• Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotetsu

    Thought you might find that interesting.


  • Thank you Garg. What a colourful career it had and I love all the history it had before it finally became the Confederate warship “Stonewall”:  very cloak and dagger!
    It seems funny that the US could have so feared its existence.


  • The fact that it looks so much like a trireme cannot be a coincidence.


  • Hadn’t spotted that. Very funny Pacific War.


  • @wittmann:

    It seems funny that the US could have so feared its existence.

    From what I can tell from the pictures, they were probably worried about the fact that CSS Stonewall was an oceangoing ironclad, which would put her in a completely different league from typical Union and Confederate ironclads like Monitor and Virginia (which were basically just coastal gunboats).  The Monitor-Virginia duel is correctly famous as the first naval fight between ironclad warships, but it needs to be kept in perspective because both of those vessels would have been hopelessly outclassed by the big oceangoing ironclads that France and Britain had already launched a few years earlier (La Gloire in 1859 and Warrior in 1860).  A case in point: sometime after the Civil War, the U.S. Navy made a misguided attempt to send a large monitor-type vessel across the Atlantic to Europe to show the flag.  It barely survived the trip, and conditions aboard the ship during the crossing were quite hellish.

    I like the part of the article which says that CSS Stonewall was commissioned in January 1865, just a few months before the end of the war.  This places the ship among other historical “wonder weapons” that arrived on the scene at the tail end of a conflict, sometimes accompanied by claims that they will miraculously snatch victory from the jaws of defeat – though this doesn’t seem to have been the case here.


  • CSS Stonewall was an oceangoing ironclad.

    Thank you for pointing that out. The significance escaped me on first reading the article.
    The North  feared the few, successful, Confederate  commerce  raiders and they were all wooden ships.
    This would have been another problem altogether. Thanks again Marc.


  • Thanks for the information.


  • Maybe a movie about it will be made, similar to “War Horse”.

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