Battle of the Hampton Roads - The Fury of Iron and Steam

[Music] [Music] it's Sunday March 9th 1862 a spring dawn breaks over the Hampton Roads and the scene is one of mild carnage wreckage and debris still float in the water from two ships that were sunk the previous day three more are aground the architect of this minor massacre of Union warships is steaming back out of port intent on finishing off one of the grounded vessels and then turning its attention to any survivors the plan is for the Sun to set this day on a Seaway where the Union blockade of the Confederacy has been broken but as the low angled shape of the Confederate warship steams to battle its sailors spot something in the water near the grounded USS Minnesota ideas of what it could be are varied amongst the crew it certainly wasn't there yesterday some of them think it might be a boiler that somehow has been thrown overboard from the grounded steam frigate in an attempt to lighten it one sailor jokes that whatever it is it looks like someone stuck a cheese on a raft but this battle cheese was maneuvering to engage them and so the guns of the CSS Virginia spoke a shell flew out missed the relatively small target and smashed into the helpless Minnesota with that the first ironclad against ironclad engagement in history had begun but how had all this come about in 1862 ironclads was still a very new thing and whilst armored floating batteries had been around for a few years the two premier navies in the world of the Royal and French Navy's had only just introduced their ocean-going iron clads to the world Gallois warrior and black prince along with a number of others were just beginning to stretch their legs in open sea but the industry of the United States was not anywhere near as large nor anywhere near as advanced as these two countries and apart from anything else this collection of former British colonies was busily tearing itself apart in a civil war so where hit these ships come from as it turns out the origins and design of the two ships could not have been more different if the designers had set out purposely to try let's take a look at both of them before we come back to the developing gunfight of March the 9th it had all started in April 1861 almost a year earlier when the secession of a number of states would split the USA in two and Herald the start of the u.s. Civil War one of the biggest items of concern for what would rapidly become the Union was the Gosport Navy Yard now known today as Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia anyone who's even vaguely familiar with the US Navy nowadays or to be honest throughout much of its 20th century history will immediately realize that losing this base and all the ships within it to an enemy would be a catastrophic blow and even back then the yard was a key part of the US Navy's infrastructure at first there were thoughts of trying to hold out but thanks to a rather clever ruse where a loud train was brought in overnight along nearby rail tracks quietly sent back then brought back in again repeatedly the illusion of a huge number of troops waiting in the darkness to attack had been created and the orders rapidly shifted to getting away with whatever they could and destroying everything else one of the things that needed to be shifted was the USS Merrimack a relatively new large and heavily armed steam frigate which ironically was a sister ship of the USS Minnesota amongst others but the soon-to-be Confederates had been busy elsewhere other than the rail track and had sunk a number of boats in the channel locking the exit the ship therefore was going nowhere determined to prevent the capture of one of the most powerful combat units in the US Navy the union officers set the ship on fire before withdrawing thanks to the strength of the ruse Merrimack was about the only thing they successfully disposed of with the incoming troops capturing nearly 2,000 naval guns of varying sizes and virtually the entire Dockyard infrastructure intact the following month of the dockyards new owners realized that the Merrimack had in fact only burnt to the waterline the machinery and the underwater part of the hull were intact although somewhat salty the wreck was therefore towed to the bases only dry dock at the time and it was decided to convert what was left into an ironclad fully stocked base or not the Confederacy knew that their Navy was by far the smaller and could not hope to challenge the Union Navy which retained the bulk of the strength of the pre-war US Navy in conventional open combat but at the same time there was nowhere near the expertise industry or time available to turn out something like the warrior so a smaller ironclad of some sort would have to be devised to officers submitted sketches of a low-slung massless casement ironclad it would never be able to go very far on the machinery of the day let alone machinery that had been submerged for a month in salt water but when your enemies are right next to you these didn't matter too much it wouldn't have to go looking for a fight the fight had come to them the designs submitted by John Mercer Brook was selected although his competitor John L Porter was given the task of turning the sketch design into a detailed design as he was actually the one who'd had the relevant naval architecture training responsibility for the work needed to turn the wreck into a functioning warship was shared out between the two of them the final design called for the bulk of the hull to remain underwater covered fore-and-aft by a deck made up of two layers of 2-inch plate armor which was to stay at or below the waterline in a typical engagement in the center the casement was built up in imitation of the European style for floating batteries with a thick backing of wood 24 inches of mixed oak and pine supporting more laminated armor again four inches thick but made up of a pair of 2-inch thick plates with the sides angled at 36 degrees to allow enemy fire to deflect off the armor as much as be stopped by it the choice of multiple layers of thinner plate was due to the innovate inability of the available iron mills to produce plates four inches thick to the needed size and quality or in the case of some of the mills at all unfortunately one side effect of this laminated approach was that the overall effectiveness was not as great as a single solid plate in this case the four inch laminate armor being equivalent to a single plate of between three point two and three point six inches thick depending on a number of small variables such as material quality and exact distance between the plates the ship would be armed with a total of twelve guns ten of which were the main anti-shipping battery this comprised two seven-inch Brooks rifled guns one mounted four and the other aft each with a choice of three gun ports to fire from one on the centerline and one on each side angle of 45 degrees for more gun ports on each side were occupied by three 9-inch Dahlgren guns captured from the dockyard and a single six point four inch Brooks rifle on either side the guns nearest the ship's engines could fire heated shot courtesy of the boiler furnaces and finally a pair of small twelve pound guns were mounted high up on the casement as anti boarding weapons in theory each gun port should have had an iron plate for the protection of the gun port when the guns weren't being fired but these were not installed until later on in a ship's career the Merrimack had been in dock in part to have its engines replaced and all the extra weight being put on the converted iron clad was not doing them any favors between this and the salt water contamination and rust from a good time spent under the surface the ship was capable of six knots at best from a theoretical 1,200 horsepower and had a turning radius of literally a country mile reports of the union building an ironclad which ironically had in turn been sparked by the original reports of the Confederacy building their new ship also led to the fitting of a ram to the ship's bow since the various available guns possessed little armor-piercing capability being designed as most guns were at the time for work against wooden ships with explosive shells being the most common ammunition type available with the newspapers on both sides running a small race as the two ships endeavored to finish first the renamed CSS Virginia would just about win the race and she would sail into battle on March 8th 1862 with workmen still aboard making last-minute adjustments as the ship led a squadron consisting of two converted tugs two converted steamers and an actual gunboat into the face of the Union blockade over on the other side of the conflict the Union Navy initially had seen little need for an ironclad thanks to the overwhelming superiority in warship numbers that they possessed compared to the Confederacy but news of the Virginia's construction forced the Union Navy to try and play catch-up and by August 1861 they were actively soliciting for designs since unlike the Confederacy they could build a ship from scratch without being constrained by the layout and dimensions of a salvaged hull over a dozen designs were submitted but in a move that will sound eerily familiar to those following more recent US naval procurement exercises having looked for competition with a single clear winner they eventually went with picking three winners each of completely different designs one of these would go on to become USS new Ironsides a decent and solid albeit coastal version of a guar type ironclad another would become USS Galena possibly the single worst ironclad in history and the third would become USS Monitor monitor was the most technically innovative but also the smallest somewhat presently the naval board was worried that a small floating armored raft with freeboard measured in inches whose primary above water feature was its gun turret might be at risk in heavy seas but they were overruled by President Lincoln after its designer John Ericson assured them that the vessel would be as watertight as a duck the fact that ducks on the water spend a lot of their time on the river or seabed seems to have passed him by when he was making this analogy unlike the other two he would also be entirely steam powered with no recourse to sail with the competition now getting into September and work on Virginia progressing quickly the fact that he promised them a ship within a hundred days was something of a decisive factor the monitor as we mentioned was a fairly small ship consisting of a basic hull which remained fully under water and this supported an armoured raft which was armored to between three and five inches of thickness depending on the location using multiple 1-inch thick plates that were bolted and otherwise attached together above this level apart from the funnels and air vents there was a small pilot house near the bow and of course the main turret this carried a pair of eleven inch Dahlgren guns which constituted the ship's entire armament some reports indicate that the ship was originally supposed to carry 15-inch Dahlgren weapons but this plan ran into the minor issue of the guns in question not actually existing in a usable form yet hence the 11 inch guns the turret was protected by 8 inch thick Armour again made up of laminated 1-inch thick iron plates which was the equivalent to between five and a half and six inches of solid plate assuming that they all held together under fire this turret was very different to what we normally think of in terms of a naval turret instead of being on rollers and bearings the entire thing was supported on a single massive nine inch thick iron spindle in the middle which then needed to be jacked up elevating the entire turret to allow the turret to rotate this was done using a small steam engine with the slight issue that nobody could actually see out of the turret unless the guns were run out and only then through the gun ports as when the guns were run in heavy armored shutters came down over the port's for protection the walls of the turret then rested on a brass ring which was supposed to be watertight but would prove somewhat less so in practice the turret ideally would then be lowered back down before engaging in battle as heavy impacts were capable of bending the spindle through transmitted shock and disabling the turret completely debris and fragments could also get in under the turret walls when it was elevated which could jam the turret in position the turret also needed to rotate to bring up powder and shot since a single hatch in the turret floor had to be aligned with a corresponding hatch in the hull and this required the turret to be trained out to starboard once it used up the ammunition and shot held in the turret itself between all this and the fact that with the limited visibility the turret could often overshoot the rotation needed to bear on target an active turret would spend an awful lot of time in rotation as it was usually faster to just keep going and come back around for another try then go through the bother of trying to reverse the engine reverse the turret drive and get it going back in the opposite direction again rumor has it that the spirit of the monitors turret would return to us in the 21st century in the form of this lovely marine mammal monitor was driven through the water by a 320 horsepower engine driving a single propeller with the design speed of 8 knots but practical in service speed around 6 knots she could however turn inside distance somewhat less than the literal mile which would make her more agile than Virginia then again there are some glaciers that are probably more agile than the Virginia was the monitor would be laid down on the 25th of October 1861 and with occasional stops due to a lack of iron and all cash to pay the workers she would finally be finished at the end of January 1862 and commissioned on the 25th of February with a few trials needed to get the ship in fighting order as an early misunderstanding on quite how the recoil damping system was supposed to work had sent the guns smashing into the back of the turret during the first test two days later on the 6th of March the ship set out for Hampton Roads almost being lost when the imperfect seal between turret and hull led to a series of problems that culminated in water everywhere disabled fans a toxic atmosphere and abandoned engine rooms fortunately some quick thinking by one of the remaining conscious crew allowed the fans and then the engines to be restarted the delay meaning the ship would arrive in the evening of the 8th of March just in time to witness the devastation Virginia had unleashed earlier in the day Virginia's entry into battle on the 8th of March had been quite decisive sailing down the river and being spotted first by the quartermaster of USS Congress who had turned to an officer and said I wish you would take the glass and have a look over there sir I believe that thing is a-comin down at last Virginia would first take on the USS Cumberland in a gunfight which was easily won on account of none of the Cumberlands guns being able to actually hurt the Confederate warship and the supporting fire of the USS Congress proving to be equally ineffective this was followed by the Virginia ramming is crippled prey which promptly began to sink but Virginia's career almost ended right there as the RAM was actually a little bit too effective and was still stuck in the sinking union vessel which began to drag the Virginia down with it at the last moment the Confederate vessel broke free leaving half the RAM behind and resulting in leaks below deck extracting itself and looking around the crew were treated to the somewhat comical nearby site of the frigates st. Lawrence Roanoke and Minnesota who had all got underway when Virginia was spotted and had all managed to run aground and were now stuck fast Virginia therefore decided to turn its attention to the Congress seeing the fate of the Cumberland the Congress had decided to deliberately go aground in the shallows and fight on from there the two converted steamers and one of the converted tugs supporting Virginia would now show up and together with the ironclad they would pound the Congress into surrender in just under an hour whilst watching the crewmen evacuating the Confederate ironclad would be struck by fire from a Union shore battery and would retaliate with redhot shot into the Congress thereby setting it on fire the ship would continue to burn throughout the evening and into the night and then explode and sink around midnight with minor damage limiting her speed and two guns knocked out during the ramming incident Virginia wandered over to see if she could do anything to the Minnesota but the falling tide and gathering darkness made both ships fire ineffective and so it returned to harbor for repairs confident of finishing off the rest of the Union ships in the morning completely unaware that another ironclad was even then entering the bay meanwhile Union vessels were trying unsuccessfully to tow Minnesota into deeper water showered by exploding munitions and burning wreckage from the Congress as they worked and so that brings us back to where we started with Virginia coming back out undercut the command of her first officer as Captain Buchanan had been hit by a rifle bullet the previous day and was assure recovering quite how had he managed to be hit by a rifle bullet whilst in command of an ironclad you ask well during the burning of the Congress he had been so enraged by the Union Shore batteries firing on him while he was trying to take off survivors that he had taken his own rifle gone on top of the ship and began firing at the Union Shore batteries obviously return rifle fire had been somewhat more effective than his one-man stand against an artillery battery as the two ships began their historic engagement the fury and firepower that opened the fight began to drag on and on and on and on you see neither ship was actually capable of hurting the other although not for lack of trying albeit for different reasons Virginia was expecting to fight only wooden ships since they'd missed monitors arrival and so they were carrying as much explosive shell as they possibly could and no armor-piercing solid shot which might have actually worked on monitor eventually by cracking and spalling off layers of the thin plate conversely monitor although designed and expecting to fight another ironclad and therefore firing solid shot had been equipped as mentioned earlier with smaller guns than had been ideally preferred and the Dahlgren design was a relatively low velocity weapon in the first place plus between the issues aiming the turret and the constant revolutions it was having to do the monitors rate of fire was glacially slow Virginia would blaze away much faster but monitors turret proved hard to hit in the first place and the explosive shells mainly just scorched the paint and rang the interior like a badly tuned Bell that isn't to say that conditions inside monitors turret were particularly pleasant far from it the interior temperature was rising more and more both over time and with every firing of the guns with sweat obliterating the chalk lines that had been drawn to tell the crew which way was forward and which way was aft telling them that their target was off the starboard bow had no real meaning to a crew who had no idea which direction starboard was or which direction they themselves were facing however monitor was the more agile ship and was to a degree able to run rings around Virginia whilst the latter's all-round weapons battery had somewhat negated this advantage both ships were describing vague circles with Virginia managing a total of four full revolutions during the battle as it may ended back and forth over the bay fully channeling the spirit of its future seal familiar the monitors turret began to stop responding to the two commands you could actually give it namely turn and stop which made it almost impossible to aim properly so at some point the crew just gave up and let it happily spin around as they went firing the guns whenever they could as the turret swept its view past Virginia a few hits by Virginia demonstrated the risks of the laminated armor of the turret without any wooden backing as they sent bulkheads pinging around the interior but having little other effect whilst in return showers of splinters from the wooden backing on Virginia would coat the Confederate gun crews getting somewhat fed up of this back and forth the Virginia despite its glacially slow turning decided to try and RAM the monitor but this oil tanker great turning circle meant that the best it could do was a gentle glancing bump that caused the Confederate vessel more issues than it did to the Union ship since it opened up some of the damage that had been caused by the deliberate ramming attempt on the Cumberland the previous day hilariously outside of this one recorded deliberate ramming attempt there were a further five collisions that occurred purely by accident due to the close-range nature of the fight and the fact that neither ship was particularly agile at one point monitor briefly opened the range to allow the turret to be stopped to resupply ammunition and to try and fix one of the gun port hatches which had become jammed and would stay jammed for the rest of the fight eventually after four hours as lunchtime approached and Virginia completed the fourth of its one hour duration turns the battle would draw to a close in something of a rather weird even draw a shell from Virginia had managed to get a hit close to the viewing slit of the pilothouse on monitor from a range of just under ten yards the explosion gunpowder and splinters temporarily blinding the monitors captain who was the only one who could see out of the pilothouse with this being the only place the ship could actually be commanded from monitor was forced to draw away rather than fight blind but after a while the first officer managed to swap places with the captain and the monitor duly returned to the fight but in the interim Virginia had obviously seen monitor disengage after hours of battle and had concluded that the battle was won and so they decided to head home to make good the various superficial damages that they had received right as they turned around monitor of course came back into the action and concluded that it was in fact at Virginia who was running away as a result both sides would claim victory and claim that the other side had been the one to retreat monitor had been hit 22 times with nine hits on the turret two hits to the pilothouse and another 11 to the hull deck or funnels she had managed a total of 41 shots but Virginia had sustained 97 hits this somewhat incongruous disparity being because other Union ships especially the Minnesota had taken the opportunity to keep up their own fire during the duel but neither ship had been especially affected by any of the ammunition thrown their way practically speaking the engagement as a whole was a Confederate victory thanks largely to the sinking of various ships and damage to others that it had achieved on the first day of the battle strategically however it was a Union victory as the blockade was not broken thanks to the monitors efforts and would remain unbroken for the rest of the war oddly enough neither ship would engage the other again with both sides trying to dare the other into a fight but both being quite risk-averse when it came to actually forcing that fight both sides would also try to work out how to deal with the other ironclad with the Union fitting up another ship with a large ramp route to try and take out Virginia's hull underwater and the Confederates dreaming up a plan to swarm the monitor with boarding parties and jammed the turret with wedges in the end neither ship would actually survive 1862 Virginia was left without a home when Union troops retook the dockyard and with a draught too deep to withdraw upriver and too shallow to be thought of as seaworthy she would be destroyed by her own side to prevent her falling into enemy hands barely two months after her clash with the monitor the Union vessel would last a bit longer and get to spend some time during a refit as a tourist attraction but having nearly sunk twice on the way to Hampton Roads she was considered as not a deep-water vessel by any of her longer serving crew on the 31st of December the vessel had been sent out to join another blockade of Charleston and was under tow but in the midst of heavy seas the low freeboard and the small size of the ship came back to haunt them as waves started coming over the deck which combined with the sheer power of the storm sea began to open the ship up in multiple places causing dozens of uncontrollable leaks as well as water pouring in from above on occasion this would eventually see the ship go down with the loss of 16 men between the actual explosion that sent it to the bottom and wreck salvages shortly thereafter almost nothing is left of Virginia whilst monitor came to rest upside down and would eventually be rediscovered with various major parts of it being raised over time although the bulk of the ship remains on the seafloor the remains of a number of the lost crew were also recovered during these operations and eventually buried at Arlington National Cemetery a replica of the monitor would also be built in 2005 and is open to the public as far as I can tell a number of myths and legends would arise surrounding the ships in the aftermath of a battle so we'll try to cover some of them here some reports indicate that after the battle concerns or intelligence about the Confederate plan to use a small boarding party to disable the monitor with wedges driven into the gap between turret and hull as it rose and turned would lead to an idea to set up a series of pipes that would send boiling water and steam from the ship's powerplant over the intruders although it's not clear if this was actually ever fitted it is also often said that monitor sailed into battle using only half charges for its guns because of fears of them exploding whilst it is true that the US Navy was very cautious regarding of very large guns following a series of explosions that had occurred when trying to fire them in the past few years the dahlgren's had been designed in response to this issue and the 15-pound charges issued and used were not in fact half charges but were the exact correct charge weight that had been specified by the US Navy for the eleven inch gun back in 1860 on dahlgren's own recommendation long before the gun was considered for use as an anti armored weapon as a direct result of the battle further tests would be conducted with Dahlgren initially recommending the charge could be increased to 20 pounds and maybe 25 pounds in extreme circumstances chances but we for very short periods of time assuming that you're using a new gun and with lots of other extra caveats about being very careful about how you did this further testing would reveal that Dahlgren had done such a good job of designing his guns that in actual fact he shouldn't have worried about the 25 pound charge because they could in fact withstand repeated firing with 30 pound charges which increase their power still further and so these 30 pound charges were issued later in the war to other ships that were using the 11 inch gun but at the time of the ships launch and use in battle of Hampton Roads as far as anybody knew 15 pounds was safe and any more could have caused the gun to explode of course with a single turret this would have disabled the entire ships offensive capability in dahlgren's own words which were stated a year after the two ships had faced off of the proper mode of increasing the power of the monitors guns was to have increased the charge which the gun was capable of enduring safely to the extent of 30 pounds but this was not known at the time and all will admit that the occasion was not one when any risk was to be incurred unnecessarily another claim that is often made is that the monitor was the world's first turreted ship and proved the concept to the world in general although it's fair to say that the monitor was the first turreted ship to see combat and thus show the concept in action it was not the first turreted ship in the world that particular honor going to HMS trusty which would receive a turret in 1861 the turret itself being designed by Captain Cole's of the Royal Navy who we last met on this channel trying to design entire warships and getting himself drowned for his troubles additionally a 7 months prior to the battle the Royal Navy had also ordered the construction of HMS Prince Albert a ship with no less than 4 single turrets both Kohl's and Ericsson appear to have invented a similar concept independently with Erickson's being more cylindrical and Cole's being more rounded on the top additionally whilst Ericsson system relied on a central spindle that went through to the roof of the turret Cole's arguably used a more familiar system to those of us around these days of a ball bearing run around the edge of the turret with the rotating spindle below the floor of the turret in the event neither of these systems would last all that long as what we think of as gun turrets for battleships in the 20th century actually developed out of what was originally an open bar bet system that was designed to dispense entirely with what were by the last quarter of the 19th century absurdly heavy and exceptionally unwieldy armored turrets built to the Ericsson and Cole's patterns however the battle had shown that armor was highly effective even when it was a little bit of a bodge job and this catalyzed the further development of iron clads especially many smaller coastal defense units similar to the various us monitor designs the sheer durability of the ship's also drove a huge arms race as gun makers strove to build bigger and better guns to penetrate armor and armor thicknesses in turn beginning to scale up in response to utterly absurd degrees which led to iron clads rapidly losing the long lines of early iron clads and gaining the squat low free broad appearance of the many gun ships of the late 19th century both sides would go on to develop further coastal and River ironclads and of course that monitor for a small ship working off the coast with absurdly oversized guns entered common usage the only time a ship would give its name to an entire class of ship until of course HMS dreadnought was launched that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 709,621

Rating: 4.9235601 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, battle of Hampton Road, Gosport NAvy Yard, Norfolk Navy Yard, USS Merrimack, USS Monitor, USS Congess, USS CUmberland, USS Minnesota, CSS Virginia, Union, Confederacy, Confederate Navy, Union Navy, American Civil War, Dahlgren gun, Ericsson, James River Squadron

Id: 28vougAE7LM

Length: 36min 42sec (2202 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Bigman3733]

It's Hampton Roads not Road

[u/carterohk]

Tier I

[u/ashishvp]

We need an April Fool's mod with old school ships of line.

[u/AcidNewports]

America vs America, fuck yeah