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Military Pron - Confederate Ironclads

Jul 12, 2021, 2:26 AM

The CSS Palmetto State and CSS Chicora patrolling Charleston Harbor

Man do I love these guys. If you ever see a flotilla of miniature ironclads defending a nearby lake, they might be the toy brown water navy I'm gonna build in my retirement in action. Here's one guy's life size hobby.

I think it was the architect Corbusier who said the two purest designs he ever saw were the battleship and the grain silo. They do exactly what they are intended to and nothing more, with no flash and no frill. A pure intersection of form and function.

Add Confederate Ironclads to that. The Confederates were in a bind early on considering they had no navy at all and the Union had pretty much everything that floated. But in their favor was the fact that they had to do nothing at all except exist. It’s kinda the bare minimum to be considered a country. All the burden was on the Union to come down and take or blockade the Confederate ports. The Confederates just had to stop them.

That’s where these guys come in. What makes them so fantastic is that there use no new technology, no new materials, no new anything except pure ingenuity. It’s literally a military advance without any new technology. Using only existing materials and parts in a new way. Pure brilliance. In simplest terms, “Wood boat sink, iron boat don’t.”

That little do-dad sticking off then end of it is an early torpedo, basically a keg of powder on a stick. Used for ramming bad guys.

Now, Union Ironclads were more complicated, because they had to be seaworthy enough to come down to confederate ports, but all you had to do to have a Confederate ironclad was find an existing ship, chop off the masts, add a steam engine, and build an iron bunker on top backed by 2 feet of lumber. Not exactly stacked palmetto trees, but close enough to be impenetrable to any gun of the day.

Easy. In fact, the hardest part of the process is finding the iron. Iron plate was preferable but there weren't many rolling mills in the South. But gawd love em sometimes all the boys in butternut did was stack locomotive rails together over top of their 2 foot thick wooden casement, side by side. Presto! Three inches of armor siding. I don’t care what anyone says that’s just brilliant. Look closely at the model above. That's not corrugated iron plate, those are individual rail sections stacked together.

This section above was actually pulled out of a river where an ironclad was scuttled to prevent it from being captured. Necessity is truly the mother of invention.

Now, it might take a year or more to build one, but you don’t have to do much more than that. Once you clean off the deck of obstructions you start on your sloped casement. More brilliance, because the angled thickness of your armor is the hypotenuse of a triangle. Not only do you get more deflection from angled armor, you increase your effective thickness from 1 to 1.414 for a 45 degree slope. Over 40% more protection vs. vertical armor. The very same concept would be used in WW2 for tanks.

Now, as all that weight gets piled on, plus your guns and your steam engine, you are gonna sink and ride low in the water, which is just what you want. You want your deck to be just above the waterline so there’s no target there to be hit. You’ll be as seaworthy as an iron kettle, but remember, you’re not going to sea...because you don’t have to leave your port. All you have to do is steam around in shallow water and create he77 for Yanggezz.

With all that armor you’ll be totally under powered and lucky to manage 4 knots. In fact, the CSS Arkansas was lost because it couldn’t manage enough steam to overcome the current and get back upriver to safety. But what’s your rush in a harbor? Just make sure you are faster than the tide. You’ll barely be able to turn but why do you need to turn if you have guns that swivel?

But it gets even better. Because you are basically indestructible you only need 1 or 2 guns. You might add a couple more if you can bear the weight, but who cares if your opponent has a 30 gun broadside if not one of the 30 guns can even affect you? You just pull up to point blank range with your 1 gun, and blow his wood hull to smithereens. Say he tries to evade you. Just swivel your 1 gun to another gun port. He77, you might even want to save your ammo and just ram him to sink him.

Hey, it worked for the Greeks and Romans. Has naval warfare really changed that much since Charlton Heston and the Battle of Actium in 31 BC?

The only thing you might have to worry about is getting boarded. But there’s a fix for that too. The nice thing about a steam engine is that it makes steam, which can be run through a hose, which can be used to hot wash any unwanted boarders or stowaways right off the deck. Ouchy. So you got that covered too.

The Confederacy also had some cotton clads, sort of a low rent version of the ironclad using cotton bales for protection instead of iron, but they were not nearly as effective. No, not this cotton clad...

This one. Note the bales on the deck.

But over the course of the war the Confederates made almost 30 of the much improved cast iron turtles. They were made right on the spot where they were going to be used. Charleston had 3 for most of the war then added 1 more late, Richmond had a few on the James River, the Albemarle Sound had one, Mobile had one, there was one on the Arkansas River, and some others. And so, while the Confederates didn’t have much of a navy, they had one that was purpose-built to their needs, was pretty #### effective at it , and was pretty #### ingeniously done.

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The area the CSS Palmetto State and CSS Chicora are in is historically rough water; 3 rivers come together there to form the Atlantic Ocean <img border=

">. I've never seen it that flat and calm. Nor have I ever seen Castle Pinckney in the background so..large. It's just not that tall, nor that close in proximity to the water. There is a pretty large beach around it, even in the front view from the mouth of the harbor this view is taken.

I looked through some of my pictures and didn't have any from that angle, surprisingly there aren't many available on the web either. This is not a great pic, but its the only one I can find that's coming from the east side of the island:

Here is an original pic from the mid 1800's from the north side before it was made a jail, that shows an entire upper section that isn't there any longer:

I found this pic odd as in the early 1900's, they tried to make a light house island out of it, and actually built some houses on it.

"1908 – The act approved February 26, 1907, authorized the establishment of 30 light-keepers' dwellings, at a cost not to exceed $6,500 each."

The last of these houses were lost in a fire in the mid 1960's.

The water depth where the ironclads are shown ranges from about 5-11 feet, and has a bottom of soft mud for another couple feet in places. If one of those ironclads had ever sank there, it'd still be there.

Water depths are close to what this NOAA chart reports, but changes due to the currents and storms. It's a little deeper further south and a little shallower further north this year.

https://www.charts.noaa.gov/OnLineViewer/11524.shtml

Also interesting the distance where St Michael's church steeple can be seen in relation to Oyster point/White Point garden, From the structures visible, it appears to include the area of south battery that wasn't even there until the 1920's when most of that land was reclaimed from the marsh/harbor. I tried to find the picture but could not tell when it was sketched/painted.

And what was the aggregate material between the stacked I beams? Concrete? I always assumed they used steel plate, riveted together, mounted to a frame.

Interesting stuff!

Military Pron - Confederate Ironclads

Wow...My favorite artwork of The Civil War is also a naval

Re: Wow...My favorite artwork of The Civil War is also a naval

That's an interesting picture of the harbor.

Re: That's an interesting picture of the harbor.

It's from the CSS Georgia, article about 7 years old

My splash painting is attributed to this guy

I saw his name when i was looking for when he did it.

Neat stuff in that article.

Re: Neat stuff in that article.

That stuff is PIA to cut even with a chain saw.

Re: That stuff is PIA to cut even with a chain saw.

Honestly shocked this post has been up for so long

Well aren't you combative this morning.***

You're just supposed to laugh, gay cowboy***

I did laugh at that

I believe I said it best:

Re: Honestly shocked this post has been up for so long

Some of us have jobs

I Love posts with

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