Tag Archives: steampunk navy

Warship Wednesday, December 12

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  December 12

0408605
Here we see the USS Vicksburg (CL-86), a Cleveland-class light cruiser, off the U.S. East Coast, 17 October 1944. Photographed by from a blimp of squadron ZP-12, based at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey. The ship is painted in Camouflage Measure 33, Design 6d. (Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval Historical Center #NH 98331.)

Vicksburg was first laid down as the cruiser Cheyenne in 1942 she was renamed before commissioning in June 1944 a week after the D-Day landings. She rushed to the Pacific and was soon in the midst of protecting the fast carrier task forces of the US Navy from Kamikazes in the push to the Japanese home islands. Although arriving late in the war she made her presence felt in Iwo and Okinawa, dropping six-inch shells on Japanese positions while bagging a number of kamikazes with her formidable battery of 40mm and 20mm guns as perhaps the most modern ship of her class.

with searchlights

with searchlights

After the war she served as the flag of Commander, 3rd Fleet before being placed into mothballs at the ripe old age of three-years old. There she remained for 15-years quietly waiting for a call that never came.

Like 26 of the 27 Cleveland class that were completed as cruisers, Vicksburg was scrapped.  Only one Cleveland-class ship remains, the CLG-converted Little Rock, which has since 1976 been a museum ship in Buffalo, New York. Elements of the Vicksburg were used to refurbish her.

The Little Rock, Vick's sistership, on display in Buffalo.

The Little Rock, Vick’s sistership, on display in Buffalo.

Specs:
Displacement:     11,800 tons (standard), 14,131 tons (full)
Length:     600 ft (Waterline) 600 ft (180 m), 608 ft 4 in (Overall) 608 ft 4 in (185.42 m)
Beam:     63 ft (20.2 m)
Height:     113 ft (34.5 m)
Draft:     20 ft mean (7.5 m)
Propulsion:

4 Babcock & Wilcox, 634 psi boilers
4 GE geared steam turbines
4 Screws
100,000 hp (75 MW)

Speed:     32.5 knots
Range:     14,500 nm @ 15 kts
Complement:     992 officers and enlisted although by 1945 this grew to 1255 total.

Armament:     12 × 6 in (150 mm) guns (4×3), 12 × 5 in (130 mm) guns (6×2), 12 × 40 mm Bofors guns (2×4, 2×2), 10 × 20 mm guns (10×1)
Updated in 1945 with 28 × 40 mm Bofors guns (4×4, 6×2) and additional sensors

Aircraft carried:     4 OS2U Kingfisher scout planes
Aviation facilities:     2 launching catapults

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday, December 5

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  December 5

New_Mexico_class_battleship_bombarding_Okinawa
Here we see the old dreadnought USS Idaho showing some love to Japanese infantry ashore on Okinawa on 1 April 1945, easily distinguished by her tower foremast & 5”-38 Mk 30 single turrets (visible between the barrels of the forward main turrets). Idaho was the only US battleship with this configuration.

With lattice masts as originally commissioned.

With lattice masts as originally commissioned.

As a New Mexico-class battleship, she was designed just before World War One, and her construction from her award in November 1914 to her commissioning in March 1919, covered the entire period of that great war. One of the most advanced US battlewagons of her days, she spent most of her career from 1919-1941 in the Pacific. That makes it even more amazing that she was not on Battleship Row on December 7, 1941..but was quietly at anchor in Iceland enforcing the US Neutrality Patrol in the Atlantic. She and her sistership USS Mississippi steamed to the Pacific and she had a very active war from then on to make up for it.

She was one of the only US ships that ever bombarded the United States in anger when she pummeled the Japanese held islands of the Aleutian chain in 1943. She later went on to lend a hand at landing after landing across the Pacific and was awarded 7 battle stars. At Iwo Jima and Okinawa she came almost point-blank to the beaches and hammered those hard-fought battlefields 24/7 as needed. She may have been designed for Jutland but the 30-year old hull was a lynchpin to the embattled Devil Dogs dug in among the volcanic ash of the Japanese home islands.

Uss_idaho_bb-42

Sadly, less than a year after the end of the war, she was decommissioned and within a year of that date, scrapped.

Specs:
Displacement:     32,000 tons
Length:     624 ft (190 m)
Beam:     97.4 ft (29.7 m)
Draft:     30 ft (9.1 m)
Speed:     21 kn (24 mph; 39 km/h)
Complement:     1,081 officers and men
Armament:     (1919)

12 × 14 in (360 mm) guns
14 × 5 in (130 mm)/51 cal guns,
4 × 3 in (76 mm) guns
2 × 21 in (530 mm) torpedo tubes
(added after 1942)
10×4 40mm, 43×1 20mm, 8×1 .50-caliber MG for AAA

Armor:

Belt: 8–13.5 in (203–343 mm)
Barbettes: 13 in (330 mm)
Turret face: 18 in (457 mm)
Turret sides: 9–10 in (229–254 mm)
Turret top: 5 in (127 mm)
Turret rear 9 in (229 mm)
Conning tower: 11.5 in (292 mm)
Decks: 3.5 in (89 mm)

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

Founded in 1963 INRO, while based in the United States, has members around the globe. The membership includes, besides many of the leading authorities in the field, members of a large variety of professions, both men and women, active and retired naval personnel, historians and just plain “warship buffs”. Anyone interested in the subject will find INRO a most valuable source of information and contact with others who have the same interest.

One of the most amazing services of the INRO/Warship International is the INFOSER . Since its inception, Warship International has included an question/answer section in which questions submitted by readers were published and responses were provided by the general membership. This section was initially known as Warship Information Service through the No. 1, 1975, issue, and thereafter as Ask INFOSER. From the first issue of WI in January 1964 through the No. 4, 1996, issue, 2377 questions were published in the WIS/INFOSER section. Well researched answers were provided for 1866 of these questions, many of which contained never before seen illustrations, charts, and diagrams.

This is an invaluable source for the naval historian.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday, November 28

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  November 28

Note the four turrets, each with a trio of huge 12-inch (305mm) guns and the Tsarist Navy banner on the stern. The Gangut class was set up with one turret forward, one sten, and two amidships that could only fire to the port and starboard in broadside.

Here we see the Petropavlovsk (Russian: Петропавловск) when she was commissioned around 1915

Laid down as a member of the four-ship Gangut class of battleships, the Petropavlovsk was the most advanced design ever to sail the Baltic under a Russian flag. Laid down in 1909 to replace the ships lost at Tsuhuma, the Petro was only completed in September 1915, a year into World War One. She spent her war years in quiet readiness as a member of the Russian fleet in being that largely barred the Gulf of Finland from German ships.


In arguably the last Russian naval action of WWI, the Petropavlovsk led the break out of the Baltic Fleet from their ice locked  bases at Tallinn and Helsinki to Kronstadt in February 1918. The Russian navy was instrumental in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ship itself flew one of the first red flags in the fleet. Her sailors served ashore with the Red Army as shock troops during the Russian Civil War while the ship itself traded shots with British torpedo boats and destroyers, who were assisting the counter-revolutionary White Russian forces. In a twist of fate, her sailors, long the bulwark of the Red forces, rebelled in the epic Kronstadt mutiny in 1921. After this, to erase the memory of the ship that fought for the Tsar, then the Soviets, then against the Soviets, she was renamed in 1921 at the end of the Civil War Marat, after French revolutionary sailor Jean-Paul Marat.

Main Caliber by Ivan Shagin, taken 1936, probably on the Marat. Some of the best battleship art ever.

With more than a dozen battleships inherited from the pre-1917 Tsarist navy, the Soviets made a move to modernize and keep a few of these around in the late 1920s. The Marat was refitted 1928-31 and turned into something of a floating showcase for the People’s Navy. She was one of the few truly oceangoing Red Banner Fleet vessels in good repair and in 1937 represented the CCCP at the Royal Navy’s Fleet Review at Spithead, sailing alongside such modern ships of her day as the Dunqurque, Graf Spee, and Rodney. She spat out 12-inch shells against Finn batteries during the Winter War in 1940 and during World War Two, she became a legend of the siege of Leningrad. Four months into the war she was hit literally by a ton of bombs (one dropped by famous German Stuka tank ace Hans-UlrichRudel ) and sank.

As post-1942 floating battery. Nine operational 12-inch guns with a twenty-mile range still makes a pretty heavy impact, even if the ship could never put to sea again.

However the ship only sank in 36-feet of water and the Soviets cut away the front, refloated the stern, filled the forward areas with concrete, and managed to get three of her four 12-inch gun turrets back in action within weeks. Her upper decks were covered with inches of concrete and slabs of granite to help provide reinforcement against future air attacks. She literally became a concrete battleship. During 1942-43 she fired more than 1900 rounds of 12-inch shells against German army land targets around Leningrad, while her excess crew fought ashore. Her small guns were landed and rushed to the front where they fought panzers face to face. Even though she never sailed again, the Soviets kept the battered relic around for another eight years after the war ended as a stationary training ship before finally breaking the half-century old ship up in 1953.

Specs:
Displacement:     24,800 tonnes (24,408 long tons)
Length:     181.2 m (594 ft 6 in)
Beam:     26.9 m (88 ft 3 in)
Draft:     8.99 m (29 ft 6 in)
Installed power:     52,000 shp (38,776 kW) (on trials)
Propulsion:     4-shaft Parsons steam turbines
25 Yarrow Admiralty-type watertube boilers
Speed:     24.1 knots (44.6 km/h; 27.7 mph) (on trials)
Range:     3,200 nautical miles (5,900 km; 3,700 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement:     1,149
Armament:     4 × 3 – 12-inch (305 mm)/52 guns
16 × 1 – 4.7-inch (119 mm) guns
1 × 1 – 3-inch (76 mm) Lender AA gun
4 × 1 – 17.7-inch (450 mm) submerged torpedo tubes
Armor:     Waterline belt: 125–225 mm (4.9–8.9 in)
Deck: 12–50 mm (0.47–2.0 in)
Turrets: 76–203 mm (3.0–8.0 in)
Barbettes: 75–150 mm (3.0–5.9 in)
Conning tower: 100–254 mm (3.9–10.0 in)

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO) http://www.warship.org/

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

Founded in 1963 INRO, while based in the United States, has members around the globe. The membership includes, besides many of the leading authorities in the field, members of a large variety of professions, both men and women, active and retired naval personnel, historians and just plain “warship buffs”. Anyone interested in the subject will find INRO a most valuable source of information and contact with others who have the same interest.

The principal activity of INRO for the last 35 years has been the publication of a quarterly journal, Warship International, recognized internationally as the leading and most authoritative publication in the field. Auxiliary services include a Book Service, offering a 10 per cent discount on current naval books, and the Photo Service, which provides warship photos at a nominal price.

All memberships are for the calendar year, thus assuring those who join any time during the year of a complete annual volume of Warship International for that year. Basic dues are kept at the lowest figure required to cover production and distribution costs for Warship International.

Im a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday November 21

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  November 21


Here we see the coastal schooner Claire Crouch around 1960. She was origanlly built in 1917 as the De Lauwers in Holland, during World War One for a Newcastle shipping company. The old schooner, at the time known as the Argosy Lemal was taken up for use by the US Army in 1942 for use in the US Army Small Ships Section, functioning as a radio communication vessel in the Arafura and Timor Seas during World War II. With a 12 man crew of mixed nationality civilian crew members and skipper, and seven army signal corps commo guys, the ship was one of the odder vessels in the war.  Her wartime service sounds like a Joseph Conrad novel:

In the Thompson’s publication for the COMH United States Army In World War II-The Technical Services-The Signal Corps: The Outcome (Mid-1943 Through 1945), S/Sgt. Arthur B. Dunning, Headquarters Company, 60th Signal Battalion, related that  he and six other enlisted men of that unit were ordered aboard her on 9 September 1943, at Oro Bay, New Guinea, to handle Army radio traffic. The commander of the ship reported to naval authorities, not to General Akin. After six months’ service along the New Guinea coast, the skipper was removed for incompetence. His replacement was no better. Among other things, he obeyed to the letter Navy’s order forbidding the use of unshielded radio receivers at sea. Since the Signal Corps receivers aboard the ship were unshielded and thus liable to radiate sufficiently to alert nearby enemy listeners, the men were forbidden to switch them on in order to hear orders from Army headquarters ashore. As a consequence, during a trip in the spring of 1944 from Milne Bay to Cairns, Australia (on naval orders), the crew failed to hear frantic Signal Corps radio messages to the Argosy Lemal ordering her to return at once to Milne Bay to make ready for a forthcoming Army operation. On the way to Australia the skipper, after a series of mishaps attributable to bad navigation, grounded the Argosy hard on a reef. Most of the crew already desperately ill of tropical diseases, now had additional worries.

The radio antennas were swept away along with the ship’s rigging, and help could not be requested until the Signal Corps men strung up a makeshift antenna. Weak with fevers and in a ship on the verge of foundering, they pumped away at the water rising in the hold and wondered why rescue was delayed till they learned that the position of the ship that the skipper had given them to broadcast was ninety miles off their true position. As they threw excess cargo overboard, “some of the guys,” recorded Dunning, “were all for jettisoning our skipper for getting us into all of this mess.” Much later, too late for the need the Signal Corps had for the ship, the Argosy Lemal was rescued and towed to Port Moresby for repairs to the vessel and medical attention to the crew, many of whom were by then, according to Dunning, “psycho-neurotic.” Besides Dunning, a radio operator, there were T/4 Jack Stanton, also a radio operator; T/Sgt. Harold Wooten, the senior non-commissioned officer; T/4 Finch and T/5 Burtness, maintenance men; and T/5 Ingram and Pfc. Devlin, code and message center clerks. Dunning described the Argosy as a 3-mast sailing vessel with a 110-horsepower auxiliary diesel engine. “She was the sixth vessel,” he wrote, “to be taken over by the Small Ships Section of the U.S. Army, her primary purpose was handling [radio] traffic between forward areas and the main USASOS headquarters.”

The Army kept the ship until 1949 for use in the Pacific. She then transferred back into civilian service as a mothership carrying fuel and food to offshore fishing fleets and running cargo along the Australian coast under the name of Booya. On 24 December 1974, Booya was moored near Fort Hill wharf with four crew and one guest on board as Cyclone Tracy approached. She put to sea to avoid the stormand  Booya was last seen at about 8.00pm leaving Fort Hill wharf. For the next 29 years she remained missing, presumed sunk with the loss of all lives in the huge seas whipped up by Cyclone Tracy’s 300 km/h winds. She was just recently found– still inside Darwin Harbor (!) in sixty feet of water.  Police divers dredged the hull searching for the bodies of the five people that had been onboard. No bodies were found but personal belongings such as jewellery and clothing were recovered. These were offered to the families and friends of those onboard.

Side Scan sonar of the Booya turned turtle on the bottom of Darwin Harbor

Specs
Tonnage:     254 GRT (Argosy Lemal)
Length:     117 ft 5 in (35.79 m)
Beam:     24 ft 5 in (7.44 m)
Draught:     10 ft 4 in (3.15 m)
Propulsion:     Sails, 1 x 2SCSA oil engine, 79 hp (59 kW) (as Argosy Lemal)
Sail plan:     Schooner

Armament:  (sidearms of Army signal detachment)

Warship Wednesday, November 14

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  November 14

Here we see a painting depicting the beautiful 198-foot United States Revenue Cutter Service Cutter Bear as she appeared around the 1890s. Built as a ocean-going sealing ship by Alexander Stephen & Son, Dundee, Scotland in 1874 (for which she was used for a decade as the SS Bear), she was bought by the US government in 1884 for use in the Arctic. Her Scottish builders had always meant for her to work in thick ocean ice chasing seals and as such she had a 6-inch thick oaken hull, sailing barquentine rig and steam auxiliary engines. Under the USRCS, and then after 1916 the USCG, the Bear served for 40 years as virtually the sole US government ship of any kind along the lawless 20,000 miles of Alaskan Territory coastline. Every year she would sail the Alaskan coastline during the spring and summer, returning to the piers of San Fransisco in the winter, refitting, and doing the same thing the next year.

She found the remnants of the Greely Expedition, helped assist the people of San Fransisco after the 1906 Earthquake, ran down poachers and smugglers, waved the flag in every inlet of the territory, protected the Gold Rush prospectors, and saved countless lives. In 1926 the Coast Guard laid her up but she was she spent the next 15 years used as a museum ship, a prop in movies, and by Admiral Byrd in one of his arctic expeditions.

On 11 September 1939, (ten days after Hitler marched into Poland) she was called back to service and, with a Navy crew (as the USS Bear, AG-28), sailed Greenland/Iceland waters in search of German weather stations and raiders during World War Two. She even captured an armed German auxiliary trawler at gunpoint. Not bad for a then-68 year old ship. She was decommissioned, 17 May 1944, and placed in mothballs. The Navy sold her in 1948 and she was used again as a sealer for another decade (as the FV Arctic Bear) then laid up once more.

Seen in WWII in USN service, note the J2F Duck Seaplane on her stern and stepped masts. Disregard the Norwegian armed trawler in the front. In her 89-year life, she served five in the Navy (including WWII), 42 in the Coast Guard (including WWI), and almost 30 years as a sealer, tramp cargo ship, floating museum, and relic.

In 1960 a Philadelphia businessman bought her to use as a restaurant, moored alongside the venerable ex-USS Olympia in downtown Philly. However, the old girl wasn’t putting up with that shit and on the tow down from Canada, she slipped her towline and took a plunge  to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean off  Sable Island, the Graveyard of the Atlantic in 1963 where she remains today.

Her captain in the old days, Michael “Hell Roaring Mike” Healy, is remembered in the name of the USCGs newest cutter, and the Bear herself is the name of the lead ship of the 270-foot Medium Endurance Cutters commissioned in the 1980s.

Specs:
Displacement: 703 tons
Length:     198.5 ft (60.5 m)
Beam:     30 ft (9.1 m)
Draft:     18.8 ft (5.7 m)
Propulsion:     300 ihp compound steam engine, 1 screw
Range:     Limited only by water and provisions
Complement:  51
Aircraft carried: Carried Barkley-Grow seaplane on Byrd Expedition III, 1942-44 one  J2F-1 seaplane
Armarment (1885-1926) 3 x 6-pound rapid-fire guns, (1941-44) Unknown but photos show covered machine guns and/or cannon, probably 12.7mm or 20mm.

Warship Wednesday, November 7

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  November 7


Here we see the beautiful new battlecruiser SMS Goeben of the Kasierliche Marine. She was the second of two Moltke-class battlecruisers of the Imperial German Navy, launched in 1911 and named after the German Franco-Prussian War hero General August Karl von Goeben.

 

SMS Goeben with torpedo nets rolled up pre1914

SMS Goeben with torpedo nets rolled up pre1914, Click to big up

She served only two years in the Kaiser’s navy officially before causing havoc and frustration in the Med while running from British and French warships on the outbreak of World War I. Her Admiral, William Souchon, made for Turkey where the ship was interned and then officially turned over to the Turkish Navy 16 August 1914, just over two weeks into the War. However, renamed the  Yavuz Sultan Selim after Ottoman sultan Selim I, and with her German crew wearing Turkish fez, she became the flagship of the Ottoman Navy.

As such she pulled Turkey into the War when Souchon sailed across the Black Sea to bombard Russian ports. For the rest of the war she traded shots with the occasional Russian battleship, avoiding lurking British subs, and generally trying to just stay one step ahead of the Turks themselves.

Goeben and Breslau

Goeben and Breslau. Click to bigup

The Germans left in 1918 but the Selim remained. In 1936 she was renamed once again as the TCG Yavuz (“Ship of the Turkish Republic Yavuz“) since the old Ottoman name was passe.

Battlecruiser Yavuz (Yavuz Selim) in Bosporus ,1931

Battlecruiser Yavuz (Yavuz Selim) in Bosporus ,1931. Click to bigup

 

Yavuz remained the flagship of the Turkish Navy until she was decommissioned in 1950. She was scrapped in 1973, after the West German government declined an invitation to buy her back from Turkey as a museum. She was the last surviving ship built by the Imperial German Navy, and the longest-serving battlecruiser or dreadnought-type ship in any navy, with some .


Specs:
Displacement:

Design: 22,979 t (22,616 long tons)
Full load: 25,400 t (25,000 long tons)

Length:     186.6 m (612 ft 2 in)
Beam:     30 m (98 ft 5 in)
Draft:     9.2 m (30 ft 2 in)
Installed power:

Design: 52,000 hp (39,000 kW)
Maximum: 85,782 hp (63,968 kW)

Propulsion:     4 screws, Parsons steam turbines
Speed:

Design: 25.5 kn (47.2 km/h; 29.3 mph)
Maximum: 28.4 kn (52.6 km/h; 32.7 mph)

Range:     4,120 nmi (7,630 km; 4,740 mi) at 14 kn (26 km/h; 16 mph)
Complement: 43 officers
1,010 men

Armament:

10 × 28 cm (11 in) SK L/50 guns (5 × 2)
12 × 15 cm (5.9 in) guns
12 × 8.8 cm (3.5 in) guns

Armor:

Belt: 280–100 mm (11–3.9 in)
Barbettes: 230 mm (9.1 in)
Turrets: 230 mm
Deck: 76.2–25.4 mm (3–1 in)
Conning tower: 350 mm (14 in)

Warship Wednesday October 31st (Happy Halloween Edition)

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  October 31

Here we see the Japanese ironclad Kōtetsu in Japan in the 1870s. She had a very interesting history and often masqueraded under several flags and names (hence the Halloween edition!).

Built in secret for the Confederate Navy to be used as the ironclad Stonewall (but dubbed the Sphinx) by  the L’Arman Yard, Bordeaux, France 1863-64, she was ‘officially’ for the Egyptian Navy (hence the original name). Her and her sister-ship were  built to break the Union blockade of the South. The sale was found out and blocked, forcing the Sphinx/Stonewall to be sold to Denmark and a Danish Navy crew took her over in the fall of 1864.

Her sister ship Cheops was sold to the Prussian Navy, becoming the SMS Prinz Adalbert.

Well, to further complicate things, the Sphinx/Stonewall/Copenhagen was turned over to the Confederate Navy, its original owner in January 1865 after Denmark lost a short war with Prussia. The ship took to sea in an epic voyage across the Atlantic shadowed by US Navy ships the whole way. She arrived in Havana Cuba  just as the war ended and the captain promptly sold her to Spain (Cuba was a Spanish territory then). Spain, turned around and sold her, unused by the Spanish navy, to the United States in July 1865 for $16,000. The US Navy sailed to to the east coast, kept her in storage for three years, often inspecting her to see how the French built ironclads.

In 1868 she was sold for $30k (almost twice what the navy paid for her) to the shogun of Japan. Delivered the next year to the Meji government (who deposed the shoguns– talk about a cursed and unlucky ship!) and named the Kōtetsu, she immediately put her ultra-modern Gatling guns and rifled cannon in action at the Battle of Miyako Bay (where she was helmed by, wait for it, French naval experts). The Japanese ultimately renamed her Azuma, kept her on the payroll for twenty years (although her internal wooden construction was rotten) and she was finally decommissioned and scrapped in 1888.

So to recap, she was built in France for Egypt with English guns (but secretly for the CSA), sold to Denmark, resold to the CSA, who sold her to Spain, who sold her to the USA, who sold her to the shogun but gave her to the Meji government to use against the shogun (under French mercenaries).

Wow, I need a drink now. Everyone, raise your Halloween punch to the Sphinx/CSS Stonewall/Copenhagen/CSS Stonewall/USS Stonewall/Kōtetsu,/IJNS Azuma!

Her specs:


Class & type:     Ironclad Ram Warship
Displacement:     1,358 t
Length:     193.5 ft (59.0 m) oa
Beam:     31.5 ft (9.6 m)
Draught:     14 ft 3 in (4.34 m)
Propulsion:     1,200 hp (890 kW) double reciprocating engine, 95 tons coal.
Speed:     10.5 kn (19.4 km/h)
Complement:     135
Armament:     1 × 300 pdr (136 kg) Armstrong
2 × 70 pdr (32 kg) Armstrong
2 x Gatling guns
Armor:     main belt, 89 to 124 mm (3.5 to 4.9 in)
turrets, 124 mm (4.9 in)

Her propulsion system was provided by Mazeline, based in Le Havre. The ship was powered by a pair of 2-cylinder single expansion engines, each of which drove a four-bladed screw that was 3.6 m (11 ft 10 in) in diameter. The engines were placed in a single engine room. Two trunk boilers, also in a single boiler room, supplied steam to the engines at 1.5 standard atmospheres (150 kPa). Two rudders were fitted side by side to control the vessel. The ship was initially fitted with a 740 square meter (2,428 sq ft) brig rig, though this was subsequently replaced with a 677 square meter topsail schooner rig.

Warship Wednesday, October 24

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  October 24

Here we see a mock up of the 1912 type US Navy battle cruiser CC-1 as mocked up by Robert Pawling.  In 1911, battlecruisers were the rage in the modern navies of the world. Great Britain had the Invincible class and was designing the HMS Hood. Japan was looking at the Kongo class. The Kaiser of Imperial Germany had the Moltke-class and looking to build the Derrflinger class.

With all of the peer pressure, the United States decided they needed a half-dozen of  their own. Original designs included ships with as many as 24 boilers to keep them fast enough (35-knots) to outrun battleships, and a heavy armament up to 10 14-inch guns to destroy anything too fast to outrun. By 1916 it had been decided to fit these monsters with powerful diesel-electric power-plants that created an amazing 130,000 kW of power. This is impressive when you consider today that the 1000+ foot USS Nimitz class super carriers of today only generate 64,000 kW of power and have to use two nuclear reactors to accomplish that feat. Eight 16-inch/50cal guns, just one fewer than those carried by the Iowa class battleships, was the final armament chosen. They would have been the most impressive six warships of their era.

World War One ended before the battle-cruisers were laid down and only two hulls, Lexington and Saratoga, were finally started in 1921. While under construction the two were a victim of the 1922 Naval Treaty. Battle cruisers were limited but aircraft carriers were allowed. This led the two huge batttlecruisers to be redesigned as large carriers. At over 800-feet long, they were only surpassed in size by the 1945-era Midway supercarriers more than two decades later. They also carried some of the largest guns of any aircraft carrier: eight 203mm (8-inch) naval rifles…making the pair every bit as powerful as a heavy cruiser. In many ways they were ahead of their time.

Saratoga after her 1944 refit, wearing camouflage measure 32 design 11A. Her 8 8-inch guns had been replaced by 16 5-inch guns and 60 40mm Bofors and– giving her the same equivalent AAA firepower of almost five destroyers.

The Lexington and Saratoga were commissioned in 1927 and for most of the pre-WWII era were the primary training and development carriers of the US fleet (the Yorktown class didn’t appear until 1937). During WWII the Lexington was lost in the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Sara won seven battle-stars, had a lifetime total of 98,549 aircraft landings in 17 years and was finally sunk in 1946 as a target for the Atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, where she is a popular dive destination.

Specs (as 1922 aircraft carrier)
Displacement:     36,000 long tons (37,000 t) (standard)
47,700 long tons (48,500 t) (deep load)
Length:     888 ft (270.7 m)
Beam:     107 ft 6 in (32.8 m)
Draft:     32 ft 6 in (9.9 m) (deep load)
Installed power:     180,000 shp (130,000 kW)
Propulsion:     4 shafts, 4 sets turbo-electric drive
16 water-tube boilers
Speed:     33.25 knots (61.58 km/h; 38.26 mph) (made 34 on trials, not broken by another US carrier till 1955)
Range:     10,000 nmi (19,000 km; 12,000 mi) at 10 kn (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Complement:     2,791 (including aviation personnel) in 1942
Armament:     4 × 2 – 8-inch guns
12 × 1 – 5-inch anti-aircraft guns
Armor:     Belt: 5–7 in (127–178 mm)
Deck: .75–2 in (19–51 mm)
Gun turrets: .75 in (19 mm)
Bulkheads: 5–7 in (127–178 mm)
Aircraft carried:     78+
Aviation facilities:     1 Aircraft catapult

Warship Wednesday, October 18

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old navies of the 1866-1948 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  October 18

Here we see the WWII Minesweeper USS Inaugural (AM-242/MSF-242) during the closing days of WWII. A 184-foot ship midway between the size of a PT-boat and a destroyer, her job was to clear mines but they were usually pressed into work as gunboats, inshore gunfire support, escorts, supply boats and any number of misc jobs around the fleet and anchorage.

Built in less than six months in 1944, the Inaugural joined the Pacific Fleet in time for the bloody push for Okinawa where she cleared eighty-two mines and was awarded two battle stars for service during World War II. In 1947, she was transferred  to the Atlantic Fleet Reserve mothballs where she waited quietly to be recalled to service for twenty years. She was stricken 1 March 1967 and sold the next year for $1 to become a museum ship in St Louis, Missouri, docked under the famous St Louis Arch. She continued to serve in that capacity for 25 years.

In 1993 the Inagural broke lose from her moorings in the great flood of the Mississippi River and crashed into the Poplar street bridge. Eventually the ship sank South of the MacArther Bridge. About 700 ships that have been recorded as shipwrecked on the stretch of the Missisppi  between Cairo and Hannibal in the past century so she has plenty of company.

Over the past couple decades apparently her 5-ton 40mm Bofors L60 AAA gun has been stolen and restolen no less than three times.  And her forward 3″/50 has vanished.

After 19 years the old minesweeper just recently and literally popped back up and her exposed wreckage has been local news in St Louis.

Specs;
Displacement:     530 tons
Length:     184 ft 6 in (56.24 m)
Beam:     33 ft (10 m)
Draft:     9 ft 9 in (2.97 m)
Speed:     15 knots (27.8 km/h)
Complement:     104
Armament:     1 × 3″/50 caliber gun
6 × Oerlikon 20 mm cannon
4 × Bofors 40 mm guns (2×2)
2 × Depth charge projectors (K-guns)
2 × Depth charge tracks

Warship Wednesday Oct 10

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk navies of the 1866-1938 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday,  October 10th


Here we see the Second Class Battleship/Armored Cruiser USS Maine sailing past the Brooklyn Bridge around 1895.

This beautiful ship was the start of the US Navy’s Great Battleship race that ran from about 1886 to the Post-WWI Washington Naval Treaty. Although she was the most advanced ship in the world when laid down in 1886, by the time she was commissioned 9 years later she was already obsolete. At only 6,000-tons she was too small for a battleship, and at 16-knots too slow for a cruiser. Although she had up to 12-inches of  nickel steel armor, by 1900 new Harvey and later Krupp armor made it look like cardboard. Likewise her mixed armament of 25 guns of 6 different calibers from .45-70 to 254mm, would be made totally obsolete by 1905. However she would not be around by then….


At 21:40 on 15 February, 1898 an explosion of unknown origin on board Maine occurred in the Havana Harbor. Later investigations revealed that more than 5 long tons (5.1 t) of powder charges for the vessel’s six and ten-inch guns had detonated, obliterating the forward third of the ship. The remaining wreckage rapidly settled to the bottom of the harbor.  Even though she was  divided into 214 watertight compartments, she sank in less than five minutes. The ship’s crew consisted of 355: 26 officers, 290 sailors, and 39 marines. Of these, there were 261 fatalities:

2 officers and 251 sailors/marines either killed by the explosion or drowned
7 others were rescued but soon died of their injuries
1 officer later died of “cerebral affection” (shock)

Of the 94 survivors, only 16 were uninjured.

The Maine became a rallying cry for revenge and the Spanish-American War was a direct result of the sinking. Teddy Roosevelt himself, the Asst Secretary of the Navy when the Maine was sunk, carried a salvaged Navy 38 revolver from the ship up San Juan Hill.

After the war, the crippled ship was raised and towed to sea, where she was interred in the Florida Straits in over 600 fathoms of water. Parts of her including the main mast, anchors, brass torpedo tube hatches, the conning tower, artillery shells, and the capstan are on public display in more than twenty states from coast to coast, making her the one of the best remembered battleships….that really wasnt a battleship…

Specs:
Displacement:     6,682 long tons (6,789 t)
Length:     324 ft 4 in (98.9 m)
Beam:     57 ft (17.4 m)
Draft:     22 ft 6 in (6.9 m)
Installed power:     9,293 ihp (6,930 kW)
Propulsion:

2 × shafts
2 × vertical triple expansion steam engines
8 × boilers

Speed:     16.45 kn (30.47 km/h; 18.93 mph)
Range:     6670km (3600nm) at 10 knots
Complement:     374 officers and men
Armament:

2 × 2 – 10 in (254 mm) guns
6 × 1 – 6 in (152 mm) guns
7 × 1 – Driggs-Schroeder 6-pounder (57 mm (2.2 in)) guns
4 × 1 – 1-pounder (37 mm (1.5 in)) Hotchkiss guns
4 × 1 – Driggs-Schroeder 1-pounder (37 mm (1.5 in)) guns
4 x 1 – Gatling guns .45-70 caliber
4 × 18 in (457 mm) torpedo tubes

Armor:

Belt: 12 in (305 mm)
Deck: 2–3 in (51–76 mm)
Turrets: 8 in (203 mm)
Conning tower: 10 in (254 mm)
Bulkheads: 6 in (152 mm)

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