US Naval power

[rebelatsea]

Sir, curious on why you would think this. HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince open ocean voyages to Bermuda were a figment of the imagination? From there it is less than 800 miles to the American coast. Both ship had a range of 2100 miles on coal alone.
217

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

Even better, so did the floating battery HMS Terror !

 

[rebelatsea]

As one wag once joked over a decade ago to me in a debate, a frigate doesn't need to fight Monitor. It just needs to steam past at maximum speed and let her bow wave inundate her...

Or HMS Bellerophon, it was said that you could see her bow wave before you could see the ship !

 

[Saphroneth]

Wood frigates can't take on the Monitor. Nelson's ship-of-the line HMS Victory can't take on the Monitor.

Victory was a mid 18th century ship, unpowered, and mounted a mix of 32 pounders, 24 pounders, 12 pounders and 68 pounders. She couldn't take on the Monitor very well.

The actual fleet of the Royal Navy in the 1860s contained some much more formidable wooden frigates - all powered. To pick a name at random from the list of frigates already in North America in 1862, we have the Immortalite - a 51 gun frigate with a trials speed of 12.3 knots under steam alone, and armed with 15 8" guns and 10 32-pounders each broadside along with one 68 pounder pivot.
The 68 pounder is nearly powerful enough to penetrate the Monitor at close range. The other guns aren't, but they can each be fired at least once per minute - producing a hail of shot which can damage the Monitor through sheer attrition (in the same way that the monitors attacking Charleston were damaged and disabled) or by hitting her vulnerable gun ports when she turns to fire. If all else fails she can simply ram, as she's three times the mass of the Monitor and has much more reserve bouyancy.

The ships of the line are much more fearsome. The Nile (again, North America at the time) had 78 guns in 1862 of which sixteen were rifles, and was a little slower at 8.2 knots; the Donegal was at Bermuda in 1862 and had a top speed under steam alone of twelve knots (pause for a moment and consider which USN vessels could outspeed her!) with 101 guns, and a designed broadside of 18 8" guns plus 32 32-pounder guns (and a 68 pounder pivot).


For inshore work, there's HMS Terror - again, actually in North America at the time. Armed with a broadside of 6-7 68 pounder guns and tougher armour than Monitor, thus more able to penetrate Monitor than Monitor is to penetrate her, it's easy to see who would win that clash.

As for the logistical issue, it's worth studying how the Royal Navy handled logistics in the Crimean War - the main problem there was actually a coal glut - while anyone proposing invading Canada to get rid of a RN base should actually plot out how difficult that would be. Question one: how do you cross the St. Lawrence, the Royal Navy can actually reach it?
(As a side point, the difficulties of the US in sustaining overseas operations are not actually very illuminative - the Royal Navy was the premier service in being able to supply coal to overseas coaling stations for the entirety of the steam-coal age, while the US was new to the whole thing. I can provide citations if desired.)

 

[Saphroneth]

Now, to look at something which deserves mention. At this point in time the Royal Navy is a coastal attack fleet - huge fractions of their personal expertise and recent construction is designed for not just blue water operations but brown water operations in enemy brown water. This is important because it means the RN has the ability to seriously threaten the ability of the USN to keep their own harbours safe.

As of the Civil War there are only a few major fleet bases or equivalent in the US - Washington Naval Yard, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Portsmouth (NH) is pretty much it, plus a few more minor bases, and depending on the date there's also Norfolk. The question is - which of these could be successfully protected against a moderately sized Royal Navy raiding force?

For now let's assume that most of the RN is occupied with peacetime duties or the blockade, but that the blockade of this specific port or river system can contribute a few ships and so can the "particular service squadron". This squadron to consist of, say, six Crimean gunboats, two Crimean gunvessels, a pair of 51s (heavy frigates), a pair of 91s (two decker liners) and two each casemate ironclads (Aetna/Erebus class) and ironclad big frigates (say, Warrior and Defence). With the local blockade squadron contributing another liner, a frigate, and a sloop.

Quite frankly this is enough to fight into just about any US port with the defences that existed historically. The gunboats and ironclads are equipped with modern rifles able to dismantle a fort at a mile's range or more, and Warrior's armour scheme is immune to single penetration by any US gun (shipborne or shore mounted) at beyond a few hundred yards. If a fort turns out to cause problems then the RN simply calls on some of their fifty-plus mortar gunboats and their fifty mortar floats; given the relative handful it took to burn Krondstadt, sustained attention by two dozen or more RN mortars is going to wreck just about any conceivable defence.

The USN must focus on harbour defence first; consider how strong the Russian navy was relative to the Royal Navy in the Crimean period, then ask if the USN is stronger relative to the RN. (The names of the USN steam liners would help, but unfortunately they start and end with the USS Doesn'tExist; this means relying on ironclads, and sadly for the USN the RN got there first.)

 

[gary]

Concur the USN would concentrate on harbor defense. This would give the RN the ability to choose its battles and to sail beyond the slow and limited ability in blue water of any monitor.

Without consulting Conway, there was only one ironclad frigate in the USN - the USS Ironsides.

 

[Saphroneth]

Without consulting Conway, there was only one ironclad frigate in the USN - the USS Ironsides.

Even that's kind of a tricky one. The Ironsides was certainly better armed than any monitor in terms of number of guns, but she was also terrible in several ways and could probably be better compared to HMS Terror or Erebus or Aetna than the Warrior or the Defence. (Among other things the Ironsides had a hullform which meant her rudder was in dead water at any speed, so she couldn't manoeuvre under power much.)


Fundamentally there's nothing the USN has which can match the Warrior or even the Defence in blue water, and I think the closest thing they have to an ability to sink the Warrior is probably to load the Vanderbilt up with a thousand tonnes of cement in the bow and try to ram. The wooden USN is basically tinder before any ship fitted with Martin's Shell, and the ironclad USN amounts basically to monitors which have significant manoeuvre shortcomings and no reserve bouyancy.

(Actually, here's an interesting question - six light RN gunboats, say Clown class, against a Passaic-class monitor. Who wins?
The gunboats every time. There's six of them, and the Passaic class is not only inaccurate but takes over ten minutes to reload her two guns. They also have a big enough crew to board and capture, and it takes two matelots with a hammer and wedges to jam the turret on an Ericsson monitor.)

 

[edgeworthy]

Now I'm fairly certain that I've posted this at least twice in similar discussions, however that doesn't make it irrelevant!

The Navy List for 1862 gives a total Royal Navy strength of 735 ships, or about 3 times that of the Union Navy, of which 28 are Armoured.

Spoiler: List of Royal Navy Ironclads.

From the Navy list of 1862 http://archive.org/stream/navylist03admigoog#page/n5/mode/2up

1. Achilles (building at Chatham, reserve from December 1863, Commissioned into the Channel Fleet September 1864)
2. Agincourt (building at Birkenhead, reserve on 26th May 1864, Commissioned 1867)
3. Black Prince (in Commission with the Channel Fleet)
4. Caledonia (in reserve at Woolwich from 2nd February 1863, Commissioned into the Med. Fleet July 1865)
5. Defence (in Commission with the Channel Fleet)
6. Enterprise (building at Deptford, Commissioned into the Med. Fleet May 1864)
7. Erebus (in deep reserve at Portsmouth)
8. Favourite (building at Deptford, Commissioned into the American Fleet 1866)
9. Glatton (in deep reserve at Portsmouth)
10. Hector (building at Glasgow, reserve from October 1862, Commissioned into Channel Fleet 1864)
11. Minotaur (building at Blackwell, reserve on 15 December 1863, Commissioned into the Channel Fleet 1867)
12. Northumberland (building at Millwall, reserve in 1866, Commissioned into the Channel Fleet 1868)
13. Ocean (building at Devonport, in reserve from 23rd March 1863, Commissioned into the Channel Fleet 1866)
14. Prince Albert (building at Millwall, reserve from 20th May 1864, Commissioned almost immediately into the Channel Fleet to test the turrets)
15. Prince Consort (building at Pembroke, reserve from 14th January 1863, Commissioned into the Channel Fleet 1864)
16. Research (building at Pembroke, reserve from March 1864, and Commissioned next month into the Channel Fleet)
17. Resistance (in Commission with the Channel Fleet)
18. Royal Alfred (building at Portsmouth, in reserve October 1864, Commissioned into the American Fleet Jan. 1867)
19. Royal Oak (building at Chatham, in reserve 13th September 1862, Commissioned into 27th April 1863 into the Channel Fleet)
20. Royal Sovereign (building at Portsmouth, complete as turret ship 20th August 1864 and placed on Harbour Commission in October, but was never fully Commissioned)
21. Terror (in Commission on the Bermuda station)
22. Thunder (in deep reserve at Sheerness)
23. Thunderbolt (in deep reserve on the River Thames)
24. Trusty (in deep reserve at Woolwich)
25. Valiant (building at Millwall, reserve from October 1863, Commissioned 1868)
26. Warrior (in Commission with the Channel Fleet)
27. Zealous (building at Glasgow, reserve from December 1864, Commissioned into the Pacific Fleet 1866)
28. Aetna (tender to HMS Cumberland, River Thames)

Those in reserve can be re-commissioned in about a month, requiring Crew, Stores and Arms. Those in deep reserve are in need of maintenance and repairs, so would take longer.
(And ships under construction can be accelerated/ rushed to completion in a crisis!?)

There were another Five Ironclads under Laid Down/ Converted from 1863 Repulse, Lord Clyde, Lord Warden, Pallas and Bellerophon.
And 14 Ironclads under-construction for other Nations Navies The Laird Rams, Rolf Krake, Affondatore, Huascar, Independencia, Smerch, Pervenets, Arminius, Danmark, Arapiles,Vitoria, Absalon and Esbern Snare.
(There was always a clause in warship construction contracts allowing for their requisition by the Royal Navy in an emergency ... which they could easily have just done anyway by an Order in Council ... The foreign contracts listed only include vessels completed by 1865, there were more in existence.)

This comes to some 47 Ironclads, assuming not a single extra ship is laid down or converted. (From the hulls already in existance the RN could have added another 7 - 1st Rates converted ala Royal Sovereign, 2-5 Bulwark's converted to Prince Consort's and 6 or more Camelion Class Sloop conversions, without any more purpose built Iron hull ships, and at the time the wooden to Iron hull commissioning ratio was about one to one?)

Noticably this is more Ironclads than the Union Commissioned in the entire Civil War. And the Arapiles mentioned is the same ship that gave the US Navy the vapours during the Virginius Affair.
There are several Brown Water vessels listed, most obviously the Aetna & Erebus Classes, such as HMS Terror, and those based on the hulls of Sloops ie. Research, Enterprise & Favorite etc. Arapiles had a shallower draft than CSS Virginia. Absalon and Esbern Snare were marginal in terms of combat power, but not obviously more so than the City-Class, they would however fit through the locks of the Welland Canal.

 

[Saphroneth]

The Navy List obviously doesn't just include viable combatants for that year, but the same is true of the US Navy List (IIRC some of the ships on it have armaments like "8 Enfield Muskets").

An interesting question is what RN production priorities would look like in the event of a war. Historically in peacetime they used only the highest quality iron and worked on day shift, but the UK was hardly bereft of experienced ship mechanics working in non-war-vital industries - they might be able to go to two-shift or even three-shift working and use slightly less high quality iron to keep up.
It's possible the limiting factor would be the ability to bend the plates, and I know there were plans to quickly clad a number of wooden steam liners in the event of a war with France so it's possible that their hot bending capacity was quite well used but that they had leeway with their cold bending.

 

[rebelatsea]

The Navy List obviously doesn't just include viable combatants for that year, but the same is true of the US Navy List (IIRC some of the ships on it have armaments like "8 Enfield Muskets").

An interesting question is what RN production priorities would look like in the event of a war. Historically in peacetime they used only the highest quality iron and worked on day shift, but the UK was hardly bereft of experienced ship mechanics working in non-war-vital industries - they might be able to go to two-shift or even three-shift working and use slightly less high quality iron to keep up.
It's possible the limiting factor would be the ability to bend the plates, and I know there were plans to quickly clad a number of wooden steam liners in the event of a war with France so it's possible that their hot bending capacity was quite well used but that they had leeway with their cold bending.

There were emergency orders to iron all the new construction steam liners but I have never seen any drawings or proposals. I'd loved to have seen the proposals for HMS Víctoria and Howe. Seven Bulwark class 91 gun 2 deckers were all completed as new build ironclads so they don't really help as a guide.

 

[USS ALASKA]

Sirs, from the above list in post #47, what does the phrase 'deep reserve' mean? I don't think I've run into that one before.
425

Thanks for your help,
USS ALASKA

 

[67th Tigers]

Sirs, from the above list in post #47, what does the phrase 'deep reserve' mean? I don't think I've run into that one before.
425

Thanks for your help,
USS ALASKA

"Deep reserve" is 3rd class Steam Reserve, and is not the official term. It is a generic term.

The RN had three classes of Steam Reserve in the 1860's:

1st class; vessels that are armed and stored (except powder) and ready for Commissioning immediately. These could be at sea in anger the day after mobilisation.

2nd class; vessels that are armed and in a state ready to go to sea, but are destored. They could be at sea within ca. a week of mobilisation, and when the 1st class reserve was activated they'd be stored and bumped upto the 1st class.

3rd class; vessels that require work before Commissioning. This can be minor, or they might need great repairs.

If you have a vessel in reserve, then the date of entry into the reserve is easy to track, because the Engineer is assigned on that day. Without further data the class of reserve can be tracked by what part of the crew is assigned. Vessels in the 1st and 2nd class have a Master assigned as well. You can distinguish because in the 2nd class the vessel is destored and they live in (are "borne in") another vessel. The vessels of the 1st class reserve are stored and livable, and so the Engineer, Master and their crewmen live aboard.

 

[USS ALASKA]

"Deep reserve" is 3rd class Steam Reserve, and is not the official term. It is a generic term.

Copy sir, thank you.

USS ALASKA