OCR Text |
Show i IDEA OF ARMORED VESSELS IN 1861 Naval Officials Quick to See Possibilities. One of those lnteresUng minor notes on naval history was supplied in a Lowell lecture at Boston when 1'rofessor Baxter, of Harvard, traced from a re-examination of the original documents, the development of the navy's Ironclad program at the beginning be-ginning of the Civil war a program of which the Monitor was merely the most celebrated product. Mr. Baxter, according to the Bos ton Transcript, has anniliilaled the charge of obstructive traditionalism sometimes leveled at the Navy de partment in connection with the Monitor. Capt. Liddell Hart's dictum dic-tum that war oliices always begin a war at a point somewhat behind that which they had reached at the end of the preceding one apparently apparent-ly did not apply to the navy in lSill. Even before the fall of Sumter the navy was considering the first of a flood of proposals for the construction construc-tion of ironclad men-of-war, and the chief of the bureau of construction and repair was soon to advocate not one but a whole fleet of these radical radi-cal innovations. Many people Donald McKay, the creator of the great clipper ships, was one were advocating armored vessels, and the idea of turret mountings for the guns had alread been advanced by a British naval officer of-ficer the year before. The Navy department de-partment went to work in a methodical method-ical fashion suggestive of World war days; it convened a hoard which studied the proposals and by Sep tember was able to recommend three different types for experimental con struction. One of them was the especially es-pecially radical Monitor. She had the luck first to meet the test of battle and to pass it magnificently, and after that the construction of the large fleet of double-turreted monitors mon-itors went on rapidly. The navy was able to take the very latest ideas available, study them, adopt and test models and then go into "quantity production" for the winning of the war. The story is not without its modern mod-ern application. It is an earlier instance in-stance of the "time lag" essential in the development of any new weapon for war service a phenomenon recently re-cently pointed out by a British writer, writ-er, Victor Lefebure, as a possible means for arriving at scientific disarmament dis-armament systems. Another point is the fact that the navy, even with this prompt and intelligent handling of the situation, got what was actually ac-tually rather a poor weapon as the result of the basics of working under un-der war pressure. The Monitor's victory In her one battle was to influence our naval construction down to Spanish war days; actually, however, the raft idea, which was Ericsson's essential contribution, was not a sotind one. The turret stayed, but the raft was not copied in other navies and finally -disappeared in our own. But mistakes mis-takes are unavoidable when a new type has to be built In large numbers num-bers all at once. New York Herald Tribune. |