Steampunk

The period from 1850 to 1870 featured a riot of invention and development in military matters, in every country with a modern military. The Union was no exception, but it is a common feature of American Exceptionalism that the Union is portrayed as the font of all technological development - even when this would involve cheating.


TFSmith's habit of rarely mentioning the type or calibre of guns makes it hard to spot where cheating is taking place – hard, but not impossible. The below is a textbook example.

By May, two submersible boats, dubbed Alligator and Marlinspike, were in service, as were two fast steamboats, Picket Boat No. 1 and Picket Boat No. 2, each armed with a small howitzer and a large explosive charge at the end of a telescoping boom called a “spar torpedo.” The picket boats were converted steam launches, fast and low in the water; the submersibles were slow but capable of diving and being propelled underwater by a hand-cranked propeller. Marlinspike was de Villeroi’s original prototype for marine salvage, modified as a torpedo boat; Alligator was the much-modified naval design. Both had originally been fitted with what amounted to submerged oars, but Drayton and his naval architects had insisted on propellers, much to de Villeroi’s annoyance. Nonetheless, the Frenchman had stayed with the project; on the flag officer’s recommendation, he had taken on Robert Smalls, the escaped slave who had brought the rebel steamer Planter out to Du Pont’s squadron of Charleston in April, to serve as a propellerman.

After several exercises in the Delaware River demonstrated that both types of torpedo boat could approach an anchored ship unseen, depending on weather, DuPont, Drayton, and a select group of their subordinates began planning an operation aimed at breaking any British blockade in one blow. When Sotheby’s squadron steamed past Cape Henlopen and into the Harbor of Refuge, the Americans put it into motion.

The problems with this are as follows.



1) The Alligator was the only submersible boat ordered by the Union, and was ordered in November 1861. It took over 180 days to build and did not enter service until June (having launched in May) – there is thus little scope for speed-up, especially with all the work the yards are doing on other tasks (e.g. several full ironclads being built over the course of a few months). The “Marlinspike” is supposed to be the original salvage vessel, but TFSmith admits he has “made up” the conversion; see below. It's also not really explained why in our world they had to order a new one if the old one was suitable for conversion.
2) The spar torpedo is very ahistorical. The weapon was not yet invented in the Confederacy, with development work taking at least until October 1863; when the Union discovered that it existed in February 1864, it took them nine months before it was first used in Union service. TFSmith has had the Union invent, engineer and use a spar torpedo faster than they historically took to reverse engineer it. He also dismisses this as a minor problem.
3) The screw conversion for the Alligator was not applied until the winter of 1862-3, and took many months. TFSmith here is pushing up improvements even as he gives them twice as much work (to convert the original vessel as well as produce the Alligator)
4) The two fast steamboats here are actually the ones Cushing would use in 1864, and he found them lying around already under construction in New York. It is by no means certain that two appropriate vessels would be available in Philadelphia.
5) The whole point of the design of the Alligator was that it would place explosive mines by use of a diver, then depart before detonating the mines; modifying such a vessel to instead use a spar torpedo (which involves a large explosive going off right next to the triggering ship, resulting in a huge pressure wave dangerous enough to ships above water) would not be a minor undertaking. Historically this was the doom of the Confederate submersible HL Hunley, which was unable to withstand the shock of a spar torpedo going off inside the danger zone (150 feet) of the hull; for the Alligator, this is a suicide mission.
6) In reality, the tests of Alligator were “unsatisfactory” and she was pronounced “a failure”; she was never used operationally:

In August 1862, Lt. Thomas O. Selfridge accepted command of the submarine, after being promised promotion to captain if he and the Alligator's new crew destroyed the new Confederate ironclad, the Virginia II. During test runs in the Potomac, the Alligator proved to be underpowered and unwieldy. During one particular trial, the sub's air quickly grew foul, the crew panicked, and all tried to get out of the same hatch at the same time--prompting Selfridge to call the whole enterprise "a failure." He and his crew were reassigned and the vessel was sent to dry dock for extensive conversion. The dream of using this "secret weapon" against the Virginia II was scrapped.
Over the next six months, the Alligator's system of oars was replaced by a screw propeller.

The Alligator also foundered due to bad weather, and this was actually a relatively good safety record for this kind of early submersible – the HL Hunley killed twenty-one Confederate sailors and only five Union sailors due to repeated sinkings during operations or practice.






As events transpire, however, things all go very well:

As the sun set the evening of May 26, the British officers were unaware of the American forces coming south.

During the day, the submersibles, towed by the picket boats and disguised by fishing craft, headed south along the river and into the bay, along the western shore, past Cedar Swamp, Taylor’s Gut, and Cattail Gut, and into the waters off Prime Hook. Cushing commanded from Boat No. 1, and kept his little force standing fast until dark, when the four craft headed south, passing Broadkill Sound and Lewes itself, into Harbor of Refuge. The boats moved as close as they dared, and cast off the two submersibles. Eakins’ Alligator, the larger of the pair, submerged under fire; it never re-surfaced; Marlinspike, now under Smalls’ de facto command (Villeroi had balked at a commission), approached Conqueror on the surface and only submerged when the British ship began firing at the submersible. As Smalls had said before casting off, “we’ll sink her so deep that there will not be seen even a bubble coming from the spot where the burial took place,” and although he did not quite sink her, he came close.

The British ship of the line had steam up, and began to move almost at the instant Marlinspike’s spar torpedo struck her at the rudder; the explosion left her leaking and out of control, and the listing battleship promptly went aground. Smalls and his crew were lost in the explosion; Cushing’s two picket boats bored in, as gunfire erupted from Orlando and Coquette (Cormorant was off Cape May); Picket Boat No. 2 was struck and stopped dead, burning; Picket Boat No. 1 bore in and lanced her spar torpedo into Conqueror’s wounded stern quarters. The explosion left the battleship half swamped; Boat No. 1 was wrecked, but Cushing, incredibly, survived and swam ashore.

The descriptions of the attacks suggest considerable confusion.
From the way the two Picket Boats “bore in” we can see that they are supposed to have full steam up, but this should alert the British commander that something is going on. Similarly, the description of the submersible attack suggests the vessels are moving very quickly – at four knots it should take about ten minutes for a vessel to cross twelve hundred yards – and with steam up the British battleship (top speed 10.8 knots) should be able to make for open water with ease.
The British battleship immediately running aground as soon as she takes a rudder hit is unlikely. The draft of Conqueror (and Orlando) was considerable, on the order of four to five fathoms for Orlando, and as such she would be in the deeper section of the harbour – a section with about seven fathoms of depth, giving her twelve feet or more under her hull.
The damage is also wildly overestimated. The New Ironsides (a wooden-hulled US ironclad) was attacked by spar torpedoes on two occasions. The first one failed completely, and the second (by a semi-submersible, the CSS David) did not render the New Ironsides in any danger of sinking.






The engagement continues with du Pont attacking by day:

By daylight, the second part of the plan came into being; as Orlando stood by her grounded and flooding consort, Du Pont’s ships came down the bay, the speedy Cuyler in the lead, with Wabash following and the gunboats Pawnee, Mohican, Seminole, Pocahontas, Unadilla, Seneca, Ottawa, Pembina, and Tahoma trailing off to the flanks. The old side-wheel gunboat Princeton, rehabilitated from her service at the Navy Yard as a receiving ship, churned along behind. Wabash, with full steam up, came at Orlando, caught between trying to aid the British flagship and facing the on-coming Americans; the four largest gunboats supported Wabash against Orlando, while the six remaining smaller American ships split to take on the two British gunboats, three against one. Princeton steamed in between her newer sisters, slowly circling Conqueror and firing away until the Union Jack fluttered down.

The results were to be expected; for the loss of the torpedo force, Capt. Francis B. Ellison’s Cuyler (blasted into ruins by Orlando before American numbers overwhelmed the British frigate), and damage to several of the other American ships, Conqueror was demolished while Orlando, unwieldy in the restricted waters of the Harbor because of her great length, was shelled into silence and eventually forced aground. Drayton, aboard Pocahontas and with Unadilla and Ottawa in company, took on Coquette in a swirling turning engagement and blew her apart with shellfire. Seneca, commanded by Lt. Daniel Ammen, led Pembina and Tahoma across the bay toward Cape May, and took on Comorant; unlike her ill-fated namesake at the Peiho three years earlier, the new steamer was lost to naval gunfire, not shore batteries, but lost she was.

The British here are shown as terribly poor at their job, but that is only to be expected by now. The Orlando (one of the fastest and most powerful warships in the world) elects to stay in restricted waters and be easily defeated. The Conqueror's 110 guns have all been disabled by the loss of her rudder, and she is sunk with insulting ease by a single side-wheel steamer (the Princeton - which historically never saw service again, in spite of the desperate need for ships to work on the blockade, and which had ten guns when new even counting carronades).
It is also interesting that the restricted nature of the harbour does not impede the 23-foot draft Wabash or 26-foot Princeton, when the Conqueror had only 21 feet of draft historically and yet has grounded immovably. Most of the harbour shoals were only 12-18 feet deep, a much greater obstacle for the manoeuvering American ships than the stationary British one.



In supplementary material, TFSmith notes:

To confess, I was looking for an example of just how difficult it really would have been for the RN to impose and sustain a blockade of the northeastern US in this period, and when I came across Washington's recommended strengths for the RN blockading squadrons, the Delaware Bay one leaped out at me. I confess, I loaded things somewhat by "assigning" Conqueror as the flagship, which gave me Sotheby, but considering how he defended the (historical) loss on Rum Cay (which also points out the dangers of littoral operations, even when no one is shooting at you), it all came together...

It also points out that an 1862 Anglo-American conflict comes at a time the US has been at war for a period of months, and some of the worst of the deadwood and peacetime practices would be gone; the British and BNAers would be dealing with that initially, which would make for a differential in combat results...not to the extreme of the Russian War...note that I have not used Brudenell and Brigham, even though both were still kicking around in 1862 and quite senior, and in fact, it could actually be argued both men had more recent combat and command experience at the formation-level with British troops than say, Fenwick Williams...;)

I pushed the spar torpedo boat concept up somewhat, as well as Alligator and (of course) made up Marlinspike (basically, she is supposed to be Villeroi's original "civlilian" boat, taken over and converted along the lines of Alligator), but the technical aspects are hardly ground-breaking for 1861-62...

Thus TFSmith advances the state of the art in weapons design in the Union by between six months and a year while also producing extra ships from nowhere, in order to demonstrate that the Union could break the British blockade easily; similarly, he uses Captain Washington's basic allocation for warships while also assigning over a hundred more vessels to the blockade – but apparently none of them to any actual blockading stations. All this really does is demonstrate that a British blockade would not be so easily broken – not, at any rate, without flagrant cheating.
It is also interesting that the 23 “90-day gunboats” of the Union end up split exactly where the British are going to attack – five here in Delaware Bay, six in Boston and twelve in New York, with none in the Chesapeake or even just other places along the coast. It is as if they know where the British plan to attack.

One assumes he would balk at having British vessels destroy their foes with a superweapon firing shells filled with molten iron – even though the engineering is "hardly ground-breaking for 1861-2". (It was called the Martin's Shell, and was a British weapon developed in the late 1850s.) An even better comparison is with the Armstrong gun, a rifled breech-loading weapon of superior explosive payload, range and accuracy both afloat and ashore to the best American weapons, and in the middle of widespread rollout to the fleet. In this timeline, it has no benefit whatsoever – the only people who get the benefit of innovation are the Union, even when the innovation requires years of historical alteration (Union) or was already in full service (British).

When TFSmith at one point states:

What I've tried to do generally, and specifically in terms of ordnance is to avoid anything that was not developed and placed into field service before or during the historical conflict...

this is essentially a half-truth at best. Weapons which were not really placed into field service (such as submersibles) are deployed with ease by the Union, while major British innovations of 1858-64 (Armstrong guns, the “shunt” rifling system, the percussion fuze, the Martin's shell, Palliser shells and the like) sometimes get a bit of lip service but are mostly nowhere to be seen, and certainly do not grant any kind of advantage.