CSPAN3 Show on Civil War Naval Technology - 2/2/2012

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For those who get CSPAN3, that channel is showing a lecture on Civil War Naval Technology today (2/2/2013). The lecture might be replayed tomorrow, but that is not a given.

All of their lectures are made available on their website, as is their show schedule.

- Alan
 
Whew! Thanks! I would've missed it. Starts 10:01 PM Eastern, run time about 1:43. :thumbsup:

Schedule says it's repeating tomorrow at 11 AM Eastern as well.
 
CSPAN3 does a civil war show of some kind every Saturday at 6pm. The same show is then repeated at 10pm Saturday and 11 am Sunday.

They regularly have other CW programming on the weekend as well which is also repeated a coule of times.
 
It wasn't precisely a thrilling television event. One of the speakers just gave a generic history of the naval war, which I'm pretty sure all the attendees knew by heart to begin with, but the other three provided some interesting information.

A few tidbits:

The Virginia's ram is not in the wreck of the Cumberland off Newport News. (Personally, I think that someone realized how big a hunk of iron it was and fished it up sometime in the past 150 years. But it remains a mystery as to what happened to it.)

There was more interservice wrangling over the Charleston defenses than I'd realized. It was to Charleston's benefit to get Beauregard named the local top dog; he provided a lot of energy and seems to have been good at herding the proverbial cats.

I was particularly intrigued by the final speaker, a German professor from the University of Wurzburg, who discussed the spar torpedo boats of the Civil War in their historical context in the development of small combatants. One of the gems he dropped along the way is that Robert Fulton actually designed a spar torpedo boat back during the War of 1812. As I know that he also designed (and built) the steam battery "Demologos" and also worked with submarine designs... clearly a man way ahead of his time. (Need to know more about him...)

Oh, and there was one member of the audience who really wanted to give his own talk instead of ask questions. :banghead:
 
Oh, and there was one member of the audience who really wanted to give his own talk instead of ask questions. :banghead:

Speakers will privately refer to that audience member (there's always one) as an "ask-hole."

Listening to the spar torpedo guy now, online. It's really important that his perspective is of the (mostly Confederate) use of spar torpedo boats in the CW as being part of, and informing, naval operational theory and tactics internationally. We tend sometimes to think of the CW as something that happened in a bubble here in this country, but it was never that way.

He also makes a critical point that the strategic purpose of the technologies deployed by the Confederacy (ironclads, spar torpedoes, mines, etc.) was not naval supremacy or breaking the blockade; it was harbor defense, and in that respect their efforts were largely successful.

Also, he's emphatic that the torpedo boats were considered dangerous assignments, but not suicide missions.
 
Yeah... In retrospect, Matthew Fontaine Maury should have championed lots of torpedo boats instead of (essentially) rehashing Jefferson's "gunboat navy." Given his experiments with torpedoes, it's surprising that he didn't.

The Confederate Navy does not appear to have been conceived with a definite mission other than "The C.S.A. should have a Navy." If they had really thrown themselves full-time into harbor defense and delaying the enemy on the coasts, it might have been, if not more successful, at least less unsuccessful. (You can definitely see how an integrated defense helped at Charleston.)
 
The Confederate Navy does not appear to have been conceived with a definite mission other than "The C.S.A. should have a Navy." If they had really thrown themselves full-time into harbor defense and delaying the enemy on the coasts, it might have been, if not more successful, at least less unsuccessful. (You can definitely see how an integrated defense helped at Charleston.)

Expired Image Removed
Detail of “Fort Moultrie” by Conrad Wise Chapman. Museum of the Confederacy.

Y'all are tied of hearing about Galveston, but this is certainly another good argument for "integrated defense." When Magruder recaptured Galveston on the first day of 1863, he immediately began building up the defenses of the area, both ashore and afloat. (It helped considerably that there was no actual, formal CS naval administration or personnel her, so Magruder didn't have to deal with constant pissing matches with his naval counterpart when he wanted to get things done.) The defenses here were so substantial that, by the spring/summer of 1863, the Union essentially gave up on retaking Galveston directly, and concentrated their efforts elsewhere along the coast at Sabine Pass, Corpus Christi and Port Isabel/Brownsville.
 
Yeah... In retrospect, Matthew Fontaine Maury should have championed lots of torpedo boats instead of (essentially) rehashing Jefferson's "gunboat navy." Given his experiments with torpedoes, it's surprising that he didn't.

The Confederate Navy does not appear to have been conceived with a definite mission other than "The C.S.A. should have a Navy." If they had really thrown themselves full-time into harbor defense and delaying the enemy on the coasts, it might have been, if not more successful, at least less unsuccessful. (You can definitely see how an integrated defense helped at Charleston.)
Maury did! Maury fought the Navy department and lost! He believed the CSA should concentrate on building a large number of gunboats rather than a few Ironclads.
J. Davis's departmental system did create a great many problems throughout the war. When the James River Squadron (CS) wanted to move down river to disrupt City Point They had to ask for permission from the Mine Department to have the river cleared. Permission was denied at first!
 
I meant torpedo boats, rather than the "Maury Gunboats", which were worse than useless, since they were a diversion of resources that the Confederacy absolutely could not afford.
 
I don't think they had any real concept of how shock waves travel through water. I believe, but am not certain, that no actual tests using the attached, full-size, spar torpedo on Hunley were carried out prior to the sortie that sank Housatonic. Hunley's second, fatal sinking had roughly coincided with David's October attack on U.S.S. New Ironsides, which didn't sink that ship but was nonetheless considered by General Beauregard a genuine success, and a model to follow in the future. Beauregard was very skeptical of the Hunley project by this point, but reluctantly agreed to allow Dixon to take over command of the boat, and for him and Alexander to recruit a new crew. One of Beauregard's conditions for continuing with Hunley was that it be refitted with a spar torpedo, and abandon the towed-torpedo model previously employed, which had already resulted in a number of close-calls, and was deemed to be of great danger of all concerned. (Beauregard also claimed, after the war, that he had insisted that Hunley's operations be confined to running on the surface, but Chaffin's book discounts this claim, as there's no contemporary evidence of such an order or policy, and Dixon and his crew continued to routinely and openly practice diving right to the end.)

David itself was very nearly sunk in attacking New Ironsides with a spar torpedo, but another of the "lessons" they learned in that incident was that the torpedo itself had to be much larger -- twice as large, as it turned out.
 
(Beauregard also claimed, after the war, that he had insisted that Hunley's operations be confined to running on the surface, but Chaffin's book discounts this claim, as there's no contemporary evidence of such an order or policy, and Dixon and his crew continued to routinely and openly practice diving right to the end.)

This Beauregardism has made its way into most of the historical literature dealing with the Hunley that I've seen, and it's never fitted in with the apparent fact that the Hunley was clearly submerged (if not too deeply) when she attacked the Housatonic. Definitely smells of "CYA."
 
Additional -- before lest week, there were too many "unknowns" about the torpedo and its distance from Hunley to justify investing in full-scale testing of such an explosive to get hard data on its effect on the boat and crew. Now that some of those variables seem to be nailed down, I expect NatGeo to go all Mythbusters on this.

 
One interesting bit I ran across while reading Milton F. Perry's Infernal Machines... while I know some basic physics, it hadn't occurred to me before: When they were testing the early torpedoes, they found that, the closer to the surface they were, the more force was directed upward and therefore less damage done, water being less compressible than air and water toward the surface being under less pressure than deeper. Things exploding right on the surface had to be right against the target, or a lot of the energy would be wasted.

It seems to me that the David's torpedo, in addition to being smaller, was possibly shallower in the water than the Hunley's torpedo... perhaps it should have been a surfaced operation? Maybe the Hunley would have taken less of her own hit?
 
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