The fate of the Allies rests in the hands of eccentric British Navy Captain George Hardy. Regarded as a madman by some, and viewed as a genius in naval warfare by those who serve with him, Hardy leads his ragtag fleet of warships into a deadly match of wits and wills against the determined Kern and his untested U-boats. Under cover of the ocean, the deadliest of enemies are about to engage their final battle…. Welcome to HuntersAndTheHunted.Com, the Cyberspace Home of author: Steven Wilson.

Iron Ships: Part 1
by Steven Wilson, 2005

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT MILITARY.COM, July 1, 2005

There are moments in military history, which define the ending of one thing, and the beginning of another. At Midway, it was the eight minutes that saw the destruction of three Japanese aircraft carriers. In Dallas, it was the time that it took to chamber three rounds. Off the coast of Ireland it was the moment that RMS Lusitania filled the periscope of a German U-boat and changed the course of the war. For the navies of the world in the early afternoon of March 8, 1862, it was the sight of cannon balls bouncing off the ironsides of C.S.S. Virginia.

The Union fleet standing off Fort Monroe and Hampton Roads in early March 1862 was impressive. It included the U.S.S. Congress and U.S.S. Cumberland between the Middle Ground of the Roads and Newport News, and the U.S.S. St. Lawrence, U.S.S. Roanoke, and U.S.S. Vanderbilt close to the protective guns of Fort Monroe. Between the two forces was the U.S.S. Minnesota, a sailing frigate. Moored next to these Union vessels in Hampton Roads, unseen by the sailors who hung their laundry under a clear, warm sky was disaster. The C.S.S. Virginia, once the U.S.S. Merrimac, was coming down the James River.

The U.S.S. Merrimac, a steam frigate, had been waiting idly at the naval yard at Gosport, Virginia for desperately, needed engines, when she was fired and abandoned by retreating federals. The Union commander apparently panicked and, after destroying several ships that the United States navy would sorely miss, abandoned nearly 1,200 cannon to the confederates. The Merrimac never had a chance to fire a shot at her attackers. Not as the Merrimac. And not as a steam frigate.

Deadly in its day: the CSS Virginia ( Image from Naval Historical Center Website).

She was not the first ironclad to go to war, or even the first ironclad. The French La Gloire and English Warrior were both constructed in 1858 by countries, which felt that iron had a place on the high seas. In appearance they were little different than steam frigates of the period but iron plating was a critical part of their construction. Warrior was all-over iron with the greatest concentration amidships to protect her engines and magazines. La Gloire was iron on wood; an arrangement that led to the need for continuous repair because the two substances did not get on well together, a condition that would be more than apparent just a few years later. The U.S navy’s first encounter with ironclads was the U.S.S. New Ironsides. Crude and ungainly looking, this ship was to see action in the Civil War but unlike her famous namesake, she would achieve recognition as nothing more than a gun platform. So the precedent was there, big ships, big guns, and sea-shaking broadsides.

But for now, smoldering in the debris covered waters of the naval base that should have been her sanctuary, her magazines intact and her hull relatively untouched was opportunity, and her name was Merrimac. What remained of the U.S.S. Merrimac was raised and plans began immediately to turn her into an ironclad. “I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as the first necessity,” Stephen Mallory--secretary of the Confederate navy, said. He expected such a ship to range up and down the coast, destroying blockading vessels with impunity. Merrimac’s blackened skeleton was cut away down to her berth deck and that deck then became her gun deck. A casement approximately 160-feet long was built over her 275-foot hull, and 4 inches iron plating was mounted atop this 2-foot thick pine and oak frame. The result was a huge interior of guns and machinery with the only natural light coming from the grating overhead or through the gun ports. The heat and smoke generated during battle must have turned this cavern into the lowest reaches of hell. But as primitive as the Merrimac, now rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia may appear today, she was a most threatening weapon in the hands of some very determined men.

The manufacturing resources available to the South were just a fraction of those possessed by the North so it required some very innovative thinking to even the odds. The result was the Virginia with her four-foot cast-iron ram and her spar torpedo—essentially low pole with an explosive charge on it, extending from the bow. The ram was a very romantic concept and its appearance on Virginia influenced naval architecture to some time but as a practical weapon, it was not very successful.

Virginia’s success lay in her iron skin, stout wooden timbers, and ten massive cannon, and the fact that she could steam in close to the wooden walls of conventional vessels and destroy them. This was brute strength; there was no finesse about it.

A quartermaster aboard the Union Congress the morning of March 8, 1862, noted smoke far up the James River and commented to an officer: “I believe that thing is coming down at last, sir.” The construction of C.S.S. Merrimac was not a well-kept secret, nor was the Union’s response in the U.S.S. Monitor. What was not known is how would “that thing,” do in battle. No one, especially the men encased in her iron body, knew. Her unreliable engines, the thing that had taken her to Gosport before the war, were now even more so—they were not likely to function smoothly for more than six hours at a time. And the iron sheathing that made her a formidable weapon placed even more demands on the engines. She moved through the war at an inevitable pace but someone walking along the riverbank could easily keep pace with her progress. It took her 35 minutes to turn, she had a 22-foot draft, and none of her guns had been fired. She was slow, cumbersome, unreliable, and the question that plagued the mixed crew of soldiers, sailors, and landsmen was; could she fight?

She moved toward Hampton Roads accompanied by a tiny flotilla of hangers-on; the Yorktown, Jamestown, Beaufort, Raleigh, and Teaser. They were there to lend assistance in a fight but it’s also likely that they went along if the temperamental Virginia decided that she had no desire to fight that day and simply shut down.

A Union gunboat spotted her first, got off a 32-pound shot, and retired in haste to the Roads. That thing was, indeed, coming down. She approached U.S.S. Cumberland, who fired on this huge barn roof with a chimney (the description of one observer), followed by the U.S.S. Congress and assorted shore batteries. For the men inside the Virginia it must have been like working in a smoke-filled bell suspended over a raging fire. The solid shot and shells crashed against the iron sides in an unending barrage that robbed the men of their hearing. The timbers cracked like gunshots and tortured wood against wood squealed in pain as every gun that could be brought to bear, pummeled the C.S.S. Virginia.

The CSS Virginia in drydock ( image from Big Country Website).

For more than an hour the Confederate warship steamed unharmed through the continuous bombardment of Union guns, a thunderstorm of explosives that would have reduced a wooden-hulled vessel to kindling. Finally, Virginia was satisfied to answer. The port shutter was raised on her bow and the 7-inch pivot gun run out. After sighting on a target it fired, the shell striking the after-pivot gun on U.S.S. Cumberland and killing or wounding most of the gun crew. She sailed blithely past Congress who continued to pour round after round into her with no effect, and chose Cumberland as her first victim. Congress had not escaped Death’s scythe, she had simply been put on notice. “Our clean and handsome deck,” one shocked Union officer recalled of Congress’s first, brief encounter with Virginia, “was in an instant changed into a slaughter-pen, with lopped-off legs and arms, and bleeding, blackened bodies scattered about by the shells, whilst blood and brains actually dripped from the beams.”

It was just before three that Virginia, impervious to the constant fire of the sloop Cumberland, sunk her cast-iron ram into the wooden ship’s side. Cumberland heeled over, mortally wounded, while the men inside Virginia felt no more than a coarse shudder. The Confederate ship reversed her engines and withdrew from Cumberland’s body, leaving the ram behind. The loss of the ram created leaks in Virginia’s bow but did not prevent her from backing off and pounding her hapless victim with point-blank fire for almost thirty minutes. U.S.S. Cumberland finally succumbed to the bombardment, slowly sinking into the waters of the Road, which did her the service of washing the blood and carnage of battle from her decks, and hiding her wounds.

The men aboard U.S.S. Congress watched with stunned horror as Cumberland died, and Virginia turned on them, black smoke billowing from its funnel riddled by gunfire, its blank gun-port eyes fixed resolutely on the next to die.

To Be Continued...

Steven Wilson / HuntersAndTheHunted.Com E-Mail: readermail@HuntersAndTheHunted.Com