This 26-inch long, 13-inch wide cavalry pennant came currently on display at the Imperial War Museum in London may look like it comes from the Napoleonic period but in fact is a century newer.

From 1889 all cavalry units of the Imperial German Army carried lances and each was fitted with a pennant, the colors indicating the state from which the regiment was recruited. The two regiments of “Death’s Head Hussars” were however the exception, having a skull and crossbones (Totenkopf) design. That of 1 Leib-Husaren-Regiment Nr.1 adopted a white Totenkopf on black, whilst 2 Leib-Husaren-Regiment “Königin Viktoria von Preußen” Nr. 2 featured reversed colors, black on white.

On active service the pennant was conventionally rolled around the shaft of the lance.

This lance pennant was picked up on the Battlefield of The Marne in 1914 where both of the above regiments saw action together in the Hussar Brigade.

Transferred to the Eastern Front in autumn 1914, the brigade fought first in Galicia and in the Battle of Riga and were involved in the occupation of the islands Oesel and Dago. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia on 3 March 1918, the units remained as occupation forces in Russia, returning in January 1919 to Danzig, they were disbanded after 178 years service though their lineage, flags, and trophies were retained in the 2nd Squadron of the 5th (Prussian) Reiter (Mounted) Regiment in the Reichswehr stationed at Stolpe throughout the 1920s and 30s.

The Wermacht distanced themselves from much of the old Imperial trappings and the hussars were not reconstituted after 1935– though of course the Totenkopfhusaren skull went on to greater infamy in the Nazi regime.

Unteroffizier, 2. Leib-Husaren-Regiment Königin Viktoria von Preussen Nr. 2 by Carl J Becker from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection  Note the pennant

Princess Viktoria Luise, only daughter and the last child of Wilhelm II, and a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, as noted from the unit’s title was the honorary colonel of the regiment and regularly inspected the hussars, complete in her uniform. The unit dated back to 1741 when Fredrick III founded it as Husaren-Regiment (H 5).

Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia wears the uniform of the Leib Husaren Regt Nr. 2. in these photos from around 1910

If the busby (fur shako hat) looks familiar, it is very similar to the one was famously worn by 1 Leib-Husaren-Regiments Nr. 1 vet, German Field Marshal August von Mackensen throughout his career.

Now that’s a mustache only a Kaiser could love. He won the Iron Cross around his throat as a volunteer with the 2nd Life Hussars Regiment during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and went on to command the 1st regiment in 1893, continuing to wear the uniform the rest of his service career. Note the black silk cover denoting the busby is that of the 1st Life Hussars. In the images above the silk is white.

During the Nazi era, Von Mackensen remained a committed and unreformed monarchist and appeared at official functions in his First World War uniform just as a particular “eat shit” to the little corporal. He lived past the last Reich, passing away Nov 1945 at age 95.

Among his nicknames was “The Last Hussar.”

Viktoria Luise, the final Regimentschefin und Oberst à la suite of the Regiment, passed away in 1980 in Hanover, reportedly still quite an equestrian even late into her life.

Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, photographers and the like that produced them.

Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of Jakub Rozalski

Jakub Rozalski is a Polish concept artist who works in modern (digital) mediums and his military themed art ranges from his very popular 1920s alternate universe Poland where steam/diesel mechs range the countryside populated by dire wolves, tame bears and Siberian tigers, to more modern visages.

“In my works I try to combine classical painting style & motifs with modern design & interesting concepts. For me, always the most important in my work is create unique atmosphere and tell some kind of story, show everyday situations in unusual environment. The biggest inspiration for me is the classic paintings of the late XIX and early XX century, history, everyday life, movies, games and books,” says the Krakow-based artist.

1920s Hussars. Note the classic “Winged Hussars” meets modern warfare

1920, Mech Kosciuszko

Wojtek. Note the sniper rifle. The bear by this name was famous among Free Pole forces in WWII

Robot Medic

1920 Krakow.

“Iron FIelds”

Besides his 1920 mecha universe, he also makes trips to the past, other periods of history, and the future, to bring his unique vision to play.

“Evil Shogun”

What’s not to like about a PPSh-wielding, tiger riding she-warrior of the Carpathians

“Westerplatte” Note the Polish infantryman vs Nazi mechs and the SMS Schleswig-Holstein, 1939

“Spacefight,” showing a very Merkava-like MBT, along with mechs and troopers.

His art is the basis for the Scythe strategy game and you can find numerous prints available as well as enjoy several online galleries of his work here and here.

Thank you for your work, sir.

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.
– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday July 27, 2016: The RNs factory for curiosities in gun-mountings

Via IWM

Here we see the Powerful-type first-class protected cruiser HMS Terrible during her brief career, decked in a tropical white scheme that she used around 1900. Although beautiful in her own respect as a late 19th Century brawler, it was the use of her guns ashore that brought her lasting fame.

Built to rule the waves as independent units capable of raiding enemy merchant ships in time of war– while safeguarding HMs own from the enemy’s similar raiders– the Powerfuls were a two-ship class of very large cruisers with lots of coal bunkerage that enabled them to sail 7,000 nm at 14 knots. Should they stumble on an enemy surface raider, their twin 9.2″/40 (23.4 cm) Mark VIII cocoa-powder breechloaders could fire a 382-pound CPC shell out to 12,846 yards, which was pretty good for the era. A large number of QF 6-inch and QF 12-pounder 12 cwt naval gun (3-inch) guns made up secondary and tertiary armament (though at some point a few 6-inchers were traded for 4.7-inchers, but more on this later).

Class leader HMS Powerful was laid down in 1894 at Vickers Limited, Barrow-in-Furness while her sister and the subject of our tale, HMS Terrible, was laid down at the same time at J.& G. Thomson, Clydebank (Glasgow). As such, she was the seventh such RN vessel with that name dating back to 1694.

HMS Powerful Steaming up the English Channel, 1900, by maritime painter Charles Dixon RI. Note the black hull, buff stacks/masts, and white superstructure. Both ships of this class carried this scheme through about 1900.

Completed 8 June 1897 at a cost of £740,584, Terrible beat her design top speed of 22 knots on her trials by hitting 22.4 kn over a four-hour period and made  Portsmouth to Gibraltar with an average speed of 18, which was fast for a pre-Dreadnought era cruiser, especially one of some 15,000-tons.

They were stately ships.

The Captain’s cabin was ornate

HMS Terrible portrait via Royal Grenwich Museum

Note how Terrible differed from the first image in this post as she looked in 1897 in these two images.

Her first use in war came when the Boers kicked it off against the British in South Africa.

In November 1899, HMS Terrible disembarked six naval guns (two 4.7″, 4 12 pounders) at Durban and, accompanied by 280 members of the Naval Brigade, saw them off by train to Ladysmith, just before the Boers closed the ring and began the storied Siege of Ladysmith. The naval guns were to play an important role in disabling the fire from the Boer Long Toms long enough till a relieving column rescued the town some months later.

Her sister HMS Powerful likewise dismounted a contingent and more guns at Simonstown, and under Commander AP Ethelston above became part of a Naval Brigade, with four guns, and several hundred men. They were sent by train to join the army of Lord Methuen, which was following the western Cape Colony railway hoping to rout the Boers blocking its advance to relieve the town of Kimberley, and engaging the Boers at Graspan on 25 November, which left half the force dead or wounded.

HMS TERRIBLE He who sups with me require a devil of a long spoon

Note the straw hats common to RN sailors, coupled with Army style field uniforms

4.7 Naval Gun on Carriage Improvised by Capt. Percy Scott of H.M.S. Terrible. Photo by E. Kennard

From “South Africa and the Transvaal War” 1899:

“You may be interested to hear a little about the Navy, who have come to the front as usual and met an emergency. From the first it would seem that what was wanted were long-range guns which could shell the enemy at a distance outside the range of their Mauser rifles, and the captain of the Terrible, therefore, proposed a field-mounting for the Naval long 12-pounder of 12 cwt., which has a much longer range than any artillery gun out here. A pair of waggon wheels were picked up, a balk of timber used as a trail, and in twenty-four hours a 12-pounder was ready for land service. Captain Scott then designed a mounting for a 4.7-inch Naval gun by simply bolting a ship’s mounting down on to four pieces of pile. Experts declared that the 12-pounder would smash up the trail, and that the 4.7-inch would turn a somersault; the designer insisted, however, on a trial. When it took place, nothing of the kind happened, except that at extreme elevation the 12-pounder shell went 9000 yards and the 4.7-inch (lyddite) projectile 12,000 yards. Captain Scott was, therefore, encouraged to go ahead, and four 12-pounders were fitted and sent round to Durban in the Powerful, and also two 4.7-inch guns. People say here that these guns saved the situation at Ladysmith. A Naval friend writing to me from the camp says: ‘The Boers complain that we are not “playing the game”; they only expected to fight rooineks, not sailors who use guns that range seven miles, and they want us to go back to our ships. One of our lyddite shells went over a hill into their camp, killed fourteen men and wounded thirty. Guns of this description are not, according to the Boer idea, at all proper, and[Pg 142] they do not like our way of staggering humanity. Had these guns been landed earlier, how much might have been saved? It is a peculiar sight to see the 4.7-inch fired. Many thought it would turn over, but Captain Percy Scott appears to have well calculated the stresses; there is with a full charge of cordite a slight rise of the fore end, which practically relieves all the fastenings. Hastily put together, and crude as it looks, it really embraces all the points of a scientific mounting, and it wants a great expert to pronounce an opinion on it. The gun is mounted so high that to the uninitiated it looks as if it must turn over on firing, but it does not, and the higher angle of elevation the less strain there is on it. The arrival of our guns practically put the Royal Artillery guns out of use, for they can come into action 2000 yards behind those supplied to the soldiers and then make better practice. Their arrival has, every one admits, quite changed the situation.’

***

“Captain Scott has also rigged up a searchlight on a railway truck with a flasher attachment, the idea being to use it for communication with Kimberley and Ladysmith if these places are surrounded. It has been tested at a distance of forty miles, and proved a great success. I am told, too, that he is now engaged in designing a travelling carriage for a 6-inch gun, and has, indeed, converted the Terrible into a factory for curiosities in gun-mountings.

“Each mounting, by the way, has an inscription upon it, presumably concocted by the ship’s painter. One, a parody upon the Scotch proverb, runs, ‘Those who sup with me will require a devil of a long spoon’; another, ‘For what we are going to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful—Oom Paul’; and a third, ‘Lay me true and load me tight, the Boers will soon be out of sight.’ I saw one of these guns fired with an elevation of 24 degrees and a range of 12,000 yards, and fully expected to see the whole thing capsize, but it hardly moved. After the firing of several rounds I carefully examined the mounting, and noticed that, crude as it might appear, a wonderful amount of practical knowledge was apparent in its construction; the strain was beautifully distributed, every bolt and each balk bearing its proportionate share. It is in every way creditable to the navy that when emergency arises such a thing could be devised and made by the ship’s engineering staff in twenty-four hours.”

Besides her 4.7’s in use, Terrible‘s Marines and Tars manned a series of armored trains that they helped craft.

A British armored train designed and manned by Terrible’s crew during the Second Boer War, covered with 6 inch anchor rope, provided by the Royal Navy, to provide it protection. The improvised additional armor was the source of its name, “Hairy Mary.” (Photo from the McGregor Museum)

Royal Navy bluejackets of HMS Terrible pose by an armored train at Durban during the Boer War. Mounted on the flatbed carriage is an improvised signal lamp consisting of a searchlight and shutter mechanism, powered by a dynamo attached to the train. The officer to the right of the image is possibly Capt. Percy Scott RN. The tower of Durban Post Office can be seen in the background. IWM Q 115145

They also found time to do a spot of fishing:

The next year, Terrible sailed for China station where she repeated her efforts ashore though in a smaller scale, during the Boxer Rebellion. On that trip, she carried 300 Tommies of 2 Btln. Royal Welsh Fusiliers and 40 Royal Engineers.

Arriving in Tientsin 21 June 1900, Terrible landed four of her 12 pounders and, with the help of muscle from Col. Bower’s Wei-hai-Wei (1st Chinese) Regiment, engaged in the relief of that city the next month.

1902 Crewmen of HMS Terrible at Hong Kong. Note the teak decking and that flatcaps have replaced straw hats. The RN was changing…

Returning to the UK, she and her sister were soon obsolete (their 9.2-inch guns were unique) and, after a brief refit, were placed in ordinary in 1904 after less than a decade’s service.

During WWI, she was reactivated and used as a high speed troop transport (sans most of her armament and with reduced crews) in the Med and Northern Africa, bringing as many as 2,000 soldiers at a time to far off ports to support operations in Salonika, Egypt and Palestine.

Great War service had her in a more sedate haze gray with only her small casemate guns still mounted.

In 1920, she was disarmed, renamed the ignoble TS Fisgard III (taken from the old central-battery ironclad ex-HMS Hercules), and used as an accommodations and training ship for another decade. She was sold in July 1932 for scrap.

Likewise, Powerful was renamed TS Impregnable in November 1919, and was sold on 31 August 1929 for breaking up.

The teak decking from both of these vessels was extensively salvaged and crafted into everything from ashtrays to inkwells, chairs and desks and are out there, typically with commemorative brass plates in great numbers.

Even her bell was sold off.

Her most enduring legacy, and that of her sister Powerful, is the long-running Royal Navy Field Gun competition which has in turn evolved into the Royal Military Tournament race, which celebrates the epic Ladysmith (and later Tientsin) gun train that saw the scratch Naval Brigade manhandle six field guns each weighing nearly half a metric tonne over rough terrain to save their Army brethren.

Although a Majestic-class carrier, HMS Terrible (R93), was to carry on the old cruiser’s memory, that vessel was instead sold to Australia who commissioned her as HMAS Sydney (R17/A214/P214/L134) in 1948. Thus, the Royal Navy has not had a “Terrible” on their active list since 1920 when our old girl took the “Fisgard” moniker.

Speaking of which, TS Fisgard itself remains as the National Sea Cadet Engineering Training Centre aboard RNAS Prestwick.

More information about Terrible, especially her use at Ladysmith, can be found at Anglo-Boer War.com, Roll of Honour and the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Specs:

Ship model HMS Terrible by Oldham Hugh, via IWM

Displacement: 14,200 tons deep load
Length:     500 ft. (150 m)
Beam:     71 ft. (22 m)
Draught:     27 ft. (8.2 m)
Propulsion:
Two shafts
4-cylinder VTE steam engines
48 Bellville-type water-tube boilers
25,000 hp
Speed:     22 knots (41 km/h)
Range:     7,000 nautical miles (13,000 km) at 14 knots (26 km/h)
Endurance:     3000 tons coal
Complement: 894 (designed). By 1915, ~300.
Armament:     (Largely disarmed 1915)
2 × BL 9.2-inch (233.7 mm) Mk VIII guns
12 × QF 6 in (15.2 cm) guns
16 × 12 pdr 3 in guns
12 × 3 pdr guns
4 torpedo tubes (deactivated 1904)
Armour:
2–6 inches (51–152 mm) deck
6 inches (150 mm) barbettes
6 inches (150 mm) gun shields

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Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Aug 3, 2016: The Grand Ole Bear

With tomorrow being the 226th birthday of the U.S. Coast Guard (by proxy of the Revenue Marine Service), I figured we would get a jump on it by celebrating their most famous vessel today.

Here we see the one-of-a-kind Revenue Cutter/U.S. Navy Gunboat/Coast Guard Cutter Bear. She remained afloat some 89-years and spent about half of that in armed maritime service, making 35 patrols to Alaska, three trips to Antarctica, and serving in the Spanish-American War as well as both World Wars.

Built in 1874 by the firm of Alexander Stephen & Son in their Dundee Shipyard (Hull No. 56) on the east coast of Scotland, she was reinforced to operate in dense sea ice as a sealing vessel operating in the Far North. Crafted of live oak, with planks six inches thick and a deck of teak wood, some spots on her hull were over 30-inches thick and braced by timbers 18-inches square. A three-masted barkentine with yards on her foremast and gaffs and booms on her main and mizzen, she could make a stately 14-knots under canvass and was fitted with a steam plant that could push her at 6-knots.

Delivered to W. Grieve, Sons & Company of Dundee (and St. John), she was operated by that firm from Newfoundland until 1880 when ownership changed to one Mr. R. Steele, Jr, who continued her sealing career, completing 10 annual trips to the waters off Greenland in the search of then-valuable seal pelts.

With the fiasco that was the U.S. Army’s Greeley Expedition needing rescue from their brothers in blue, who had no such vessels capable of service in the ice, Bear was purchased for $100,000 by the U.S. Navy, 28 January 1884, at St John’s and duly commissioned after brief refit as USS Bear, 17 March 1884, with one LT. (later RADM) William Hemsley Emory (USNA 1866) in command.

After her brief naval career that involved assisting in the retrieval of Greeley and remaining associates (which can be read in more detail here) the 10-year old scratch-and-dent sealer turned rescue ship was decommissioned and struck from the Naval Register in April 1885, transferring to the Treasury Department’s Revenue Cutter Service.

Leaving New York 9 Nov after picking up a trio of 6-pounder popguns and a magazine filled with torpedoes (mines) for destroying derelicts found at sea, USRC Bear arrived in San Francisco after a fairly rapid passage of just 87 days.

Soon after arriving, she picked up her most famous master.

Captain Michael A Healy, USRC Bear. Note parrot

From the Coast Guard Historian’s office:

In 1885 the colorful “Hell Roaring”‘ Mike Healy, a dynamo of a man with an unpredictable temper, assumed command. Healy was a good skipper, and he commanded the Bear for more than nine years, longer than any other. He had another distinction as well: he was the first African-American to command a U.S. Government vessel. In time, Healy and his ship became legend in the lusty, brawling Territory of Alaska.

The Bear’s duties on the Alaskan Patrol were many. She carried mail which had accumulated at Seattle during the winter, as well as Government agents and supplies. On her trip south from Alaska, she transported Federal prisoners and other questionable characters whose presence in Alaska ‘was undesirable. The deck of the Bear often served as a court where justice was dispensed swiftly but fairly. The Bear also conducted investigations, undertook crime prevention and law enforcement. She and other cutters like her were often the only law in that turbulent part of the world. The Bear also conducted soundings to improve charts of Alaskan waters, and her surgeon furnished medical attention and surgery to natives, prospectors, missionaries, and whalers. These duties are still part of today’s Bering Sea Patrol.

“Hoisting Deer aboard the Bear, Siberia, Aug 28th 1891.”; no photo number; photographer unknown. USCG Photo

Photograph shows a Native American child and man sitting on the deck of a ship, the revenue cutter Bear during a relief voyage to rescue whalers off the Alaska coast in 1897. The man is showing the child how to smoke a pipe. By photographer Samuel Call. LOC.

In 1897, Bear was involved in the great Overland Rescue of eight whaling vessels and 250 crewmembers who were trapped in the ice and was able to penetrate to within about 85 miles of Nome, still far too short to do the whalers any good. The ship then dispatched an over-land party of’ 1LT D. H. Jarvis, 2LT B. P. Bertholf, and Surgeon S. J. Call. Equipped with dog teams, sleds, and guides, Jarvis and his companions set out for Point Barrow.

Crew of the Revenue Cutter Bear ferrying stranded whalemen,

Again, the Coast Guard office:

Before them lay a 1,600-mile journey through frozen, trackless wilderness. But the “Overland Expedition for the Relief of the Whalers in the Arctic Ocean” as it was ponderously called, became one of the great epics of the north.

During the exhausting journey, Jarvis and Call collected a herd of nearly 450 reindeer. Driving the herd ahead of them in the face of icy winds the party reached Point Barrow about three and one-half months after being put ashore by the Bear. To the despairing whalers, the arrival of the relief party was nothing short of a miracle.

An in-depth Harpers article from 1899 details the mission with maps and illustrations.

The Spanish-American War saw Revenue Cutters mobilized under Naval service but the slow and increasingly creaky Bear simply maintained her annual trip to Alaska and performed patrol on the West Coast on the outside prospect that a Spanish auxiliary cruiser may pop up over the horizon.

This followed a tough couple of years during the Klondike and Yukon gold rushes from 1898-1900 in which she was the only law enforcement asset in the territory, her bluejackets having to enforce order on more than one occasion while in port. She likewise had to rescue many a lost landlubber who had packed aboard condemned craft in Seattle and set off for Alaskan waters or bust.

Off Barrow

USRC Bear Dressed with flags circa 1900. Description: Catalog #: NH 56690

USRC BEAR Caption: At San Diego, California, before World War I. Description: Courtesy of Thomas P. Naughton, 1973. Catalog #: NH 92207 Copyright Owner: Naval History and Heritage Command

Alaskan natives dancing on deck of USRC BEAR circa 1913

When World War I came, Bear conducted neutrality patrols along the Alaskan coast while on 28 January 1915, the Revenue Cutter Service, and the U.S. Life-Saving Service were combined to form the United States Coast Guard.

COAST GUARD BUREAU OF TREASURY DEPARTMENT. REVENUE CUTTER ‘BEAR’, RIGHT, WITH S.S. CORWIN, 1916. Harris & Ewing Collection. LOC LC-H261- 6165 [P&P]

Then, came another decade of more traditional service on the frozen beat.

USCGC BEAR At Point Barrow, Alaska, 21 August 1922. Catalog #: NH 91762
Copyright Owner: Naval History and Heritage Command. Note she still maintained her 1917 “war-paint” which was not painted over with the more standard white scheme until the following year.

The midnight watch on 10 June 1924 showing the crew in the land of the midnight sun, literally. Courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard, 1930. Catalog #: NH 56694

USCGC BEAR in the Arctic Ocean. Description: Courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard, Catalog #: NH 56692

United States Coast Guard cutter BEAR (1884-1948), in ice pads. Description: Received from Coast Guard, 1930. Catalog #: NH 170.

In 1929, after 35 annual deployments to Alaska and service on the periphery of two wars, Bear was removed from the Treasury Department and offered for sale, with a half-century under her keel. Her place had already been taken in the fleet with the commissioning in late 1927 of the purpose-built steel-hulled icebreaking gunboat USCGC Northland (WPG-49).

Saved from the scrappers by the city of Oakland, California, for a token fee, she was renamed Bear of Oakland and used as a museum ship.

In 1930, she was used as the filming location for the sealer “Ghost,” in the Milton Sills as ‘Wolf’ Larsen version of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf.

Then came the famed Arctic explorer, Rear Adm. Richard E. Byrd, USN, who was looking for a (cheap but capable) vessel for his Antarctic Expedition and he purchased the Bear of Oakland from the city for just $1,050 in the Spring of 1932.

The thing is, Bear (renamed SS Jacob Ruppert) still had her 1885-mounted 6-pounders aboard (with breech blocks) which caused Byrd, officially a civilian on a civilian ship, some heartburn in Mexican ports when he stopped to recoal her on the way through the Panama Canal to Boston, but he nevertheless appeared in that New England port in August.

For visibility in the whiteout, she was painted coal black

Leaving for the Antarctic in 1934, the ship was vital to Byrd’s successful expedition, which included the explorer spending four months over-winter on the frozen continent that is discussed in his autobiography Alone.

Note her black scheme

Returning to Boston in 1935, Byrd leased Ruppert/Bear to the Navy for $1 per year, and she was stored at the Boston Naval Yard in poor condition.

Then in 1939, Byrd’s United States Antarctic Service Expedition got underway and the old Bear was refitted with a diesel engine, her original figurehead was replaced with a carved polar bear, new canvas and rigging was brought aboard, and new spars and a foreyard of fresh Oregon pine were fitted.

She was given stores for 18-months, kennels for 78 sled dogs were built on deck, and a U.S. Army M2A2 light tank was heaved aboard to test in the ice. A Barkley-Grow T8P-1 two-engine seaplane was hoisted aft.

This resulted in her second official (not counting her unofficial transfers in 1898 and 1917) Navy commission as USS Bear (AG-29), 11 September 1939.

USS Bear (AG-29), formerly the US Revenue Cutter Bear, operates in Antarctic waters during the 1939-40 season as part of the U.S. Antarctic Service. The aesthetic of the seaplane on a three-master is pure 1930s.

Photographed circa 1939, possibly during Byrd’s 1940 Antarctic Expedition. This ship also served as USS BEAR (AG-29) and as USCGC BEAR. Description: Catalog #: 80-G-1033748

In early 1941, Bear returned to the Antarctic for her third and last trip, this time to evacuate the Americans from the continent with the looming war.

USS BEAR (AG-29) Awaiting to evacuate west base in the Bay of Whales, Antarctica in 1941, she noses against bay ice. Supplies had to be carried from the base camp in the background. Ross Barrier is the thick ice on the left. Description: Catalog #: NH 56697 Copyright Owner: Naval History and Heritage Command

Returning to Boston, her newly rejuvenated sail rig was scrapped. Her spars and yard removed, only the stumps of her masts remained. Equipped with a Grumman J2F-1 seaplane and armed with some AAA mounts (seen under tarps below).

She was a warship again.

In May 1941, the Northeast Greenland Patrol was organized with Bear, her ice-strengthened Coast Guard replacement Northland, and her old sailing companion the former Interior Department ship North Star, with Captain Edward H. “Iceberg” Smith, USCG, in overall command of the force.

USS BEAR (AG-29) Off the Boston Navy Yard, 2 July 1941. Catalog #: 19-N-24311 Copyright Owner: National Archives. Note Grumman J2F-1 aircraft carried.

They soon struck pay dirt and Northland seized a three-man German weather station along with the Norwegian sealer D/S Buskø (159 gt) in September (three months before Pearl Harbor) and took her to MacKenzie Bay, on the Greenland coast, where Bear took up tow and “protective custody” of her prisoners for the trip down to Boston.

Buskø carried with a crew of 20 Norwegian quislings, a supposed German agent, and “one other dog,” who was working as a radio supply ship to keep German weather stations operating in the Far North operational. She was the first capture of a belligerent ship by U.S. Naval forces in World War II and arrived on 14 October to a big international news splash.

A few more trips around Greenland and Iceland were left for her, but by 1944, the writing was on the wall for the old warrior.

Decommissioned, 17 May 1944, Bear was transferred to the Maritime Commission for disposal, 13 February 1948.

Sold by the Maritime Commission for commercial service in 1948, she was renamed Arctic Sealer and was to be used as a sealer home ported at Halifax, Canada– her original purpose, but this largely fell by the wayside and she did not return to her old stomping grounds after all.

After moldering away in Halifax for almost 15 years, she was resold for conversion to a floating museum and restaurant at Philadelphia, PA, but she foundered under tow 90 miles south of Cape Sable, Nova Scotia on 19 March 1963.

Note that her rigging and masts have been partially restored

Her wreck site is unknown, despite the best efforts of a 1979 search conducted by cadets from the Coast Guard Academy.

The old ship remains alive in the work of maritime artists.

The famous old Coast Guard cutter BEAR. From the Collection of President Franklin D. Roosevelt Catalog #: NH 1918 Copyright Owner: Naval History and Heritage Command Original Creator: Charles Robert Patterson, artist

USCGC BEAR, 1884-1948. Description: Copied from U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1945 Catalog #: NH 56695 Copyright Owner: Naval History and Heritage Command Original Creator: Hunter Wood, USCG, artist

Her bell is at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling and is kept in tip-top shape while her binnacle has been retained at the USCGA.

The polar bear figurehead from Bear is in the collection at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. Following his celebrated 1940 expedition, Admiral Byrd presented the figurehead to the facility.

The Coast Guard maintains an extensive 40-page online scrapbook of the old Bear as well as an extensive website.

Since 1980, her name has been perpetuated by the class-leader of the Famous-class 270-foot medium endurance cutters, USCGC Bear (WMEC 901) based at Portsmouth, VA.

Coast Guard Cutter Bear transits past the Statue of Liberty in New York City June 19, 2016. The Bear is a 270-feet medium endurance cutter

As for “Roaring Mike” Healy, the Coast Guard named their newest icebreaker (WAGB-20) for him in 1997, shown below, while reindeer-herding lieutenants Berthoff and Jarvis each had a cutter named after them in modern times.

Specs:

Length: 198′ 4″
Beam: 30′
Draft: 17′ 11″
Displacement: 703 tons
Launched: 1874
Machinery: Compound-expansion steam, 25-5/8″ and 50″ diameter x 30″ stroke, 101 nominal hp (1885)
Diesel engine/sail rig (1935) Diesel only after 1939.
Speed: 14kts max on sail, 6 on steam, 8 on diesel
Complement: 51 (1884) 39 (1939)
Armament: 3 x 6-pound rapid-fire guns (1885) disarmed 1935. Equipped with small arms and light machine guns 1940.

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

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

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.

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Joseph Pennell (1857–1926). Submarines in Dry Dock, 1917. Transfer lithographic drawing. Bequest of the Estate of Joseph Pennell. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (005.00.00) LC-DIG-ppmsca-40029

The Library of Congress—which holds the largest multi-format collection of materials on the American experience in World War I—will present a major exhibition in 2017 to commemorate the centennial of The Great War.

The United States’ involvement in the “war to end all wars” began on April 6, 1917, when the U.S. Congress formally declared war on the German Empire, and concluded Nov. 11, 1918, with the armistice agreement.  The exhibition will examine the upheaval of world war, as Americans experienced it—domestically and overseas.  In the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, the exhibition will open in early April 2017 and close in January 2019.  Initially, it will feature 200 items, but during its 18-month run, numerous other artifacts will be rotated into the display.

Now through April 2017, the Library of Congress is featuring twice-monthly blogs about World War I, written by Library curators who highlight stories and collection materials they think are most revealing about the war.  The blogs can be viewed at http://www.loc.gov/blogs/.

An exhibition showing how American artists galvanized public interest in World War I is currently on display at the Library of Congress.  “World War I: American Artists View the Great War” is on view through May 6, 2017 in the Graphic Arts Galleries on the ground floor of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C.  The exhibition is free and open to the public Monday through Saturday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.  An online version can be viewed here.

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Aug 10, 2016: The Dynamite Buffalo of Rio

Cruzador Nitheroy [sic] [i.e. Nictheroy] by Marc Ferrez, Detroit Publishing Co. Image via LOC LC-D4-21236

A Dynamite Gun, that is.

In March 1892, a group of Brazilian navy commanders and army leaders started to run afoul of President Marshal Floriano Peixoto that led to an open manifesto between the military and the executive branch that basically said, either you listen to us and fix the government, or we will fix it for you. It wasn’t farfetched as the year before the Brazilian Navy had a hand in replacing President Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca.

Well, Peixoto called their bluff and by Sept. 1893 the Navy was in an open revolt known to history as Revolta da Armada, and the best ships, including the ironclad battleship Aquidabã (5,500-tons, 4×9.2-inch guns) went over to the rebels in Rio harbor/Guanabara Bay.

This left Peixoto fresh out of a Navy to command and his agents went about assembling what was derided as the “cardboard squadron” to blockade the rogue forces into surrender.

Guns were thrown on fishing vessels coastal steamers acquired locally and manned by whatever mariners could be enticed to put to sea, but everyone knew they and the handful of torpedo boats still loyal to the government would be no match for the big Aquidabã should the leviathan make a determined break for open water.

Aquidabã at Hampton Roads 1893. A formidable foe indeed.

In New York, agents of the Peixoto government purchased the pleasure yachts Feiseen and Javelin as well as the merchant steamers Britannia (Norwegian-built, 2600-tons) and El Cid for rapid conversion to warships for the new fleet.

The SS El Cid, a 7,080-ton cargo ship with some accommodation for passengers, was built for the Morgan Line at Mr. Collis P. Huntington’s Chesapeake Dry Dock & Construction Company, only the sixth ship constructed by that yard, since known as Newport News Shipbuilding. Delivered for merchant service 24 August 1893, the Brazilians purchased her almost sight unseen on 26 October.

El Cid and her three sisters (El Sud, El Norte, and El Rio) were designed as auxiliary cruisers for wartime service if needed and had three deckhouses, a 17-knot speed (very fast for the merchantmen of the day), coal bunkers arranged to protect her machinery and boilers from naval gunfire, watertight bulkheads, and a main deck with weight and space reserved for a decent naval gun forward.

Speaking of guns, the Brazilians went all out.

Dynamite gun on Brazilian ship, Nitheroy [i.e. Nictheroy] by Marc Ferrez, Detroit Publishing Co. Image via LOC LC-D4-32259

All guns are projectile weapons. In other words, they use force to propel an object down a barrel out to a target. The only thing that changes is the type of propellant and the projectile. In a Remington 870, a load of shot is scattered out of the muzzle by an explosion of smokeless powder set off by a primer. Well the dynamite gun does the same thing, it’s just that the projectile is made of TNT and it’s pushed out by a charge of compressed air. Kinda like a spud gun, but instead of a potato, you fire a bomb. The father of this device was one Edmund Zalinski.

Born in Kórnik, Prussian Poland on December 13, 1849, Edmund Zalinski immigrated to the US with his parents at age four. Not quite 15 years old, he dropped out of high school and volunteered for the Union Army during the Civil War. Serving in the artillery, he finished the war as an officer and remained in the Army once peace broke out. A pretty smart guy, he taught military science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while inventing several mechanical doo dads. One of these was a dynamite gun. Showing his device to the military, (he was still on the Army rolls as a First Lieutenant); it was love at first sight.

By the next year, Zalinski had teamed up with a company calling itself the Pneumatic Dynamite Gun Company of New York (presumably to tell itself apart from the Pneumatic Dynamite Gun Company of other towns) and was off and running. The gun was huge, and looked like something Jules Verne would use to shoot a missile to the moon. It had a 15-inch (379.5mm) bore. Using compressed air, it could catapult 500-pounds of dynamite more than two miles with better accuracy than the black-powder cannon of the era. The air was produced by a steam-powered (think locomotive) compressor fueled by coal.

Well the Navy liked the idea so much that they built the world’s first “Dynamite Cruiser.” Ordered for $350,000 from cruiser and battleship maker William Cramp and Sons, Philadelphia, she was laid down in 1887. Named appropriately the USS Vesuvius, its main battery would be these new guns. Mounting three of Zalinski’s 15-inch pneumatic guns, the guns were located with their breech along the keel of the ship three decks down and their 55-foot long barrels poking up through the 01 top deck. To aim the weapons, since the guns could not be turned, the whole ship tacked port or starboard while the pressure of the air was adjusted to correct range. Charges of various sizes ranging up to a quarter-ton could be used to do anything from bombard shore positions to sink ships and, being electrically fused, could fire on a delay or even while submerged.

Vesuvius in 1891…the three tubes on her main deck are 15inch FIXED Dynamite Guns

Other than Vesuvius, the Brazilians were the only other sucker taker for a large caliber Dynamite Gun naval mount. For the gun, they purchased one (1) full caliber 15-inch round and 10 10-inch sub-caliber projectiles meaning the ship had a very big but very brief bark. A further 2 full caliber rounds and 16 10-inch sub-calibers were loaded on the more lightly armed (2×4.7inch QF) steamer Britannia (renamed America by the Brazilians) who would serve as Nictheroy‘s escort of sorts.

As for the two yachts, they were stripped of their above deck structures, given a pivoting Hotchkiss torpedo tube and 1-pounder rapid-fire mount of the same make. They were hoisted aboard Nictheroy‘s deck for the voyage to Brazil.

Unlike on Vesuvius, in which the Dynamite Guns were fixed and the ship had to be tacked one way or the other to bring a target under fire, the gun on Nictheroy was made to slew port to starboard, allowing a much more efficient laying on target. A Rand air compressor below decks provided pneumatics for the gun.

Besides the 15-inch Zalinski forward, Nictheroy was well equipped from the works of Mr. Hotchkiss under the supervision of E. W. Very, late Lieutenant USN and now General Director of the Hotchkiss Ordnance Co, to include a 120mm rapid-fire single mount (with 50 rounds) aft of the after deck house, two rapid-fire 100mm mounts (with 200 rounds) on the bluff of the bow, eight rapid-fire 6-pounders (with 1,419 rounds) distributed broadside firing through the existing freight ports, nine 1-pounders (with 1,340 rounds) distributed on deck, and two 37mm revolving cannon on the bridge wings outside the pilothouse. Ports were cut for four torpedo tubes on deck to launch Howell automobile torpedoes of which the Brazilian agents bought 10, each with a 92-pound gun cotton warhead.

Two magazines were arranged in the former holds, reinforced with wooden planks, equipped with elevators, and flooding capabilities.

(Brazilian auxiliary cruiser, 1893-1898, formerly S.S. El Cid, later USS Buffalo) View on board, probably taken while fitting out for Brazilian Navy service in November 1893 at the Morgan Iron Works, New York City. The gun, which is mounted at the ship’s stern, is almost certainly a 4.7 quick-fire weapon built by the Hotchkiss Ordnance Co. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105944

View on board, probably taken while fitting out for Brazilian Navy service in November 1893 at the Morgan Iron Works, New York City. Her single 15-inch dynamite gun on the forecastle (left center) was offset 3 feet to starboard of the centerline and was trainable right ahead and on both bows. The gun on the right may be one of the two 33-pounder (4-inch) Hotchkiss quick-fire guns that were listed as having been mounted forward on the bluff of the bow on each side. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105942

View on board, probably taken while fitting out for Brazilian Navy service in November 1893 at the Morgan Iron Works, New York City. Shown looking forward from near the stern, aft of the main mast. The gun is probably one of the ship’s nine one-pounder Hotchkiss quick-fire weapons, eight of which were mounted on top of the deckhouses. She also had two 1-pounder Hotchkiss machine guns on top of the pilothouse. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105943

Probably shown fitting out for Brazilian Navy service in November 1893 at the Morgan Iron Works, New York City. Several barges are alongside. Nictheroy’s single 15-inch dynamite gun is on the forecastle. A small quick-fire gun, probably one of her eight 6-pounder Hotchkiss weapons, is barely visible behind a shield on the weather deck aft. Six of the other 6-pounders were carried behind ports in the hull, along with four tubes for Howell torpedoes. Her former name, El Cid, has been painted out on the bow but the ship still wears the rest of her mercantile paint scheme. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105941

In the span of just 24 days from when the Brazilians purchased El Cid, she was armed, equipped, painted, and recommissioned as Nictheroy. With the two yachts turned torpedo boats lashed to her deck and her holds filled with new shells for her never-fired guns, Nictheroy left New York on 20 November 1893. Her escort Britannia/America, carrying most of her Dynamite Gun shells, set out five days later as her armament was held up in shipping, delaying her departure.

As amazing as it sounds, just four months later this little formation took on the mighty Aquidabã and won.

On 16 April 1894, the ironclad warship was anchored off the coast of Santa Catarina, near the Fortress of Anhatomirim. Early in the morning, the loyalist government-controlled former yacht turned torpedo boat Gustavo Sampaio, accompanied by three other torpedo boats and Nictheroy in support, attacked Aquidabã. They managed to pump at least one Honeywell torpedo (some sources say two) into the bow of the once-proud battleship and, her front compartments open to the sea, she settled in the mud as her crew fled after thoroughly wrecking her.

During the battle, Nictheroy took Anhatomirim and a smaller rebel battery under naval gunfire and kept them from plastering her mosquito boat squadron.

The next day, when Nictheroy and company returned, Aquidabã and the forts were deserted and, as reported by the New York Times, a boarding crew from the Dynamite cruiser soon struck up song on the ironclad’s organ.

Over the next few years, with the naval revolt ended, Nictheroy was increasingly sidelined, no longer needed. The ship was subsequently used as an accommodation hulk for the school for apprentice seamen at Rio de Janeiro.

Going back home

When the United States entered into war with Spain in 1898, Nictheroy‘s three sisters were bought by the U.S. Navy from commercial service and, after a few guns were added, were used as the auxiliary cruisers USS Yosemite, USS Yankee and USS Dixie.

Remembering the Nictheroy, U.S. agents approached the Brazilians and arranged to purchase the former American steamer for the battle line (they already had the only other Dynamite cruiser in service, USS Vesuvius) on 11 July 1898. However, the Brazilians had the last laugh and disarmed the Nictheroy completely, forcing her back to the East Coast to rearm.

Rearmed with a more traditional battery of 2×5″/40cals and 4×4″/40s and refitted, she was commissioned into U.S. service as USS Buffalo on 22 September 1898 at New York Naval Yard. However, as hostilities halted with the signing in Washington of a Protocol of Peace between the United States and Spain more than a month before, her wartime service was moot and she was decommissioned, 3 July 1899 after a cruise to Manila.

A bugler sounding the call to breakfast in 1898. The gun appears to be a 4″/40cal. At this time the ship carried four of these weapons plus two 5/40 guns. Courtesy of Commander Donald J. Robinson, USN (Medical Service Corps), 1975. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 82990

Buffalo was brought back out of ordinary 2 April 1900, to serve as a Training Ship, a role she maintained for the next five years. During this period, she undertook four voyages to the Philippines with replacement crews for the Asiatic Fleet and on one of the return legs accomplished a circumnavigation.

She does look handsome in white! Photographed in 1902, while serving as a training ship. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 56644

USS Buffalo Photographed at Algiers in January 1904 while serving as a training ship. Courtesy of Rear Admiral Ammen Farenholt, USN (MC), 1933. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 434

A footlocker inspection on the main deck in 1904. The Sailor on the left, closest to the camera, is Chester Bryon Harper. Courtesy of Mr. Gene B. Reid (Harper’s grandson), 1983. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 94193

After layup at Mare Island Navy Yard in 1905, she was refitted for work as a transport and largely disarmed. She continued her operations carrying replacement crews to the far off Asiatic Fleet on China station, carried Marines to Nicaragua in 1909, and operated off Mexico during the troubles and civil war there.

In 1914, Buffalo undertook a seven-month expedition to Alaska to build radio stations and towers up and down the coast, many of which remained operational as late as the 1960s. Her expedition, which included some 44 civilian technicians, upgraded the facilities at Woody Island near Kodiak, on St. Paul and St. George in the Pribilof Islands, on the island of Unalga, and at Dutch Harbor near Unalaska as well as built new ones at Sitka and Cordova.

USS Buffalo at Mare Island, California loading materials for the expedition to Alaska radio stations. 1914 NHC Accession #: UA 557

Dressed with flags at Kodiak, Alaska, on Independence Day 1914, during the 1914 Alaskan Radio Expedition. Note her extensive away boats. Collection of Admiral Montgomery M. Taylor, donated by Louisa R. Alger, 1962. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105444-A

At the naval coaling station at Sitka, Alaska, in October or late September 1914. During the 1914 Alaskan Radio Expedition. Courtesy of the Naval Historical Foundation. Collection of Admiral Montgomery M. Taylor, donated by Louisa R. Alger, 1962. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105470

Teddy, a ship’s mascot, on the ship’s forecastle circa mid-1914 during the 1914 Alaskan Radio Expedition. Teddy, probably an Alaskan bear cub, is also shown posing with one of the ship’s divisions in Photo # NH 105464. Note the ship’s capstain in the background. Collection of Admiral Montgomery M. Taylor, donated by Louisa R. Alger, 1962. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105596.

When World War I broke out, Buffalo transported the U.S. diplomatic mission to Russia’s Provisional Government after the fall of the Tsar in 1917 and was then refitted as a destroyer tender (AD-8), serving in Europe until Sept. 1919 when she transitioned to the Pacific, serving in China and Japan until 1922.

On 12 November 1918 in European waters wearing pattern camouflage dazzle paint. Note her masts have been enhanced. Photographed by E. J. Kelty. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 56642

At Gibraltar circa December 1918, with USS Schley (Destroyer No. 103 ) alongside and the collier USS Jupiter (Fuel Ship No. 3) in the background. Note that Schley is still wearing pattern camouflage, while Buffalo has been repainted from the image above into overall grey. Also, of interest, Jupiter with her distinctive transfer stations, would go on to become USS Langley CV-1. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 56643

Now all gray. At Villefranche on the French Mediterranean coast in late 1918 or early 1919. Donation of Captain Stephen S. Roberts, USNR (Retired), 2008. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 105907

The ship’s baseball team ashore in the Azores in March 1919. Photographed by St. Jacques. Courtesy of Paul H. Silverstone, 1983. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 94998

No longer useful, the aging steamer was decommissioned on 15 November 1922 at San Diego. She was used as a barracks ship until stricken from the Navy List on 27 May 1927. She was sold four months later for scrap. It is not believed that any artifacts remain from her although I would like to hope that some museum in Brazil has her Dynamite Gun in a dusty back room.

As for her merchant sisters turned SpAmWar auxiliary cruisers: El Sud/USS Yosemite hunted down the Spanish steamer Antionio Lopez during the war and was scuttled after being wrecked in a storm in 1900; El Norte/USS Yankee was very active off Cuba and survived as a Naval Militia training ship until she ran aground on Spindle Rock near Hen and Chickens lightship in 1908; and El Rio/USS Dixie (AD-1) gave her full measure as a warship then training ship and finally the Navy’s first official destroyer tender before she was sold for scrapping in 1922– meaning El Cid/Nictheroy/Buffalo was the last survivor of her class.

Specs:

Displacement: 7,080 tons (6,635 t)
Length: 406 ft. 1 in (123.77 m)
Beam: 48 ft. 3 in (14.71 m)
Draft: 20 ft. 8 in (6.30 m)
Propulsion
Coal fired boilers
Steam turbine
Single propeller
Speed: Designed for 17 knots, made 14.5 knots (26.9 km/h; 16.7 mph) in Naval service with armament.
Complement: A figure of 350 officers and enlisted given for Brazilian service. In U.S. service this was reduced to as little as 150 by 1898 and to >50 before 1909.
Armament:
(Brazil, 1893)
1×15 inch Dynamite Gun
1x 4.7-inch (120mm) rapid-fire single mount
2 4 inch (100mm) mounts
8 6-pounders
9 1-pounders
2 37mm revolving cannon
4 torpedo tubes
(US, 1898)
2x 5 in (130 mm) guns
4x 4 in (100 mm) guns
(*Disarmed by 1909 though her 5 inchers may have been removed by 1900)

*In 1917 she probably was rearmed, most likely with a few 3″/23 cal mounts and 6-pdrs though I cannot confirm this.

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

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

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.

PRINT still has it place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Here we see a beautiful Springfield Armory 1903 MK I .30-06 SPRG caliber rifle with an uber rare and original Pedersen device.

Mr. Pedersen’s device was a very simple top loading, blowback-operated pistol without a grip. Its barrel was the exact size, shape, and length of the standard .30-06 M1906 cartridge case. All the soldier had to do was pull out the regular turnbolt of his Springfield and any .30-06 ammo, insert the Pedersen Device, attach the device’s 40-round magazine, and let her rip. The device used the host rifle’s trigger group, sights, barrel, and stock. The device would cycle new rounds, and eject spent cases through a small port cut in the side of the rifle.

Other modifications to the rifle were to the sear, magazine cut off, and trigger to allow the regular bolt or the Pedersen device to be used interchangeably. In tests a trained infantryman could rip off two full magazines in less than a minute—a 500% increase in the Springfield’s rate of fire.

To accommodate the device’s short action (it had to fit completely in the space occupied by the Springfield’s original bolt), it fired a short .30 caliber pistol sized round. This 7.62x20mm round, a cross between .32 ACP and the WWII-era .30 Carbine loads, held a 80-grain bullet over 3.5 grains of bull’s-eye powder which gave a blistering 1300fps out of a rifle barrel. This allowed the Pedersen device rounds, although pipsqueak in size, to still be lethal and accurate enough to reach out to 300 yards.

Overall, the device added 1.75 pounds to the weight of the standard Springfield rifle, but, best of all, all the all the infantryman in the field had to do to convert back over to .30.06 was pull out the device and insert the regular bolt and ammo. Two guns with the weight of one!

Of course, WWI ended before the Pedersen could be fielded in great numbers, and the lean peacetime Army brass decided it wasn’t worth keeping so most ended up smashed or burned in the 1920s, hence their great rarity today.

All images via Collectors Firearms, where the above gun is available for just $39,999

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Aug 17, 2016: The quiet but everlasting Alert

Photo by William Henry Jackson/Detroit Publishing Company, Via LOC LC-D4-21686 [P&P]

One of the few new naval ships built after the Civil War, Alert was built with funding authorized by the 42nd Congress and listed at the time as a Sloop of War. Powered by both sail and steam, she was the leader of a three-ship class and was 175 feet long, displaced 541 tons and were designed to carry up to a half-dozen Civil War surplus 9-inch guns split between broadsides.

Laid down at John Roach & Sons Shipbuilders in Chester, PA in 1873, Alert was commissioned 27 May 1875.

While under construction, her armament scheme was converted to a single 11-inch smoothbore Dahlgren rifle, two 9″ Dahlgrens, one 60-pounder Parrott, a single 12-pounder “boat” howitzer that weighed only 300-pounds in its carriage, and one Gatling gun– the latter two of which could be sent ashore by a naval landing party to conduct business with the locals as needed. Speaking of which, she could afford to send her small Marine detachment as well as up to 40 rifle-armed bluejackets on such festivities, but more on this later.

Alert had two sisters completed at the same time, one, Huron, was built at Roach and lost tragically on her first overseas deployment off the coast of North Carolina 24 November 1877 near Nag’s Head.

Although the Life Saving Service had been started three years prior to the Huron running aground, due to massive under funding the Service only manned stations in North Carolina for three winter months beginning December 1; one week too late to be of help to the crew of the Huron. The outrage over the Huron tragedy prompted Congress to fund the Service year-round. The Life Saving Service eventually evolved into the modern U.S. Coast Guard.

The second sistership to Alert, Ranger, was constructed at Harlan & Hollingsworth and commissioned 27 Nov 1876.

The trio were the last iron warships to be built for the U.S. Navy, with follow-on designs moving to steel.

Alert at the Boston Navy Yard in 1875. Note details of her iron hull; boat. Note her dark overall scheme, which she would keep for most of the 19th Century. Catalog #: NH 57105

Alert‘s first decade was quiet, being assigned to the Training Squadron where she carried Annapolis mids on summer cruises until being assigned to the exotic Asiatic Station in May 1876. There she would continue operations from China to Australia and Japan for more than a decade, only venturing back to the West Coast for regular overhauls.

In 1882, she was embarrassingly involved in a nighttime crack up with the Japanese ship Jingei, a side-paddle steamer that served as the Imperial yacht for Emperor Meiji. It was the Jingei‘s fault and no members of the court were aboard at the time.

Besides fighting the occasional Chinese pirate gangs on the water and warlords ashore, improving U.S. charts of the region, showing the flag, and just generally protecting American interests from Hawaii to Singapore to Alaska, Alert had to come to the rescue of lost and wrecked vessels from time to time.

This included responding to the disastrous 1889 hurricane in Samoa that left German, British and U.S. naval vessels alike wrecked and battered. Once she arrived, her crew helped perform repairs on the immobilized USS Nipsic and escorted her back to Hawaii.

Photographed after the Samoa hurricane of March 1889. She was configured thus until 1899. Note her white scheme and her extensive awnings in the tropical heat. Catalog #: NH 586

Following this effort, the 15-year-old gunboat with lots of miles on her hull sailed for Mare Island for refit.

In dry-dock at the Mare Island navy yard, about 1890. Catalog #: NH 71061

And from the stern– In dry-dock at the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, about 1890. Note her huge rudder and prop Photograph from the William H. Topley Collection. Courtesy of Mr. Charles M. Loring, Napa, California, 1969. Catalog #: NH 68684

In 1891, with seals in Alaska facing near-extinction, the U.S. and Britain formed a joint 11-ship Bering Sea Squadron that operated in the area to enforce a prohibition on hunting over the summer. During this period, Alert intercepted and ejected dozens of interloping vessels from the exclusion zone.

Spending the next few years summering in Alaska chasing poachers and wintering in the Pacific Squadron’s stomping grounds in Korea and China, Alert was transferred to operate off the coast of Mexico and Central America in 1895, where she would spend the majority of three rough and tumble years in the politics of the banana Republics.

During this time, in 1898 Nicaragua’s President Zelaya decided to extend his tenure for still another term, the local U.S. consular agent requested Alert to anchor in the harbor of Bluefields, and stand by in case of an attack on the city.

On the morning of 7 February, the American flag rose union downward over the consulate– a sign of distress. In answer to this signal, an expeditionary force of 14 Marines and 19 Sailors was landed by Alert, Gatling gun in tow. On the following day, the government forces agreed to guarantee the safety of all foreigners, and the landing party was withdrawn, though she remained on station there through April.

Returning to Mare Island, she remained on guard against a possible Spanish attack (there was something of a war going on with Spain at the time) but when no such attack likely after Mr. Dewey’s actions in Manila Bay, Alert was decommissioned and partially disarmed on 4 June 1898.

After three years in ordinary, she was used as a training ship after 1901 and loaned off and on to the California Naval Militia until 1910.

Photographed about 1901. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Catalog #: NH 57108

Off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, about 1901. Catalog #: NH 57109

Postcard photo, probably taken while she was serving as California State Naval Militia Training Ship, 1906-1910. Note she still has some cannon mounted. Courtesy of Commander D.J. Robinson, USN (Ret), 1978 Catalog #: NH 86255

Once again emerging from ordinary, Alert was further converted to allow for transient sailors and became one of the Navy’s first official submarine tenders (AS-4), placed back in full commission 1 July 1912.

Post card image of USS Alert (Submarine Tender #4) moored at San Pedro, CA. The submarines alongside are “F” class boats, circa 1916. Note the wicker deck furniture over her extensive awnings.  Via Navsource: Photo – Ron Reeves Caption – Ric Hedman

USS Alert (Submarine Tender #4), serving as tender for the Third Submarine Division of the Pacific Fleet, laying alongside the wharf at Kuahua, U.S. Naval Station, Pearl Harbor, 22 August 1917. K-3 (Submarine #34) and K-4 (Submarine #35) are identifiable alongside; the unidentifiable “boat” is probably either K-7 (Submarine #38) or K-8 (Submarine #39). Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval History and Heritage Command. Catalog #: NH 42542

Ship’s baseball team, 1917. Note her deckhouse. Photo via San Diego City Archives.

This mission ended for her when the U.S. entered World War I and, for the first time in decades, she left the Pacific and made her way to the waters of her birth along the Eastern seaboard, briefly serving as a depot ship in Bermuda for outbound convoys to the Great War in Europe.

USS Alert. In port, circa late 1918 or early 1919. Note the old cannon used as a bollard in the left foreground, and the submarine chaser (SC) tied up astern of Alert. Donation of Dr. Mark Kulikowski, 2006. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 104155

With the war winding down, she reverted to the Pacific Squadron, once again serving as a submarine tender until she was decommissioned 9 March 1922 after a very respectable 47 years of service. She was sold three months later for scrap and I can find no trace of her today.

During her time in service, Alert had 23 official captains, including future RADM. William Thomas Sampson, known for his later victory in the Battle of Santiago.

As for her sisters, 60 sailors from the wreck of the Huron are buried together in Section Five of the United States Naval Academy Cemetery in well cared for lots while the ship herself is protected by federal mandate in her watery grave. A highway marker near Nag’s Head mentions her loss.

Alert‘s other classmate, USS Ranger, (later renamed USS Rockport and USS Nantucket PG-23/IX-18), was involved in the Barrundia Affair with Guatemala, patrolled the coast during WWI, and served as the training ship for first the Massachusetts Nautical Training School then the Merchant Marine Academy, only passing to the scrappers in 1958.

Ranger‘s original engine —  the only back-acting type known to be still in existence—was saved from destruction and is on display at the American Merchant Marine Museum in Kings Point, New York.

The last of her class.

Specs:

Displacement: 1,202 long tons
Length: 175 ft. (53 m)
Beam: 32 ft. (9.8 m)
Depth of hold: 15 ft. (4.6 m)
Draft: 13 ft. (mean)
Installed power: Five boilers driving 1 × 560 ihp, 64 rpm compound back-acting steam engine
Propulsion: 1 × 12 ft. diameter × 17.5 ft. pitch propeller, auxiliary sails
Speed: 10 knots under steam
Complement: 138 officers and enlisted (typically including a 15 man Marine detachment until 1898). Berthing for 200 after 1901.
Armament:
(1875)
1 × 11 in (280 mm) Dahlgren gun
2 × 9 in (230 mm) Dahlgren guns
1 × 60 pdr (27 kg) Parrott rifle
1 × 12 pdr (5.4 kg) howitzer
1 × Gatling gun
spar torpedoes for her steam launch (provision deleted after 1889)
(1901)
6 small pieces in gundeck broadside, possibly 6 pdrs or 3-inchers
(1912)
Largely disarmed other than saluting pieces and small arms.

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

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

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.

PRINT still has it place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Here we see a group of of the 2nd General Krukovskii’s Mountain-Mozdok Regiment of the Terek Cossacks, with their distinctive Cossack model Mosin-Nagant Model 91s.

The Cossacks were organized somewhat differently than the regular line cavalry and also varied slightly between the different “hosts” (voyska)—Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, etc.—however, in general, a Cossack regiment consisted of six companies (sotni), grouped into two battalions (diviziony) of three companies. Each host maintained a “1st regiment” of men on active duty with the regular army. Each of these regiments had a “2nd regiment” back home on the farm of those who had recently completed service and could be recalled within two weeks. Then there was a further “3rd regiment” of older men in their 30s and even 40s who could muster to the flag inside of a month if needed.

The small Terek host hailed from the Caucasus Military District along the banks of the Terek River and had their headquarters at Vladikavkaz, now the capital city of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania, Russia.

In peacetime the Terek host provided four “1st regiments” (1st General Krukovskii’s Mountain-Mozdok, 1st Sunzha-Vladikavkaz, 1st Volga, 1st General Yermolov’s Kizlyar-Grebensk) along with four batteries of horse artillery while the Terek Guard Watch [Terskaya Okhranaya Strazha]  remained in the krug itself to handle bandits and raiders and the Terek horse farm kept breeding and breaking ponies. The Tereks also had the honor of providing two squadrons [Terskaya Kazach’ya Sotnya] to the Tsar’s own personal household cavalry escort [Sobstvennyi EGO IMPERATORSKAGO VELICHESTVA Konvoi].

‘The Last Inspection” depicting Tsar Nicholas II inspecting the Cossacks of the convoy at Pskov March 15, 1917 after he abdicated. The men of the unit in many cases had been with the sovereign for decades and at that moment, was the last loyal force in the country. These men were made up of two sontia of Terek Cossacks and another two of Kuban.

When the war kicked off in 1914, the four “2nd regiments” as well as the quartet of “3rd regiments” were swiftly called up, which is what you see in our brave, if aging, lads above.

The 2nd Mountain-Mozdok Regiment found itself part of the Russian Imperial Army’s 1st Caucasian Cavalry Corps of Lt. General Nikolai Nikolayevich Baratov (Baratashvili)  fighting the Turks in Persia during the Great War. The corps, as its name implies, was formed of almost two-thirds horse mounted units but did have some artillery (38 guns) and infantry attached. It was composed of the Cossacks mentioned above and reinforced by such exotic units as the Georgian Cavalry Legion (which Colonel Kaikhosro Cholokashvili, later a white partisan leader in the Russian Civil War served in), Omansky Cossack Regiment, the Katerinadraski Cossack Regiment, a unit of Armenians, and Shkuro’s Kuban Special Cavalry Detachment (under Andrey Shkuro who would also lead white partisans in the Civil War). This assemblage of units was as colorful and interesting as any that graced the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars. It would fight the Ottoman Turks and their German allies across the deserts of modern day Iraq and Iran for the next four years and survive to be the last of the Tsar’s armies.

The Russians supported the Persian Shah and even provided officers for his own Cossack brigade of bodyguards. They fought rebellious tribes, demonstrators and bandits on the Shah’s behalf and served the greater Russian political good in the region.

General Baratov landed at Bandar-e Pahlavi in November 1915 and marched rapidly to Tehran where the Shah (Ahmet) was in hiding at the Russian Legation after being forced out in a coup. The Russian force reinstalled the Shah and then marched to the Hamadan to scatter the pro-German tribes and small units of Turkish troops.

He attempted to relive the British Forces under siege at Kut and indeed made it as far as Hamadan (some 100 miles away). Baratov fought Ottoman forces consisting of scattered Mesopotamian infantry, some Persian irregulars, and a handful of German officers. The Russians routed a Turkish force under German Count Kaunitz at Kangavar. Pushing on, they captured Kermanshah on February 26, 1916 and Kharind on March 12th where the army encamped and awaited an advance on Baghdad. It was not until the Turkish Gen. Ali Ishan Bey’s XIII Corps entered the theater (June 1916) that Baratov was finally met by a sizable force. The two forces met at Khanaqin where Baratov withdrew after a sharp skirmish.

Gen. Baratov led his force back into Persia to regroup and attempt to link up with British forces in northern Mesopotamia. In January 1917 the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich Romanov was sent to join Baratov’s unit as punishment for taking part in the assassination of Rasputin. The Grand Duke met the general at the Cavalry Corps headquarters at Kasvin in northern Persia. The two became fast friends and the young Romanov, who had represented Russia at the 1912 Olympics in equestrian events, served on the general’s staff.

After the Russian Revolution (March 1917) Baratov’s forces began to suffer terrible desertions. By the time the Bolsheviks opened peace negotiations with the Germans and Turks in November 1917 Baratov could barely field an effective regiment. Many of his Cossacks would return hundreds of miles from Persia to their stanisa villages only to join the new White cause in the brewing Russian Civil War.

Baratov did in fact meet with a force sent north from the British in April 1917 which included a Col. Rowlandson, who would served as a liaison until the Caucasian Cavalry Corps linked with the British Dunsterforce in February 1918. By this time the Caucasian Cavalry Corps only consisted of Baratov, Gen. Lastochkin, Col. Bicherakov, Col. Baron Meden and about 1000 loyal Kuban and Terek cossacks (including our veterans of the 2nd Mozdoc). The rest of the Russian soldiers had left for home or deserted and milled around the town on their own recognizance. Baratov and his men, largely a forgotten army with no home, assisted the British in Persia until the end of World War One.

Many of the Russian officers found appointments as aides and eventually transitioned into the British Army. The Grand Duke Dimitri even came away with a commission as British Captain at the time. When the last of Baratov’s troops dissolved near Baku as part of Dunsterforce in August 1918, the old Ossetian general supported the fledgling state of Georgia, which was briefly independent. He lost a leg to a terrorist’s bomb there in 1919 and left the country just before the Red Army occupied it.  He died in 1932 while in Paris in exile. While in France he worked as senior editor of the Russki Invalid newspaper and was president of the Union of White Officers veterans group. He is buried in the Russian cemetery in St-Genevieve de Bois and his diaries and correspondence are held at the Hoover Archives.

As for the distinctive rifles shown above, the Soviets used the  Cossack/Dragoon pattern to convert the overly-long M91 into the more common M.91/30 that we know today.

Alan Seeger was born in New York City on June 22, 1888, and received a BA from Harvard University in 1910 where he edited and wrote for the Harvard Monthly– alongside future 10 Days that Shook the World author John Reed and had  T.S. Eliot and Walter Lippmann in his classes.

A poet and idealist of sorts, he moved to Paris and was a resident of the City of Lights when the Germans came in 1914. A foreigner in France, he did what many both before and after did– joined up in the Foreign Legion. Fighting at the time in metropolitan France, a rarity for the unit, Seeger was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre in the Somme, riddled by a Boche Spandau while cheering on a charge of his fellow legionnaires, age 28.

He gave his last full measure on July 4, 1916 along with 900 other legionaries, including fellow poet, Camil Campanya. Able to seize the battlefield, the Germans withdrew from the ruined village on July 8.

The Legion remembered him in a ceremony on the 100th anniversary last month, and unveiled a marker.

Seeger is perhaps best remembered for his poem, I have a rendezvous with Death.

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ‘twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear…
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Aug 24, 2016: 100-feet of Turkish Surprise

Here we see the steam-powered Nordenfelt-type submarine Abdülhamid of the Ottoman sultan’s fleet (Osmanlı Donanması) as she was completed in 1886.

The Ottoman Navy dates back to the 14th Century and was hardened in centuries of warfare with the Greeks, Russians, Venetians, Spaniards, Mamelukes, and Portuguese and ventured as far as the English Colonies in North America and the Indian Ocean by the 17th Century. However, the fleet peaked around 1708 and fell into steady decline, being annihilated first by the Tsar’s navy at Chesma in 1770 and then again by the Brits at Navarino in 1827. This led to a building and modernization spree under the reign of first Sultan Mahmud II, then Abdülaziz.

While the Ottoman Navy was largely inactive during the Crimean War, by 1876 the fleet was again the focus of attention as the country loomed to yet another war with Imperial Russia.

And, after getting another licking at the hands of the neighbors to the North, new Sultan Abdülhamid II had on his hands 13 ironclads including the British made Mesudiye (formerly HMS Superb) as well as a number of dated wooden vessels and river gunboats. Further, the Ottomans had been introduced to the bad end of a new weapon when Russian torpedo boats carrying surfaced launched torpedoes in 1878 sank the Turkish ship Intibah.

Unable to afford to go bigger, the Sultan needed to stretch his funds and innovate.

Enter Swedish industrialist Thorsten Nordenfelt.

With the help of British inventor George Garrett, who had crafted two small steam-powered submersibles in England, in 1885 the Swede living in the British Isles paid to build a 64-foot steam-powered submarine of some 56-tons, which he dubbed unimaginatively the Nordenfelt I.

The Greeks, fearing the Sultan’s ironclads and taking a cue from the Russian use of torpedoes in the late great regional hate, promptly purchased the tiny submarine– though they never used her. Further, and most ominous for the Turks, the Russians were looking at Nordenfelt’s designs as well.

Nordenfelt I in trials in Landskrona, Sweden just before she was handed over to the Greeks. (September 1885)

With the writing on the wall and already falling behind in the submarine arms race, the Ottomans doubled down and bought two improved Swedish steamboat subs.

Ordered 23 January 1886, the Turkish vessels were longer, some 100-feet overall, and as such topped 100-tons on the surface (160 submerged). Powered by a Lamm locomotive type engine and boiler fed by up to 8-tons of coal, they could make 6 knots on the surface by steam, then did the unusual and shut down the engine to dive and carry on underwater until the pressure on the boiler dropped– usually just a few minutes or so.

Armament was a pair of 14-inch torpedo tubes forward and outside of the pressure hull. An initial stockpile of Schwarzkopf torpedoes (Whiteheads made in Germany) were acquired, each capable of carrying a guncotton warhead some 600 yards. These fish were popular with navies of the time, being purchased by the Chinese and Japanese as well as both the Spanish and Americans on the eve of their dust up in 1898.

For surface action, Mr. Nordenfelt offered a pair of double-barreled 35mm heavy machine guns of his own design. Good guy Thorsten.

Nordenfelt two-barreled 25mm gun on naval mounting. The guns sold to the Turks were the same, except in a larger caliber. (Courtesy: Royal Armouries)

Barrow Shipyard in England built the two submarines under contract by Nordenfeld in 1886. The first sub, Nordenfeld-2 was dubbed Abdülhamid and was launched 9 June 1886 after the sections were assembled at the Tersane-i Amire shipyards in Constantinople.

The second vessel, built as Nordenfeld-3 in sections, was commissioned at Tersane-i Amire as Abdülmecid on 4 August 1887 (though she never had her torpedo tubes fitted).

Library of Congress’s Abdul Hamid II Collection

The Sultan paid some £22,000 for the two ships and their gear all told, which was quite an inflation from the £1,200 that the Greeks paid for their Nordenfeld boat.

The Ottomans were also forced to establish an entire infrastructure to support their fledgling submarine arm.

Turkish torpedo factory. Library of Congress’s Abdul Hamid II Collection

Turkish assembled torps. Library of Congress’s Abdul Hamid II Collection

Divers at the Imperial Naval Arsenal, 1893. Library of Congress’s Abdul Hamid II Collection

Battalion divers at the Imperial Naval Arsenal. Library of Congress’s Abdul Hamid II Collection

After trials in the Golden Horn and Bosporus in late 1887, the two submarines sailed together with a tender for the Bay of Izmit in 1888 and the wheels fell off. They suffered from stability problems and super easy to swamp on the surface in any sort of sea state. The longest leg of the trip completed without the assistance from their tender was just 10 miles.

Due to their lack of reliable propulsion while submerged, they were static when awash and, being very primitive indeed, their raw crews (no such thing as experienced submariners in 1888) were unwilling to submerge very deep, though they were thought capable of 160-feet submergence.

Still, that spring, Abdülhamid made history by firing a Schwarzkopf while submerged in the general direction of a target barge– the first such submarine to do so.

Like the Greeks, the Turks soon had their fill of their tricky Nordenfelds and the vessels were docked after the Izmit tests and scrapped in 1914 when it was found they were in condemned condition.

As for Nordenfelt, he had similar luck. Getting out of the U-boat biz after his fourth submarine sank while en route to the Russians, he was forced out of his machine gun company by a fellow named Hiram Maxim in 1890, which he fought in the courts for years without success. Bankrupt, he retired in 1903.

Specs:

Image by Michael Crisafulli

Displacement: 100 tons surfaced (160 submerged)
Length: 30.5 m (100 ft.)
Beam: 6 m (20 ft.)
Propulsion: Coal-fired 250 hp Lamm steam engine, 1 boiler, 1 screw
Bunkers: 8 tons of coal
Crew: 2 gunners, 2 firemen, 1 coxswain, 1 engineer, 1 officer (7)
Speed:
6 kn (11 km/h) surfaced (10 on trials)
4 kn (7.4 km/h)
Test depth: 160 ft (49 m)
Armament:
Two 356 mm torpedo tubes, Schwarzkopf torpedoes
Two 35mm Nordenfelt twin machine guns

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

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

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.

PRINT still has it place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

While the sun may have never set on the British Empire (until 1956, anyway), the Brits were big fans of using technology to their advantage to allow units with small footprints to control large areas.

From 1912 through the 1950s, the water-cooled .303 caliber sustained fire Maxim machine gun variant produced by Vickers Limited, best known just as the Vickers, filled the bill.

1st Battalion, Manchester Regiment gunners sit with their WWI era Vickers gun during a demonstration of preparedness for jungle warfare in Malaya, circa August 1941. They would become POWs in just a few months.

Weighing in at over 40-pounds (sans bullets and water) old Mr. Vick was a beast, but by nature of its water jacket could fire almost forever or until your ammo supply ran out, making a static defense point able to control everything in a 360 degree arc out to 1,000 yards with accuracy, with grazing fire a death sentence for infantry trying to move on the emplacement.

When using plunging fire, especially when sited from elevated positions, the Vickers could reach out and produce a beaten zone over 4,000 yards away. As such, these guns were equipped with pretty effective and advanced for their time clinometers on which trained crews could calculate angles of slope (or tilt), elevation or depression of their target and match their gun to make an intersection of brass and body.

It was simple, the machine gun in its truest form.

A Vickers machine gun post, June 1919. Of the 13 British infantry battalions that served during the 3rd Afghan War and the Waziristan uprising (1919-1920), nine were Regular and the rest Territorial. Photo: National Army Museum via Under Every Leaf.

Vickers machine gun emplacement in a sangar, North West Frontier Province between the wars. The pouches on the back on the No. 2 (with his hand up) are for clinometer and the foresight bar deflector – seldom seen in the field. The headdress of British Indian troops was normally the khaki puggaree which varied by the soldier’s religion–Muslims with a pointed kullah skullcap inside the puggaree and Sikhs with a more open version that allowed their uncut hair to remain in a bun atop their head, while most Hindu troops wore a simple turban. Photo via British Empire Uniforms 1939-45.

Sepoys manning a Vickers Machine Gun, Spinwam, south west of Peshawar. The sepoy manning the gun has a .455 Webley in a holster on his belt and a tin mug fastened to the 08 haversack on his back.

The Vickers was only replaced in the 1960s by the FN MAG 58, termed the L7 General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG), which has been affectionately nicknamed the “gimpy” by generations of British troops.

Mr. Vick, however, endures in the armories of many former British colonies. While no longer actively used, the 100+ year old design is still an effective defensive machine gun if needed as long you bring the water and .303.

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday Aug. 31, 2016: The Nebraska stiletto

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval History and Heritage Command. Catalog #: NH 97970

Here we see the four-piper Omaha-class light (scout) cruiser, USS Omaha (CL-4) besieged by pelicans in harbor, 8 December 1923. She was fast, could hit hard, chase down enemy steamers, and do it all with an air of efficiency.

With the United States no doubt headed into the Great War at some point, Asst. Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt helped push a plan by the brass to add a 10 fast “scout cruisers” to help screen the battle line from the enemy while acting as the over-the-horizon greyhound of the squadron, looking for said enemy to vector the fleet to destroy.

As such, speed was a premium for these dagger-like ships (they had a length to beam ratio of 10:1) and as such these cruisers were given a full dozen Yarrow boilers pushing geared turbines to 90,000 shp across four screws. Tipping the scales at 7,050 tons, they had more power on tap than a 8,000-ton 1970s Spruance-class destroyer (with four GE LM2500s giving 80,000 shp). This allowed the new cruiser class to jet about at 35 knots, which is fast today, and was on fire in 1915 when they were designed. As such, they were a full 11-knots faster than the smaller Chester-class scout cruisers they were to augment.

Artist’s conception of the final class design, made circa the early 1920s by Frank Muller. Ships of this class were: OMAHA (CL-4), MILWAUKEE (CL-5), CINCINNATI (CL-6), RALEIGH (CL-7), DETROIT (CL-8), RICHMOND (CL-9), CONCORD (CL-10), TRENTON (CL-11), MARBLEHEAD (CL-12), and MEMPHIS (CL-13).Catalog #: NH 43051

For armament, they had a 12 6″/53 Mk12 guns arranged in a twin turret forward, another twin turret aft, and eight guns in Great White Fleet throwback above-deck stacked twin casemates four forward/four aft. These guns were to equip the never-built South Dakota (BB-49) class battleships and Lexington (CC-1) class battle cruisers, but in the end were just used in the Omahas as well as the Navy’s two large submarine cruisers USS Argonaut (SS-166), Narwhal (SS-167), and Nautilus (SS-168).

Besides the curious 6-inchers, they also carried two 3″/50s in open mounts, six 21-inch torpedo tubes on deck, four torpedo tubes near the water line (though they proved very wet and were deleted before 1933), and the capability to carry several hundred mines.

Mines on an Omaha class (CL 4-13) light cruiser Description: Taken while the ship was underway at sea, looking aft, showing the very wet conditions that were typical on these cruisers’ after decks when they were operating in a seaway. Photographed circa 1923-1925, prior to the addition of a deckhouse just forward of the ships’ after twin six-inch gun mount. Donation of Ronald W. Compton, from the collection of his grandfather, Chief Machinist’s Mate William C. Carlson, USN. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 99637

Triple 21-inch torpedo tubes on the upper deck of an Omaha (CL 4-13) class light cruiser, circa the mid-1920s. The after end of the ship’s starboard catapult is visible at left. Donation of Ronald W. Compton, from the collection of his grandfather, Chief Machinist’s Mate William C. Carlson, USN. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 99639

Omaha had been ordered during the war but she was not laid down at Todd Dry Dock & Construction Co., Tacoma, Washington until 6 December 1918. Built for a cost of $1,541,396, she was commissioned 24 February 1923 and her nine sisters all joined the fleet within two years after, replacing several prewar designs including the Chesters.

Photographed circa 1923, immediately after completion. Note her peculiar stacked casemates. These ships proved top-heavy in operation. Go figure, huh? Catalog #: NH 43052

Assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, she spent the early 1920s in calm peacetime service, showing the flag, making training and gunnery cruises, crossing over into the Pacific a few times to visit Canada and Hawaii, and other typical fleet operations. Later she was used to escort the body of the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, J. Butler Wright– who died at his post after an operation at age 62– from Havana to the Washington Navy Yard.

Passing through the Panama Canal, circa 1925-1926. Note the tropical awning over her stern. Her aft casemates are clear. Catalog #: NH 43054

Boxing match held between the aircraft catapults of an Omaha (CL 4-13) class light cruiser, circa the mid-1920s. View looks forward, with the ship’s after smokestack in the left center background. Donation of Ronald W. Compton, from the collection of his grandfather, Chief Machinist’s Mate William C. Carlson, USN. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 99640

Great overhead shot. Anchored in the Hudson River, near New York City, 2 May 1927. Catalog #: NH 43059

Putting the “screen” in screening! Omaha Class Light Cruisers lay a smoke screen during maneuvers in about 1930. Courtesy of Chief Photographer’s Mate John Lee Highfill (retired) Catalog #: NH 94898

In 1932, Omaha set a record for a naval crossing between San Francisco and Honolulu– just 75 hours and change to cover 2,400 miles, humming along at an average speed of 32~ knots for three days and nights. Not bad for 1920s technology.

In 1933, she was given an overhaul that included removing her mine handling capability and lower torpedo tubes, but adding more AAA guns and aircraft handling capabilities.

Underway, circa the early 1930s. The original photograph is dated 20 October 1936, but it was actually taken prior to Omaha’s 1933 overhaul, during which her topmasts were reduced and a bathtub machinegun platform was fitted atop her foremast. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval History and Heritage Command.
Catalog #: NH 97971

6″/53 casemate gun on USS Omaha CL-4 Picture taken in August 1933 after overhaul at the Puget Sound Navy Yard. Note newly installed machine gun bathtub atop Omaha foremast, rangefinders, and other fire control facilities on and about the mast, voice tubes running down from the masthead, and Battle Efficiency E painted on the pilothouse. Courtesy of Don S. Montgomery, USN (Retired). U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 93507

However, not all was joyous:

Aground in the Bahamas, 18 July 1937. Note lighthouse at right and vessels alongside Omaha. Meh, these things happen. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 43061

USS OMAHA (CL-4) Post 1933. Courtesy of Mr. Donald M. McPherson, Corte Madera, California, 1969 Catalog #: NH 68319

When World War II loomed, the aging cruiser and her sisters were far outclassed by the newer Brooklyn and St.Louis-classes, but they were uparmed by adding 20mm and 40mm anti-aircraft guns and radar while landing some of their older casemates and 1.1-inchers fitted in the 1930s.

On 6 November 1941, while on neutrality patrol in the mid-Atlantic near the equator with her escort, the USS Somers (DD-381), Omaha spied an American flagged ship, the freighter Willmoto out of Philadelphia, and closed to inspect her. When a boarding team came close, the freighter’s crew started abandoning ship, signaling it was sinking.

Taking quick action, the Omaha‘s team went to salvage work and saved the ship, which turned out to be the 5098-tonner Odenwald owned by the Hamburg-American Line. Enroute to Germany from then-neutral Japan when she was seized, she was packed with 3,800-tons desperately needed rubber and tires that never made it to the Third Reich.

Odenwald, NH 123752

USS OMAHA/ODENWALD Incident during World War II. Autographed Portrait of Salvage Detail. American Flag and emblem of the Nazi party/ Swastika flag on ship with Salvage Detail portrait signed by each member of Salvage Detail.NH 123757

Odenwald was escorted to Puerto Rico and made a big splash when she arrived.

According to the U-boat Archive, Odenwald contained the first German military POW taken by the U.S. though they didn’t know it:

Helmut Ruge was a Kriegsmarine radioman aboard the Graf Spee when that ship was scuttled after the battle of the River Plate. He escaped from internment crossing the Andes on foot to Chile and then on to Japan where he joined the crew of the Odenwald for the return to Germany.

During his initial interrogation both U.S. Army and Navy interrogators failed to discover that Helmut Ruge was not a civilian merchant marine officer but in fact was a German Navy sailor or that he was an escaped internee from the crew of the Graf Spee. Throughout his captivity he was interned with the civilian crews of German merchant ships and not with other German Navy personnel.

When the war kicked off for real, Omaha remained in the Atlantic doing patrol and escort work.

USS Omaha (CL-4) In New York Harbor, 10 February 1943. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. Note the added AAA suite. Catalog #: 19-N-40594

In the lead up to the Dragoon landings in Southern France, Omaha sailed to the med and gave naval gunfire support to the troops going ashore in August 1944, for which she was awarded one battle star, the only one she would receive.

When the war ended, the writing was on the wall for Omaha and she was decommissioned 1 November 1945, stricken four weeks later, and sold for scrap the following February.

Of her sisters, they proved remarkably lucky, and, though all nine saw combat during the war (including Detroit and Raleigh at Pearl Harbor), none were sunk. The last of the class afloat, USS Milwaukee (CL-5) was sold for scrap, 10 December 1949 mainly because after 1944 she had been loaned to the Soviets as the Murmansk.

In one last laugh, a federal court in 1947 awarded the members of the boarding party and the salvage crew $3,000 apiece while all the other crewmen in Omaha and the Sommers at the time picked up two months’ pay and allowances.

Although it has been reported this was prize money “the last paid by the Navy,” the fact is that the ruling classified it as salvage inasmuch as the U.S. on November 6, 1941, was not at war with Germany.

In all, the court found that the value of the Odenwald was the sum of $500,000 and the value of her cargo $1,860,000, which was sold in 1941 and, “As a matter of law, the United States is entitled as owner of the two men of war involved in this case to collect salvage and the officers and members of the crews of the U.S.S. Omaha and U.S.S. Somers are also entitled to collect salvage. This is not a case of bounty or prize. The libelants are entitled to collect salvage in the aggregate sum of $397,424.06 with costs and expenses.”

So there is that.

One enduring curiosity of the Omaha‘s crew was the issue of V-42 combat knives to some of her boarding crew.

From RIA who has one of these rare Omaha-marked pig stickers up for auction Sept. 7:

A descendant of the Fairbairn-Sykes combat knife, the V-42 Stiletto was designed with input from members of the First Special Service Force, the joint American/Canadian arctic and mountain warfare unit that is considered one of the forefathers of modern American Special Forces. While the majority went to the 1st SSF, around 70 were diverted to the Navy, and were among the armament issued to the U.S.S. Omaha.

Now that’s something you don’t see every day.

Specs:

Displacement: 7,050 long tons (7,163 t) (standard)
Length:
555 ft. 6 in (169.32 m) oa
550 ft. (170 m) pp
Beam: 55 ft. (17 m)
Draft: 14 ft. 3 in (4.34 m) (mean)
Installed power:
12 × Yarrow boilers
90,000 ihp (67,000 kW) (Estimated power produced on trials)
Propulsion:
4 × Westinghouse reduction geared steam turbines
4 × screws
Speed:
35 knots (65 km/h; 40 mph)
33.7 knots (62.4 km/h; 38.8 mph) (Estimated speed on trials)
Crew: 29 officers 429 enlisted (peacetime)
Armor:
Belt: 3 in (7.6 cm)
Deck: 1 1⁄2 in (38 mm)
Conning Tower: 1 1⁄2 in (38 mm)
Bulkheads: 1 1⁄2–3 in (38–76 mm)
Aircraft carried: 2 × floatplanes
Aviation facilities:
2 × Amidship catapults
crane
Armament:
(1923)
2 × twin 6 in (152 mm)/53 caliber
8 × single 6 in (152 mm)/53 caliber
2 × 3 in (76 mm)/50 caliber guns anti-aircraft
6 × triple 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes
4 × twin 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes
224 × mines (removed soon after completion)
(1945)
2 × twin 6 in/53 caliber
6 × single 6 in/53 caliber
8 × 3 in/50 caliber anti-aircraft guns
6 × triple 21 in torpedo tubes
3 × twin 40 mm (1.6 in) Bofors guns
14 × single 20 mm (0.79 in) Oerlikon cannons

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

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

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.

PRINT still has it place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Len Dyer of the National Armor and Cavalry Restoration Center discusses the World War I era Mark VIII Tank, of which just two are still in existence, both in the possession of the U.S. Army.

The Mark VIII was more advanced than the planned British Mark VI, though it was larger, male only (as in gun mounts, with 6-pounder 57 mm gun on each side), had a central crew compartment, and used a Liberty V12 aircraft engine for power. Designed as a joint Anglo-American project, the French were in on it as well. As such, it was called the Liberty or International at the time and some 1,500 were planned to swamp the German lines and tweak the Kaiser’s mustache in 1919.

A beast with a 10 man crew, the two aforementioned Hotchkiss 6-pounders (with 208 shells)  and five Browning M1917 water-cooled machine guns (with 13,848 machine gun rounds), it weighed 38 tons, a figure not soon seen again in a main battle tank.

In comparison, the WWI British “Flying Elephant” super heavy tank weighed 100 tons but never left the drawing board while the German’s Großkampfwagen or “K-Wagen” 120-ton leviathan was only a non working prototype when the war ended. Only 10 experimental French Char 2Cs, at 75-tons each were built in 1921, leaving the Mark VIII as the heaviest production tank in the world until the Soviets put the 45-ton T-35 into regular production in 1935)

In the end, just 100~ Mark VIIIs were made by Rock Island before production was halted, and they never saw combat. The Army did, however, maintain them for training use until WWII.

Today we have narco subs (self-propelled semi-submersibles, or  SPSSs) to deal with but they are an idea that is almost a century old.

The Volstead Act in 1919 came at a time of technological innovation and, with a lot of Great War era soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines out of work, some quickly fell into the quick and easy field of bootlegging. While there were plenty of overland smugglers, rum row operations where speedboats (often powered by surplus Liberty aircraft engines) zipped up and down the coast, and some aerial smuggling, there also seems to be at least some evidence of submarine ops.

Some were apparently large scale as related in Smugglers, Bootleggers and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York City by Ellen NicKenzie Lawson, which contains a 1924 aerial photo, purporting to show rum-smuggling submarines in the Hudson River near Croton Point.

The photo appears in the chapter “Rum Row”—the name of the smuggling area of the Atlantic coast from Nantucket to New York City and New Jersey. Lawson writes:

“News of a submarine being used on Rum Row appears to have some substance to it. One smuggler testified in court that he saw a submarine emerge on the Row with a German captain and a French crew. Newspapers in 1924 reported that submarines were smuggling liquor to New Jersey and Cape Cod. An aerial photo, taken by a commercial Manhattan map-making firm that same year, suggested submarines were thirty miles up the Hudson River near Croton Point. (German submarines were kept out of the river during World War I by a steel net strung low across the bottom of the Narrows.) The photo purported to document two submarines below the surface of the Hudson River, each 250 feet long [as big as a German Type U-93 class boat or a UE-II minelaying sub] and 600 feet apart. The aerial firm sent the photograph to the U.S. Navy, which had no submarines in the area, and the startling image was given to Coast Guard Intelligence and filed away.”

A firearms blog also contends that, “During prohibition a syndicate of bootleggers operating out of Puget Sound somehow managed to acquire a World War I German U-Boat.  They used the submarine to smuggle booze from Canada to Seattle.”

This is backed up by newspaper reports of the time (see The Evening Independent – Feb 16, 1922)

As Roy Olmstead, the “King of the Puget Sound Bootleggers,” was very well connected and financed, it may have been theoretically possible.

So there is that.

The only thing is that at this time the U.S. Navy (as well as those of France, Britain and Italy) were really stingy with selling surplus subs to the public with the exception of established ship breakers and other subs that may seem like there were floating around on the open market just weren’t.

Former Warship Wednesday alumni, the obsolete Lake-built submarine USS USS O-12 (SS-73) was stricken after being laid up during Prohibition and was soon leased for $1 per year (with a maximum of five years in options) to Lake’s company for use as a private research submarine– as far as I can tell the first time this occurred. But, as part of the lease agreement, she was disarmed and had to be either returned to the Navy or scuttled in at least 1,200 feet of water at the conclusion of her scientific use.

Further, in 1919 the Allied powers agreed that Germany’s immense U-boat fleet should be surrendered without the possibility of return and, while some boats were kept for research, the majority were dismantled and recycled or gesunken in deep water in the 20s. Of course, there is always the possibility that a scrapper may have resold a scratch and dent U-boat for the right price, but good luck keeping that quiet as subs of the era had to spend most of their time on the surface and most certainly would have been noticed by some busy body.

Then there is the crew, and a former bluejacket or unterseeboot driver who worked on such a project–providing he didn’t wind up in Davy Jones locker with said rum sub– would be sure to pass on the wild tale to their family post-Prohibition leading to the inevitable “my great uncle told me about his whisky U-boat” anecdotal recollection on a Ken Burns’ documentary.

Build your own

A 1926 newspaper article tells a similar tale of a towed submersible caught coming across the U.S./Canadian border via Lake Champlain.

“[S]ubmarine without motors, has been seized at Lake Champlain with 4800 bottles of ale. The seizure was made by the Royal Canadian Boundary Waters and Customs officials. It is pointed out that bootleggers have been using every known method of conveyance to run contraband liquor from Canada to the United States, including automobiles, motorboats, aeroplanes, and submarines. The latter have been known an mystery boats, having a length of 28ft., with a device for submerging and rising to the surface, but without any propelling mechanism, they being towed by the hawser 175ft. long. Air and vision are obtained by periscopes. The authorities say these vessels are extremely expensive, but they have successfully conveyed so much liquor that they have quickly paid for themselves.”

A history of the anti-smuggling patrol from U.S. Customs on the Lake, collected by the Vermont Historical Society, relates a similar tale, with a better take on a smaller unmanned semi-submersible:

While in the main channel of the lake a bit west of the Rutland Railroad fill, we saw an object which, from a  distance, looked like a  floating log. Whenever we found logs or other floating hazards to navigation, we dragged them ashore. As we approached the presumed log, to our surprise we saw instead a sort of barge anchored in such a way that the top of it lay awash. About 10 feet long, 6 feet wide and 4 feet deep, it had a hatch on the top which, when removed, disclosed a cargo of sacks of beer which weighted the barge sufficiently to keep it awash. Presumably towed by a small boat in stages over several nights,  we assumed that the smugglers would tow it as far as they dared during the night hours and would then anchor it in the hope that no one would discover it during the day. We towed the barge with its contents back to St. Albans Bay and again destroyed the alcoholic contents. The 1932 clippings from the St. Albans Messenger refer to a “submarine” bought at auction. Jack Kendrick later told me that this was the same barge which we had found floating in 1926.

Another Lake Champlain tale:

To disguise themselves on the water, some bootleggers tied a long rope to one end of the bags of alcohol and towed it behind them in a hollow log under water like a submarine. The disadvantage here, however, was that the log would immediately float to the surface and become visible if the boat were to be stopped by an officer. The method that worked best was to tie the bags of alcohol to one end of a rope and tie a box of rock salt to the other: if chased, the bootleggers could push the setup overboard, the bags and box would sink to the bottom, and later, as the rock salt dissolved, the box would float to the surface and act as a buoy-like marker for bootleggers to recover their lost cargo.

Then, there is the small scale home-built river running submersible on public display at the Grand Gulf Military Park near Port Gibson, Mississippi.

Apparently the one-man submarine was powered by a Model T Ford Engine and used during the early Prohibition period to bootleg whiskey and rum from Davis Island to Vicksburg.

A turn of phrase

Another popular action of the period (and even today), moon-shining, saw the advent of “submarine stills” large black pot stills with a capacity of  up to 800-gallons of mash.

Submarine stills…like Japanese midget subs waiting for the 7th Fleet

This led to the inevitable possibility of bootleggers passing off bottles of hootch that, when asked where they came from, would be told “From a submarine”….which may have made the legend of surplus U-boats full of whisky more popular than the reality.

Either way, it is a great story.

Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, photographers and the like that produced them.

Combat Gallery Sunday: The Martial Art of James Arthur Pownall

Not much is known of James Arthur Pownall, coming from the landed gentry and born in to a family of cotton merchants. Pownall apparently eschewed work in the cotton concern to take up painting full time.

Soon afterward, starting around 1882, his work chronicling British and Indian military units began to circulate and continued to do so until the early 1930s.

A Mounted Sowar in Drab Full Dress, Guides Cavalry, James Arthur Pownall, 1902, National Army Museum.  Note the Martini rifle while the rest of the empire was going Lee-Metford. The Corps of Guides was raised in 1846/1847 by Lieutenant (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Harry Lumsden (1821–1896). In 1886, as part of the later nineteenth-century reform of the Indian Army, the Guides were transferred from the control of the Governor of the Punjab to that of the Commander-in-Chief. The cavalry regiment was later numbered 10th in the 1922 reorganization of the Indian Army.

Bringing Up the Guns, James Arthur Pownall, 1898,Atkinson Art Gallery Collection

Indian Corps of Drums,1918, James Arthur Pownall, Cheshire Military Museum

Mounted Lancer, James Arthur Pownall, 1918, Cheshire Military Museum

On exhibit extensively in the UK, a number of his pieces have also passed into private collections in recent years and has appeared in a number of books about the Indian Army (Soldiers of the Raj: The Indian Army 1600-1947, et. al)

Thank you for your work, sir.

Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

Biplane above the clouds. Handwritten on photograph front: “France, 1918, De Haviland ‘4.’” Handwritten on photograph back: “De Haviland – Liberty Motor, Dear Mum: Put this away for me. Maybe Adam helped make this engine. Ted.”

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off 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. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday October 5, 2016: The quiet behemoth of Toulhars

Here we see the French ironclad cuirasse Dévastation, leader of her two-ship class of early battleship. She had a quiet life, and has spent most of it on the beach.

In 1872, the huge central battery ship Redoutable was laid down at the Lorient Dockyard and was one of the most advanced composite-hulled (iron and steel) battleships in the world– sparking a naval building spree by possible foes Italy and Britain. With a wonky exaggerated tumblehome hull shape and full square rig, Redoubtable was a one-off vessel of some 9,500-tons with seven 270mm guns and 14 inches of plate armor with another 15 inches of plank composite timber backing.

With lessons learned from that vessel, a near sister, our Dévastation above, was laid down at Arsenal Lorient 20 December 1875 while a follow-on carbon copy of our hero, full-sister Courbet was laid down at Toulon.

Some 10,000-tons with a full 15 inches of armor in her belt, Dévastation mounted a quartet of 340mm (13.4-inch guns) which far outclassed Redoubtable, as well as a secondary battery of four 270mm pieces and 24 anti-boat guns. Four 14-inch torpedo tubes, two on each side of the ship, completed the outfit.

270mm gun on Devastation letting it rip

Commissioned 15 July 1882, her full dozen boilers exhausted through a very odd arrangement of twin side-by-side stacks under a two-masted square auxiliary rig. She could make 10 knots at best and was a beast.

Assigned to the ‘Escadre de la Méditerranée at Toulon, she carried the squadron flag of Vice-Adm. Thomasset, and gave quiet service in the Med for a decade before transfer to Brest.

She was a beautiful ship at the height of 19th Century indulgence as these series of shots from 1892 show. In particular, dig her Nordenfelt and Hotchkiss guns, her 270mm and the shot of the Marine.

Just look at the commanding field of fire from that clustered fighting top….

Talk about a wheelhouse

Note the bridge works and the Nordenfelt on the bridge wing

In 1896, her dated armament was changed to four 320mm/25 and another four 274.4mm guns.

She was placed in second-line service in 1898 and then in ordinary in 1901.

Afloat as a machinists school ship in Toulon after 1901, she was re-engined with two 3-cyl. compound engines and Belleville boilers, which enabled her to make 15-knots with a smaller number of stokers.

She was retained in nominal service until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, when she was repurposed.

Note her extensive fighting tops, filled with Hotchkiss guns

Her last cruise under her own power to Lorient in October 1914 saw Dévastation largely disarmed and transformed into a floating brig for incorrigible German prisoners of war, housing up to 500 troublemakers at a time under high security on the mole.

By 1919, with the Boche repatriated and little use for a 1870s ironclad, the French hulked Dévastation and in March 1922 sold her to one MM. Jacquard for her value in scrap iron– 180,000 francs.

Jacquard resold the rusty heap to a German breaker and two tugs, Achilles and Larissa, arrived from Hamburg on 7 May to pull the ironclad away but instead wound up running her aground on the sandy bottom of the Ecrevisse bench some 220 yards off the mouth of the channel marker.

Stuck embarrassingly all summer, the Germans sent the large tug Hercules to help the two smaller ones pull her off– unsuccessfully.

This wound up in a third sale to Albaret and Kerloc of Brest who attempted to break Dévastation in place in an operation run by former Tsarist Navy engineers in exile, removing hundreds of tons of topside armor plate in a risky effort to get her light enough to refloat that ended in the death of at least two workers though did get her to more pedestrian Larmor-Plage.

This operation continued for decades with ownership of the grounded scrap switching hands several more times until, by 1954, salvage operations halted.

While the ship is gone above water at high tide, her bones are still visible off Toulhars beach (47°42’417 – 003°22’643) at low tide and divers still poke around her submerged hull for souvenirs.

Her name has not been reused.

As for her sistership, Courbet was struck 5 February 1909 and sold for scrap the following year, in a more successful recycling effort than Dévastation.

Specs:

Displacement:
9,659 tonnes standard
10,090 tonnes full load
Length:
100.25 m (328 ft. 11 in) o/a
95 m (311 ft. 8 in) p/p
98.70 m (323 ft. 10 in) w/l
Beam: 21.25 m (69 ft. 9 in)
Draught:
7.51 m (24 ft. 8 in) loaded draught forward
7.80 m (25 ft. 7 in) 7.80 m loaded draught amidships
8.10 m (26 ft. 7 in) 8.10 m loaded draught aft
Depth of hold: 7.34 m (24 ft. 1 in)
Installed power: 12 boilers, 2 Woolf triple expansion engines totaling 6,000 ihp (6,000 kW), 900 tons of coal as built, 10 knots.
Re-engined 1899-1901 with two 3-cyl. compound engines and Belleville boilers, capable of 8,100 hp, and said to be good for 15 kts afterwards.
Propulsion: Twin screws (5.24 m diameter) + sail
Sail plan:
Ship rig
Sail area 1,833 m2 (19,730 sq ft.)
Speed: 10 knots as built, 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph) at full load (steam) after 1901
Range: 3,100 nmi (5,700 km) at 10 kn (19 km/h) (steam)
Complement: 689 as completed varied until 1901 when dropped to ~200 plus 300 trainees.
Armament:
As built:
4 × 34cm/18 model 1875
4 × 27cm/18 model 1870M
6 × 14cm model 1870M
18 × 37mm Hotchkiss revolving cannon
4 × 14in torpedo tubes
May 1896:
4 × 320mm/25 model 1870-81
4 × 274.4mm model 1875
6 × 138.6mm
2 × 65mm
6 × 47mm QF
20 × 37mm QF
2 × 14in torpedo tubes
After March 1902 refit:
4 × 274.4mm model 1893
2 × 240mm/40 model 1893/96
10 × 100mm model 1891 and 1892
14 × 47mm QF
2 × 37mm QF
Largely disarmed after 1914

Armor:
Wrought iron
38 cm (15 in) belt amidships
24 cm (9.4 in) redoubt
6 cm (2.4 in) main deck [1]

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

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

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.

PRINT still has it place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Crewmen load a 16-inch shell aboard the battleship USS WISCONSIN (BB 64) as the vessel is readied for sea trials (Photo: National Archives)

The answer to that would be 15,595 live ones in 10 different variants including HC, armor piercing and practice.

The last battleship salvo was from USS Wisconsin 16 May 1991, with the last battleship transferred to museum life in 2012.

The Army’s last 16″/50cal Gun M1919 coastal artillery battery was disbanded in 1946.

Currently at AAAC, Crane:

Designation/Type                                     Filler                                  Number
D862        High Capacity                         Explosive D                       3,624
D872        Armor Piercing                        Explosive D                       2,430
D874        High Capacity                         Explosive D                           591
D875        Armor Piercing                        666 M46 GP Grenades          22
D875        Armor Piercing                        400 M43A1 GP Grenades   234
D877        Armor Piercing                        Explosive D                        1,743
D878        High Capacity                          Explosive D                               2
D879        High Capacity                          Explosive D                           411
D881        Practice                                  Tracer only                              272
D882        High Capacity                          Explosive D                        6,266
Total                                                                                                  15,595

And the Army is looking to get rid of them, as I detailed in this piece at Guns.com

I thought it was cool that PM picked up the piece, I read PM as a kid.

Anyway, I think they make great conversation pieces. Central City Surplus just redid a 1,900-pound D875 AP shell (and yes, that is a QH-50 DASH in the background).

The Scottish war poet Capt. Charles Hamilton Sorley of the Suffolk Regiment was killed in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. He was the youngest of the major war poets, having been born in 1895.

He left this poem, probably his most famous, untitled at his death:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Sorley was killed 13 October 1915 (aged 20) Hulluch, Lens, France. The poem above was in his kit.

As for the Suffolk Regiment, whose device he wears in the image above, just short of their 300th birthday they were amalgamated with a number of other units to form the Royal Anglian Regiment, which continues to take the Queen’s schilling today.