ironclads slugged it out for two hours.
At one point, Virginia ran aground, but she backed into deeper water before Monitor could make a kill. Later, a shell from Virginia exploded on Monitor’s pilot house — a tiny, boxlike structure on her deck — wounding the captain.
Monitor temporarily stopped firing, and Virginia took advantage of the pause to steam back to Norfolk and the protection of the Confederate forts. Because Monitor stopped firing, the Confederates claimed a victory, and, because Virginia ran away, the Yankees claimed a victory. Actually, it was a draw, tactically. Strategically, the Confederates had been defeated. Virginia never again threatened a Union ship and the Confederates scuttled her when they had to abandon Norfolk.
The affair at Hampton Roads was the first battle between ironclads, but it was hardly the only use of iron ships during the Civil War. The Union built a number of sea-going ironclads, including New Ironsides, which mounted the heaviest gun yet put on a ship and which won renown as a fort-destroyer, a whole fleet of monitors with one or two revolving turrets, and a swarm of ironclad river boats, which were instrumental in the Union’s victorious campaigns in the West. The Confederacy, too, built a number of ironclads, although its industrial capacity was limited. The biggest was the C.S.S. Tennessee, which was defeated and captured at the Battle of Mobile Bay. Tennessee, like Virginia, was a ram, a class of warship invented by the Confederates and used only in the Confederate Navy. The U.S.S. Monitor was also the original of a class of ships called monitors — small, low-lying ships with extremely heavy guns in revolving turrets. Monitors were used in many navies: the British and Austrians were using them in World War I. Neither the rams nor the monitors were good for ocean travel because their decks were so low, so neither type was the wave of the future.
Armored ships with high freeboards were, however. Unlike the original ironclads — wooden ships covered with iron armor — the new warships were built entirely of iron and, later, steel. All steel construction made it possible to build them bigger and drive them with more powerful engines.
The victories of Yi Sun Shin in the 16th century were spectacular, but they led to no permanent change in naval warfare. The indecisive fight between Virginia and Monitor, however, changed warfare permanently.
Chapter 23
“Damn the Torpedoes!”: Naval Mines
It was 1864, and only one port in the Confederate States — Mobile, Alabama — remained open. Now David Glasgow Farragut, commanding a fleet of four ironclad monitors and fourteen wooden ships, was attempting to close it. Mobile was heavily fortified, and in its harbor was the C.S.S. Tennessee, a huge armored ram, a larger version of the famed C.S.S. Virginia (nee Merrimack).
Farragut was on the wooden frigate Hartford. When the battle began, Farragut wanted to be able to see what was happening, and he could get a better view from the tall Hartford than from one of the low-lying monitors. The old sea dog climbed a mast so his view wouldn’t be obscured by the smoke of Hartford’s guns. Farragut was not a young man: he was a veteran of the War of 1812. So a quartermaster tied him to the mast for safety. His age and long service in the navy had not made Farragut a tactical conservative. He sensibly positioned the monitors between the Confederate Fort Morgan and the more vulnerable wooden ships.
Suddenly, the water under the lead monitor seemed to explode. The armored ship lurched, tipped up, and sank like a piece of iron. The Union fleet stopped.
“There are torpedoes ahead,” someone told the commodore.
“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” the old man yelled.
Crewmen on Hartford later said they could hear the “triggers of the torpedoes snapping” as the flagship steamed past them. Fortunately, none exploded.
Then Tennessee tried to ram the Union flagship, but Farragut’s frigate was too agile for the armored monster. The monitor U.S.S. Chickasaw got behind Tennessee and pounded one spot with 11-inch cannonballs until it made a breach in the big ram’s armor. Chickasaw continued firing and the Confederate flagship filled with smoke. One shot cut the ram’s tiller chain, and another injured Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan. The Confederate ship surrendered.
Farragut had closed the last Southern port in spite of the torpedoes.
The torpedo (what we call a mine today) was a relatively new weapon in 1864. A few years before then, in 1829, a 14-year-old Yankee inventor named Sam Colt had demonstrated how an underwater powder charge could be set off by electricity. The demonstration did not increase young Colt’s popularity: Onlookers were showered with muddy water, but Colt showed how devastating a small charge of explosive could be when exploded against a boat under water.
The water tamped the explosive, so that the greatest force of the explosion was directed against the boat.
The Russians used mines during the Crimean War of 1855-56, but no ships were sunk. The first ship sunk by a mine was the gunboat U.S.S. Cairo at the Battle of Yazoo River in 1862.
In 1866, a Scotsman and an Austrian invented a new kind of torpedo — one that went after an enemy ship instead of waiting to be hit. At first (as we’ll see in Chapter 26) the new weapon was called a “locomotive torpedo.” Later, it became simply the torpedo. That meant there had to be a new term for the stationary weapon. For centuries, stationary explosive charges had been placed in tunnels under enemy positions — in a mine (one that was dug to put something in rather than take something out). So the explosive charge buried in water instead of land became the naval mine or simply the mine.
Although the new torpedo could chase enemy ships, the old mine did not become obsolete. Far from it. Mines have become a key part of just about all wars that involve ships. Weak naval powers depend on them heavily. Mines cost less than ships, but few ships can hit a mine and avoid a trip to Davy Jones’s Locker. Strong naval powers also used mines extensively. Both sides used mines in the Russo-Japanese War. The Russians lost a battleship, a cruiser, two destroyers, and a couple of smaller ships to Japanese mines. The Japanese Navy suffered more losses from mines than from any other weapon — two battleships, four cruisers, two destroyers, a torpedo boat, and a minelayer. In World War I, the British laid a “mine barrage” between Britain and Norway and between Britain and France to cut off Germany’s access to the Atlantic. Later, the British Navy, the world’s largest, was joined by the U.S. Navy, the world’s second largest at the time, and the two allies made the mine barrage practically leak-proof. Germany began to starve.
Mines in the mine barrage were all moored mines. Belligerents sometimes used drifting mines, but a loose mine is worse than a loose cannon. One can seldom accurately predict where winds and currents will take a drifting mine, so it is a danger to neutral and friendly shipping. A moored (or anchored) mine, like a drifting mine, has enough air in it to float, but it is attached to a sinker. As the sinker sinks, it pays out a previously determine length of cable. When the predetermined length is reached, the sinker’s cable drum locks, and the sinker pulls the mine down to a predetermined depth below the surface.
There are a variety of ways to detonate a mine. In World War I, the British used the Elia mine, which had a long lever attached to its side. If a ship struck the mine, it would probably move the lever, which would release a firing pin to strike the detonator. A more common mine, used by all belligerents in both world wars, relied on Hertz horns. The Hertz horn, a German invention, contained a glass vial with a bichromate solution. When the horn was crushed, the solution poured out of the broken vial and completed an electrical circuit that exploded the mine. A typical mine had Hertz horns protruding from all sides.
Some mines planted close to the shore have been detonated by electricity shot through a cable from the shore. This type, however, requires an observer to decide when an enemy ship is close enough to the mine, so it’s
