even held it should become the principal warship.
Less heavily armoured was the protected cruiser, the engines and magazines of which were shielded by an armoured deck, but which lacked an armour belt. Unprotected cruisers had little or no armour, carried fairly light guns, and were designed primarily for scouting, patrolling, and raiding.
Carrying the new self-propelled torpedo, the torpedo boat had great potential, particularly under conditions of low visibility. Small, unseaworthy, and useful only in restricted waters with the then-short-range, slow torpedoes, the new boats did not immediately live up to expectations; nevertheless, as craft and torpedo improved, they were soon regarded as a major menace.
Armour
Early hull armour had been of wrought iron backed by wood. To increase resistance against ever more powerful rifled guns, compound armour of steel backed with iron was devised to combine steel’s surface hardness with iron’s resiliency. The firm Schneider & Cie in France invented an oil-tempering process to produce a homogeneous steel plate that had good resiliency and greater resistance than compound armour. The later addition of nickel further improved its resistance.
Steel-armour-piercing shells came into use in the late 1880s, again threatening the armoured ship. Accordingly, an American engineer, Hayward Augustus Harvey, perfected a face-hardening process, applying carbon to the face of the steel plate at very high temperatures for an extended period and tempering. Harvey nickel-steel armour superseded earlier types. Then, in 1894, the Krupp firm of Germany devised hot-gas tempering, based on Harvey’s process, which in turn became standard with world navies. Later, the addition of chromium to nickel steel was found to be a further improvement.
Armament
The impact of developments in guns and powder exceeded even that of warship design in their effect upon navies. In the two decades after the American Civil War the main difficulties with breech mechanisms were resolved. Better guns, along with breech-loading, made possible both longer ranges and higher rates of fire.
New powders were equally important. About 1880 brown or cocoa powder appeared, employing incompletely charred wood. It burned slower than black powder and hence furnished a sustained burning that was effective ballistically but did not create excessive pressures within the gun barrel. To take advantage of this for longer-range firing, gun-barrel lengths jumped to 30–35 times bore diameter.
Several nations began to achieve success with smokeless powder of nitrated cellulose and usually some nitroglycerin. With greater striking power available, armour-piercing projectiles became more formidable. These were originally solid shot designed simply to punch through armour plate. In the 1890s, better steel and fuses made it possible to add an explosive charge. The resulting semi-armour-piercing shells became highly destructive, and in time all of the armour-piercing projectiles carried explosive charges.
In 1881 the British Admiralty advertised for an anti-torpedo-boat gun to fire cased ammunition at a rate of 12 shots per minute. Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss, an American ordnance engineer with a factory in Paris, produced a series of one-, three-, and six-pounder rapid-fire guns that vastly increased the rate of fire for small guns.
Ernest McNeill Eller Robert L. Scheina John C. Reilly John F. Guilmartin