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After word
W
HAT ARE THE ENDURING
lessons of the history of coastal
defence, for the attacker as well as the defender? Part of the
intellectual problem which both specialists and historians
have in taking a balanced view of this discipline is that,
since Mahan, it has been very hard to find evidence of
coastal defence being among the classic preoccupations of
maritime thinkers concerned with grand strategy. The tra-
ditional view, to the extent that any serious intellectual
consideration was given to the subject at all, was that coastal
defence was merely a mechanistic adjunct to the main
game: you either had enough destroyers, torpedo boats,
minefields, guns and troops to defend your shoreline - with
air support to match - or you didn't. According to t h i s out-
look, more complex and subtle coast defence calculations
were meaningless and anyway, since 1940, they summoned
up unkind parallels with 'Maginot line' thinking and could
hence be safely overlooked.
The result, more often than not, was that with the excep-
tion of those countries which demonstrated an understand-
ing of the strategic value for themselves of an integrated
coastal defence, very few countries took coastal defence
seriously at all until they had to - or until it was too late.
But, as this study has tried to show, from the floating
batteries of the Crimean War to the unwieldy monitors and
ironclads of the American Civil War, from
Prince Albert
to
Devastation,
purpose-designed coastal warships have had an
influence on the development of naval design far greater
than their humble original purposes might at first have
indicated.
Though there were some Americans who were
so
bed-
azzled by the new technology that they believed their
monitors could take on far more powerful
European
advers-
aries, most realistic observers of the time knew well the
limitations of these craft. And yet,
Monitor
proved to be
both an inspiration, a source of desperation - and a deter-
rent. One important major study of the Battle of Hampton
Roads which unfortunately only came to the author's atten-
tion after the main body of this book was written describes
the impression which both
Monitor
and her redoubtable
opponent
Virginia
created in the minds of those who saw
them, served on them, or fought against them.
Monitor
caused desperation to her crew simply because of
her very low freeboard. Her paymaster wrote that: 'Our
decks are constantly covered with a sea of foam pouring
from one side to the other as the deck is inclined, while at
short intervals a dense green sea rolls across with terrible
force, breaking into foam at every obstruction offered to its
passage'
1
.
That the Union had felt obliged to so rapidly construct
what was essentially an armoured, steam-powered raft to
defend her ports and coast against Confederate marauders
was a reflection of her weakness at the outset of the Civil
War. Despite her implicit industrial strength, the Union
lacked the iron-cased seagoing warships which were begin-
ning to grace the fleets of France and Britain. America's
foremost shipbuilder, Donald McKay, had called for a US
response to European progress, saying: ' I t would be easy for
us to build in one year, a fleet of 500 to 600 men-of-war
ships, from a gunboat to the largest of iron-cased frigates'
2
.
This
was of course somewhat optimistic, especially when
more sober minds were concentrated on simply trying to
keep one particular frigate, the
Merrimack,
out of Confede-
rate hands. This effort failed.
Merrimack
was transformed
into the ironclad
Virginia,
and the inconclusive Battle of
Hampton Roads in 1862 was the result.
William Davis' book makes a number of interesting ob-
servations. One is that John Ericsson's design for
Monitor
was only one of six designs for turrets vessels to be submit-
ted to Commodore Joseph Smith's examining board
3
. An-
other illuminating sideline is that the original contract
called for the vessel to be capable of making six knots under
sail!
4
A further point is the sheer strangeness
of Monitor's
appearance to anyone who saw her at the time. One such
observer, upon setting eyes on the curious Union vessel,
was moved to say that: 'No words can express the surprise
with which we beheld this strange craft, whose appearance
was tersely and graphically described by one of my oars-
men, "A tin can on a shingle."'
5
Whatever the fallbacks of
Monitor
and
its contemporaries -
and both
Monitor
and
Virginia
came to ignominious ends -
their layout and concept nevertheless inspired a line of de-
velopment which ultimately culminated in the
Sverige,
the
Dhonburi
and the
Vainamoinen
and, via different lines of
development, both the
Dreadnoughts
and all the battleships
of the first half of the twentieth century.
The idea of mustering some tantalising, equaliser of a
force on a small or modest hull with which to overcome a
more powerful warship is as old as maritime warfare. But
the classic coast defence ship, either when included in a
balanced fleet or when it led a fleet, and when it was built in
sufficient numbers, could contribute to a very meaningful
'fleet in being'. Powerful navies, like France's for instance,
considered them as essential adjuncts to the main fleet.
Lesser navies had few other options and, realistically, the
construction of effective coastal defence battleship fleets
was the only credible strategy.
But the fact is that only a very few countries managed to
develop such strategies and construct meaningful flotillas of
these vessels. Sweden had a dozen coastal battleships in
service in 1906 (after the launching of
Oscar II
in the pre-
vious year), while France had no fewer than fifteen (of very
mixed capabilities) in the same year. But the latter were
part of a much larger fleet, originally constructed very much
with a British threat in mind. By 1906, following the com-
missioning of
Dreadnought
and the establishment of the 'En-
tente Cordiale' with Britain two years before, many of these
vessels' original purpose had been eradicated. Neverthe-
less, some proved useful in the First World War, as shown in
Chapter 7.
Yet only Sweden and, arguably, Denmark and the
Netherlands with their nine coast defence ships apiece in
1906, ever had a truly meaningful coast defence battleship
force at any one time. In the Danish case, some of the
vessels still around in the early twentieth century were very
old. The rest of the coast defence navies never had more
than a handful, or fewer, of the type at any one time. Nor-
way had four ships from 1900 to 1940, while the Thais had
four in the late 1930s (if you include the two 886 ton
Ratanakosindra
class vessels, that is).
So, if their numbers were so small in most countries, what
was the point of having them at all? Why not simply spend
money on, say, an armoured cruiser (very popular around
the turn of the century), or a mixed fleet of destroyers,
submarines and, at the most, cruisers in later years?
The latter approach was precisely the course chosen by
the Netherlands, although this was more by default as that
country's ambitious plans to build capital ships, first battle-
ships and later battlecruisers, never came to anything. The
former approach of reliance on armoured cruisers was partly
chosen by the likes of Argentina and Spain, although the
Spanish learned at Santiago in 1898, in a very painful man-
ner, just why armoured cruisers could not be
a
credible
answer to battleships with superior gunnery and armour.
But what could have been an answer, in the right loca-
tion, might have been a coast defence ship with armour
comparable to the battleships of the period. In the context
of this debate, the decision to design or build modern coast
defence ships after the
Sverige
class is more significant.
Fin-
land
with the
Vdindmoinens,
and Denmark with its stillborn
concepts of the 1930s, showed that very considerable bat-
teries and respectable armour could yet be provided on
small shallow draught hulls.
It may be of interest to readers that a useful source of
information on Ingenieur-Kantoor voor Scheepsbouw (IvS),
the Dutch firm which designed
Vdindmoinen,
is William
Manchester's massive study of the German armaments and
steel family Krupp. This describes in detail how the restric-
tions of the Versailles Treaty were evaded by the establish-
ment of IvS - 'the heart of Krupp's Dutch complex' - in
The Hague 'with the approval and co-operation of Admiral
Behncke's Marineleitung in Berlin'. A careful reading of
these pages establishes a strong indirect link between
Vdindmoinen
and the 'Panzerschiff
Deutschland
b
.
In the light of such impressive designs and concepts, it is
tempting to wonder what might have happened at Narvik in
1940 if the Norwegians had been equipped with modern
vessels comparable to the
Vaindmoinens.
There seems little
doubt that, in capable hands, two such vessels might have
wiped out the German destroyer force which fell upon Nar-
vik that April. Whether a better-equipped Norwegian fleet
could have altered the course of history, or at least the
Narvik campaign, is of course a moot point, although there
is no shortage of opinions which hold that the latter's out-
come was not inevitable
7
.
If classic gun-armed coast defence ships never managed
to alter the course of actual maritime conflicts, they cer-
tainly inspired further developments of the genre which
played a major role in the creation of the big gun battleship,
as well as contributing to the design process which spawned
intermediate ideas like Germany's 'Panzerschiffe'. As out-
lined in Chapter 8, these vessels were difficult to classify
when they were designed, 'armoured ship' being a mean-
ingless or euphemistic term to most foreign observers, lead-
ing to such hyperbole as their description by the British as
'pocket battleships', a term which the Germans never used.
Today, they are perhaps best described as armoured
cruisers. In this connection, it is interesting to note that
Britain continued this habit of not sharing the German view
of their capital ships,
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst
being de-
scribed as battleships by the Germans and battlecruisers by
the British, who felt that their inferior armour and -
compared to most battleships - their inferior gunnery mer-
ited the description.
In at least one case, that of Sweden, coast defence battle-
ships and the rest of the network of coastal defence so
painstakingly constructed in that country, posed an effec-
tive deterrent to much more powerful potential adversaries
like Germany and the Soviet Union and as such influenced
the course of greater events in northern Europe.
The demise of the battleship after the Second World War
and the creation of wholly new military technologies, rang-
ing from the atom bomb to the guided missile, seemed to
make a nonsense of the idea of coastal defence. (The same
assumption was made by observers reflecting on many other
military technologies, from armoured vehicles to artillery
and conventional manned military aircraft.) Still, many
countries chose to retain their coastal gunnery after 1945
and, in time, a totally new coastal defence vessel in the fast
missile boat was created whose primary weapon had a far
greater range than the torpedo boat with limited seakeeping
which it replaced.
Almost a century and a half after the
Monitor,
the modern
missile corvette is the true inheritor of the mantle once
worn by the gun-armed coast defence ship. In designs such
as the trimaran frigate and corvette concepts now being
investigated by shipyards and, for example, the Ministry of
Defence in Britain, the coast defence missile corvette is
even leading the way towards wholly new hull forms. It is a
fair bet that within the next generation, the trimaran hull
form might take its place in several of the world's navies.
As such, one generic type of vessel - the coast defence
ship - will have again shown that just as it can be renewed
to cope with new threats, it can also be modernised in order
to seize a technical lead, just as the turret ship
Prince Albert
had done in the 1860s, inspiring a whole new range of ves-
sels which, as the 'Family Tree' of coast defence ships
shows, led directly to the largest battleships. Thus has the
coast defence ship earned its place in history.
1
William C. Davis,
Duel between the First Ironclads,
(Pennsylvania, 1994), p2.
Edition, with new material, of a work first published in New York in 1975.
2
Ibid. p6.
3
Ibid. pl9.
4
Ibid. p42.
5
Ibid, pi 18.
6 William Manchester,
The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968
(London, 1969),
pp395-6. See also pp422, 424, 426 & 464.
7 For instance, Waage,
The Narvik Campaign,
op. cit.
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