December 31, 2006
The Reign of Iron Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:40 PM EST Christine Gibson’s lead article on this website today, “The Brief, World-Changing Life of the Monitor,” begins with Admiral John Dahlgren’s tersely eloquent prediction about the future of naval warfare: “Now comes the reign of iron.” The duel between the Monitor and the Merrimack was the first clash between steam-powered ironclads, and everyone who pondered it reached the same conclusion: The wooden walls, the ships that had saved both Athens and England, were now obsolete. When I was a boy this was depicted as a bolt from the blue. Americans built the first ironclads, and everyone suddenly realized that the world would never be the same again. Any state bidding for world power had to have ships like the Monitor or the battleships that descended from her. Does history endorse that judgment about our revolutionary status? Not quite. Christine Gibson points out that a Korean ironclad fought in 1592. That ship in fact fought another ironclad, the Japanese Nihon Maru, part of an ironclad fleet the warlord Nobunaga had built in 1576 and first used in 1578. The doom of wooden-hulled warships was foretold in 1824, when guns firing Henri-Joseph Paixhans’s explosive shells over flat trajectories incinerated a wooden ship in a trial, and was clear as early as 1853, when Russian warships armed with the new Paixhans guns incinerated a Turkish fleet at the battle of Sinope. Paixhans guns had in fact been used in naval combat a few years earlier, in 1849, during the Danish-Prussian War. The race to build steam-powered ironclads began in 1859, when the French launched La Gloire, and the British replied the following year with the Warrior, not an ironclad but a true iron-hulled warship. But the Monitor and the Merrimack fought the first engagement between such ships and are justly famed for it. They also fought one of the few crucial engagements that ever occurred between such ships, although no one knew it at the time or would realize it for the century during which iron reigned. Warship design evolved very rapidly over the second half of the nineteenth century, and there was a race between steadily improving armor, better guns, and better marine engines, but naval battles between gun-armed armored surface combatants became extremely rare, so the history that the Monitor and Merrimack seemed to predict almost never happened. History allows us to learn from experience, but because ships fought so rarely, there was little history to ponder and small chance to see what would actually work in combat. When the Austrians won the Battle of Lissa, on July 20, 1866, by ramming their enemies, naval designers made sure that warships had rams for the next 50 years, although to the best of my knowledge the only ships lost to rams over that period were lost in accidental collisions. The greatest naval race in history, between Great Britain and Imperial Germany, produced a single fleet engagement, one usually described as inconclusive, and the great naval battles of the Second World War almost never saw the descendents of the Monitor and the Merrimack clash directly. War at sea when it really mattered—when it seemed to decide the victory or defeat of nation states—seemed to turn on submarines or aircraft carriers. So while fantastic sums were spent on building fleets descended from the Monitor, those fleets are often described as having decided nothing, and the sums were long assumed to have been ludicrously squandered. The relevant lesson of naval history seemed to hold that by the middle of the nineteenth century the importance of conventional sea power was fantastically overrated, and that the most influential theorist of sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, had written, vastly misleadingly, only after the day of the battleship had irrevocably passed. An intriguing current revisionist wave, however, holds that this is nonsense. British battleships enforced the blockade of Imperial Germany, which in the long run helped starve Germany into submission, while ensuring that Britain imported the food and munitions it needed to prevail. The most recent historical work holds that it was the Royal Navy, not the Royal Air Force, that made it impossible for Hitler to invade Britain in 1940. Surface combatants were the first antisubmarine warfare weapons and held the line against German submarines in both World Wars, before air power was deployed to do the trick. Sea power allowed the United States to supply Britain and ferry millions of soldiers across oceans in two world wars. Sea power subtly shaped the Cold War, toward the end of which it was again described as vastly overrated. Sometimes the history that didn’t happen is more instructive than we realize about the necessary contours of the history that did happen. The Monitor’s descendents almost never fought, but the powers that accumulated more of them won the vastly important wars they did fight. As a friend once observed, the odd thing about getting old is the realization that a fair amount of the stuff you believed when you were in your teens turns out to be true.
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