The real prize was the fleet at Toulon under Admiral Jean de Laborde. Even with Darlan’s ceding of his fleet to the Allies, Toulon had 77 available french ships. Darlan tried to barter with his old rival to throw his lot in with his, but laborde remained silent over the topic In occupying Vichy France after the African landings, the Germans stopped short of Toulon demanding the surrender of the fleet. Soon the German’s grew tired of waiting for a reply and moved in to take the fleet by force. Quoted as “one of the greatest acts of self immolation in military history”, Laborde scuttled his fleet and sabatoged it before it could get into German hands. In all 3 battleships, seven cruisers, and thirty-two destroyers were lost amongst the fleet. Eisenhower had mixed feelings, he was dismayed that the fleet was gone, but relieved the prize was not in German hands.
For you Civil War and Navy buffs
-
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”.
Suggested Topics
