Emulation and offensive mindedness took a particularly bizarre turn in naval warfare during and after the American Civil War. In Classical times, naval warfare had largely been dominated by oared galleys equipped with massive, bronze rams. Tactics revolved around ramming or boarding enemy ships. Even before the end of antiquity, ramming was little used, and the rams were turned into spurs, better suited to breaking an enemy's oars or superstructure than punching a hole in his hull. With the advent of the sailing ship of the line in the years around 1600, the galley was relegated to a minor status, suitable for use in shallow waters and to protect estuaries. Ramming made no sense in an age of ships at the mercy of the wind and armed with heavy batteries of artillery.
That changed with the coming of steam. Once again ships could maneuver in any direction without reference to the wind. Some in the decades before the 1860s thought the ram might be the weapon of the future. This was particularly the case in the French and American navies, interested as they were with negating the Royal Navy's huge advantage in ships of the line. The ram attached to the steam ship seemed to offer a way that smaller vessels might inflict fatal damage on a large one. Some experimentation was underway before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, but it was the need of the Confederacy to counter the potential naval power of the Union that led them to build armored rams. They were emulating the substance of ancient weapon and its tactics in a way seldom seen in history.
The ram was to have a curious history in the years that followed. The Confederates had a certain amount of success with it, beginning with the attacks on wooden warships at Hampton Roads in 1862. The CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack) was the first of these rams, was successful with her ram, but also learned the fragility of the weapon. Her ram was stuck fast in the hull of the USS Cumberland, nearly sinking the Virginia, but sheared off instead. Had the Virginia retained her ram, the story of the next day, when she faced the revolutionary USS Monitor in battle, might have been different. As it was, neither ironclad was able to do significant damage to the other with their guns.
For the duration of the war, the South continued to build rams, and experience some successes with them. The North built only a few, intended for use on rivers, and, curiously under the command of an army officer. There successes were minor, but they were to exercise a powerful fascination on the naval mind in the decade following the peace. Most major navies built at least some rams, and the Austrians won the one major naval action (the Battle of Lissa, 1866) in which they were employed, sinking two Italian warships by ramming. There were tactical treatises written to investigate the best way to use the ram.
In the end, though, the ram was sunk as an important weapon by a new technology, perfected just a year after Lissa by an Englishman (Robert Whitehead, who was also the maternal great-grandfather of the children depicted in the Sound of Music) working for the Austrians. This was the modern (or automobile, i.e., self-propelled) torpedo. In effect, the torpedo took the idea of the ram (punching a hole below the waterline of a ship) to its logical extension, for it was a ram at a distance. By 1893, when the ram-bowed HMS Victoria was accidentally rammed and sunk by HMS Camperdown (parodied in the Alec Guinness film, Kind Hearts and Coronets), the ram was effectively dead as a weapon. Ramming would remain a tactic for emergencies, and was several times employed against submarines in the World Wars, but it was never again considered for use against armored ships in battle.
At the beginning of this post, I commented that the reintroduction of the ram was both an example of emulation, and of the offensive-mindedness I have previously noted in the Civil War era and after. At its heart, the ram is a purely offensive weapon. Unlike guns, which can be fired at a distance and used to keep an attacker at bay, the ram can only be used by charging directly at an enemy and driving the attack home. (The ancients did have an awkward tactic of forming their galleys into a circle with the rams pointing outward, but it was rarely effective and would have been pure suicide against ironclads armed with big guns capable of firing from a distance.)
The sailors of this era had been just as impressed with the success of Horatio Nelson's extreme aggressiveness at St. Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar, as the soldiers of the period were by Napoleon's on land. Unlike their counterparts on terra firma, the sailors were confronted not with minor advances in weaponry, but by a whole series of revolutions in propulsion, gunnery, construction, and, finally, by armor. Armor plating, in particular, was a threat to the offensive, giving the defensive a great advantage, and, in so doing, posing the threat of a stalemate at sea. This was unacceptable, and the ram, was for a while, one of the responses to an unacceptable situation. It took time for this bit of emulation to prove itself more of a problem than a solution, and its supporters could always point to the great naval battles of the past.
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