“The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the world.”
A SLIM correspondent sat down at his typewriter, mounted on a packing case under a palm tree, and banged away at his notes on what he had just been through. “Japanese battleships shelled us with 14-inch shells and everything else. Eight of us huddled in the shelter, sweating and praying. It was the worst experience I have ever been through in my life...it goes on for hour after hour...we are convinced that no one can live under any more of this, but still it goes on.” Thus correspondent John Dowling of the Chicago Sun paid unwilling tribute to the effects of the fire of Japanese surface vessels on our position at Guadalcanal. And thus also he pointed up in dramatic terms the tremendous value of floating fire power as an adjunct to combat ashore.
It is a value which needs pointing up. In this war, ships of both nations have repeatedly shelled hostile positions in the Southwestern Pacific. In the English Channel, light vessels of the British Navy have again and again sent salvos crashing among the German positions on the French coast. In North Africa the British Navy has carried out the same function with even more effectiveness, due to the fact that Rommel’s communication lines across Libya and into Egypt lay close to the coast on a bare and open desert. In the northern Mediterranean, Genoa has felt the impact of high explosives from the British Fleet. And indeed, in the very first days of the war, the old German battleships Schlesien and Schleswig-Holstein helped wipe out the last pocket of Polish resistance in the Gulf of Danzig when they bombarded the naval base at Hel. Yet in spite of these activities, in spite of the fact that combined sea-land operations are more important in this war than in any war in recent history, these operations have not been reflected in the development of new types of naval ships. The fleet today, as never before, is a balanced team of specialists; of craft which fight below, upon, and above the ocean; of big ships and little ships; of slow ships and fast ships; of heavily armored giants and tinclads; of great turreted guns and slim-barreled automatics; of fighting ships and store ships; repair ships and hospital ships; and a myriad of other auxiliaries. Yet in all these types there is no ship specifically designed for what may well be, before the war is ended, one of the most important functions of our Navy—to attack any enemy flank which rests upon the water.
There are good reasons why this has been overlooked. It has become an axiom of naval warfare that ships at sea are by their very nature unable to cope with guns mounted ashore—that the advantages of a firm gun platform and fixed positions for ' directing fire permit the mounting of guns which outrange and outhit anything which can be brought against them, and that this advantage of land over sea is greatly increased by the fact that a hit on one gun ashore merely puts it out of action, while one hit on a ship at sea may, in many cases, sink it and put an entire battery out of action.
There can be no question of the truth of this statement—other things being equal. There is but one catch to it: other things rarely are equal. There is no question but that large guns mounted in prepared positions ashore, properly entrenched and fortified, can beat off with disastrous results any attack by sea. The result is as unfortunate for the attacker as was the mass charge of British tanks against the prepared gun positions of the Afrika Korps which led to the disastrous defeat of the British Army in North Africa in 1942.
But just as the fact that the British lost many tanks in that one unfortunate charge has by no means ended the use of tanks in land warfare, but rather taught an important lesson as to where and when they should be used, so the fact that ships cannot stand up against heavily gunned and protected fortifications ashore should not blind us to the fact that there are many occasions on which floating fire power may successfully attack an enemy ashore.
We have seen one example of such a successful attack—the occasion with which this piece began—the Japanese shelling of our positions on Guadalcanal. They were successful because they were not against prepared land fortifications, but against a lightly armed expeditionary force. They were carried out under cover of darkness, which prevented our own air forces from contesting control of the sea areas adjacent to our positions. And they were effective because in fire power, a modern warship, even such a small ship as a destroyer, is one of the most concentrated engines of destruction which man has devised. A single salvo from a light cruiser, for example, fires twelve 6-inch shells, weighing 105 pounds apiece—the equivalent of no less than three batteries of 155-mm. field artillery. The great 16-inch guns of a battleship are unknown ashore, except in the form of railway guns or fixed fortifications. And both of these are found only in countries with a highly developed and closely integrated coastal defense system.
The ships of our Navy are specialized because it is a basic axiom of naval architecture that it is impossible to combine maximum fire power, armor protection, speed, maneuverability, and radius of action in one ship. Any attempt to do so almost inevitably leads to compromise vessels, which excel in nothing.
It would seem worth-while, therefore, to consider the advantages of adding a new specialist to our team—the coast-attack ship. It, too, would concentrate on certain characteristics at the expense of others to create a vessel able to slug it out with artillery ashore. Primary among these characteristics is great fire power, since the basic mission of the coast-attack vessel would be to smother enemy positions with a heavy blanket of shells. At the same time, she would require great defensive strength, since she would be expected to stand up under heavy punishment. Her defenses should, of course, include not only deck and belt armor for protection against shellfire and aerial bombs, but extreme compartmentation and extensive torpedo blisters. Along with these she should have comparatively shallow draft to enable her to operate close to shore when occasion demands.
This extensive fire and defensive power—as great as, or greater than, that of our largest battleships—could be put on a vessel of this type by sacrificing other characteristics: speed, or engines; range, or fuel capacity; and maneuverability, or fine lines. The high speeds of modern warships require a very considerable portion of useful space to be devoted to their propelling mechanism. If a considerable percentage of that weight could be devoted to armor, compartmentation, and torpedo protection, ships could be built which would be the strongest in the world. And this change could be made in a coast attack vessel since speed and maneuverability are primarily useful in fighting enemy ships, and this proposed type, far from being expected to carry out such assignments, would on the contrary avoid them as much as possible.
These, then, are the characteristics we want: big guns, heavy armor, great compartmentation, strong torpedo protection, and shallow draft. To obtain these we are willing to sacrifice great speed, large fuel capacity, and maneuverability. These characteristics add up to one thing: the monitor.
It may seem a startling proposal to revive a type which we are accustomed to think of as having long since passed away. Indeed, for most of us the monitor, along with Admiral Farragut’s frock coat, and Gideon Welles’ beard, has come to be a symbol of the far away navy of the Civil War. And it must be admitted that so far as the United States Navy is concerned the monitors and their sister types, the various kinds of armored river gunboats, performed their most useful service in the Civil War. The improved types which followed in the post-war era never saw action, and the monitor gradually disappeared, or rather evolved into the modern battleship—even though the last of them, the old Cheyenne (ex-Wyoming) was not stricken from the Navy list until 1937.
But the reasons for the decline of the monitor in public and professional favor are not hard to find. In the years between the Civil War and the first World War, our Navy was considered by the public, when it was thought of at all, as a purely defensive weapon. It was this which led to the popularity, first of the monitor, and later of that somewhat anomalous type, the so- called coast-defense battleship. Meanwhile, however, the importance of having a battle fleet able to fight on the high seas was becoming more and more evident—and even the firmest friends of the monitor could not make much of a case for it as a seagoing fighting ship. Coast and harbor defense became its allotted sphere—and even here it became obvious that shore batteries could protect our harbors more efficiently than the unwieldy old Monadnocks and Puritans. As the O. N. I. Notes on Naval Progress of November, 1899, put it,
Armored coast-defense vessels appear to be practically ignored in present foreign programs for the increase of modem fleets. There are two reasons for this, the first being the general belief that naval force will be mainly employed in sea contests rather than in merely defending home shores against attacks by an enemy. The second reason for not building new armored coast-defense vessels is that in the European navies it is felt that they already have a sufficient number of vessels of this type, and that future needs will be supplied by taking from the active armored fleet the older vessels as these are replaced from time to time by others of later type .... The monitor type is regarded abroad as having been thoroughly discredited by the experience of the war.
What was overlooked, or more accurately, never even imagined by the defensive-minded naval experts of the day, was that if the monitor was no great shakes as a harbor-defense weapon, it was nevertheless by all odds the most powerful offensive weapon which could be brought against the coasts of the enemy. At home and abroad the monitor gradually disappeared, until at the outbreak of the first World War it was represented largely by the 1903 class in the United States Navy, several old flatiron gunboats in the British Navy, and six tiny vessels in the Danube River squadron of the Austrian Navy.
The rapid push of the German armies across Belgium to the English Channel in the summer of 1914, and the following struggle between the contending armies, each with its western flank resting on the ocean, soon awakened the British to the realization that some specialized vessels would be highly useful, both in assisting the left flank of their Flanders armies and in harassing the German positions far behind the front lines. The monitor was the obvious type for this duty, and the British government hastily took over three shallow-draft gunboats which were being built for Brazil and converted them into small monitors. These three pioneers were soon followed by a number of larger vessels, which finally resulted in no less than fifteen monitors taking part in the English Channel operations. These included, besides the early ones, three principal types: six of the General Craufurd type, armed with a pair of 12-inch guns; the Marshal Ney and Marshal Soult, each armed with a pair of 15-inch guns; and the Erebus and Terror, of similar armament but twice the speed. There were also smaller vessels armed with 9.2-inch guns.
From 1915 onward, these sluggish vessels repeatedly attacked with heavy shellfire the German-held coast of Belgium. The Germans were surprisingly unenterprising in devising defensive methods, with the result that the British were able on occasion to anchor their vessels offshore and bang away. The Germans gradually increased their coastal batteries until they had no less than 300 guns of 6-inch caliber or better between Westende and the Dutch frontier. As the range of the shore batteries increased, the large monitors became the only vessels which could lie offshore in comparative safety, and even they required smoke screens to conceal them from the enemy. In addition, they were surrounded by anti-submarine nets to guard them against torpedo attack. From March, 1917 to January, 1918, the German-held submarine ports of Zeebrugge and Ostend were bombed so effectively that the use of the latter as a naval base was abandoned. Because of the extreme range and the lack of aerial fire control, the British evolved a unique method of planting spotters close to shore. Four observers and signal equipment were put aboard tripod masts moored in to shore. These were painted to conceal them from observers ashore, but it is nevertheless remarkable that the British were able to use them for a considerable time with success.
To meet the threat of the monitor, German ingenuity brought out the electrically controlled motorboat carrying explosives, which would charge madly at their gigantic enemies. Most of them were smothered by gunfire before they could accomplish any harm, but one badly damaged the Erebus. She was able to return to her post in a fortnight, however. Of the others, the Raglan was surprised by a German battle cruiser and sunk by gunfire, while the Glatton caught fire and had to be sunk. The Terror was hit by three torpedoes, but was repaired and returned to her station.
Perhaps even more interesting than the actual achievements of the monitors in the Channel warfare were the plans which were projected for their use in a proposed landing behind the German lines. Then, as now, the idea of an invasion of the European coast was very much in the minds of the British military leaders. In the summer and fall of 1917, plans were made for landing, at Middelkerche and Westende, special troops trained with naval forces. Six 100-foot pontoons were built to carry the men ashore. Two monitors were to be lashed to each pontoon and were to push it ashore under the protection of their guns and the concealment of a special smoke screen. Every detail was gone into and it was expected that it would be possible to throw 20,000 men ashore in 20 minutes. Unfortunately, this ambitious plan was never tested. It was timed to come off when the Passchendaele offensive reached a certain point. That point was never taken, and the scheme was dropped.
The monitors were also to play a considerable part under the original plan drawn up by Sir Reginald Bacon for blocking Zeebrugge and Ostend. The monitors were to push head-on against the mole at Zeebrugge, while an 80-foot landing brow dropped to provide a slanting gangway 10 feet wide. Special steel shields on the sides of the monitors were to protect the personnel, while smoke screens concealed the operation. But this plan also fell through, this time because Bacon was replaced by Sir Roger Keyes as the commanding officer of the Dover patrol—and Keyes had other ideas.
But the Channel was not the only area which saw monitors play a useful part in World War I. The six ships of the Austrian Danube squadron played no small part in the struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Two of these vessels, the Maros and the Letha, were 42 years old when war broke out. They were small ships of only 310 tons, each mounting a single 4.7-inch gun in a turret. The Koros and the Szamos were twenty years younger, about 140 tons heavier, and with twice the gun power. The newest pair, the Bodrog and the Temes, built in 1904, carried the same number of smaller guns. Four ships were added after the war broke out. The Inn and the Enns, 536 tons each, added a second 4.7 howitzer; which in turn was increased to three in the Bosna and Sava, which came into service in 1915.
This monitor squadron played a considerable part in blunting the first Serbian offense and in assisting the Austrian counteroffensive which followed. In fact, they were so successful that a British naval mission brought the Serbians anti-torpedo guns, borrowed from ships, with the expectation that their shells would be able to pierce the monitors’ armor. These were mounted along the rivers Save and Drina. In the seesawing operations which followed, the monitors were used continuously as mobile artillery by the Austrian army, shelling bridges, Allied batteries, and defensive lines. When the final overwhelming Austro-German offensive was launched, which put Serbia out of the war, they gave invaluable support to the advance troops which established the bridgeheads across the Danube and the Save. The work of the monitors did not go unrecognized. As quoted by Fletcher Pratt, “Von Mackensen cited the monitors in an order as the main architects of the victory, and declared that he could have accomplished nothing without them.”
The monitors’ next task came with the entry of Rumania into the war. Rumania had four monitors similar to the Austrian type, but they were not handled with any great vigor and played a minor part in the campaign which followed. The Austrian monitors, however, continued their aggressive policy and in the first few days of the war shelled the great Ramadan oil depots and left them in flames. Heavy mine and boom defenses, dividing the Austrian and Rumanian held areas of the Danube, made it difficult for the naval action to be carried on. Later, however, the Austrian squadron assisted the Bulgarians by attacking two pontoon bridges in the face of heavy fire from shore batteries. The bridges were broken by pushing against them heavy barges to which mines had been attached. The considerable damage done the monitors by the Rumanian shore artillery did not prevent them from carrying out this operation successfully. The result was to cut off a large Rumanian force and to end their counteroffensive. Later that same year, 1916, the monitor squadron covered with Austro-German right flank for Mackensen’s armies as it encircled the Rumanians. In so doing, these little ships forced the Rumanians to concentrate more than half their artillery against them. As a result, the other Rumanian flank broke and the Austro-Germans were victorious.
From there on, monitors saw little action until the closing days of the war, when the successful Allied offensive once again brought fighting back to the Danube River. They fought gallantly but vainly against the Allied forces and surrendered with their country. Enns, Bosna, Bodrog, and Koros were turned over to the Yugoslavs, while the Rumanians received the Temes, Sava, and Inn.
Mr. Pratt has eloquently summed up the work of these few vessels, and through them, of the monitor type as a whole:
Out of these experiences two facts emerge with considerable force. The first is the extreme value of armor in actions with coast defenses. In every case, it was the lighly protected patrol boats which failed to accomplish anything, while the armored monitors accomplished a great deal. The second point is that a gun on shore is not so overwhelmingly effective against a gun on a ship as is sometimes supposed. The instances where the monitors were badly pounded can be resolved into two general cases—where the width of the stream did not permit them adequate space for throwing the enemy’s fire direction out by maneuvering (as in the actions of the old monitors with the Misar Heights batteries and the fight at the Rjahovo bridges) and cases where the shore guns were part of a permanent fixed defense, for which the ranging and traversing had been carefully worked out in advance, as at the Belgrade crossing in 1915. Which suggests that ships may be able to attack improvised or impermanent shore defenses anywhere with good prospects of success, and need not despair of an attack even against permanent batteries if they can get good spotting.
Only three of the English monitors survived the lean years of disarmament of the post-war era. Only two of these, the Erebus and the Marshal Soult, remain on the list. Little is known of the activities of these two survivors. But the fate of the third monitor of the group, the Terror, became known in June, 1941. On June 13 the New York Times reported that the Terror had sunk off the coast of Libya. She had been caught at twilight by a squadron of planes and heavily attacked with 500-pound bombs. Apparently she suffered no direct hits, but a near miss caved in her side and a British cruiser sank her nine hours later. At that time it was revealed that the Terror assisted in reducing the defenses of Bardia and had many times shelled Italian positions and exposed transport lines along the North African coast. Earlier she had been stationed at Malta, having been transferred there from Singapore. According to the dispatch describing her end, the Terror was armed with two 15-inch, eigh 4-inch, and two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns, and 10 smaller guns.
The fate of the Danube squadrons of Yugoslavia and Rumania, made up largely of the ships received from the old Austrian Navy, has not been announced. As for the use of monitors elsewhere, there have been vague references in Russian communiqués to naval craft resembling monitors used in a number of actions on the southern front, including the defense of Stalingrad. In the Far East one news report told of the bombing of a Japanese “monitor cruiser,” but no other reference was made to it and no explanation was given as to how, if at all, the craft differs from the ordinary cruiser.
The possibilities of a new monitor class today cannot be measured adequately by the achievements of their predecessors of a quarter century ago. It must be remembered that the last class of monitors (with the possible exception of unreported Russian vessels) to be built was the British channel monitor class of the early years of the first World War. Since then, naval architecture has progressed from the Nevada, in its original, unreconstructed form, to the Iowa. It is reasonable to assume that this tremendous advance, involving improved armor, better propulsion, more efficient guns, greater compartmentation, anti-torpedo protection, could be applied with equal success to the development of a new class of monitors, or, to use a more accurate phrase, of coast-attack ships.
An alternative would be to rebuild some of our older battleships to give them the special characteristics of the coast-attack ship: great protection and fire-power, at the expense of their cruising radius. The value of some of these older vessels to our battle line is problematical. Too slow to keep up with the fast charging task forces of sea-air war, it is questionable whether in this present conflict we will ever have an opportunity to carry out the job for which they were built: that magnificent clash of opposing battle lines of which the finest—indeed almost the only—example was the titanic struggle of Jutland. In any case, it would appear that the combination of new building, by ourselves and the British, the adherence of the French naval forces in North and West Africa, and the suicide of the balance of the French Fleet at Toulon, will soon give us such a preponderance in capital ship strength in all theaters of the war that we may be able to afford to devote some of our older units to experimental purposes, which may well bear fruit in the bitter struggles which lie ahead.
The objection may be raised that in these struggles air power will play a predominant part and that the monitor is vulnerable to air attack. There is no question but that this is true. All the experience of this war, however, seems to show that no naval vessel can safely approach a hostile shore if the enemy holds air supremacy over the coastal waters. The monitor is no more vulnerable to air attack than other types, and indeed, with its heavy armor and torpedo defenses, may well be less so.
The operations before us will involve land-sea campaigns on a scale such as the world has never seen. In the Pacific, it appears that we shall have to carry out a continuous series of such operations, among the islands which are the fixed aircraft carriers of the Japanese fleet. In Europe the final subjugation of North Africa will leave us confronted by what Hitler is fond of calling “fortress Europe,” a vast and armored continent moated on three sides by water and grimly defended by leaders spurred by desperation.
To crack this fortress, which must be done before we can claim a final victory, will require the summoning of every ounce of strength the United Nations can put forth. It will require more than strength. It will require skill and imagination—imagination not merely in solving the technical problems which will then present themselves, but also in the development of new weapons and in finding new uses for old weapons. The early successes of our enemies were due in no small part to this very factor. But with the long tradition of Yankee ingenuity—ingenuity which is so vividly demonstrated in the new types developed during the Civil War—we should have every hope of not merely equalling but of surpassing that effort.
A monitor fired the first shots of World War I, when the old Maros and Letha of the Austrian Navy descended the Save River and shelled the Serbian bridgeheads on the fateful night of the declaration of war. Other monitors were the last units of the Austrian Empire to carry on the hopeless struggle, holding out after the forces ashore had been hopelessly smashed. It could well be that this same sturdy type, brought to a new efficiency by modern technology, will prove the key to final victory in the second great world war.
Note.—The description of the activities of the British monitors off the Belgian coast was largely drawn from “Admiral Bacon and the Dover Patrol,” by H. A. De Weerd, U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, February, 1932, “Naval Monitors,” by Captain Edward Altham, C. B., R.N., Vol. 15, 14th ed., Encyclopedia Britannica and “Belgian Coast Operations,” by the same author, Vol. 3, 14th ed., Encyclopedia Britannica. The description of the Austrian monitors is based on “The Inland Navy of Austria,” by Fletcher Pratt, U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September, 1933. The other principal sources are mentioned in the text.