American History Hit - Civil War Battle Of The Ironclads

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

In March 1862, wooden warships had dominated global warfare for centuries. In less than 48 hours off the coast of Virginia, two experimental metal monsters made every Navy on Earth obsolete overnight.Don Wildman is joined by Dr Howard Fuller reader in war studies at University of Wolverhampton, UK. His first book was Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power.Edited by Tim Artstall. Produced by Freddy Chick and Tomos Delargy.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is the morning of March 9th, 1862, here in eastern Virginia, as a heavy mist rolls across the brown waters at the mouth of the James River.

Everyone has been up since before dawn. They're on edge, can't sleep, not after what happened yesterday. A strange beast of a thing has entered into the war. A massive floating fortress of iron called the CSS Virginia. In battle, it rammed and ripped to the wooden hulls of Union ships, as though they were made of kindling, spreading terror and death until night finally fell. Today, she resumes the hunt, bearing down on a Union frigate stranded on a mudflat. In the panic of the previous day's action, that ship ran aground,

and now it sits trapped and exposed directly in the crosshairs. But just as the Virginia maneuvers closer, preparing to attack, another vessel unexpectedly glides into view. And if the Virginia is a monster, This Union Ship is like nothing anyone has ever imagined. An iron raft, low slung in the water, with a revolving gun turret positioned at its center. With steam hissing and smoke rising from its stacks,

this new riveted Leviathan moves to confront the Confederate warship, and the Battle of the Iron Clads is underway. Hi, everyone, it's Don Wilden. This is American History Hit. Thanks for listening. To the modern eye, the ironclad ships, of the Civil War are steampunk aberrations. Madcap, awkward. They represented, though, in the day, a huge technological leap forward in nautical design, the cutting edge of new thinking in military warfare that would play a crucial part in the Civil War, never mind in wars to come.

My guest today in discussing this is Dr. Howard Fuller, reader in War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His first book was Clad in Iron. the American Civil War and the challenge of British naval power. Hello, Howard. Greetings. How are you today? I'm good. Thanks, Don. Thanks for having me on here. This is your first time on American History Hit, but you are no stranger to history hit itself. You have met Dan Snow. Yeah, I met Dan Snow. We did a podcast for his series a couple years ago about our hunt for another ironclad HMS captain, which maybe we can discuss if it comes to it. but rolled over in Sankanist dorm and we've been looking for a shipwreck.

And then I met Dan in person at the Royal Geographical Society for the first time in September when the royal family was there and we were doing an HMS captain sort of event. And he's very tall. He's very tall. He's not like a British grenadier. So, you know, damn him in his square jaw. But yeah, he's really lovable guy. He's totally keen.

He's got that. I love history buzz about him. So it's... He does have that. He's a good, good friend of mine, and never forget, he's part Canadian. That's where some of that North American size comes from. That's right, but probably all part Canadian. Yes, I guess so.

Howard, the ironclads since I was a child, one of my favorite subjects. You know, the battles all blurred together back in grade school. But boy, when they came out with the monitor, with the ironclad idea, I perked right up. So I'm excited to talk about this. Let's first define the term. What is Iron Cloud? What did they do? What do they look like?

Well, they had lots of different definitions at the time because it was a new technology and they didn't even know what to call it. You could almost say we're having the same problem today with artificial intelligence. You know, I mean, we've kind of settled maybe on AI, but, you know, even a year or two ago, there were different kinds of things swinging around. Same thing with drones in warfare. Now it's kind of settled on drones. You can go back five years and they were still talking about different kinds of things.

They were calling them like automatic vehicles, automated vehicles, all kinds of things. In the late 1850s going into the 1860s, same thing. They were calling them armor-plated ships, iron-plated ships, and iron-clad ships, a ship that was literally clad in iron plating. And then finally, I suppose, for the sake of simplicity, it's a good question. And why did they settle upon that nomenclature, if there was anything else? They just settled upon ironclads. I think it was also the Americans who were calling them iron-placred.

clads more and more. It was iron hyphen clads as just these are the armored ships that are that we're discussing here like in a newspaper article as the Civil War was going on. And then finally, because the Civil War was being reported on extensively abroad, this was like big news like the war in Ukraine or something is, you know, daily news, you know, around the world today. They were reporting the American Civil War events quite extensively, let's say in European papers, France, Britain, all the rest. So they were getting more and more references coming over to iron clads. And then eventually it just stuck.

As often happens, American slang or nomenclature got adopted there in the same way. Sometimes British nomenclature would work its way back to the other side of the Atlantic. But ironclads kind of stuck. And that's what they were just simply calling them. You can still find the odd reference to armor clads or again, armor plated steamships or whatever. But eventually ironclads stuck. And it's literally a vessel, a modern steam-powered warship. You're not going to have a ship that just runs on sails that's going to be carrying around an iron carapace.

It just won't work. It won't go very far with just wind power to try to get you anywhere. So it is a steam-powered, often screw propelled, but sometimes also paddle wheel steamers were being armor-plated, especially in the west. And they're clad in iron plating because the idea is that you're using iron. during the Industrial Revolution or at this point they call it the second Industrial Revolution era you're using iron as shielding. It's just shields.

So if you want to put it in like Star Wars terms or Star Trek terms or you're a bit of a sci-fi nerd, then you would say, well, look, they have shields. These ships have shields. And at the time, that was extraordinary. And back then, the only shields you might have was to simply try to outgun your enemy in a ship-to-ship engagement

and sink them or maybe not, probably even sink them, but at least reduce them enough where they would strike their colors. And he'd probably end up capturing their wooden ship. But, you know, back in the age of sail, it was still very difficult to destroy a wooden ship that had a hull that was, you know, several feet thick of solid oak or something. When they started introducing shells, then that you could set that on fire. So in a way, the armor plating, the shielding is a response to exploding shell fire.

Yeah, I mean, very much at the time, I imagine, almost. science fiction before there was such a thing as science fiction. I mean, a crazy thing is going on here. You're going from a tradition of sailing ships that have been going for hundreds of years and people are well aware of them, very proud of them. And suddenly, you know, there's this whole other idea, which didn't come out of nowhere, right? I mean, the British and the French had tried this already. Yeah, I mean, most recently in Europe, the big war was kind of the Crimean War, 1853, 1855 kind of thing, which focused primarily in the sieges of Vastopol and the Crimea, but there were also a theater in the Pacific, but particularly in the Baltic.

And it was because that the British and the French who were fighting against the Russians couldn't get their wooden ships, even their wooden steam-powered ships, very close against the Russian coasts because the Russians had forts everywhere. They had modern coastal defenses. And their forts were armed with, in many respects, shell-firing guns. and when they tried to take on forts in a direct assault, basically in October of 1854, the British and French ships started to catch on fire very quickly, and they had to pull out while doing minimal damage to these granite-faced heavy Russian forts guarding the entrances to Savastopol.

And that's why the siege is Savastopol had to carry on with just a long, conventional, you know, costly land siege, you know, because naval power couldn't do it in the same way that naval power couldn't do it in the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War and subsequent campaigns, you know, even after the Crimean War and the Civil War. So a response to that conundrum was the French saying, well, we can use iron plating and cover some ships. We'll get rid of the sales. We'll just, you know, we'll have what they call a floating battery. So it's just basically a big floating platform with a steam engine and covered with iron plates. We'll put some heavy guns on it as much as we can. It won't be very maneuverable. Maybe we could even tow these things

into position against a Russian fort, and we duke it out. And by the end of the war, they were just able to create these things and safely deploy them through the Mediterranean into the Black Sea. And they did. At Kinburn, they actually were able to use these things against Russian forts. And oh, the surprise on the faces of the Russian gunners, when these weird black-plated things were towed into position, and these gun ports opened up, and their exploding shells were just bouncing shells

were just bouncing off this armor plating, which even then was like four inches solid armor. And that was that. It's so important to understand that the last half of the 19th century, including the American Civil War, of course, is such an innovation time in terms of military technology. I mean, it's really fair to compare this

to the drones that we're hearing about now, all the computer technology that's being applied. The same thing is happening, but with, you know, materials. And a shift over to steam propulsion, of course. By the end of the war that we're going to be talking about, the Civil War, the Union ends up with 50 plus ironclads, depending on your definition of them. The Confederacy will have something like 20 to 24. So understand that we're going to be talking about an isolated incident, a very famous one, well, several of them pertaining to several ships, but there are a massive fleet, or at least for the time, a large fleet of these kinds of things used for other purposes. I want to talk about the state of the U.S. Navy at the start of this war, the Union, you know, before.

it's divided. How much was the Navy playing a role in our forces and our defense? Traditionally, the United States, even when the Republic was founded and they were, you know, ratifying the Constitution at the end of the 18th century, looking into the 19th century, they were always saying, well, look, we have an advantage being geographically isolated out here on the far side of the Atlantic. We're far removed from these endless power struggle. going on in the European powers, you know. So we don't really need a large standing army. We don't need a large standing navy. We're not going to get in anyone's faces. When things seem to spill over in the 1820s, the U.S. formulated the Monroe Doctrine, which just said, look, we're not going to

mess with Europe, but you're not coming over here and messing with us. Now, they had no real way of enforcing that because they had no large standing army, and Congress didn't want to pay for a large standing navy. So for the longest time, yes, the U.S. military, the army was very small. Whatever they had was deployed maybe on the frontier kind of thing out west. And same thing with the Navy. They would have a couple of, you know, very nice sloops, frigates, you know, just call them cruisers. They'd have a small cruiser force, which could go anywhere in the world, but they were basically showing the flag.

They had a couple of ships of the line, call them battleships that they had been building, but they took their time building them. And again, they're not going to try to outbuild Britain. or France, you know, the so-called maritime powers, as they were calling themselves by the mid-nit 19th century going into the Crimean War, and I could try to outbuild them battleship for battleship because they don't want to pay for, and they don't really see the need of getting embroiled with that kind of arms race. Their interests just aren't intersecting enough. Now, of course, when the Civil War breaks out, they got a problem because one of the first things they want to do, Lincoln's government, you know, just coming into the White House,

Whoops, we're now on a war from the get-go. Their problem is that they don't know how to fight this war. And there's lots of different ways of fighting this war. You can go out and try to seek a big bloody battle and maybe end it in a sort of Battle of Waterloo bloody afternoon in one day. If you're lucky, it'll come to that, but it'll be a bloodbath. Or maybe you can just try to apply political pressure and hope that the South really is led by.

nothing more than just a handful of demagogues and, you know, all the people supporting them will realize they've been diluted and they'll all, you know, lay down their arms and quickly return to the union all happy, in which case you would apply what you call it maybe economic pressure. You'd apply like a series of sanctions, right? You hit them where it hurts. Most of the southern economy by 1860 is an export commodity, right? It's exporting cotton primarily. And they get very rich doing that. It's the biggest export is. the U.S. economy overall. So they figure, well, look, if we can mess with that in the form of a blockade,

we could bring this war perhaps to a quick and reasonable close within a year. The problem is that blockades require a lot of ships. You need a lot of cruisers. And the U.S. Navy, you know, was always feeling star for funds. And a lot of their ships were off on distant patrol and different stations at that point. Some in China, some in the Mediterranean. They all had to be called home when the war. broke out, then they'd want a nice overhaul, and they're not going to get that because apparently

there's no but a blockade declared that goes all the way from Virginia to where, the tip of, you know, border of Mexico and the Gulf. And one of the things that there's a factor in here is that one, the building really happened with coastal fortification, which is, you know, such a chapter-by-chapter experience for the United States. The first chapter of this really is the 1812 beginnings of these forts. So there are strong defenses built for the time. in all of these ports, which we will encounter. The ships that the United States had could not go in there and do battle like that. You know, they're not going to do well against those kinds of fortifications.

So the blockade idea is really where you default. The outset of the war, the Union Navy, about 40 ships. Is that about right? Yeah, it depends on how you define it. So you might have ships that are on the Navy list. You might have ships that are an actual commission. You might have ships that are technically U.S. taxpayer funding is paying for, but they're mothballed.

You know, they need extensive repairs. They really should be broken up in Seoul, but maybe they're like, oh, I'll just keep it. So, yeah, they've got a couple of dozen effective ships, right? And their crews. And forget about the Confederacy. They have nothing to speak of, really, no organized Navy at the outset of this thing. And so we're laying the groundwork for, you know, both the technological breakthroughs, of course, that we're talking about, that the times we're in, but also the default that they have to make here to try to come

up with something that's going to, you know, have more bang for the buck, I suppose. The iconic encounter that we're talking about, everybody's got this lodge in their brain. It's the Battle of Hampton Roads. Let me get this started for you. March 8th to 9th, this happens, a two-day situation, 1862, so we're still just one year into the war at this point. It involves specifically two, most famously, two vessels. the CSS Confederate state ship Virginia and against the USS monitor, which we'll talk about.

Tell me about the Virginia, first of all. What is this ship about? Where did it come from? Well, as it just so happens, I'm going to show this to you. No one can really see it, but I think, you know, I'll describe what you're looking at. So this is a 192 model of the CSS Virginia. Now, what you can notice, perhaps first of all, is that there's no masks in sales. It's strictly steam powered. You can see the smokestack, very large smokestack sticking out. Nothing else to really see, nothing else to really shoot at except what looks like a big tank. It's like a sloping armored fort above the waterline. Howard, let me be the audience here. I am looking at a very odd object.

The hull would be the length of, you know, a man's arm stretch is what you are doing right now. it's a standard hull, I guess, build of wood, right? And then on top of it, you're pointing to a deck on top of this metal, sort of a dome-like figure. It's sort of a dome-like shape over this hull. It looks like a canal boat almost is really what this is kind of thing. And along the sides are all these portals. I guess these are where the cannons would be shot.

There's a lifeboat on the side of this, a nice little white lifeboat. And out the top, very important. is a steam stack, right? This is a chimney where that steam-powered engine will have been, you know, spewing out its exhaust. That is the USS Virginia. Let me ask you this, Howard, before this time, before the USS Virginia takes to the waters, no one in this part of the world has ever seen anything like this, right? No, this is, I mean, a lot of naval historians, Civil War historians will point out that they had been working on like an ironclad vessel called the Stevens Battery, which was kind of a byproduct of the war of 1812,

which was seen as a sort of coastal defense armored ship. But again, they could never get the funding for it. It was sort of, you know, being constructed in fits and starts. And it simply wasn't going to happen by the outbreak of the Civil War. And the South was able to create something like this because they happened to have the advantage of Virginia joining the Confederacy. And Virginia, of course, is the home of Norfolk Naval Yard, which even to this day is practically the biggest naval base, you know, for the U.S. Navy, at least on the Atlantic. It always has been. So it was back then as well. So the largest U.S. naval base, the best funded, best defended in many ways, was suddenly in Confederate hands.

Now, there were U.S. Navy warships that were parked there. Some were under repair, like the new steam frigate, the USS Merrimack. Now, they couldn't get the Merrimack out. They couldn't tow it out. They couldn't get it out. So their only alternative was to try to prevent the rebels from capturing it. So they burned that ship down. And it burned very brightly.

And they even tried to blow up the dockyard and that didn't work. And the Merrimack only burned down to the water line. And then the fires went out. And then the Confederates were able to raise what was left. So this part that you see here, all the lovely copper plating on that hull. That's from the original USS Merrimack. So the engines were inside of that, stores were inside of it, but the general sort of hull was intact. And they were able to raise that, pull it into the dry dock, and they said, right, we're not going to have sales on this thing, like the new European ironclads that are building, like the Glaw or the warrior.

We're going to just build a big armored fort. It doesn't have to go very far, you know, along our coast, certainly out in the Hampton Roads. And we can build a shield on this. and they had some people who were experimenting with different designs, and this is the design that they settled on. Again, you could look at this and say, it's a floating battery, right? A floating battery, even though if you're a, you know,

a sort of naval enthusiast is a derogatory term, that's not a proper ship, that's not a cruiser, that's not going to go anywhere. However, you don't want to fight against a floating battery if you can help it, because that thing is only made, like you said, for its guns and its armor. The weapons are guiding the ship design on this.

It's totally about its weapons. It's given up strategic range. It's given up speed. It's given up a lot of things so that it's a killer. And, of course, when this thing does end up creeping out in the morning of March 8, 1862, a lot of the astonished union sailors who are watching from their grand old wooden warships, they don't even know what to think about this thing. They don't even know what they call it.

Some call it just like a submerged crock. They can't see any men on it. All the men are inside. It looks like just some big black, steam-powered monster. Just as a tank is a moving battery. This is going to be a floating one, as you say, but this is without the revolving gun, which is an important part of this story. You've got to move this very sluggish vessel into a position fairly close up and then turn it, I guess, accordingly as to where your guns are going to shoot from. But those guns are not, Those are inside as well. You know, everything's inside.

And so you're really quite limited in how you move around here. There's one of the thing I probably should hold this up. And if you look on the bow, you can see they've added this sort of iron beak, right? Oh, there you go. And that's exactly what you think it is. That is literally an iron ram. So the idea was this thing may be slow, but heaven help you if its guns have disabled your engines or you're stuck in the mud or you can't move for whatever reason. And this thing, maybe moving only at four knots, keeps coming on to you. It keeps

creeping up to you. And it'll eventually just drive its whole bow into your ship. And it'll create a massive hole and you will sink. That's exactly what happens on the first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads. The real killing aspect of the Confederate Virginia is not even its guns that are protected by armor. It's the fact that they can't stop it. And it just slowly crashes into the U.S. says Cumberland, and it sinks within minutes. They have destroyed a modern warship in minutes. No one's ever seen anything like that in a long, long time. Why was this battle happening? What was the strategic purpose of this? Well, Hampton Roads is geographically where the James River empties out. The Confederate Capitol is on the top of the James River, Richmond. The Potomac also

empties out into Chesapeake Bay and leads into Hampton Roads. course, the end of the Potomac is Washington, D.C. So the American Civil War is going to be primarily fought in the Eastern Theater in many respects, and it's going to be fought between these two capitals, which aren't that far apart, 100 miles or something, between Washington, D.C. and Richmond. Now, of course, there's hellacious battles that take place over the next four or five years there. The overlaying campaign in 1864 in particular is really bad. They're fighting over every yard of ground. But that water that connects them is also strategically very important. because whoever controls Hampton Roads and by wider extension, Chesapeake Bay, can cut off the communication of these capitals from the outside world.

It can cut off their ability to move up and down the coast, whether you want to go up to New York or down to Charleston or something. And also, it gives you a back door. If you've got ships and they're commanding the waters, it potentially gives you a back door to launch ships directly against these capitals, lay those cities under their guns. And, of course, in April 1862, just the next month after the Battle of Hampton Roads, the U.S. Navy demonstrates that possibility quite spectacularly when Farragut captures New Orleans, not with an army, but with a fleet. He pulls off what they call a naval coup to Maine. You know, is Fredford blow to the head, gets his ships through the head of the passes,

goes right up the Mississippi. Suddenly, New Orleans wakes up one morning, and there's these Union warships parked outside, and their guns are trained on the city, and the alternative is, you're either going to surrender or we're going to bombard your city into oblivion, and you can't stop us. So whoever controls Hampton Roads potentially has that capability. So, of course, there is a telegraph wire set up from Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads. It's basically feeding up to Washington, D.C.

And when they start getting this de, de, de, de, de, de, the thing that the Virginia has come out, and we can't stop it. And it's already destroyed two of our largest finest. frigates, and we don't know what's going to happen the next day. You know, in Washington, in the White House, they're literally saying that Virginia's going to come up here up the Potomac and it's going to shell the Capitol. It's going to shell the White House. It's going to destroy the U.S. Capitol and do much more efficient way than what the British

did in 1814 and the War of 1812. It almost has a gothic quality to it. You know, this monstrous vessel has come out out of nowhere, out of the shadows. and suddenly is attacking these union vessels with incredible determination and new technology. It's an amazing movie moment, isn't it? I've always wondered how much of it really was because these ships are moving so slowly in reality compared to what would happen today that it must have been a more gradual thing than we think of so. But the end result is what it is.

Tell me about the toll that was taken in that first day. Well, as very good Civil War and naval historians have pointed out, like I'm thinking Craig Simons here, a nice shout out to Craig Simons. You know, he has pointed out that, you know, the loss of life to the U.S. Navy on the first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads, March 8th, 1862, is the worst defeat that the U.S. Navy suffers. Right up until December 7th, 1941, the Japanese surprise sneak attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Pearl Harbor. It's that bad. And there's a lot of even similarities there, you know, that you have a new technology like carrier strikes being employed. against an old technology like battleships and doing it in a preemptive first strike. They're caught by surprise, very much like the Union Squadron at Hampton Roads was caught by surprise

for all intents and purposes. They were trying to get away so quickly the couple ships ran aground. And the steam tugs are trying to get them off to go out and try to fight the Virginia. And they can't get them off. So they're sitting ducks. And it's really, really bad. And again, they've got sailing ships with wooden hulls, now having to cope with, okay, a floating battery, but it is a, yeah, a faceless iron-armored steam belching monster that they can't stop. And it all happens very slowly, like you say. It's like a slow-motion nightmare.

Like time itself seems to be distorted. The other thing we could probably point out, Don, is that at that point in the war, the overall commander of the Union forces, in the East, at least, was George McClellan. And McClellan had been an eyewitness out at the Crimean War. He was a sort of self-styled engineer kind of soldier. He was very much into the idea of using combined operations. So the Army and Navy combined could do things that just lumbering out into an open field with your armoring your army and looking for a battle, Waterloo couldn't.

It was considered more sophisticated. And McClellan is not up for the idea of marching straight. to Richmond, onto Richmond. He's saying, look, we have naval power, so why don't we lift the Army of the Potomac, steam it down the Virginia Peninsula, dump it off behind Confederate lines, as such, behind their defenses that it'll go away from Harper's Ferry onwards. And then, before the Confederates can react, we can make a quick barge up the peninsula and take the Confederate capital of Richmond in the rear, right? It's a great plan. He says it'll be, you know, using all the resources that we have at our disposal in the most sophisticated manner

again. And maybe we can avoid a big bloody battle and save lives. And, you know, at that point, Lincoln had been very frustrated with how long and it's taken McClellan to get the Army of the Atomic ready, he says. So he says, fine, fine, just do it. So they'd put that plan into operation. And the whole Army of the Potomac is waiting to be deployed on the Virginia Peninsula, starting with Fort Monroe, and suddenly the Confederates pop up with an ironclad. And the entire operation, the entire war effort in the Eastern Theater, you could say, is now been thrown off by a single Confederate warship. Right.

It's profound. It's so dramatic. You can't make this kind of stuff up, right? I mean, it's just, it's incredible. I mean, you talk about something like 300, you know, like a small, like Spartan army held off a huge Persian invasion force. They were at this very narrow gap, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think this is even more dramatic than that.

A single warship holding off an entire army and threatening the anchor point in the entire union blockade. If all those ships get destroyed, the union blockade itself could be entirely rolled up. You know, the Confederates are going port by port. After this, we'll go down to Wilmington and we'll clear up that blockade and we'll go down to Charleston and we'll go down to, you know, Savannah and all the rest of it. The blockade done. Tell Britain and France to come over and join us because their blockade turned out to be a farce and nothing can stop the Virginia. And in many ways, it's kind of like the high tide of the Confederacy. You know, never mind the second day or the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In many ways, the high tide of the Confederacy, you could say by C was March 8 to 1862. Until the next morning and everything changes. Dun da da da. Right after this break. We're back with Professor Howard Fuller of Wolverhampton University in England discussing the fateful battle at the Hampton Roads between the new technology of the ironclads.

The CSS Virginia has had its way with the Union Navy. It was a terrifying experience, destroyed vessels, sailing vessels, meeting their match and more in this new and bizarre technology. This ironclad floating fortress, as we've described. which is now not only firing at these ships, but also ramming them. Day one closes, night falls, and we pick up with day two as we speak now. Explain the situation at dawn, let's say. Well, even during the night, the sky around Gossport and around Fort Monroe is lit up with the fires of the USS Congress, which has been set on fire by the exploding shell fire of the Virginia.

And they're still smoking wreckage from the Cumberland, which has been rammed. and sunk. They're trying to get the St. Lawrence off the ground. They're trying to get the Minnesota off the ground. It's run aground. They can't. They know that daylight will bring the Virginia back and they're doomed, right? Now, they're not going to abandon their vessels. They're not going to scuttle them because these are brave men fighting for their country. And God love them, they're prepared to fight to the bitter end, just like they were fighting at the bitter end when the Congress went down and the Congress was on fire and they were still firing off guns, knowing it, their weapons were useless against this thing. So the courage is incredible. It's another one of

these things of Civil War era courage, which is just boggling. So they're in a desperate situation. Now, what happens in the middle of the night is at one point, this weird craft comes into the harbor, and they don't know what this thing is. There's been lots of people, you know, trying to get supplies. They're trying to lighten the loads on the ships. There's a lot of chaos and panic. There's debris in the water. There's bodies everywhere. There's thousands of troops on the shore on both sides. of Hampton Roads, Confederate and Union, who've been watching this thing and war piling in because they know that something big is happening. This is history. This is history in the making here. Something very important is happening here. The whole course of the war, it seems, could be decided here.

And the Union sailors see this thing kind of edge up to the USS Minnesota, and it looks like just a floating like a steam tank, like a water reservoir or something. They don't know what of this. I think maybe it's like a coal carrier or something. And in fact, because it has no mass in sales, it's completely flat. It looks like a raft. And it's just got this kind of cylinder in the middle of it with smoke coming out of a smokestack. They don't know what this thing is. It's some kind of barge. And then they realize when this thing comes in a clearer view, off the firelight, if you will, that it's got gun ports, two very large gun ports with two big guns sticking out of it. And there are men coming out of this thing, and it's a warship.

And they had known that the U.S. Navy had started to build ironclad warships of their own. And they had known, the senior officers at least knew that one of them was what they were calling the Erickson battery, a floating battery of a different design. And the novelty of its design in particular, never mind the fact that it's almost completely submerged below the water line. It's like a stealth vessel. It's what they call a semi-submerged vessel. It's almost a submarine, is that it has a revolving gun turret. The guns actually revolve on a turntable, and that's protected by a thickly armored iron shield that itself is powered with a steam engine.

So this is really state of the art. This is a real technological breakthrough. And it has literally arrived from New York, getting through a gale where they thought the thing was going to sink at one point, but it survives. And it got there in the nick of time. He didn't get in time to save the Union Navy as such on the first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads, but that night it arrives. And the commanding officer goes on board the USS Minnesota, and the flag officer there just tells him, he says, thank God. And he says, when he's like, what do you want me to do? And he says, you sit here.

And next morning, when the Virginia comes back, as it surely will, you go out and stop it. And you have to stop it. If you can't stop it, we're doomed in multiple different ways that I don't even want to have to outline to you. you. And all the sailors on the monitor know that at that moment, it seems the fate of the Union war effort is on their shoulders, right? There's so much hinging upon that vessel now. Just like the Confederates come back at first light, escorted by some, you know, smaller gunboats. They're coming back thinking that they're going to finish off the Navy. And in fact, their ship might even win the war that day, right? It's incredible. And of course, now the

surprise works against the Confederates. Because as a. they get closer to their target, the Minnesota, they get closer and closer. Out from behind the Minnesota creeps this thing. And they're like, what the hell is that? And, you know, the Confederate creators are watching it through their telescopes, you know, their spy glasses. And they know, they're like, that is the Erickson battery. They knew that they had built one. They knew that it might show up. But they'd forgotten all about it with all their glorious success the day before. and they were ready to make minceme to the rest of the Union squadron at Hampton Roads. And now here comes this thing and there's going to be a fight.

And this speaks to the importance of this battle and the scale of this battle. The Union had planned, obviously, to bring this new ship of theirs into this very important battle long before, right? I mean, weeks before they would have had to make that decision to sail it down this way. So this was, it's always seemed too fortuitous for words that suddenly there's this other opposing ironclad. But in fact, this was part of the strategy all along, right? Yeah. So, I mean, the Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, was basically likening ironclads as a wolf amongst sheep.

So that strategy seemed to be certainly paying off on their first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads. They made sheep out of the U.S. Navy, right? Some of the best armed and beautifully designed cruisers of their day. Now there's another wolf in the fold as such, and they're going to fight. and none of the other ships are going to get involved. There's no point. So the wooden escorts to the Virginia back away, even if they could have gotten the Minnesota off,

maybe it wouldn't have gotten involved. But at any rate, you've got two small batteries now approaching each other very slowly. Their decks are cleared for action, and they know they have to fight this out. And here they go. Tell me about the USS Monitor. Let's talk about that the same way we did about the Virginia. And you've got a model.

I have got another model here, Doc. I want to know what you do in your spare time. Well, I guess I know. We're riding books and playing the toys. That's it. All right, let me explain this to the audience. You are holding up in my Zoom window here, a beautiful model of, again, it looks like a ship on the bottom, the hull, of course. But on top, you've got a very flat decked ship that has a turret in the middle, a big smokestack in the middle of that, several lifeboats.

along the way. This is more of shippy than I would imagine. It's very shallow draft compared with the Virginia's hull, as you can see. So it's drawing, what, maybe 15 feet of water, which means because it doesn't have sales, it has just enough space in that hull for the engine, for the crew, for ammunition and supplies, and as much coal as it can carry. So the Confederates knew this ship existed, it had been designed and built for this purpose. Yeah, well, I mean, when the ship was being built, it was covered by the report. The press loved it, you know, the Harper's Weekly or whatever, and the builder of the ship,

the designer of the ship, John Erickson, who was a Swedish immigrant and a genius. Luckily, we had a sort of Captain Nemo figure working for the U.S. at that point. You know, he had reporters around, and they basically sussed out the design features of the monitor, and it was in the press. And, of course, anything gets in the press, and the north gets easily distributed in the south. So there were people in the South who knew that the Union Navy was building technological upgrades to their naval force as well. They were also investing in ironclads, you know, armor-plated warships. So this would have been a motivating reason for creating the CSS Virginia.

Yeah, I mean, there was a kind of race involved. There was a lot of hurry with the Virginia. So when the Virginia was launched on that first day, they didn't even wait for the gunport shutters to be installed on this thing because they knew they were in a hurry that the longer the South was, waits to try to win the war, the stronger the North is going to get. It's just going to mobilize more and more and more. I mean, they've done a census in 1860, and all the statistics were on the side of the North. Population, money, industrial resources, mercantile resources, manpower, everything was on the side of the North. So the South has got to do something fast. And that's even reflected in their Navy

and even with their deployment of the Virginia in such haste. And they did. It did pay off on that first day. But their luck runs out the very next day. Their luck runs out. The union catches up. Tell me what this is like inside the monitor. I mean, it's basically a submarine, right?

Yeah. So Erickson had actually, I mean, I'm going back to the Crimean War again. But Erickson was one of many inventors who was watching the Crimean War get bogged down in this very costly siege. It's the Vastopol guys dying of. disease is, Florence Nightingale, all this thing. And he's saying, well, look, I can devise a weapon system that will allow you to steam past Russian forts. It'll be totally impregnable to any known gunfire. And you can attack the Russian Navy hiding behind their forts at Kronstadt outside St. Petersburg

in the Baltic, for example, and steam right back out after you've killed them all. And the reason you can do that, according to my design, is because most of the ship is under the water. And you only thing that's ticking up on the water will be this iron dome with this big huge singular weapon in it. And he sends the design, first of all, to Napoleon III, you know, the sort of ruling monarch of France. And they look at it and they go, ooh, gosh, this is really strange. That's okay. We've got our own floating batteries. We're going to do this first. So they say no. And then Erickson has that design, including a little cardboard model of this thing that he built. And he has it like in storage. So when he's now in America and Civil War breaks out in the spring of 1861, and suddenly

the U.S. Navy puts out a call for iron-plated warships, they just put him out of the newspapers. They're like, calling all inventors, you know. And Erickson doesn't want to get involved. He's kind of like, no, I've dealt with the U.S. Navy before. You know, I had this whole bad incident with the U.S. as Princeton, which was also a revolutionary ship. We won't go down there. I don't have anything to do with him. And he basically has to be talked into it by a colleague who says, look, you know, we need help. You know, the South we know is building something at Norfolk, you know, a monster. And we've got to help us save the Union, you know, this kind of thing. Your country needs you. And he goes, well, look, you know, my idea back in the Crimean War was this thing,

which I was going to send to the French. And his companion, Griswold, looks at it and he goes, oh, my God, that's incredible. How does it work? And he shows him. And he says, oh, this turret revolves. And the guns are in a turret. And he's like, yeah, yeah. And it's all powered by theme and most of it's below the waterline, so everyone's perfectly safe, you know, and they get air through forced air induction. Another engine runs that, you know, there's like life support. I will build a mechanical toilet so you could even flush the water under the toilet. Does there have been a toilet before? He creates a toilet, you know. The one's going to the head on this kind of vessel. And he manages to convince Erickson. He says, you've got to take this idea down to Washington.

You've got to show the Secretary of the Navy and the Ironclad board who are reviewing designs. right now you've got to do it, please. And they convince Erickson to do it, and he goes down there, and he puts on this display, and he says, all these other designs that you've got from these hack inventors will not work. And you won't get it built in time, and it'll cost a fortune. And you've got to think outside the box. And I can do this. And he shows him this design, and they're like, what's this thing?

And it's like, they're really quite dismissive of it. They say that, you know, go off and worship it. It doesn't resemble any living beast, you know, in God's natural world. So you can treat it as an idol, Mr. Erickson. Get this thing out of here. It'll sink. And he says, no, it won't. I'll show you why it won't sink.

And he gives him this mathematical display about reserve buoyancy and all these other things. And he said, look, as long as the hatches are kept closed, it'll ride upon the ocean like a duck. It'll be like a raft. You can't sink a raft. And the crew will live underneath. They'll be perfectly safe. They'll live in an underwater world. Today, of course, we would liken this to a surfaced submarine.

Take an Ohio-class submarine if it's surfaced and it's in rough seas, but the hatches are battened down, your crew can survive this. They could probably survive a hurricane better than an aircraft carrier would, right? So that idea is first played out with Erickson's design in the Civil War. And, of course, the only reason why they finally agreed to his design, along with two others, is because they're out of time. they're at an absolute crisis situation. He's also got the cheapest design. And he says, I could build your ship in 90 days, from start to finish in 90 days. It actually takes them closer to 100 days.

But that's still months in advance of these other two designs that they also approve. Where is it built? It's built in New York. So it's built at like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, effectively. And he's a private contractor, but he basically is building an iron ship like you would build Legos. So he has the engines built here, the guns built here, the turret built there, the plating built here, the engine machinery built there. And it's all going to come together piece by piece into this thing, which only he knows is how it's going to be assembled. Right.

And all they can say is, he better work. This thing better work. The press starts getting hold of it. They call it Erickson's Folly, you know, this kind of thing. Finally, when he builds this thing, and it is coming together in less than 90 days, and they launch it and it doesn't sink into the East river, it actually does float. Then they start calling it Erickson's battery. And then they're like, this guy may actually do it. You know, he might actually pull it off. And as it turns out, it does manage to get down from New York, like we say, to Hampton Roads. It does get through a storm. It's close, but it doesn't founder. And it does show up in the nick of time. And again, most of these men are below the waterline. They're living in basically a submarine environment for the

first time in any warship in history. But I'm still a little confused in that. It took three months to build this, and they had this battle planned, this attack on Hampton Roads. So they wanted to be the ones who were really calling the shots with the monitor. They didn't expect the CSS Virginia to be taking such a toll day one, right? Yeah. So the battery is built in a big hurry. They're in a big hurry. You can read the correspondence, the government reports like I have, and there's an incredible sense of urgency.

Like, hurry up, hurry up. When's this thing going to be done? We can't afford any delays because people are dying. People are dying in the east or dying out in the West, and they want the war to end. There's this incredible sense of urgency. You get that later played out in the First World War terribly. You've got to, something's got to be done. So, yes, they want to deploy the monitor as fast as they can.

They want to probably first take it down to the union anchor point of the blockade at Hampton Roads. And then there's even talk of what they'll do with this thing if, you know, there is no Confederate naval threat emerging from Norfolk, even though they know there is a Confederate naval threat, like I said, emerging. from Norfolk, it is anticipated. They're also saying, well, we can steam this thing against, like, Wilmington, North Carolina, and we can do what Erickson originally had in mind, which was just steam into the harbor, lay that city under the guns of this battery, and capture a city with a single ship, you know, this kind of thing, or synchety Confederate shipping in there, and then steam right back

out and we're impervious, this kind of thing. Plus, plus, as my first book was really getting into more than anything, this kind of weapon, which we can deploy fairly cheaply and quickly, might be just the thing that we need to deter the very huge overriding threat in the American Civil War of foreign intervention. Like Britain and France getting involved and not getting involved in our side, getting involved on the rebels side, in which case we're doomed unless we have a way of stopping their intervention, which of course will start with ships. So tell me about day two. The sun comes up, devastation everywhere, as you've

explained colorfully, the ships are on fire, et cetera. It's basically I've seen of panic. And suddenly, the Virginia is confronted by the monitor, and off we go. Yeah, so they basically circle each other. They start opening fire. In one sense, you've got a turreted warship versus a broadside warship, because the Virginia has its guns mounted in fixed ports essentially on a broadside. You've got a turret versus broadside kind of duel going on. Both ships try to ram each other when they can. sometimes they hit each other, like half a dozen times they actually collide. They're fighting that close. They're fighting at point blank range.

A blast from their guns is blackening the sides of both ships even. And what they're really doing is they're kind of probing the designs of the other ships looking for a weakness, right? Because we'd say, you know, an ironclad is only as strong as it's weakest part. Now, as it turns out, they do start finding the weaknesses of each other's design because the monitor has a chance of of hitting the exposed water line of the Virginia a couple times. Some of their shots seem like they might start cracking the four and a half inch armor plating of the Virginia because they're firing with even bigger guns, big 11-inch dogrens, whereas the Confederates managed to land a lucky shell hit on the pilot house

that sticks out on the bow of the monitor and they blind the captain and the pilot. You know, they're kind of like stunned, about the only weak part of that vessel as such. So they are trying to expose each other's weakness. The weakness that's finally exposed on the Virginia is the fact that it's a deep vessel. It was built on top of an ocean-going cruiser. It draws much more water than the monitor. And as the tide begins to change, the pilot of the Virginia is going, we've got to get out of here. We're done.

If we stay out here much longer, we run a serious risk of running aground ourselves. And if we run a ground, we're done. We're done. So they have to leave. is running out that's very coal-hungry. So they leave because their deep draft is preventing them from, you know, they've got like a time limitation as such that the monitor doesn't have. Monitor's only drawing about eight to ten feet. And that's a crucial difference when you're fighting in coastal waters. How long do they fight? Over four hours. Wow. Four hours at point-blank

range, colliding half a dozen times, firing everything they've got. The crews are exhausted. The engines are overheating, you know, that there's dents in the armor on both sides. sides, but at the end of the day, neither ship can really, you know, crack the other. It's more about these larger situation that decides the matter of that the tide is going out. And the Virginia, being a deeper vessel, doesn't want to run aground. And it's running out of coal and, you know, the ammunition needs to replenish, this kind of thing. So they're going to creep back to Norfolk. And other ships didn't get involved?

I would have thought that they would have. Not if they're smart. They won't get involved. Because an exploding shell on a wooden dust will ruin your whole day, particularly if it hits like a boiler or something. Interesting. So everybody's pulled back. They're like watching a boxing match.

There's even crowds on the shore. I mean, all these troops that you mentioned are there as well. Everybody's watching this thing like they're two heavyweights. That's right. And they know that if either vessel is cracked, if either vessel surrenders or is sunk even, the whole war could change. Oh, my Lord. How about death? Did men die during this battle inside those vessels?

Nope. No one got killed. the captain was kind of blinded for a while, but he even gained his eyesight later on, Captain Warden. No one, I think, got killed on the Confederate side. Admiral, or so, flag officer Buchanan was in command of the Merrimack, Virginia on the first day. He was a former superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy. So like a lot of Confederate Army leaders, he'd been part of the U.S. Army, he was a member of the U.S. Navy and had gone south. And he was in command of the Virginia on the first day, and he got wounded.

He shows up later in the Civil War at the Battle of Mobile Bay, Commander of the CSS Tennessee, another ironclat, and he gets wounded there too. So in the end, it's a draw. These vessels are still able to move themselves, and so they sail away from each other, right? I mean, if that's the right word for it, they move away from each other. And no one ever wins the Battle of Hampton Roads, correct? Yeah, it's one of these things that you like to debate, you know, who won this battle, this kind of thing. Most historians tend to come down on the side of the United States overall because the South isn't able to fulfill its mission, which was to break the blockade. The blockade is preserved.

The Union warships at Hampton Roads are preserved quite directly by the intervention of the monitor. And as long as those ships are afloat, the blockade is afloat. Likewise, McClellan now feels confident enough to start landing troops on the Virginia Peninsula and the so-called Peninsula campaign then unfold. throughout that spring in the summer of 1862. As it turns out, you know, it doesn't go very well anyway. It goes so well, yeah. That first meeting of the Monitor and the Virginia 1862 is generally the Ironclad Showdown, told down the ages.

But another climactic confrontation two years later is what will seal the fate of the wooden warship and send Confederate hopes on the water sinking to the bottom. We'll talk about that after the break. We're back with Howard Fuller talking about the next great. battle of the ironclads. Howard, this iconic battle comes towards the end of the war. It's August 5th, 1864. We're outside Mobile and Alabama, which is, if anyone's ever seen, a gigantic bay that were in there. It's just endless. How do events come to pass there? Well, like you pointed out,

Don, earlier, which was a very good point to make. The U.S. after the war of 1812 feels rather bitten by the fact that the British Navy is able to bottle up their fleet for the most part and destroy union commerce and then eventually carry out combined operation strikes culminating in this, you know, the sort of sacking of Washington, D.C., the new national capital. So Congress and presidential leaders ever afterwards, particularly like Monroe, say, look, we don't necessarily need a large-standing army. We don't necessarily need a big Navy that's going to try to compete with Britain, probably will never achieve it. But we can build coastal defenses. We can invest heavily in forts. And this then leads subsequently to what's called

the third sort of tier, third system of coastal defenses in the U.S. Because as badly as the sacking of Washington was in 1814, remember that the British then take their force and try to do the same thing against Baltimore next. And this culminates in a bombardment of Fort McHenry, the approaches to Baltimore. And ultimately, that fort holds. It doesn't surrender to British naval fire. And a very inspired VIP prisoner, basically, on board a British ship watching this thing take place at night, these long-range mortar bombardment, among other things.

Francis Scott Key is so inspired. He talks about the bombs bursting in air, the rockets, red glare, Congreve rockets. And this becomes a sparse bang of better. This is our national anthem to this day. Many of your listeners will be interested to know that the national anthem of the United States is about U.S. coastal defenses repelling British naval power in 1814. Now, the carry-on to this is that by the outbreak of the Civil War, as you pointed out, there are a lot of big coastal forts that have been built up, going from New York all the way to Texas.

And, in fact, the Civil War starts over the issue of one of these forts, Fort Sumter, in the middle of Charleston Harbor. Who is going to have that fort? Because whoever has that fort controls Charleston. And, you know, the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter is what eventually triggers the outbreak of open war firm. All right. Now, the Confederates also had a big fort guarding, been built pre-war, Fort Morgan, guarding the approaches to Mobile and Mobile Bay. So what the Confederates had learned at that point in the Civil War was that if you combine forts with obstructions that literally block the entrance to the harbor, and maybe you litter those obstructions as well with what they call torpedoes, which is essentially mines,

floating mines, and then you maybe prevent anybody from trying to mess with the fort or demolish the minefield with a couple of gunboats or even an ironclad or two, you've got a layered defense. You've got a combined defense, which is very tough to crack. The Russians are arguably kind of worked that out for themselves during the Crimean War, didn't necessarily help them so much in the Black Sea at Sevastopol, but it really worked very well in the Gulf of Finland at Cronstadt. Forts, protecting minefields, very narrow approaches into the inner bay or a city that you're protecting, in that case, St. Petersburg, also bolstered by gunboats or something.

So the Confederates have worked this out as well. And Mobile by 1864 is one of the most heavily defended places in the Confederacy by the Confederacy by sea. It takes a long time for the U.S. to mobilize the kind of force that they feel they would need to just assault it. The guy who's going to make the assault is flag officer David Farragut, who had captured New Orleans by that naval coup to Maine two years before. He's the guy he wants to do this kind of thing. Farragut's kind of crazy. All right, he's got an attitude of like just attack, you know, and then if we have to take a gamble, then damn it, that's what war is. And God help me for risking my brave men's lives, you know.

And Farragut finally has the West Gulf blockading squadron beefed up enough where he feels he has a comfortable margin, well, I won't say a margin of superiority, but maybe a marginal loss where he thinks he can make that kind of salt with acceptable losses and still achieve a victory. Because remember now, by August 1864, you're within a couple of months of the next presidential election, right? Lincoln isn't doing very well politically

by the summer of 1864. Grant is stalled in Virginia with the Overland campaign. There's bloodbass at Cold Harbor. There's a siege bogged down now at Petersburg. It's going nowhere. It's French warfare. People don't like trench warfare. It doesn't seem to be advancing that quickly in the West with Sherman against Atlanta for the same reasons. You know, these campaigns are bloody. They're going on and on. Casualties are piling up. And what? You're going to have a presidential election now? It's basically a referendum on the conduct of the war. And right now, the war doesn't seem to be really going anywhere. And it has to go somewhere for the North in order to win. The South can just survive, but the North has to actually conquer, right? And they have to move. And the only thing that they got moving in the

beginning of August 1864 is the Navy going for Mobile. And they need a victory. They need a victory politically, more than anything. And Farragut, finally by the dawn of 5th of August 1864, he goes for He's going to roll the dice. Okay. So for this, there's more ironclads involved here. And we're two years down the road, so ironclads have been getting built a lot more. The Confederates have only one in play, the CSS Tennessee, but the Union have four iron clads in there, plus 14 other wooden warships. The key, as you're talking about this, are the torpedoes, what are called torpedoes.

They're really mines that have been laid. That's the word for it in those days that have been laid by the Confederates at this point. As the union moves in, one of these mines blows up the ship. It blows up a ship. But the Union Rear Admiral, the man you've talked about, David Farragut, shouts the legendary order. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, which goes far in getting him a city square and a statue in D.C. And count him two metro stops, named in his honor. And here's some good trivia.

Farragut's statue in D.C. today is cast from the bronze propeller of his flagship at Mobile Bay, which is so cool, the USS Hartford. I didn't even know that. I didn't know that. That's really neat. Thank you. Yeah. It's a cool little fact. You'll win many a trivia contest in a bar for that one. Take us through this battle after the union's engaged.

This is going to go much better for the union this time. Yeah. So again, the union's not going to risk that kind of assault because they learned the hard way the year before against Charleston's combined defenses that even though they have a superiority by sea, if they're running

to problems against forts or they run into a problem against minefields, their attack can be repulsed. And in fact, Union ironclads, there's like nine of them, mass for an attack in Charleston in 1863 in April. And they're repulsed. They're repulsed by just a complete brash of forts firing from multiple directions. None of the Union ironclads except for one that wasn't like heavily armored sink, but they're battered and the Admiral in charge there, DuPont, decides I ain't trying that again. We ain't going to take Charleston this way. Sorry, but we've got to land an army, and it's going to get bogged down into a siege as a

vastopol affair. And everyone's like, oh, no. And then there's a big controversy, and DuPont's reputation is ruined, and he says the Navy is being ruled by jackasses, and it's not my fault. It's not my fault. We shouldn't have been building these Erickson batteries. They're ridiculous, particularly against forts. And in one sense, he's right.

Kind of ship killers, not necessarily fort killers. And nevermore. mind, the pressure is really on Farragut to do what DePont couldn't. And he decides, all right, we're just going to go for it. We're just going to go for it. He knows the Confederates have got an ironclad ram, the Tennessee. He knows the Tennessee has got up to six inches of armor plating now versus the four, four and a half inches that the Virginia had. So the Confederate ironclad design has really refined itself as well. It's a smaller ship. It's shallower. It's got a more octagonal shields, but more concentrated shielding.

which means that the shielding can be thicker that help protect against heavier and heavier guns that are being deployed in the Civil War at this point. He knows that they've got forts. He knows that they've got a minefield. But he says, look, we've now got four monitors of our own. Two of them

have 15-inch caliber guns. Now, these guns are colossal. They weigh like 22 tons. They weigh as much as a light tank. And they fire a 450-pound solid shot. Okay. So the heaviest gun that was in service during the Crimean War was a 68

pounder. When HMS Warrior was launched, it had the biggest guns that the Britain could produce. It was a 68 pounder, basically. And the Union Navy is now floating 450 pounder solid shot guns, which are so big and so heavy, they can only be wielded on a revolving turntable, powered by a steam engine, and it's protected by, you know, 10 inches of solid, you know, iron plating. So these 15-inch guns are on two of his monitors, and then he's got two sort of river monitors, which have double turreted with 11-inch guns in it, and they can create all kinds of havoc. So he says, we're going to go for it. We'll go in two columns.

The column closest to the fort will be the monitors to help absorb fire. They're basically impregnable. And the wooden ships will have other smaller wooden ships lashed to their side so that if one of our engines gets knocked out, the other ship can pull it through. Because if you get stalled under the guns of a fort, you die, right? You'll quickly get caught on fire and you're done. Everything seems to be going well. They think they've got how to get past this minefield. But unfortunately, the lead ship is a monitor.

The USS Tacomsa, one of the ones with these big 15-inch guns. And these guys are hungry. They want to kill the Tennessee. That's where the glory is, is to really knock out a Confederate ironclad ram. Mono and mono. My ironclad versus your ironclad, just like at Hampton Roads. Only at this time, we're going to really smash you. So he sees the Virginia parked out in front of this advancing union line, and it's going to set it set up like a raking position.

They've heard across the T, and the Confederate Ironclad just starts popping off shots and it's creating damage. So the commander of the Tecumseus says, we're going for it. We're going to go right at it, and we're going to attack it. And by doing that, by altering his ship just a few degrees to port, he goes right to. in the middle of this minefield. And wouldn't you know it, boom. So a mine goes off. Yes, monitors are great,

even with their limited reserve buoyancy, provided that you keep them water tight. If you open up a big hole under hull, they will sink like a stone. They will sink very quickly, just like when you depth charge a sub or something in the First or Second World War, they sink, they're gone.

And sure enough, this monitor is a huge geyser of water. This thing rolls over and then blah blah blah blah down it goes. Only a few guys managed to scramble out of the turret and there's just a bunch of bubbles and steam and everyone is stunned by this. They're like, oh my God, this powerful worship is just gone. It's just gone.

It's like the sea and reached up and grabbed it and pulled it down with its fist. I never see anything like this. All the people in the Confederate Fort Morton are stunned. They actually seize fire to watch this. Everybody in the Union Fleet practically stops firing. They're stunned. And then like you say, the lead ship in the wooden squadron, the Brooklyn, he basically goes, oh, crap, we've gone right in the middle of a minefield.

And he starts reversing his screw to back up. Now, of course, by doing that, he's going to throw the rest of the column all into confusion. And that's where Farragut coming up into Hartford next. They kind of insisted he was second in the line in case everything went wrong. And he's lashed for the rigging so he can see everything from up top. And he's like, what are you doing? What the hell are you doing? As his ship passes at Brooklyn.

And he's like, well, there's torpedoes. We've sailed into the torpedo field. We've done what DePont didn't want to do at Charleston. And he wisely called off the attack. So he didn't lose all his ships in a minefield. We can't fight mines. You know, we're getting out of here. And Farragut goes, damn the torpedoes.

I'm sorry, but damn the torpedoes. It's full speed ahead. So, yes, it's great that Farragut has this memorial in Washington, D.C., but Farragut was a madman. He basically gambled. That was a gamble. He led, he ordered a suicide charge through a minefield because the alternative was to be repulsed

to take a union defeat when there was an election coming up deciding the whole course of the war and if they stay there under the guns of the fort, they'll get murderized. So they, he just says charge and we're going to take our chance. In the end, the CSS Tennessee, which had been their ironclad on the Confederate side, fights to the bitter end. But that finishes with a suicide charge

in the middle of all 17 Union ships. It doesn't go well. It's a win for the Union in this case, mixed results, but nonetheless a win. What happens to the ironclads after the Civil War? Where does this all head to? Well, a lot of the ships were built in a hurry, so they're built with green wood. So they're probably not going to last very long. The hulls will require totally rebuilding.

So they're not going to last that long to begin with. The ones with iron hulls might last longer. But again, these ships for the Union Navy during the American Civil War are built for coastal operations. They're built to go up rivers. They're built to operate in harbors where you hopefully won't run aground. They're not really meant for ocean sort of going type stuff. I mean, Erickson gets really ambitious after Hampton Roads and says, I could build you a monitor as big as you'd like. And they actually, he is able to persuade Washington to build two super large monitors.

One, he calls the USS dictator. and the other one, the USS Puritam, as well as the Navy putting down larger double-turaded monitors like that model I just showed you, which did go overseas. They made deployments and stuff. But Erickson was saying, well, I could build a monitor that can go beyond the horizon,

and if Britain and France ever do come in on the side of the South or whatever furorries and they're at war with the United States at this time when we're our most vulnerable, these things can go out and attack them and win. So we can break any British blockade with these things, and we could break it, you know, far away from the coast. They'll have a thousand tons of coal capacity, this kind of thing, blah, blah, blah.

But the rest of the ironclads that are built by the Union Navy, particularly ones that were built out west. We haven't even talked about that. They're scratch built. They're built in a hurry, greenwood. Their engines are knackered. And they decommissioned them. They decommissioned the U.S. Navy at the end of the Civil War as fast as they decommissioned

the U.S. Army. Some are sold for scrap, right? Most of them were. some were sold to foreign powers. A couple monitors went to Peru, this kind of thing. As far as they thought they could safely sell these things, I think at one point they were talking about selling monitors to Japan. They thought they could get a monitor out to Japan without too much hassle.

But, you know, yeah, for the most part, these things are a mothball. There's some talk about, you know, now's our chance. We've built a huge Navy that, you know, the Navy people have always dreamed of. We could be the first-rate naval power in the world now. Britain is scared of us. And we should be really asserting ourselves. But folks, the Americans have been through the worst war in their history. And it still remains the worst war in the history in terms of casualties.

And it remains a country that doesn't believe in a standing army right into the 20th century. It's really World War I and two that turned that around. Yeah. And the country is also politically mired with issues associated with reconstruction. So they're not going to be waving a flag. and, you know, being the world policeman. Not, not yet. You know, it's tempting to see a direct link between the ironclad, especially the monitor,

and the future battleships of the world, you know, the dreadnoughts. There is some link, but it's not as direct as that, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, obviously a big design element of American ironclads in the Civil War that takes hold abroad is the rotating gun turret. Now, Britain had been experimenting with rotating gun turrets themselves, Captain Cooper Phipps Coles was the big advocate for turretships in Britain. But watching the monitors perform in the Civil War very well against other Confederate ironclads, like the CSS Atlanta, which gets captured by one, and say against the Tennessee at Mobile Bay.

You know, they were saying, well, look, we could be building low freeboard monitor type ironclads ourselves and have all the advantages that the Union Navy seems to have enjoyed with those types of vessels, you know, like it's semi-submerged, just stealth-like, very hard target to hit, and all the weight savings of not being above the waterline can be applied to even thicker armor on the turrets or armor along the waterline belt, even more powerful, heavier guns. And the ultimate expression of that is HMS Captain, which is a low, freeboard, very monitor-like looking ironclad.

But because this is the Royal Navy, at the height of the Victorian era, they're not going to give up. cruising, they're not going to give up imperial power projection anywhere in the empire as need be, Australia, India, the Pacific, who knows? So the captain still has a very

large spread of mass and sails. So they want to build an American ironclad and yet keep a sort of British power objective behind it. And in the end, it's a fatal combination because the captain turns out to be

top heavy and the low freeboard combined with this huge top hamper is its doom and it capsizes in the storm off Cape Finister Spain in 1870 and takes down nearly 500 men, the entire crew. Wow. Well, one way or the other, the Iron Clouds inspired a massive imagination change, I guess, as to what could be happening in the world being naval warfare. I mean, we didn't even mention that Jules Verne, you know, writes about this. Two years later, he comes out with 40,000 leagues under the sea, which is really inspired

by what the story of the monitor and the Virginia. Howard, what's the final word on ironclads? You've written this book. Where did you land with this in terms of its importance in the world? Well, I mean, in many respects, the U.S. resorting to ironclad shielded warships, the height of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, is a sort of product of its time. It wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for the Civil War.

The Civil War political crisis, the social political crisis of the Civil War, is what really allows them to capitalize on the technological possibilities of the time. You could almost make the same argument for every major technological warfare advancement that's been made in modern history. So even like the A-bomb, would they have built an A-bomb in peace time? If there hadn't been a Second World War going on, probably not. And likewise, with ironclad technology, it does experience an incredible surge because of the Civil War crisis. steam-powered ships, armor plate production, super heavy guns that can wipe out enemy ships

and a few good landed blows, this kind of thing, blasts your armor. That carries on throughout the First and Second World Wars, for example. Semi-submerged technology, ships that run completely on steam engine machinery. Sailors aren't even needed as such anymore. It's an engineers kind of world. It does give it that surge. After the war, it disappears because the United States is still an armed. isolation is power. It's still protected by the Atlantic, and they're still just deploying

the Army out west on the frontier. The Homestead Act has passed in 1862, and everyone wants to go west. And out east, it's about reconstruction. And yet, the saliances of this experience do inform Jules Verne when he writes 20,000 leagues under the sea. The Nautilus is an underwater vessel. It employs stunning new technology, and just imagine if that was in the hands of a madman, you know, and could anyone stop him, you know, this kind of thing. And likewise, it spurs turret ship, capital ship, modern capital battleship development in Britain and beyond going into the 19th century. But monitors themselves, for example, don't actually reappear in modern warfare until the First World War. And the Royal Navy tries to build monitors for use against the German coastline with mixed results.

And likewise, battleships themselves, even though they reach their nadir, you could say, by the end of the First World War going into the Second World War, they too are eclipsed by airpower. You know, like we said, the Japanese attack pro-arbor demonstrates that. It's really a fascinating thing to discuss the advent of technology, you know, usurping each other as you goes. It happens so quickly, really, over a 50-year period. Dr. Howard Fuller is a reader in war studies at the University of Wolverhampton in UK.

His first book, which we have referred to several times, was clad in iron. The American Civil War and the challenge of British naval power, there have been others, and please have a look for them. Thank you so much. Professor, really nice to meet you. Fascinating story. Thanks, Don.

I really enjoyed the talk. And again, you could have me go on like this for days, if you give me a chance. It's my pleasure. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. From mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements

to some of the biggest battles across the centuries, don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.