Casemate
A casemate is a fortified gun emplacement or armored structure from which guns are fired, in a fortification, warship, or armoured fighting vehicle.[1]
When referring to antiquity, the term "casemate wall" means a double city wall with the space between the walls separated into chambers, which could be filled up to better withstand battering rams in case of siege (see § Antiquity: casemate wall).
In its original early modern meaning, the term referred to a vaulted chamber in a
Etymology
First recorded in French in the mid-16th century, from the Italian casamatta or Spanish casamata, perhaps meaning a slaughterhouse,[2] although it could derive from casa (in the sense of "hut"), and matta (Latin matta), "done with reeds and wickers", thus a low-roof hut without windows or other openings set in marshy place.[3] It could also come from casa matta with matta in the sense of "false".[4] However, it may have been ultimately derived from the Greek chásmata (χάσματα), a gap or aperture.[2]
Antiquity: casemate wall
The term casemate wall is used in the archaeology of Israel and the wider Near East, having the meaning of a double wall protecting a city[5] or fortress,[6] with transverse walls separating the space between the walls into chambers.[5] These could be used as such, for storage or residential purposes, or could be filled with soil and rocks during siege in order to raise the resistance of the outer wall against battering rams.[5] Originally thought to have been introduced to the region by the Hittites, this has been disproved by the discovery of examples predating their arrival, the earliest being at Ti'inik (Taanach) where such a wall has been dated to the 16th century BC.[7] Casemate walls became a common type of fortification in the Southern Levant between the Middle Bronze Age (MB) and Iron Age II, being more numerous during the Iron Age and peaking in Iron Age II (10th–6th century BC).[5] However, the construction of casemate walls had begun to be replaced by sturdier solid walls by the 9th century BC, probably due the development of more effective battering rams by the Neo-Assyrian Empire.[5][8] Casemate walls could surround an entire settlement, but most only protected part of it.[9] The three different types included freestanding casemate walls, then integrated ones where the inner wall was part of the outer buildings of the settlement, and finally filled casemate walls, where the rooms between the walls were filled with soil right away, allowing for a quick, but nevertheless stable construction of particularly high walls.[10]
Modern period
Land fortification
Early modern period
In fortifications designed to resist artillery, a casemate was originally a vaulted chamber usually constructed underneath the
18th and 19th centuries
In the late 18th century, Marc René, marquis de Montalembert (1714–1800) experimented with improved casemates for artillery, with ventilation systems that overcame the problem of smoke dispersal found in earlier works. For coastal fortifications, he advocated multi-tiered batteries of guns in masonry casemates, that could bring concentrated fire to bear on passing warships. In 1778, he was commissioned to build a fort on the Île-d'Aix, defending the port of Rochefort, Charente-Maritime. The outbreak of the Anglo-French War forced him to hastily to build his casemated fort from wood but he was able to prove that his well-designed casemates were capable of operating without choking the gunners with smoke.[13] The defenses of the new naval base at Cherbourg were later constructed according to his system.[14] After seeing Montalembert's coastal forts, American engineer Jonathan Williams acquired a translation of his book and took it to the United States, where it inspired the Second and Third Systems of coastal fortification; the first fully developed example being Castle Williams in New York Harbor which was started in 1807.[15][16]
In the early 19th century, French military engineer
The advantages of casemated artillery were proved in the Crimean War of 1853–1856, when attempts by the Royal Navy to subdue the casemated Russian forts at Kronstadt were unsuccessful, while a casemated gun tower at Sevastopol, the Malakoff Tower, could only be captured by a surprise French infantry attack while the garrison was being changed.[18] In the early 1860s, the British, apprehensive about a possible French invasion, fortified the naval dockyards of southern England with curved batteries of large guns in casemates, fitted with laminated iron shields tested to withstand the latest projectiles.[19]
However, in the
Towards the end of the century,
20th century
Following experience gained in the
In warship design the term "casemate" has been used in a number of ways, but it generally refers to a protected space for guns within a ship's hull or superstructure.
The first ironclad warship, the French ironclad Gloire (1858), was a wooden steamship whose hull was covered with armored plating, tested to withstand the largest smoothbore guns available at the time. The response by the British Royal Navy to this perceived threat was to build an iron-hulled frigate, HMS Warrior (1860). However, it was realised that to armor all of the hull to fully withstand the latest rifled artillery would make it unfeasibly heavy, so it was decided to create an armored box or casemate around the main gun deck, leaving the bow and stern unarmored.[27]
The American Civil War saw the use of casemate ironclads: armored steamboats with a very low freeboard and their guns on the main deck ('Casemate deck') protected by a sloped armoured casemate, which sat atop the hull. Although both sides of the Civil War used casemate ironclads, the ship is mostly associated with the southern Confederacy, as the north also employed turreted monitors, which the south was unable to produce. The most famous naval battle of the war was the duel at Hampton Roads between the Union turreted ironclad USS Monitor and the Confederate casemate ironclad CSS Virginia (built from the scuttled remains of USS Merrimack).[28]
"Casemate ship" was an alternative term for "
A "casemate" was an armored room in the side of a warship, from which a gun would fire. A typical casemate held a 6-inch gun, and had a 4-to-6-inch (100 to 150 mm) front plate (forming part of the side of the ship), with thinner armor plates on the sides and rear, with a protected top and floor,[31] and weighed about 20 tons (not including the gun and mounting).[32] Casemates were similar in size to turrets; ships carrying them had them in pairs, one on each side of the ship.
The first battleships to carry them were the British Royal Sovereign class laid down in 1889. They were adopted as a result of live-firing trials against HMS Resistance in 1888.[33] Casemates were adopted because it was thought that the fixed armor plate at the front would provide better protection than a turret,[32] and because a turret mounting would require external power and could therefore be put out of action if power were lost – unlike a casemate gun, which could be worked by hand.[32] The use of casemates enabled the 6-inch guns to be dispersed, so that a single hit would not knock out all of them.[32] Casemates were also used in protected and armored cruisers, starting with the 1889 Edgar class.[34] and retrofitted to the 1888 Blake class during construction.[34]
In the
Shipboard casemate guns were partially rendered obsolete by the arrival of "all-big gun" battleship, pioneered by HMS Dreadnought in 1906, but were reintroduced as the increasing torpedo threat from destroyers forced an increase in secondary armament calibre. Many battleships had their casemates plated over during modernization in the 1930s (or after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, in the case of US vessels) but some, like HMS Warspite carried them to the end of World War II. The last ships built with casemates as new construction were the American Omaha-class cruisers of the early 1920s and the 1933 Swedish aircraft cruiser HSwMS Gotland. In both cases the casemates were built into the forward angles of the forward superstructure (and the aft superstructure as well, in the Omahas).[citation needed]
Armoured vehicles
This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2022) |
In regards to armored fighting vehicles, casemate design refers to vehicles that have their main gun mounted directly within the hull and lack the rotating turret commonly associated with tanks.[37] Such a design generally makes the vehicle mechanically simpler in design, less costly in construction, lighter in weight and lower in profile. The saved weight can be used to mount a heavier, more powerful gun or alternatively increase the vehicle's armor protection in comparison to regular, turreted tanks. However, in combat the crew has to rotate the entire vehicle if an enemy target presents itself outside of the vehicle's limited gun traverse arc. This can prove very disadvantageous in combat situations.
During World War II, casemate-type armored fighting vehicles were heavily used by both the combined German Wehrmacht forces, and the Soviet Red Army. They were mainly employed as tank destroyers and assault guns. Tank destroyers, intended to operate mostly from defensive ambush operations, did not need a rotating turret as much as offensively used tanks, while assault guns were mainly used against fortified infantry positions and could afford a longer reaction time if a target presented itself outside the vehicle's gun traverse arc. Thus, the weight and complexity of a turret was thought to be unnecessary, and could be saved in favor of more capable guns and armor. In many cases, casemate vehicles would be used as both tank destroyers or assault guns, depending on the tactical situation. The Wehrmacht employed several casemate tank destroyers, initially with the still-Panzerjäger designation Elefant with an added, fully enclosed five-sided (including its armored roof) casemate atop the hull, with later casemate-style tank destroyers bearing the Jagdpanzer (literally 'hunting tank') designation, with much more integration of the casemate's armour with the tank hull itself. Examples are the Jagdpanzer IV, the Jagdtiger and the Jagdpanther.[38][39] Assault guns were designated as 'Sturmgeschütz', like the Sturmgeschütz III and Sturmgeschütz IV. In the Red Army, casemate tank destroyers and self-propelled guns bore an "SU-" or "ISU-" prefix, with the "SU-" prefix an abbreviation for Samokhodnaya Ustanovka, or "self-propelled gun". Examples are the SU-100 or the ISU-152. Both Germany and the Soviet Union mainly built casemate AFVs by using the chassis of already existing turreted tanks, instead of designing them from scratch.
While casemate AFVs played a very important role in World War II (the Sturmgeschütz III for example was the most numerous armored fighting vehicle of the German Army during the entire war), they became much less common in the post-war period. Heavy casemate tank destroyer designs such as the US
See also
References
- ^ Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary
- ^ ISBN 9780486122878.
- ^ Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957). Dizionario etimologico italiano [Italian Etymological Dictionary] (in Italian). Vol. 1. Florence: Barbera. pp. 788–89.
- ^ Devoto, Giacomo (1979). Avviamento all'etimologia italiana [An Introduction to Italian Etymology] (in Italian). Milan: Mondadori. p. 69.
- ^ a b c d e Emswiler, Elizabeth Anne (2020). "The Casemate Wall System of Khirbat Safra". Andrews University. pp. 1, 3–15. Retrieved 22 October 2021.
- McGraw-Hill. Retrieved 16 July 2022 – via The Free Dictionary.
- ^ Emswiler (2020), pp. 7–9.
- ^ Lloyd, Seton H.F. "Syro-Palestinian art and architecture". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 16 July 2022 – via Britannica Online.
- ^ Emswiler (2020), p. 4.
- ^ Emswiler (2020), pp. 4–5.
- ^ Civilwarfortifications.com Archived October 6, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Lloyd, Ernest Marsh (1887). Vauban, Montalembert, Carnot: Engineer Studies. London: Chapman and Hall. pp. 114–115.
- ^ Lloyd 1887, pp. 125–127
- ISBN 978-0-7864-4477-9.Lepage p. 96
- ISBN 978-0-9748167-2-2.
- ISBN 0-356-08122-2.
- ^ Civilwarfortifications.com Archived April 17, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Hogg 1975, pp. 79–82
- ^ Hogg 1975. pp. 87-89
- ^ Hogg 1975, p. 101
- ^ Hogg 1975, p. 94-95
- ^ Hogg 1975. p. 104
- ISBN 978-1848840683.
- ^ Kaufmann, Kaufmann & Lang 2017, pp. 10-13
- ^ Hogg 1975. pp. 141-142
- ^ Hogg 1975. pp. 143-148
- ISBN 978-0907771340.
- ^ Civilwarhome.com
- ^ a b Hovgaard, William, Modern History of Warships, pp. 14–15.
- ^ Hovgaard, William, Modern History of Warships, p. 18.
- ^ Hovgaard, William, Modern History of Warships, pp. 78–79.
- ^ a b c d Brown, David K, Warrior to Dreadnought, p. 129.
- ^ Brown, David K, Warrior to Dreadnought, pp. 101–02, 129.
- ^ a b Brown, David K, Warrior to Dreadnought, pp. 134–35.
- ^ Brown, David K, Warrior to Dreadnought, p. 136.
- ^ Brown, David K, The Grand Fleet, Warship Design and Developments 1906–1922, p. 42.
- ISBN 978-90-5702-481-8.
- ^ These translate as 'Hunting Tiger' and 'Hunting Panther', respectively
- ISBN 978-1-61060-031-6.
External links
- Media related to Casemates at Wikimedia Commons