Block Aid

Or, A Sample of Blockade Actions



We can garner some impression of how TFSmith thinks blockades work from his description of actions around New York.


In the chapter for December, he describes ironclads "both built from the keel up and extemporized from existing warships" as "the ideal blockade breakers" - not actually true, as results from the American Civil War show. The Palmetto State and the Chicora did not manage to break the blockade of Charleston, and the Virginia did not break the Union blockade of Norfolk.

He states that the British have been focused on "blockaders with sufficient endurance to remain on station, protect trade and troop convoys, and hunt American commerce raiders, much less maintain the necessary presence on the peacetime stations" as a justification for why they have not done similar full conversions to ironclads with their own wooden ships; that is, he considers ironclads to be ships without sufficient endurance to remain on station or do most other tasks. This would be a surprise for both the Royal Navy of the following decades (which was quite happy replacing wooden ships with ironclads for all ships of force) and the Union navy of the Civil War period (which retained ironclads off Charleston for months at a time).


He explains that Farragut's defending force consists of the New York and New Jersey (both ahistorically early Re D'Italia class ships), the Colorado (described as a 50-gun vessel, though it did not carry this many guns historically unless 12-pdr howitzers are counted), ten sloops (four of them upgunned past their historical armament and another three accelerated from their historical commissioning), seven ironclads (of which two should be in commission) and fourteen gunboats - it is perhaps interesting that of these ships about half the firepower, and well over half the ironclads, are attained by cheating; as such TFSmith portrays an ahistorical picture of the level of force available to the Union to resist a blockade.

There are also four flotillas of "extemporized torpedo boats" - itself fairly without historical precedent as the Confederacy did not deploy large flotillas of torpedo boats despite having the weapon for years by the end of the war.

The American small ships are described as being based out of "Raritan and Gravesend bays to the south, and the myriad small ports on both sides of Long Island Sound to the northeast".
This suggests a misunderstanding of how the British planned to conduct their blockade, at least to the south - Raritan and Gravesend bays have no fixed defences, and it is silly to imagine that the British would allow unfortified bases full of small craft to exist when they could threaten the blockade. (This picture is furthered when it mentions in the next breath that the Americans are going to use the telegraph to warn Farragut of "early warning of any British movement into the approaches to New York" - in reality the British would be blockading New York from inside the lower bay to the south, and they should already be in the "approaches".)

TFSmith mentions Totten's plan to use floating obstructions to obstruct the passage of enemy ships, but he fails to make at all clear that this was Totten's *only* plan for the defence - he did not intend to set up large mine belts or quickly construct additional earthworks; his presentation of the garrison ("a mix of enrolled and service militia, state troops, and small numbers of regulars and volunteers") suggests that New York is largely seeing to its own defence by way of forts, which begs the question of what Totten's plan is against a British landing on Staten Island or (especially) Long Island (something which took place in 1776.)
It is certainly convenient that the Union has large forces present near where the British decide to attack and no forces present near where the British do not.


Farragut is described as using "feints and false alarms" to reduce the effectiveness of the blockade, by doing things like sending squadrons out and then falling back when the British come up to intercept, and spending the rest of his time letting the British "cope with the open ocean" while he is training in "the relatively placid waters of Upper New York Bay and the west end of Long Island Sound". This by itself sounds superficially reasonable, until one remembers that one of the major problems for a blockaded force is that it cannot train in open water; obviously the Union has no problem with training up a rapidly-expanded navy to great efficiency while the British have efficiency problems with a force of much more modest wartime expansion.

For some reason, the British do not ever actually catch any of his squadrons which come out, even when "monitors" steam up on British pickets at night to alarm them. (Since the maximum speed of the monitors was five to six knots, and since the British planned to post their blockading ships across the line from Sandy Hook to Rockaway Point - six miles from the forts at the Narrows - it beggars belief that the British do not manage to catch them.) It is also mentioned that Farragut on occasion sends ships out from multiple points to split the attention of the British and distract them from blockade runners or commerce raiders; this misses that by definition the blockade would be operating across a singular choke point to which all ships must come.


But perhaps the oddest of all is that the British attack Sandy Hook in December 1862. This is a direct contradiction of the originally stated intent of Captain Washington (who TFSmith relies on religiously for all the other details of the British squadrons at any specific port, even though in aggregate they somehow end up using three times the ships he recommends). Washington's recommendation for the bad-weather anchorage of the blockade of New York was:

There would be no difficulty in taking up an anchorage in Sandy Hook Bay, as Sandy Hook and its battery, said to be of six guns, might be approached within 600 yards, and destroyed. The low sandy island on which it stands is about four miles long by about half a mile broad, and the northern part might be taken possession of, and defence thrown up at a mile and a half from the north end at the narrowest part of the island. As guns placed on the highlands of Navesink (200 feet) would command the souther part of the island, there would be no advantage in attempting to hold that part of it.

For some reason, despite this advice, the British remain outside the Lower Bay subject to the winds and storms of the Atlantic for eight months before getting around to making an attack on Sandy Hook. When they do, of course, the Americans are quite ready for them and a battle results in which the British lose two of the most modern ironclads in the world.

Even the battle in question completely misses how blockades tended to operate - it is the attacker who can choose when to attack and muster sufficient force in that location, whereas the defender must defend with whatever is present. The British mount their first ironclad attack eight months after the beginning of the war and more than a year after the inciting incident, on the hardest target on the entire American coast, do so with such incompetence that they allow their own "T" to be crossed, and then play bumper-cars with their own ironclads so that the Americans can win.