The Battle of Hampton Roads, 8-9 March 1862

Battle of the Week 2011-10

In our classrooms, the Battle of Hampton Roads gets a curious treatment. We recognize it as a turning point in naval history and treat it as a giant contest between two behemoths--but we give it about three sentences in our textbooks and lectures, and perhaps a question or two on a test or quiz. Every fifth-grader can tell you about the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack (or, if he's from the Deep South, the Virginia), but how many know who won--or what the battle accomplished?

There's a reason for that. See, the short answers to those questions are neither and nothing. Neither side won, in the sense that neither ship sustained critical damage and they both left the area under their own power; and they accomplished nothing in the sense that the Union blockade remained in place, but Confederate waters remained firmly in Confederate hands. Of course, the battle changed naval warfare profoundly--but the Civil War was over before the changes could have any real effect on the conflict.

The Confederate ram CSS Virginia was the second incarnation of the USS Merrimack, a steam-powered warship scuttled by Union forces when they abandoned the Gosport Naval Yard in April 1861. The Confederates raised her, cased her in iron, armed her with the latest guns (which the Federals had generously left in the shipyard), and sent her out to break the Union blockade that kept the south from exporting cotton or importing the weapons it needed to fight the war. She had her baptism by fire at Hampton Roads, a waterway at the head of the Chesapeake Bay where three large rivers come together.

The USS Monitor was the Union response to the news that the Confederates were putting an ironclad into the water. Unlike the Virginia, though, she was designed as an ironclad, mounting a rotating turret with two huge 11-inch guns instead of a more traditional broadside with smaller guns. Of the two ships, the Monitor was clearly the more advanced--but that did not make the Virginia any less a threat to the wooden ships she was built to prey upon.

On the 8^th of March, 1862, the Virginia steamed into Hampton Roads, supported by three other Confederate ships and two gunboats, to take on the Union vessels blocking their way into the Chesapeake. She opened the fight by ramming the USS Cumberland, which sank so quickly she nearly took the Virginia down with her. Next the Confederate ships turned their attention to the USS Congress, which surrendered after an hour or so of hard fighting. Their next target was the USS Minnesota, whose captain had run her aground to avoid the Cumberland's fate. The failing light and falling tide forced the Virginia to abandon the fight, and she headed upriver to evacuate her wounded.

Confederate spirits were high that night, and the little squadron returned the next day to finish off the Minnesota and see to the other Union ships in the area. They found the Monitor, which had steamed in during the night, waiting for them. The escorts stood off and let the ironclads fight each other.

After the first few minutes of firing, it must have been clear to everybody that the fight would be a long one. Expecting to do battle only with wooden-sided ships, the Virginia carried only explosive shells and hot shot, neither of which had much effect on the Monitor's armor. But the Union ironclad had her own handicap--her big guns were loaded with half their normal powder charge for fear of explosions in her turret. Had the Virginia carried solid shot, she could have penetrated the Monitor's armor and sent her to the bottom. Had the Monitor been firing with full powder-loads, she could have done the same to the Virginia.

As it was, they wasted their ammunition for three hours. The Virginia rammed the Monitor once--but she had lost her ram when she sank the Cumberland the day before, and the attack did no damage. The Monitor tried to run astern of the Virginia and knock her unprotected rudder off--but the Confederate managed to lumber out of the way without damage.

Finally, a shell burst outside the Monitor's exposed pilot-house, temporarily blinding her captain, and she steamed into shallow water where the Virginia could not follow. The captain's intent was to return and rejoin the fight as soon he could, but the Virginia, after waiting an hour or so and determining the Monitor wasn't coming back, turned and steamed back toward her base at Norfolk. The Monitor returned in time to see her opponent apparently retreating--and both sides claimed the victory, even though neither had accomplished its objectives.

So the results: two ships sunk (the Congress had exploded in the night), four others--including the ironclads--heavily damaged, and three or four hundred men dead and wounded. And that's about it. The blockade remained in place, and the following month the Confederates had to abandon Norfolk, scuttling the Virginia because it couldn't go any farther upriver. The Monitor sank in choppy seas in December.

But the battle's real impact was the changes it wrought in naval warfare. The world quickly recognized the advantages of a turret over a broadside; although it meant a ship could carry fewer guns, those could be heavier, and the ship could bring its guns to bear in any direction without having to maneuver. The Union commissioned several more Monitor-class ships--in fact, the turreted design spread rapidly around the world, changing the way naval ships looked and fought. The design can still be found on battleships today, and turreted heavy guns remained the primary armament of the world's most powerful ships for three quarters of a century--until aircraft launched from Japanese carriers at Pearl Harbor showed the world how naval warfare had changed again.

So the Dreadnoughts and Bismarcks and Missouris and Yamatos all owe their concept to a small ship that changed the way nations thought about ship-to-ship combat. That, I suppose, is the real legacy of the Battle of Hampton Roads.

You can read more about the battle at the link below:

http://www.civilwarhome.com/ironclad.htm

Now go get your nerd on!

HN

Operation Cerberus (the Channel Dash), 11-13 February 1942

Battle of the Week 2011-06

Occasionally, victory in battle is the result of a commander's talent at reading the tactical situation, devising and communicating a plan to his subordinates, then directing its execution so flawlessly the enemy is left wondering what happened. Often it's the product of a sound but unimaginative plan executed against an incompetent or unsuspecting enemy. Sometimes it's the product of boldness and luck.

But most often, it's a combination of these factors: a sound plan, executed boldly against an enemy expecting something else, can prove as decisive as the presence of a Napoleon or a Lee or a Rommel.

Operation Cerberus--or as the British call it, the Channel Dash--was such an operation. Poor reading of the tactical situation, poor communication and coordination, bad weather, and bad luck made what should have been an impossible task for the German navy into a major naval embarrassment for Britain.

The German battle cruisers Gniesenau and Scharnhorst were key players in the early months of the Battle of the Atlantic. Fast and well-armored, they were ideally suited to hit-and-run raids against the merchant and supply ships that became critical to Britain's survival after the Blitzkrieg cut it off from the continent. Between them, they sank more than 115,000 tons of British merchant shipping in early 1941, making them extremely valuable to the German war effort--and extremely valuable targets for the Royal Navy.

The two warships returned to port in Brest for repairs in March 1941, but remained vulnerable; Brest, on the peninsula of Brittany, was easily within the range of British bombers. The sinking of the Bismarck in May threw their vulnerable position into new light, and the German navy, on orders from Hitler, began making plans to return them to less exposed ports in Germany. The order came in January 1942: the Gniesenau, the Scharnhorst, and the Prinz Eugen, which had joined them in June, would sail for the German ports on the North Sea to defend the Fatherland against a potential invasion from Norway.

The Royal Navy knew at once the ships were preparing to sail; French partisans reported they were being loaded, and Royal Air Force reconnaissance flights showed increased activity all along the Channel coast. Reconnaissance flights were increased accordingly, a submarine positioned to watch the Brest harbor, and swift, light torpedo craft called motor torpedo boats (MTBs) stationed where they could easily intercept any traffic trying to run up the Channel to Germany. All this, and the navy scrambled to add to the more than a thousand mines already scattered through the Channel passages.

But by the thirteenth of February, the three ships and their escorts lay berthed in German ports on the North Sea, having accomplished the impossible--without the loss of a single ship.

How had they done it? First, with a sound plan and excellent coordination between the component forces of the operation; the German Navy and the Luftwaffe had coordinated fighter cover for every segment of the operation well before it kicked off, and every ship in the convoy (the three cruisers were escorted by six destroyers, plus assorted support vessels) understood its mission and what it was to do at every point of the run. Every detail, from radar jamming to meteorology to minesweeping to spreading false rumors throughout Brest to deceive the partisans, was considered and dealt with.

The British, for their part, misread the German plans spectacularly. To their credit, they did not fall for the Germans' deceptive indications the ships would sail south, but their read of the German intentions seems to have broken down from there. The British believed the Germans would leave Brest in daylight, so as to run the Straits of Dover, the narrowest point of the crossing, in darkness; in fact the German fleet left Brest at 10:45 on the evening of the 11th of February, and was crossing below the Isle of Wight by daybreak.

British coordination seems to have suffered a catastrophic breakdown, as well. The submarine watching Brest harbor had ended its day's watch an hour before the German ships left port; an RAF reconnaissance flight failed to see the ships in the darkness because of unreliable radar; radar failures at Coastal Command and Fighter Command went unreported; the MTBs stationed to intercept the Gniesenau and her fleet were being refitted and rearmed from an action on the previous day; and, to top it all off, an RAF patrol passed directly over the fleet, identified the German vessels--and maintained radio silence, not reporting the sighting until it returned to its airfield.

The weather, too, worked solidly in the Germans' favor. Low clouds concealed the ships from British bombers; most did not even release their bombs, and those that did missed their targets. Heavy fog for most of the run kept shore-based spotters from seeing the fleet, and kept the shore batteries at Dover from hitting the ships as they pushed through the narrow strait. And the airfield Bomber Command's planes had planned to fly from to intercept the fleet, North Coates, was snow-bound and useless to them.

The result was embarrassment for the Royal Navy--but little gain for the Germans. The three cruisers spent the rest of the war in the North Sea, making Allied supply runs to the Soviet Union difficult but accomplishing little else. And bottled up in the North Sea, they could do nothing to influence the strategically more critical Battle of the Atlantic, which from that point the Germans left largely to their U-boats, or to hamper the even more critical Allied invasion of Europe.

So once again, a massive and expensive undertaking went off with hardly a hitch--and accomplished almost nothing. Such are the fortunes of war: the side that can see where their limited resources can be put to most effective use is the side most likely to push on to victory. The side that overextends itself, wastes its effort on operations that are unlikely to decide anything, soon finds itself asking for the terms of surrender.

Now go get your nerd on!
HN