US Monitors vs. Battleships

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McAvoy	US Monitors vs. Battleships	Lead	[-]
Posts: 27 ( 7-Jun-2008 10:45:12) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	The modern monitors that were built during the 1890's were almost as modern as their battleship counterparts. In an engagement, could these Monitors effectively whatever coast they were at against a battleship? Let's say the USS Arkansas BM-7 vs. HMS London off of Key West. Seas are calm and skies are clear. The goal of the US Monitor is not defeat the enemy but to defend the coast, sinking is just an added plus.
emc		#1	[-]
Posts: 3827 ( 7-Jun-2008 15:36:23) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	McAvoy wrote: The modern monitors that were built during the 1890's were almost as modern as their battleship counterparts. In an engagement, could these Monitors effectively whatever coast they were at against a battleship? Let's say the USS Arkansas BM-7 vs. HMS London off of Key West. Seas are calm and skies are clear. The goal of the US Monitor is not defeat the enemy but to defend the coast, sinking is just an added plus. "sinking is just an added plus," I assume you mean the USN monitor sinking the forces of perfidious Albion, not the sinking of the monitor. The USN clearly thought that the monitors were useful (else they'd not have built them), but this writer considered them useless from the day they were built, and I agree with him.
p620346		#2	[-]
Posts: 503 ( 7-Jun-2008 16:13:11) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	The Arkansas class monitors are generally considered to be the result of "panic legislation" passed during the Spanish-American War when every coastal city waned its own warship for protection.
hoist40		#3	[-]
Posts: 1021 ( 7-Jun-2008 19:33:02) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Not much of a contest, a 3,225 ton monitor against a 15,000 ton battleship. How about two Arkansas class vs HMS London and move the battle to Chesapeake Bay where the monitors 12 foot, 6 inch draft can take advantage of the shallow water while HMS London has to figure out how not to run aground with its 27 foot 5 inch draft. After all they gave monitors shallow draft so they could operate where ocean going ships could not
E F Draaijers		#4	[-]
Registered Member Posts: 217 ( 7-Jun-2008 23:29:45) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Monitors are not designed to engage warships in the first place, but are landattack vessels, giving heavy artillery a mobile (floating) platform. A battleship is primarily designed to engage other (battle)ships at sea, so she is naturally the better equipped type of vessel in a ship against ship fight.
McAvoy		#5	[-]
Posts: 28 ( 8-Jun-2008 02:41:25) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	While I agree that monitors are useless. But if you look at the armament of the two, it shouldn't be that much of a disparity. Especially around that timeframe as well which combat dictated to get as close as possible to the enemy to use the medium guns. The low freeboard should give the HMS London some problems as opposed to the monitor.
emc		#6	[-]
Posts: 3830 ( 8-Jun-2008 05:22:37) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	E F Draaijers wrote: Monitors are not designed to engage warships in the first place, but are landattack vessels, giving heavy artillery a mobile (floating) platform. A battleship is primarily designed to engage other (battle)ships at sea, so she is naturally the better equipped type of vessel in a ship against ship fight. No; the USN's "modern navy" (the navy was rebuilt, practically from scratch, in the 1880's) monitors were coast defense ships, which were designed to engage other warships; your characterization is correct for the monitors built by the royal navies of the UK and Italy, which were built for gunfire support.
Joshua Kintner		#7	[-]
Registered Member Posts: 427 ( 8-Jun-2008 07:39:16) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	Spain didn't have much in the way of heavy battleships, the Monitors the USN built were probably intended to engage or just scare away any Spainish cruisers that were on commerce raiding duty, which just about any Spanish warship should be scared off at the prospect of engaging a ship armed with 10 or 12" guns.
flyingdutchman1980		#8	[-]
Posts: 78 ( 8-Jun-2008 14:37:44) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	What's the difference between a monitor and a coastal battleship? Like the ones the Finns, Swedes and Norwegians had when WWII broke out? AFAIK, they served their purpose???
emc		#9	[-]
Posts: 3833 ( 8-Jun-2008 15:37:57) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	flyingdutchman1980 wrote: What's the difference between a monitor and a coastal battleship? Like the ones the Finns, Swedes and Norwegians had when WWII broke out? AFAIK, they served their purpose??? USN monitors and many navies' coastal battleships probably had the same or similar roles, but the term "monitor" had historical resonance in the US, as powerful warships capable of defeating much larger foes. Within restricted circumstances, coast defense ships (including monitors) can be successful, e.g., against a raiding cruisers, but they've little chance against a squadron built around one or more battleships. I suspect that the coast defense ships were not intended to deter a full blown naval attack, a la Copenhagen, but to deter raiders, and to enforce a nation's non-belligerent status during a larger conflict. Did they serve their purpose? Mostly, yes, even the USs "New Navy" monitors. Warships are built for many purposes, including that of demonstrating that the nation is doing something to protect its citizens. The New Navy monitors were successful in demonstrating that the contemporary administration was protecting its citizens from a foreign threat. That the monitors couldn't stand up to a foreign battleship and that the threat was largely illusory were irrelevant. A modern equivalent may be the Nike SAM sites that were scattered around the US into the 60's. Churchill appropriated the term for single-purpose gunfire support ships, possibly because of his American ancestry and possibly because the first class of RN monitors were built around US weapons.
flyingdutchman1980		#10	[-]
Posts: 83 ( 8-Jun-2008 17:18:48) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	emc wrote: flyingdutchman1980 wrote: What's the difference between a monitor and a coastal battleship? Like the ones the Finns, Swedes and Norwegians had when WWII broke out? AFAIK, they served their purpose??? USN monitors and many navies' coastal battleships probably had the same or similar roles, but the term "monitor" had historical resonance in the US, as powerful warships capable of defeating much larger foes. Within restricted circumstances, coast defense ships (including monitors) can be successful, e.g., against a raiding cruisers, but they've little chance against a squadron built around one or more battleships. I suspect that the coast defense ships were not intended to deter a full blown naval attack, a la Copenhagen, but to deter raiders, and to enforce a nation's non-belligerent status during a larger conflict. Did they serve their purpose? Mostly, yes, even the USs "New Navy" monitors. Warships are built for many purposes, including that of demonstrating that the nation is doing something to protect its citizens. The New Navy monitors were successful in demonstrating that the contemporary administration was protecting its citizens from a foreign threat. That the monitors couldn't stand up to a foreign battleship and that the threat was largely illusory were irrelevant. A modern equivalent may be the Nike SAM sites that were scattered around the US into the 60's. Churchill appropriated the term for single-purpose gunfire support ships, possibly because of his American ancestry and possibly because the first class of RN monitors were built around US weapons. Ah, thanks! You mean US guns originally meant for Salamis? Learned that from Letterstime...
E F Draaijers		#11	[-]
Registered Member Posts: 218 ( 8-Jun-2008 20:06:09) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	emc wrote: E F Draaijers wrote: Monitors are not designed to engage warships in the first place, but are landattack vessels, giving heavy artillery a mobile (floating) platform. A battleship is primarily designed to engage other (battle)ships at sea, so she is naturally the better equipped type of vessel in a ship against ship fight. No; the USN's "modern navy" (the navy was rebuilt, practically from scratch, in the 1880's) monitors were coast defense ships, which were designed to engage other warships; your characterization is correct for the monitors built by the royal navies of the UK and Italy, which were built for gunfire support. I agree with the different way of the USN monitor as being designed more as a coas defence vessel, rather than a pure landattack platform, but the basuics of the design of any monitor is that of a shallow draft and not very seaworthy vessel, rather than a seaworthy battleship for deep water missions. So the role was different, not the basical design. The USN monitor did well in the time between the US Civil War and the growing up of modern warships that abandoned sail and wood, against primarily wooden oponents, but was already was becomming at a disadvantage when opposed by an armored vessel, like CSS Virginia. Although the fight resulted in a draw, the USS Monitor could not defeat the CSS Virginia more permanently, although her mission was succesfull, since the grounded USS Minessota was saved from destruction. Since CSS Virginia was originally based on a frigate's hull, she was much more stable as a gunplatform, than the flat and shallow USS Monitor, although in the shallows the deep draft played against her. In general, the USN Monitors were more of a sentimental purpose, rather than a military one, since the revolutionary first USS Monitor was a USN product of invaluable propaganda weight, and this alone became symbolic for the new might of the USN as a whole.
Pengolodh		#12	[-]
Posts: 1711 ( 8-Jun-2008 22:07:24) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	flyingdutchman1980 wrote: What's the difference between a monitor and a coastal battleship? Like the ones the Finns, Swedes and Norwegians had when WWII broke out? AFAIK, they served their purpose??? The main difference is the freeboard, I think - both the Norwegian and the Swedish navies earlier had operated monitors, IIRC constructed in the 1870s. The coast-defence armourclads (this type of ship was never called battleship by the navies that owned them) had much higher freeboard, and thus were reasonably oceangoing. The fact that you needed to know was not known at the time that the now known need to know was known, therefore those that needed to advise and inform the Home Secretary perhaps felt the information he needed as to whether to inform the highest authority of the known information was not yet known and therefore there was no authority for the authority to be informed because the need to know was not, at that time, known or needed.
NewGolconda		#13	[-]
Posts: 3430 ( 8-Jun-2008 23:28:04) Commonwealth Moderator Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	I dont really agree ef. The use of the word monitor in the late 19th century seemed to centre around low freeboard, turret armed ships. The one above had a draft og 16ft, and trimmed down further in action to reduce the target size. Most (post civil war) seemed to have been built with a coast defence rational, for the USN and eslewhere.
theorist	Third Purpose	#14	[-]
Posts: 451 ( 9-Jun-2008 16:31:21) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	The missing middle term of cost defense vs. shore bombardment for post-1880 monitors is systems development. The later US monitors, as well as the similar French Henri IV, were instrumental in developing superfiring turrets (the French actually had one, the US used the conveniently low-placed turret of a monitor to fire over from a conventional pre-dreadnought to prove the Michigan concept. In addition, the US monitors served as destroyer (and submarine?) tenders - again, that convenient low freeboard to tend low-freeboard small combatants. HM Navy went through a similar exercise with the four (or six, if you count the colonials) mini-Devastations - which helped refine the breastwork monitor concept - but don't forget the Rendel/flatiron gunboats. If anything, the French overdid it a little with Henri IV which was closer to 2/3 of a Charlemagne than half. Was development a design goal? Maybe not for the authorizers, but surely for the designers?
bill sanderson		#15	[-]
Posts: 2296 (12-Jun-2008 14:48:11) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	It seems to me that shore bombardment was always going to be a more enduring role for monitors than coast defence. In the latter role they are second choice to fixed land batteries, and are useful for as long as it takes to establish such batteries along a coastline, which is itself dependent on the size of a country's armed forces relative to the length of their coastline. As the naval arms races intensified, and then ships were scrapped wholesale in accordance with treaties, major naval powers were awash with second-hand and/or obsolescent guns perfectly good enough to equip and proliferate land batteries, so their only use for the monitor was in attack rather than defence. The coast defence ship grew up in an environment where big guns were scarce and near neighbours were hostile.
p620346		#16	[-]
Posts: 505 (15-Jun-2008 23:23:45) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	The USN Arkansas class monitors were built for coast defense as a result of panic legislation passed during or just after the Spanish-American war when every coastal city wanted their own warship for protection.
ViribusUnitis		#17	[-]
Posts: 495 (16-Jun-2008 07:44:03) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	NewGolconda wrote: I dont really agree ef. The use of the word monitor in the late 19th century seemed to centre around low freeboard, turret armed ships. The one above had a draft og 16ft, and trimmed down further in action to reduce the target size. Most (post civil war) seemed to have been built with a coast defence rational, for the USN and eslewhere. Is that HMVS Cerberus ?
McAvoy		#18	[-]
Posts: 29 (16-Jun-2008 10:16:28) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	I think it is. The website address is Australian War Memorial. Which fits considering that picture shows a breastwork monitor.
StevoJH		#19	[-]
Registered Member Posts: 54 (16-Jun-2008 12:39:02) Reply Quote More My Recent Posts Message Me Connection Blocking Invite Ignore User's Posts	McAvoy wrote: I think it is. The website address is Australian War Memorial. Which fits considering that picture shows a breastwork monitor. I'm fairly sure that thing is still sitting on the bottom of port phillip bay where it was sunk as a block ship during or just after world war one.

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