I may as well lead off by defending the Armstrong gun: I assure you, it gets more plausible hereafter. Lincoln claims that the Armstrong guns have been withdrawn from service (p.34): in fact, manufacture only ended in 1863 and Warrior (to cite one example) rearmed with RML guns in 1864. Though Harrison claims that Parrott was in possession of the plans for the Armstrong gun (p.319), he never explains which point of departure leads to Parrott magically inventing the interrupted screw (p.34)
Harrison asserts through Parrott that “After very few shots the gun becomes inoperable,” (p.33) but evidence doesn’t tend to support this conclusion. Between 5 July 1861 and 20 Feb 1863, the gunnery training ship HMS
Cambridge fired 316 shot and 81 shell with the 110pdr. Over these 397 shots, they encountered 8 jams, or an average of 49.6 shots per jam, none of which rendered the gun inoperable. You may protest that a training establishment would naturally be more adept with the gun than the average sailor, but surely this should be equally true of Parrott and his men. As such, if they’re damaging the gun badly enough to render it inoperable after a few rounds, the fault would seem to lie more with them than with the gun.
It should also be noted that the results of the bombardment at Kagoshima bear out this approximate 50 round per failure figure. The
Euryalus fired 67 rounds and encountered one vent piece broken off; the
Racehorse fired 50 rounds and encountered 3 jams, one which delayed firing for 25 minutes and another for 10 minutes; the
Coquette fired 37 rounds and the
Argus 22. None of the guns were rendered completely inoperable, only temporarily so.
Harrison also struggles to understand the
Warrior. He believes that: “To lessen drag when she is under sail the screw is lifted clear of the water. So the stern is unarmoured. As is the bow.” (p.170) However,
Warrior’s bow and stern were unarmoured because it was believed that weights near the end increased pitching, not because of the lifting gear (and why would the bow be unarmoured if it was the lifting gear that cause the problem?) Her sister ship
Black Prince had the same unarmoured ends but a fixed screw, and when the original tender for
Warrior was drawn up, bids by wooden shipbuilders were required to have full-length armour because a wooden ship could not be given waterproof subdivisions as an iron one could. Harrison subsequently claims that “Her hull is made of 1-inch thick iron…This citadel is made of 4 inch-wrought iron plates backed by 12 inches of teak.” (p.170) In fact,
Warrior actually had 4.5in of armour with 18in of teak and a hull 9/16th of an inch in thickness.
Jeffers expresses his desire “to see what a ball from an 11in Dahlgren will do against this citadel” (p.170). In fact, we know what would have happened: “The 11-inch gun, fired with a solid steel shot of 189 lbs, and charge of 20 lbs, would not penetrate the ‘Warrior’ at any range, not even if the muzzle of the gun were touching the armour plates.” [
source] This was confirmed by US trials, in which three 169lb cast iron and three 186lb wrought iron balls were fired with 30lbs of powder at 30 yards at a Warrior-style target with 4.5in of iron armour, 20in of oak backing and a 1in iron skin. None of the shot penetrated the target. [
source]
Monitor's guns were limited to 15lb of powder until late July 1862, when Dahlgren's experiments led him to conclude that "The XI in gun may be fired with 20 pounds of powder for shot or shell... When iron sides are to be battered, even 25 pounds of powder may be used, not exceeding 50 fires per gun, provided the gun has not been much used previously". [
source]
Jeffers also claims that “Our shot bounced off the
Merrimack because she had slanted sides. I want to see what a ball from an 11in Dahlgren will do against this citadel- with its vertical sides”. (p.170) However, the book describes the
Monitor “punching the cannon balls through the armour plate to wreak havoc and destruction in the gun deck.” (pp.170-1). The lower sill of the
Warrior’s gun-ports was nine and a half feet above the waterline; the
Monitor’s guns were around four feet above the waterline. In order to hit the gun deck from such close range,
Monitor must have been firing with her guns almost at full elevation, leaving
Warrior’s armour just as slanted as that of the
Virginia.
In a later battle, the British fleet is described as follows: “
Royal Oak led the way, a 60 gun ship of the line. In line astern where [sic] two other great ships.
Prince Consort also with 60 guns, and following her was
Repulse with 59.” (p.217) It has been noted that none of these ships existed, but it has not been noted that the 60 gun ship-of-the-line was a creature of the 18th century: the last class of 60 gun fourth rates, the Edgar class, were ordered in 1756. The other possibility, given that these battleships are specifically noted as having steam power (p. 219), is that these are intended to represent the ex-74s which were turned into blockships.
Ajax,
Blenheim,
Edinburgh,
Hogue,
Cornwallis,
Hastings and
Pembroke all served in the Crimean war: however, this was because Baldwin Walker, the surveyor of the navy, insisted that the inferior Russian fleet could be met with second-class ships. His aim was to save properly seasoned timber for the construction of first-class steam battleships for a potential future conflict with France. The actual battleships that would take part in a Trent War would have 80 guns and over, with the 60-gun ships relegated to harbour service.
It should also be noted that Palmerston believes that Milne has three battleships on 21 December 1861, (p.49), whereas in reality on 20 December Milne had
Agamemnon,
Conqueror,
Donegal,
Nile,
Sans Pareil and
St George, with
Aboukir and
Hero on their way to join him- Milne, in fact, had more battleships than he knew what to do with. This, however, is less of an embarrassing misapprehension than Gustavus Fox, Assistant secretary of the Navy, asking “is not iron heavier than water? Will it not sink when launched?” (p.56) Given that the first iron-hulled warship was built in 1819 and SS
Great Britain crossed the Atlantic in 1845, this is rather like someone in 1929 looking at a motor car and asking which end you feed with hay.
