Casemate ironclad

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the high-freeboard ironclad type developed in the 1870s, see Central battery ship.

Casemate Ironclad USS Cairo on a contemporary photograph.
CSS Palmetto State, the archetypal casemate ironclad. Note the sloped deck and the low waterline.
Detail of the remains of USS Cairo as a museum ship today. The sloped casemate deck is clearly visible.

The casemate ironclad was a type of iron or iron-armored gunboat briefly used in the

gun battery
. As the guns were carried on the top of the ship yet still fired through fixed gunports, the casemate ironclad is seen as an intermediate stage between the traditional broadside frigate and modern warships.

Overview

In its general appearance, a casemate ironclad consisted of a low-cut hull with little

pilothouse, and one or two smokestacks.[4]

The casemate ironclad being steam driven, either by screws or by paddle-wheels, it did not need sails or masts, although sometimes, when not in combat, temporary pulley-masts, flagpoles, davits, and awnings were added. Inside the casemate, the guns were housed in one continuous deck. Unlike with turret ironclads, the guns had to fire through fixed gunports and therefore aiming was done by moving the gun relative to the gunport. This was labor-intensive and often up to 20 men were needed to load, aim, fire, and clean a gun, and even with this manpower the firing rate was no better than one shot per five minutes.[citation needed]

In the Confederate Navy

Although the

Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory (who was the one who came up with the idea of employing ironclads to offset the numerical superiority of the Union Navy in the first place) to the Confederate House Committee on Naval Affairs,[7] the majority of them were from the outset designed to operate in coastal waters as well as inland waters, and unlike their Union counterparts were, theoretically at least, seaworthy to a limited extent – since they were never expected to venture out onto the high seas.[8] This was exemplified by the fact that most Confederate ironclads were designed with a keeled deep-draft hull, as opposed to the Union shallow-draft flat bottom hulls (also featured on the Confederate river ironclads of which there were also a number built). This came at a cost, however; Confederate coastal ironclads frequently ran aground when operating in inland waters or shallow coastal waters, with more than one being captured by the Union because of it, or were destroyed by their own crews to prevent capture in such circumstances – a fate that befell the CSS Virginia as her draft ultimately prevented her escape some time after the Battle of Hampton Roads.[citation needed
]

Furthermore, even the relatively modest aim of limited seaworthiness was rarely achieved, since the Confederacy had to make do with repurposed and underpowered machinery that was originally designed to power wooden vessels, and which was unsuited for powering the now-heavier casemate ironclads, seriously hampering their maneuverability and leading to many grounded Confederate ironclads being unable to free themselves without help.

slack water in the harbor.[10] Having to add heavier armor in the later stages of the war only served to aggravate matters. All this resulted in the Confederate casemate ironclad never quite living up to its full potential, with glimpses of what might have been gleaned from the exploits of such vessels as CSS Virginia herself, CSS Arkansas, CSS Albemarle and CSS Tennessee (1863).[citation needed
]

Outside North America

In their specific outer appearances, i.e. being essentially floating gun batteries encased in armored citadels, albeit powered, the low-freeboard Union and Confederate casemate ironclads were almost uniquely North American. However, the concept of a fixed armored citadel mounted on a warship housing the main armament itself was further explored by European navies in the last third of the 19th century, by the French and British navies in particular, in no small part due to the inspiration gained from the Battle of Hampton Roads. This resulted in larger, high-freeboard ironclad frigates or battleships the British dubbed "centre battery ships" and the French "casemate" or "barbette" (if the citadel was circularly shaped) ships, which were oceangoing, unlike the American originals (excepting the Confederacy's CSS Stonewall, the only Confederate high-freeboard and oceangoing barbette/casemate ironclad, and the Union's rather unusual low-freeboard, but equally oceangoing, casemate ironclad USS Dunderberg). British examples were, among others, HMS Bellerophon (the first such one completed by the British in 1865) and HMS Hercules (1868). French examples included Brasil (casemate, and as the name implies, completed for the Brazilian Navy in 1865, and, when stripped of its masts, sharing a striking side-profile similarity with its Confederate progenitors) and Redoutable (barbette, and the first warship in history to be constructed in steel in 1878, instead of iron).[11][12]

Two earlier and rarer examples – having more in common with American ironclads – concerned the

Royal Dutch Navy ship-of-the-line Zr Ms De Ruyter, whose conversion into an "armoured steam battery" – completed in 1865 – was ordered immediately after the Battle of Hampton Roads, much like the Merrimack's into Virginia, and suffered from the same defects. Still, all admiralties concluded that it was an evolutionary dead-end and that the revolving gun turret was the way to go – the validity of the conclusion being amply hammered home when the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought (1906) entered service, rendering everything that went before obsolete overnight. As a result, by 1910 no navy had any casemate warship left in service.[13]

References

  1. ^ Konstam, 2002 (1), p.15
  2. ^ Preston, 1979, p. 24
  3. ^ Konstam, 2001, pp. 5–9
  4. ^ Konstam (1), 2002, p.16
  5. ^ Scharf, 1894, p. 673
  6. ^ Konstam, 2002 (1), p. 14
  7. ^ Melton, 1968, pp. 27–28
  8. ^ Konstam, 2001, p. 3
  9. ^ Konstam, 2001, pp. 11–12
  10. ^ Melton, 1968, pp. 155–161
  11. ^ Preston, 1979, pp. 20–39
  12. ^ Hill, 2002, pp. 28–71
  13. ^ Preston, 1979, pp. 43–45

Bibliography
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