Iron Floats… and Sinks: Armored Ships

^{Monitor and Virginia slug it out in 1862.}

In 1592, Toyotomi Hideoshi, the only peasant in Japanese history to make himself supreme ruler of that ancient empire, invaded the neighboring land of Korea. Hideoshi, called “Old Monkey Face,” but not to his face, was a man of immense ambition and the energy to match it, although his esthetic tastes ran more to gold chamber pots than to his country’s exquisite poetry. After Korea, he planned to conquer China and then the Philippines.

He never quite made his first goal (Korea). The biggest reason was a Korean secret weapon and an admiral named Yi Sun Shin.

While the Japanese fleet was unloading at Pusan, several strange‑looking objects moved into the harbor. They had no sails. They may have been towed or rowed – accounts differ. All agree, however, that they looked like immense metal turtles. Below their curved iron shells, Yi’s turtle boats had rows of cannons.

That day the turtle boats, designed by Yi himself, sank 60 Japanese ships and stalled Hideoshi’s invasion at its opening.

The Japanese eventually began moving up the peninsula. At that time, the Japanese army had more guns per capita than any other in the world – including anywhere in Europe. Almost all of their guns were matchlock harquebuses; they had few cannons. The Koreans had few handheld guns, but quite a few cannons. And they had allies. Chinese troops flooded into the peninsula. The Japanese were better armed, better trained, and more experienced soldiers, but they couldn’t match the Chinese numbers. Then Yi Sun Shin returned with his turtle boats. In 1598, at Chinhae Bay, Yi and his ironclads sank 200 of the 400 Japanese ships. Yi lost his life in the battle, but he saved his country. The rest of the Japanese fleet fled back to Japan, where they brought news of the disaster to the ailing Hideoshi, who promptly died. The Japanese invasion died with him. Korea was to be free of Japanese troops until 1910.

Fast forward 270 years. Yi Sun Shin and his works have been forgotten everywhere but Korea. In the United States, no one is interested in old tales from exotic places. The country has split into two parts, North versus South, and brothers are fighting brothers. Ships from the North, what is left of the United States, or the “Union,” are blockading ports in the South, or the “Confederacy.”

Confederate troops captured the navy yard at Gosport, Virginia. The Union made an attempt to destroy everything of value before they evacuated the yard, but the Confederates managed to raise the sunken U.S.S. Merrimack, a 40‑gun steam frigate. Confederate naval architects changed the former Union warship into something entirely new. They gave the frigate a sloping super‑structure composed of two 2‑inch‑thick layers of wrought iron. The weight of all that iron pushed the ship low in the water, but the Confederates added still more iron – a 1‑inch belt of iron around the hull that extended 3 feet below the waterline. The completed vessel, rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia, had a draft of 22 feet. There was no way it could take the weight of the old Merrimack’s 40 guns. It had four smoothbore cannons on each side and one 7‑inch rifled gun at the bow and another at the stern. Even with the reduced armament, Virginia’s draft was too deep to allow movement in shallow water, and its deck was so close to the waterline that steaming on the open ocean would be extremely hazardous.

The prime Confederate objective, though, was not to create an ocean‑going warship. It was to get rid of the Yankee ships blockading Virginia. For that, this new class of ship, called a ram (because its bow carried that ancient weapon of the classical galleys), seemed ideal. On March 8, 1862, the C.S.S. Virginia, chugged into Hampton Roads and confronted five Union warships, the United States Ships Minnesota, Roanoke, St. Lawrence, Cumberland, and Congress. The clumsy, underpowered ram chugged toward Cumberland, firing as she advanced.

Cumberland fired back at what one witness said looked like “a barn roof floating on the water.” The Union ship’s iron cannonballs merely bounced off the monster, and its shells exploded harmlessly on the armor. The Virginia drove its ram into Cumberland’s hull. When it backed away, the ram was wrenched off, but there was a 7‑foot hole in the Union ship. Cumberland went to the bottom, some of its guns still firing as the water closed over them.

Virginia next engaged the U.S.S. Congress. Its guns proved as potent as its ram. One shot hit Congress’s powder magazine and blew the blockader up. News of the Confederate ironclad’s victories caused a near panic in Washington.

Ironclads were not unknown to the U.S. Navy. They had already been tried in Europe.

Until the mid‑19th century, all warships were protected by enormously thick hulls of seasoned oak. To make any impression at all on these masses of hard‑wood, ships closed to pistol range before firing their cannons. The missiles fired were exclusively solid shot – cast iron cannonballs, sometimes two cannonballs connected with a chain (“chain shot”) or an iron bar (“bar shot”) to take down masts and rip up rigging. In 1822, Colonel Henri Joseph Paixhans, a French army officer, proposed firing shells in naval warfare. Shells, being much lighter for their size than cannonballs, had no chance of penetrating those massive oak hulls, so they had never been used. But Paixhans, being a soldier, was not inhibited by naval tradition. He pointed out that even if a shell did not penetrate one of those wooden walls (if it lodged in a hull and exploded), it would do a lot of damage. It would also throw hot metal fragments and bits of blazing wood far and wide. Sails, tarred rope, and wood all burn readily.

In 1853, the Russian Navy tested Paixhans’ theory. At the Battle of Sinope, a Russian squadron firing shells burned a 12‑ship Turkish squadron. France and Britain, fearing the Russian capture of Constantinople and the entrance to the Black Sea, went to war with Russia. To counter the scary new “shell gun,”

they turned to iron. In the ensuing Crimean War, the French used three armored floating batteries to demolish Russian forts. They followed that by launching, in 1859, La Gloire, the first armored, steam‑powered battleship.

Word that the Confederates were building an ironclad woke up authorities in Washington. Congress appropriated money for three armored ships, Galena, New Ironsides, and Monitor. The first two looked like conventional ships, but Monitor, the smallest, was revolutionary. Its deck was barely above the water. It had a 4‑inch‑thick belt of homogeneous armor and a revolving turret – the word’s first – made of 4‑inch‑thick iron. The two 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.