Unfortunately for TFSmith, as the mission statement of this blog makes clear, we do uncover this kind of cheating.
Chapter 5, part 2 of Burnished Rows of Steel quotes from Chapter 13 ('…to Cripple the Enemy') of Contested Waters. This is copied with minor amendments into Chapter 11 part 2 of BROS, which is intended to be from Chapter 20 ('Blockade Runners and Commerce Raiders') of Contested Waters. Witness:
The problem, as in all mobilizations, was the [available/lack of] resources. To make [the issue plain/it clear], the Royal Navy did not have enough ships on station in North American and West Indian waters to mount [such/the] extensive operations [planned by the Admiralty] simultaneously; even with ships from the Channel and Mediterranean fleets, and commissioned from the [steam] reserve, [the available] numbers were much [fewer/less] than what was necessary. All the British strategists acknowledged their strongest weapon against the United States was a blockade; the problem was there were [nowhere near/not] enough ships with the ability to cross the Atlantic, close up every port [north of/from] Chesapeake Bay [northwards], and remain on station through the summer and fall – absent a major mobilization and significant expense.The only significant change is that, after a year, TFSmith realised that 24+16+24+32 did not equal 106. Sadly, TFSmith was too lazy to update his master copy with his accurate maths: the revised version still has Milne ask for 106 vessels.
As a point of comparison, the U.S. Navy’s blockade[s] of the southern ports required patrolling some 3,500 miles of rebel coastline and 180 possible ports of entry, the largest [such] effort ever attempted; when the war began in 1861, the Americans had some 90 purpose-built warships, including some 40-odd steamers, in commission or laid up. By the end of 1861, another 140 vessels – mostly converted merchantmen, and mostly suitable only for coastal and inshore service - were added, including another 80 steamers. Even then, with some 160 vessels assigned to blockade duty (the remainder were operating in support of the Army, or assigned to other tasks), and [essentially] no real rebel navy [to oppose the blockaders/in opposition], the U.S. Navy’s campaign was widely seen as partially effective, at best. Although purely commercial shipping had stopped, fast blockade runners, often built in Britain, were operating [fairly] freely out of Cuba, the Bahamas, and Bermuda.
As the Anglo-American crisis deepened in the winter of 1861-62, the problems of any similar British effort aimed at the north became manifest; even setting aside the Pacific Coast, the Royal Navy faced the problem of trying to patrol some 1,260 miles of coastline – roughly one-third that of the rebel states – with, initially, a force the Admiralty wanted to limit to some 40 ocean-going steam warships. Such a force was one-quarter the size of the American squadrons mobilized for their blockade of the southern and Gulf coasts. In addition, Captain Washington, the Admiralty’s lead planner, included no less than six steam ships of the line in the plan, a type that [Admiral] Milne, the fleet commander, saw as the class least suitable for blockade duty.
For his part, Milne asked for as many as [106/96] ships, almost all of them smaller types, including [as many as/some] 24 frigates, 16 corvettes, 24 sloops, and 32 smaller gunboats [and the like]. Worth noting is that the Navy List for 1861, including ships in ordinary, named [only] 35 frigates and 57 corvettes and sloops, as well as some 75 smaller ocean-going ships, not including the various ironclads (whether ocean-going or for coastal and harbor defense), sailing ships, or the tiny steam gunboats built for operations in the Baltic and Black seas during the war with Russia.
Although many of these vessels were sound and well-suited for operations in North American or West Indian waters, they still had to be refitted, manned, commissioned, and cross the Atlantic; once there, of course, they had to be supplied, which raised another issue – just how little, other than water and fresh food, the rebels could provide to their new allies. Coal, powder, shot and shell, preserved food, and replacement personnel all had to be provided from overseas; at best, from British North America; at worst, from the United Kingdom itself, and at transatlantic distances and across an ocean where U.S. commerce raiders were active and numerous, as early as the first week of April – just days after the American declaration of war.
Subsequently, Chapter 9, part 1 of Burnished Rows of Steel features a quotation from Chapter 18 ('High Barbaree') of Contested Waters. Again, this is copied almost wholesale into Chapter 20 of Contested Waters:
Along with the macroeconomic issues illustrated above, the damage the cruisers the U.S. commissioned in the spring of 1862, many of them fast side-wheel merchant steamers, including a couple of Blue Riband holders, had been bad enough. The results achieved by the initial group of commerce raiders had been substantial; more than 400 British-flagged or controlled merchant ships, a mix of sailing and steam vessels, were taken in the first year of the war by the 40 commerce raiders, all duly commissioned as vessels of the United States Navy, that saw active service. Those sailing into the Atlantic or Mediterranean included 20 ships, ranging from the modern screw sloops Tuscarora and Kearsarge to the old sloops-of-war Constellation and St. Louis, although the majority were converted merchant steamers that included the liners [Vanderbilt], Rhode Island, and Santiago de Cuba; the 20 that sailed first into the Pacific and then as far west as the Indian Ocean and as far south as the Antarctic, included purpose-built warships that ranged from the side-wheeler Saranac to the sailing sloop Cyane. The majority, however, were converted merchantmen, including the so-called “three pirates”: California, Oregon, and Panama.
The vast majority of their captures were sailing vessels, which even in the 1860s made up 90 percent of the British[-registered] merchant fleet. Steam was rapidly replacing sail, however; sailing-ship tonnage reached its peak in 1865 and then diminished rapidly, with the Anglo-American war having a significant impact on both the loss of [such/sailing] vessels and their replacement[s]. Those changes, however, were in the future; in the spring, summer, and fall of 1862, the loss of a sailing packet, clipper, or schooner loaded with anything from coal to wheat to saltpeter was a commonplace enough occurrence, and the ability of the Royal Navy to protect British merchant shipping was widely debated in the City. The ability of any of the three-dozen or so American steam cruisers, including the converted merchantmen, to run down a sailing ship was unquestioned; the long list of British–registered prizes that were taken into American or foreign ports by prize crews, bonded as cartels, or burned at sea, is clear enough evidence.
The British steam fleet, however, was another story; almost 2,000 [steamers] had been placed under British registry between the 1820s and the 1860s, and of those, a total of 145 steamers of 62,000 gross tons were registered in 1860 alone. These included 35 wooden-hulled paddle-wheel steamers; [5/five] wooden-hulled screw [steamers]; 30 iron-hulled paddle-wheel; and 75 iron-hulled screw steamers. Part of the reason was the rapid obsolescence of the early steamers [steamships]; by 1860, less than half of those registered in the previous four decades, some 929 in total (excluding river steamers) were actually in service. Some of the best known pioneering steamships – Cunard’s Brittania of 1840, for example, the line’s first in regular trans-Atlantic service, and retired in 1849 – were already gone, lost, hulked, or sold overseas. A few of these older ships were still available - through purchase or repair - for British naval and mercantile needs in the war, but the mass of the steam merchant fleet in 1861-62 were the thousand or so most modern ships, built within the previous decade and both wooden- and [steam/iron]-hulled, and both screw and paddle.
These ships, as important as they were to Britain’s trade, were also of tremendous importance to the Royal Navy – the ships themselves were by far the most useful auxiliaries available, for service as troopers, dispatch vessels, and [potentially] as cruisers themselves to help convoy both merchant and military shipping and thicken the British blockade of the United States. Their crews, of course, including both deck and engineering officers with experience in the temperamental marine steam engines of the Nineteenth Century, were an important source of trained mariners for the warships the British were commissioning from the reserve, as well as cadre for the crews of newly-built [and commissioned] ships.
In addition, these ships, plus the Royal Navy’s existing steam transports and [store ships/storeships], formed the backbone of the pool of troopers, supply [ships/vessels], and the like necessary to support the British blockaders scattered from the Chesapeake to the Bay of Maine. As an example, the movement of the 30,000 British and colonial troops of Pennefather’s Army of New Brunswick, their artillery, horses, mules, oxen, wagons, and stores from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick south to Maine had required the assembly of a fleet of more than 130 vessels ranging from Atlantic liners and packets to coastal steamers, tugs, barges, and sailing craft of almost every size, shape, and description.
The movement of Williams' Army of Canada, with as many British soldiers and an increasing number of locally recruited colonials, to the southwest from Quebec toward Montreal required even more, despite the availability of the Grand Trunk on the [north/south] side of the Saint Lawrence. The railroad, with a right-of-way subject to sabotage by patriote forces, could [not/never] move as much cargo as shipping on the river, which rapidly became yet another battlefield in the war. Even the use of the handful of “monster” steamers - Great Eastern, Great Britain, Atrato, and HMS Himalaya - as troopers did not alleviate the need; the call, as always, was for “more ships,” and came from sources as diverse as the Admiralty, the Army, and the civil authorities in British North America, the West Indies, and across the Empire.
By September [August], the initial, [ad hoc] efforts by the British and Americans – the leaky blockade imposed by the Royal Navy in the middle of a half-dozen other missions and the counter, the [initial/first] wave of raiders sent out from U.S. ports – was winding down. The steam ships of the line, frigates, corvettes, sloops, and gunboats that Milne had on hand when war broke out in March were in need of refits and repairs, especially since many had been on station since 1861 or earlier. The British had suffered their share of losses, as well, ranging from the 99-gun Conqueror sunk at Cape Henlopen to the 21-gun corvette Orpheus wrecked off Hilton Head. The problem, of course, was that the British still had to maintain their traditional presence in the Channel and Mediterranean, as well as on the South Atlantic, East Indies, China, and Australian stations.
This kind of laziness might escape detection in the work of an amateur author whose audience's primary interest is the sadistic pleasure gleaned from reading about British people dying. However, suspension of disbelief can only go so far: the most junior editor at HarperCollins would identify this kind of lazy copying and pasting almost immediately, and would reject any manuscript that contained it as utterly unpublishable.
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