Atlantic (28 page)

7. WALLS OF WOOD, CASTLES OF STEEL

Great sailing-ship battles would take place in the Atlantic theater for many years to come. The War of 1812, the endlessly stalemated conflict between Britain and the United States, which arose as a sideshow to Britain’s ongoing war with Napoléon, saw many memorable naval encounters: despite the entire U.S. Navy being a quarter the size of the Royal Navy’s force assigned to blockade duties—a mere twenty-two American ships to the eighty-five British—the courage and good seamanship of the crew of the USS
Constitution
thrills to this day: not only did she soundly defeat the thirty-eight-gun frigate HMS
Guerriere
off Cape Cod, but she then took off south to Brazil, where she forced another British capital ship, HMS
Java
, to surrender and scuttle herself. The first battle was all neatly done in half an hour, but the second endured for three hours—a long exchange of shot and shell that gave the
Constitution
—which still floats in Boston Harbor—her current nickname:
Old Ironsides
.

But then, and all too swiftly for some, the age of sail, with all its honors and rituals and romance, came to an end, and in its place there came the ruder replacements of coal and steel and steam, and Winston Churchill’s sardonic remark suggesting that British naval tradition was henceforth to be based on
rum, sodomy, prayers, and the lash
. Vessels that had been made of great walls of teak, pine, and oak were soon to give way to ships that resembled nothing more than immense castles of iron. The last British wooden warship to be built was the
Howe
, a three-decker with 121 guns and a full suite of sails, but with a thousand-horsepower steam engine and a screw for good measure, launched in 1860. She swept off for her duties just as the keel of the first British ironclad, HMS
Warrior
, was laid down—a vessel fully intended “to overtake and overwhelm any other warship in existence.” The new shipyards on the Clyde and the Tyne and the Wear, equipped with furnaces and foundries, welding torches and rivet guns, would then promptly set to, clanging and fizzing for decades to come, to produce many thousands of successors. They were all wooden ironclads first, then eventually ships entirely made of steel, with their production continuing into the twenty-first century.

The first ironclad ships to enter into battle with one another did so in the Americas during the Civil War. They went at each other with hammer and tongs—and by doing so in the New World, also offered an early indication, unrecognized at the time, of the torch of technological advance being passed westward across the Atlantic.

The first involved a British sidewheel steamer, the
Banshee
, which managed to break through a fiercely imposed Union blockade and sneak into South Carolina waters no fewer than seven times, with much-needed cargoes for the Confederate forces. After more than a year running between Britain, Bermuda, and various ports on the secessionists’ coasts, her luck eventually ran out, and she was captured in a battle in Chesapeake Bay. In a delicious example of the cruel irony of fate, a judge in New York ordered this Liverpool-built ship to be transmuted into a gunboat and commissioned into the Union Navy—as the USS
Banshee
. Moreover, she would join the very same North Atlantic Blockading Squadron with which the federal government was then trying to seal off the Confederacy from supplies and outside sympathy—a classic case of poacher turned gamekeeper, even if accomplished by force of arms.

The somewhat better-known early battle that involved metal-encased ships—and here two of them, for the
Banshee
’s captors had been made of wood—also involved an enforced turncoat: in this case a former Union forces’ steam frigate, the USS
Merrimack
, which cunning Confederates had plated with iron and festooned with guns and had renamed the CSS
Virginia
.
⁵¹

On the morning of March 8, 1862, this strange-looking but evidently formidable weapon of war steamed slowly out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, intending to join battle with the local units of the Blockading Squadron. To the
Virginia
’s delight, dawn delivered her a magnificent potential prize: a federal twenty-four-gun wooden sailing frigate, the USS
Cumberland
, was riding in the shallows, at anchor. She and a sister vessel, the USS
Congress
, clearly stood no chance: though both ships, along with various other sister ships hastily summoned, rained shot and shell down on the
Virginia
, everything bounced off her flanks without causing injury. When finally the
Virginia
opened up her guns from short range, the USS
Cumberland
and the USS
Congress
were sunk in a matter of hours. Almost three hundred Union sailors were burned to death as the ships went down.

The
Virginia
’s dominance of the waters would be a short-lived affair. Overnight, while she and her crew were resting, the Union admirals were planning. The White House was frantic with the belief that this extraordinary new vessel might well next turn her attentions to the Potomac River, sail into the estuary, and begin shelling the seat of the Union government within a day or two. She had to be stopped by all means possible.

As it happened, the timing was perfect. The union forces’ brand-new and purpose-built ironclad, the USS
Monitor
, was that very night battering her way down through the Atlantic rollers on her way from her builders in Brooklyn. She reached the shelter of Hampton Roads just in time to hear the last of the gunfire from the
Virginia
—and despite her crew being dog-weary from the storms en route, took up station immediately alongside the
Minnesota
, her enormous revolving gun offering formidable protection. When the sun came up the following morning, and the
Virginia
steamed out from shelter, an historic battle was immediately joined.

For three hours the two clumsy and heavily armored warships traded fire, salvo after salvo ricocheting from the iron plates, an air of smoke-filled and noisy bewilderment everywhere, crowds onshore watching in horrified amazement, and in the end, after a whole day of fighting, with neither commander inflicting fatal damage on the other. Both ships withdrew, each corps of bridge officers supposing they had won the fight, but neither side having achieved their intended goal. The
Virginia
was scuttled inside the Roads some weeks later, and toward the end of the year
Monitor
, under tow out at sea, took on water and sank off Cape Hatteras. Yet despite the individual fortunes of the vessels involved, the Battle of Hampton Roads, fought at the very site of what has now become the greatest naval base in the world, changed the face of Atlantic warfare—and in time, the face of maritime warfare generally—forever.

From the moment of that battle—news of which spread around the world with surprising speed, considering that a reliable transatlantic telegraph cable had yet to be completed—no major Western navy would build an important sailing warship out of wood again. Iron, steam, engines, coal, oil, trunnions, swivels—these were the new vocabulary of late-nineteenth-century naval warfare. Topgallants and Turk’s heads, powder monkeys and marlinspikes and mainsails were words and notions that faded swiftly into memory.

Inventions that had eluded the mind of man through much of the age of sail now started to seep into common use: less than forty years after Hampton Roads came the marvels of wireless, which allowed ships to talk to one another and to their owners or their directors; forty years later still, there was radar, which allowed ships to see one another, or the land which they wanted either to avoid or to reach; then there was sonar, which permitted a mariner to know how far the ocean’s bottom was beneath him; and the making of submarines, which changed every rule of maritime warfare. These and a thousand other piece of wizardry turned the oceans, and the Atlantic in particular, into a very different arena for the conduct of war. Ships that in the sailing age could find and engage one another only with frustrating infrequency now could arrange to rendezvous—whether for reasons peaceful or belligerent scarcely matters—and with accuracy, regularity, and reliability. Warfare that had become more tactically organized now became more geographically directed; and when these developments were supplemented by the creation of weapons of great power and by a new generation of ships of great strength, and with vessels ordered to ranges of unimaginable scale and at speeds hitherto unthinkable, so the stain of warfare spread, cable by cable, fathom by fathom, until it encompassed the entire ocean.

And stain of warfare it was: Trafalgar had been a bloodbath, a massacre of wanton ship-killing and man-killing, and no battle that followed would be much less brutal. Decorum was at an end. Naval warfare was henceforward to be a truly horrible business, and though all the evidence of death sunk into the ocean, it was every bit as foul and fierce as the great land battles that were so notorious for their ghastliness. If Trafalgar was the last great Atlantic battle of the wooden ships, the Battle of Jutland, which was fought over two days in the early summer of 1916, was truly the first great Atlantic battle of vessels forged from steel. It was also the first Atlantic battle that employed guns designed to hurl explosive projectile shells—not merely the sail-slicing, spar-smashing balls of iron fired from the muzzle-loading black cannon that navies had used for centuries. Wooden-ship commanders had in past years come to some kind of unspoken accord neither to fuse nor to use exploding shells (since both were likely to set wooden ships ablaze, your own as often as your foes’); but post-
Merrimack
sailors, fighting aboard ships made of nonflammable metal, could do as they wished with high-explosive devices, could tinker with them on deck, could use immense rifled artillery pieces to lob these terrifying fast-spinning devices three miles across the water or more, to scourge and savage an enemy.

Naval visionaries soon realized that steel ships would at last offer floating platforms to the same kind of artillerymen who had for years been using rifled shell-firing guns on land. At a stroke the world’s new navies could become every bit as modern as the world’s land armies—but with just one difference: the ships, which were obliged to carry their own highly explosive ammunition with them in their magazines, had to be absolutely sure to protect them against hostile gunfire—for one well-placed shell in a magazine could destroy a ship in seconds, ripping her apart and sending her to the bottom. Armor, and lots of it—a belt of twelve-inch-thick steel plates weighing a quarter of a ton for each square foot enwrapped a battleship’s midsection—had to be applied; and vastly powerful new steam turbine engines had to be created to move this ponderous metal edifice swiftly across the seas.

All of this modernization was the brainchild of the then First Sea Lord, the remarkably ugly, autocratic, dance-obsessed,
⁵²
and much-loved Ceylon-born martinet Admiral Jacky Fisher—a man who first entered a navy of elegant wooden-walled sailing vessels, and who left behind him the biggest and most modern fleet of steam-powered iron ships then ever assembled. By the time of the outbreak of the Great War, Fisher’s new navy was a fighting force created in and for the Atlantic, and it gave Britain for the next half century near-total mastery of all the world’s seas.

Enormous bases, with quays and piers and cranes, graving docks and fuel bunkers, ammunition and stores, were constructed all around the British coasts and on the fringes of the world’s oceans. Though the Indian Ocean was nominally supervised from Trincomalee and the Pacific from Hong Kong and Sydney, the Atlantic was deemed most vital, and it was accordingly policed by squadrons of capital ships and their escorting flotillas based at naval headquarters in Bermuda, Jamaica, and Trinidad in the west, the Falkland Islands in the south, and Freetown, Simonstown, and Gibraltar in the east. Britain, from which the affairs of the North Atlantic were policed, was herself draped in an immense chain-mail curtain of naval protection: destroyers patrolled the western approaches, battleships cruised the North Sea and the deep waters off Ireland, enormous guns were forever trained over the narrow choke point of the Channel. Under Admiral Fisher’s explicit instruction, what was called the Grand Fleet was moved north, close to where the ever-expanding German navy might one day try to venture from her Baltic and North Sea bases. The ships were to be based at a sheltered lagoon—Scapa Flow—in the midst of the Orkneys, a roadstead protected from the Atlantic gales and the sub-Arctic blizzards by furze-covered sandstone islands, with waters shallow enough to provide a secure anchorage, and of an area large enough to accommodate the mammoth assembly of hardware—almost forty modern capital ships, which together with flotillas of destroyers and frigates made up the biggest and strongest military force then known in the world.

This fleet was untested, however. Napoléon’s defeat and death (on the mid-Atlantic island of St. Helena) was followed by a century of near peace in which scarcely any warships ever fired a shot in anger, nor did any British admirals stage any kind of major battle at sea. The first true test of these men and of their
dreadnoughts
, as the most gigantic of Fisher’s huge vessels came to be known—named so simply, for what could possibly cause so mighty a craft ever to be afraid—came in the cold early summer waters of the North Sea, eighty miles off the western entrance to the Baltic between Norway and Denmark, the Skaggerak.