Battle of Hampton Roads

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The Battle of Hampton Roads , often referred to as The Battle of the Ironclad Ships or the Battle between Virginia and Monitor , was a naval battle during the American Civil War . It went down in history as the first battle between ironclad ships and took place on March 8th and 9th, 1862 in the mouth of the James , the Hampton Roads , in Virginia .

Map of Hampton Roads

prehistory

At the beginning of the civil war, the northern states imposed a sea blockade on the ports of the Confederate States of America . This was intended to prevent the export of cotton and the import of weapons, on which the southern states were dependent due to their backward industry. The entire coastline of the southern states was then more or less cordoned off by the US Navy with their wooden warships, including the waters of Hampton Roads in southern Virginia. In order to be able to break through the blockade, the southern states, whose navy was inferior both in terms of weapons and numbers, looked for new technologies and placed their hopes above all on armored warships.

Virginia

CSS Virginia

The first southern draft of an armored warship was the Virginia . After the conquest of Norfolk and the Gosport naval shipyard , the Confederates lifted the Union frigate Merrimack , which was sunk there . They now used the hull of this ship as the basis for their ironclad Virginia (still known in the north as Merrimack ), which was provided with a 10 cm armored deck and a casemate . The Virginia was armed with ten guns: one fore and aft, and four on each side. Since their designers had also learned that the northern states were also working on armored warships, they also provided the Virginia with an iron ram .

The Confederates worked on the Virginia in a hurry , but the main problem was the drive. When it was first deployed in early March, it had not carried out any sea trials and there were still workers on board.

USS monitor

USS monitor

Shortly after the construction of the Virginia began, the northern states began designing an armored warship. One of the developers of the ship's propeller, John Ericsson , designed the ship. It had a few more innovations than its southern counterpart. The Union ironclad, baptized USS Monitor , had low superstructures and was armed with two 28 cm Dahlgren guns, which were stored in a rotating tower (see also Monitor (ship type) ). The ship was designed primarily for operations in shallow waters and should offer the smallest possible target. The parts of the monitor were manufactured in nine different shipyards, so the ship could be completed within 120 days. As it turned out, she was still a day late to face the CSS Virginia on her first mission .

March 8 - Virginia baptism of fire

On the morning of March 8, 1862, the CSS Virginia , accompanied by the ships CSS Raleigh , CSS Beaufort , CSS Patrick Henry , CSS Jamestown and CSS Teaser , appeared in the mouth of the James at Hampton Roads and began to break the blockade of the Union fleet.

The sinking of the Cumberland rammed by the Virginia

First, she attacked the 50-turreted sailing frigate Cumberland and rammed her underwater with her spur. The Cumberland had no watertight bulkheads and therefore sank quickly. 121 crew members were killed. Since the Virginia had gotten stuck with her ram in the Cumberland , she almost went down with the Union ship. Only at the last moment could the Virginia break away from the Cumberland .

Then the Virginia turned to the sailing frigate USS Congress , with which she exchanged several broadsides. In order not to be rammed like the Cumberland , the Commander of the Congress ran his ship aground in shallow water. The Congress and the Confederate ships around Virginia continued firing at each other, with 120 men, including the commander, killed on the Congress . After an exchange of fire that lasted more than an hour, the Congress finally gave up. While the remaining crew members left the ship, land batteries of the northern states opened fire on the Virginia , which then again fired at the Congress . The Congress started to burn and exploded when its ammunition magazine caught fire.

The Virginia hadn't been undamaged either. Two of their guns had been disabled and their funnel was riddled with holes, reducing their already slow speed even further. She had also lost part of her ram in the attack on the Cumberland ; Moreover, their commander, Captain Franklin Buchanan , had been seriously wounded in the battle against the Union's land batteries . Nevertheless, the Virginia attacked a third ship, the USS Minnesota , which ran aground on a sandbank while fleeing the Virginia . Due to its draft, the Confederate ironclad could not reach the steam-powered frigate and withdrew to the safety of the Confederate-controlled waters when it was dark.

Skirmish between Virginia (left) and Monitor (right) at close range

March 9th - Duel of the armored ships

When the Virginia sailed back to Hampton Roads the next day under Lieutenant Catesby Jones to complete the destruction of the blockade ships, she found a new enemy - the USS Monitor . Under the command of Corvette Captain John Lorimer Worden , she had entered Hampton Roads the night before and was now protecting the USS Minnesota .

The two armored ships fought with each other for several hours, mostly at the shortest possible distance, but no ship was significantly damaged. The smaller and more manoeuvrable monitor could outmaneuver the Virginia and escape its ram, but it could not sink it either. The Virginia came into the fire of land batteries of the Union forces and the stuck Minnesota .

Eventually the Virginia withdrew and left the "battlefield" to the northern states.

Aftermath

In the weeks that followed, the Virginia and Union fleet stalked each other without further fighting. Monitor and Virginia never fought against each other again, neither of the two ships played an important role in this war.

In the course of McClellan's peninsula campaign , the Confederates were forced to evacuate Norfolk and its surroundings in May 1862. Because of her draft, the Virginia could not flee up the James to Richmond . Since there was hardly any prospect of being able to escape across the open sea and past the waiting Union fleet, she was aground on May 11, 1862 off Craney Island and set on fire.

The Monitor did not survive 1862 either. On December 31, 1862, she sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras , North Carolina , killing 16 of her crew members. The ship's turret, cannons and steam engine were recovered in several expeditions and are currently on display at the USS Monitor Center in Newport News, which also has a replica of the ship.

In Hampton Roads, the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge Tunnel still commemorates the battle. The road crosses and crosses the waterway not far from the place where the duel between the ironclad ships took place.

meaning

Tactically, the first battle between two ironclads ended in a draw - strategically, it was a Confederate defeat, because the north was able to maintain its blockade. Even if the direct impact of the battle on the course of the war was rather small, the battle is of military historical importance.

Armored ships had already been used by the French to bombard land positions during the Crimean War , and the French La Gloire and the British HMS Warrior built the first Ironclads in Europe in 1860 . To what extent these were actually superior to the conventional wooden ships, however, became clear on the first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads.

The British newspaper The Times described the impact of the news of the battle: “Yesterday Great Britain had 149 first-class warships for immediate use. Today, with the Warrior and the Ironside , we only have two that we could send into battle with the small monitor with a clear conscience . "

The Battle of Hampton Roads demonstrated the inferiority of wooden ships to armored ships so strikingly that from then on unarmored ships were no longer considered as warships. It therefore marks the end of the wooden warship and the change to the steam-powered ironclad.

Movie and TV

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume IX, p. 8: Unterwassertreffer
  2. ^ The USS MONITOR Center. Retrieved August 25, 2016 .

literature

  • United States. War Dept .: The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , Govt. Print. Off., Washington 1880–1901, online here .
  • James M. McPherson: Die for Freedom. The history of the American Civil War, List Verlag Berlin, ISBN 3-471-78178-1 , also Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 2000
  • Lawrence Sondhaus: Navies of Europe. 1815-2002. Edinburgh 2002. ISBN 0-582-50613-1
  • Jack Greene / Alessandro Massignani: Ironclads at War. The Origin and Development of the Armored Warship, 1854-1891 , Conshocken, PA 1998, ISBN 978-0-938289-58-6 .

Web links

Commons : Battle of Hampton Roads  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on January 29, 2006 .