History And Technology Research Paper

John Murray

Over the past semester, it has been shown time and again how important a small change

in technology can be, and how these changes affect the way people interact with the world. What

I would like to show next is the importance of human acceptance and implementation of

technology, as well as the importance of good knowledge of a technology’s potential. In

addition, it will be shown that improper understanding of technology or deficiencies in training

will result in a weakness in the “human element”, which can be regarded as the other half of any

good piece of mechanical innovation.

The main area in which these technological places will be observed for this study is the

field of naval warfare. Military engagements push technologies to their absolute limit, and force

users to constantly adapt and improve their technology. Because sailors and ships are constantly

evolving, there are key points in history where the technology in use and the training or tools

given to the sailors do not always work in perfect harmony. Craig Symonds Decision at Sea

outlines five naval engagements in American history. In his book, his goal is to explain the

historical significance of these engagements and how they have shaped the American navy for

today. This paper will attempt to use these same five events, with the assistance of official naval

reports, catalogues, and museum reports, to provide five unique perspectives on technology, in

order to determine the best situation for naval technology to be used with maximum efficiency.

In addition, with the use of Symond’s narratives, I hope to explain the incongruences between

both the sailor and their technologies at hand, as well as several gross mismatches and

deficiencies and the difficulties they cause for men at sea.

Beginning nearer to the topic of maritime shipping and transportation, the Battle of Lake

Eerie will not be discussed for its tactics. Instead, logistics will be the focal point. Military

transportation has always been a highly complicated, and often frustrating process. For almost all

of recorded history, especially prior to the invention of the automobile, soldiers carried

everything they needed into battle on their backs. With naval warfare, this method is of course,

impossible. Crews require food, necessities, and weapons and materiel in order to conduct their

lives at sea and in battle. Since 1970, the U.S. Navy has had the benefit of many different

organizations, such as Military Sealift Command(MSC) , a merchant marine service dedicated

to delivering supplies and fuel to the Navy, as well as the United States Naval Construction force

(NCF or Seabees), a core part of the Navy’s logistics corps that provides “have a history of

building bases, bulldozing and paving thousands of miles of roadway and airstrips, and

accomplishing a myriad of other construction projects in a wide variety of military theaters”1

Prior to the formation of organizations like these, armies and navies had extreme

difficulty in conducting logistics support at home, not to mention when deployed internationally.

One need only look to all the failed winter invasions of Russia to see the importance of a force

like MSC and NCF. Without the presence of logistical forces to preposition supplies around the

globe and here at home, Navy life would grind to a halt. As such, it is important to look at naval

logistics in a period before this infrastructure was in place, in order to show its value. As such,

Commodore Perry’s arming of the Great Lakes fleet will provide example.

Perry had a novel challenge in preparing his forces for the Battle of Lake Erie. He was

undermanned, and one hand, he had to have ships built or recommissioned from civilian service.

An even greater challenge, upon acquiring these ships, was arming them. According to one

1 Seabee (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabee, last web accessed 4/12/15

logistics report “Sixty-five cannon of several kinds and sizes were shipped to Erie for the arming

of the fleet, thirty-six from Washington and the remainder from New York and Sackett’s Harbor

via Buffalo.”2 Of these sixty five cannons, forty-six of them were capable of firing 32-pound

shot3. A 32 pound carronade weighed around two-thousand pounds. This means that Perry had to

ship over 50 tons of iron up river and overland to arm his Lake Erie fleet. One hundred thousand

pounds of iron did not move easily, especially in the Wilderness region. Furthermore, this was

before paved roads had been introduced, and there was no Naval Construction force to build

roads for Perry, and no Military Sealift to ferry the guns for him. As such, guns had to be

“Dragged by brute force over abysmal forest roads, or smuggled by boat across a lake that was

regularly patrolled by the British”4 Historians such as Craig say “It was ruinous on the animals.

One contemporary estimated that a total of thirty-two hundred horses died over the winter

hauling materials from Albany to Sackett’s Harbor, to buffalo, and finally to Erie.”5 One can

only imagine the difficulty of trying to move horsedrawn carts through wooded, muddy, hilly

terrain, all the way from Washington to the Great Lakes region, a distance of almost four

hundred miles.

One of the greatest technological mismatches in all of naval history is clearly shown

through the engagement of the battle of the Monitor and Merrimack, known as the Battle of

Hampton Roads. Anna Holloway, a scholar of the Newport News Mariners’ Museum, wrote that

“Steam power and the revolving gun turret would assure that the graceful white wings of sailing

ships would give way to the black coal smoke that broke the ships free from old broadside

2The Building of Perry’s Fleet on Lake Erie, web accessed 4/12/15 http://archive.org/stream/buildingofperrys00rose#page/41/mode/1up3 Ibid, table 1, page 424 Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 495 ibid

tactics.”6 Indeed many scholars argue that these technologies, when finally applied to naval

vessels, provided the first real sense for what a modern, mobile navy would operate like, not

simply forming a line of battle and inflicting maximum casualties, but instead relying on

maneuverability, surprise, and precision to defeat their enemy. Upon reading accounts of the

battle, however, it becomes apparent just how far technology had to go to reach the modern day

missile cruiser’s level.

In the modern navy, ships are outfitted with advanced surface-to-surface anti-ship

missiles. These weapons systems allow seamen, at great range, to target, engage, and destroy

ships weighing thousands of tons, sometimes with as little as a single shot. Two hundred years

ago, sailors didn’t have it so easy. At the time of the Battle of Hampton Roads, heated shot and

solid shot were the best types of ammunition gunners could employ in destroying an enemy ship,

either through “holing” an enemy vessel below the waterline, or by starting large fires aboard by

superheating cannonballs over braziers, then quickly loading and launching them into vulnerable

sections of the enemy ship. With the advent of the Monitor and Merrimack class ships, both of

these methods were nullified. The Monitor and Merrimack both wore about 6 inches of armor

over their hulls, which were already over two feet thick of wooden plank, and in some places,

like the Monitor’s turret, sported armor up to eight inches thick 7Even before Ironclads were

implemented, these thick warship hulls had been known to resist cannon fire. Now, with an extra

layer of iron rolled over the hulls, the effect of round-shot was almost comical.

6The Battles of Hampton Roads – March 8 & 9, 1862 Anna Gibson Holloway, The Mariners’ Museum http://www.marinersmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/The-Battles-of-Hampton-Roads.pdf, web accessed 4/10/15.7 Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p124

8

In the end, the warships were drawn into a brutal exchange of firepower that lasted over

an hour, with only minor damage to either side9. The Virginia lost its smokestack and suffered

from hampered mobility for the rest of the battle, the gunnery crews onboard the Virginia

became frustrated, and had all but given up. Lieutenant John Eggleston, a gunnery officer aboard

the Virginia, commented “After two hours of incessant firing I find that I can do her [the

Monitor] about as much damage by snapping my thumb at her every two minutes. As shown

above, the smaller cannons aboard the Virginia, firing shell, simply couldn’t hole the Monitor.

Likewise, the Monitor, although using a better penetrating solid-shot ammunition, failed to

pierce the Virginia because they could not produce enough muzzle velocity, due to limitations of

how much powder they could load into their Dahgren Guns.10

8 AmericanCivilWar.org, http://cdn2.americancivilwar.com/americancivilwar-cdn/pictures/monitor_deck.jpg, web accessed 4/13/159 Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p12810 Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p126

Ultimately after two hours of close fighting, when the ships finally pulled away from

each other, no one died aboard either vessel11. In the aftermath of this battle, navies around the

world quickly realized the usefulness of iron armor, and the technique proliferated quickly. By

world war one, most of the major European powers had followed suit, and gunnery was forced to

evolve and adapt to this new threat on the seas, and the world saw the beginnings of the

battleship: “heavily armored ships not of great speed ‘whose heavy artillery was to be used at

close range against the vital parts of enemy ships and at all ranged against particular enemy ship

types’”12

The next example of a poor meeting of man and machine in American naval history is the

Battle of Manila Bay. In 1898, America had transitioned its navy from wooden vessels to

armored cruisers. However, some vestiges of the old wooden hulled broadside trained navy

remained, especially in its gunnery training. Although the navy now sported 8 inch guns, capable

of ranges over five thousand meters, they had no surefire targeting systems. Indeed in Craig

Symonds’ Decision at Sea, the difficulties of targeting these long guns is made clear. Gun

captains had to sight down a gun’s barrel to a crosshair, which they would then allow the rolling

of the sea to carry over a target, while consulting a ranging chart. As the ship swayed he would

order the gun crews to make minor adjustments, up, down, left and right, to the weapon’s barrel,

and at the appropriate time, when the target slid across the proper markings on the gunsight, the

weapon would be fired manually.13 In a modern battleship, the more advanced targeting systems

are able to take readings from the navigation system of the ship itself, and make adjustments to a

11 Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p13212 Rose, Lisle A. Power at Sea Vol. 1: The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. pp45-46, web accessed via Google Books13 Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p174.

targeting solution before firing a missile or large caliber cannon, allowing for a great deal of

leeway

This made for two great deficiencies that became very apparent to the American sailors,

accuracy, and rate of fire. Both of these weak points in the weapon system no doubt gave

gunners mates a very real sense of what it must have felt like to operate a cannon battery on the

wooden vessels of their grandfathers. The guns themselves were a very impressive innovation,

capable of extreme range, at over two miles, as well as better barrel durability and accuracy than

their roundshot firing forbears. In the past, smoothbore cannons on the old wooden vessels were

dangerous to operate (prone to bursting under stress), inaccurate (due to lack of rifled barrels and

round shot), and had considerably shorter effective ranges. Although rounds could be propelled

to such distance, accuracy was hideously unreliable. However, the new guns found on the ships

at Manila Bay also sported fairly poor performance. Per Symonds book, “Out of 9,500 shells

fired by ships of the American squadron, only 123 of them actually hit a Spanish vessel, an

efficiency of about 1.3 percent”. The main issue presented by these weapons isn’t the weapons

themselves. Eight inch cannons can easily reach these ranges with full force, as is proven by the

American victory, but the trouble is in getting the round on-target. Therefore, the true issue lay in

the navy’s not developing fire control to apply this weapon system at such long ranges,

especially in its manual firing via a break-cord, and crank-wheel gun adjustment. It would be

another 40 years before sufficient changesto the gun system could be implemented, in the form

of electric and hydraulic gun adjustment, and eventually, electronic targeting systems.

Naval technology, up until this point, has been depicted as a rather hodgepodge of

mismatched technologies, all competing, as if in a massive game of rock-paper-scissors. It is

important to note that these are exceptions, and not the rule. As a whole, the U.S. Navy has been

powered by very successful innovations, two of which will be discussed in the next section,

aircraft carriers and cryptography.

Cryptography is the encoding of messages. Radio, when broadcast over open airwaves, is

easily intercepted by enemy forces, as such, modern militaries put great emphasis on creating

complex methods of code for communicating over long distance, especially via radio, although

telephone lines at paper messages can be ciphered similarly. Having a code that the enemy

cannot translate can have game-changing effects on how one can run a war. For example, the

Enigma Code, created by Nazi Germany during World War II, enabled the German air force to

conduct almost unrestricted U-boat warfare, as well as the bombing raids on London and points

inland. For the British, it wasn’t until Alan Turing began working on the German code that the

British were able to gain the upper hand against the German offensive.

The Japanese had a similar code, known by the designation JN-25 by the Americans.

Commander Joseph Rochefort was the commanding officer of Station Hypo, the Navy's

codebreaking center in Hawaii, Naval Station Pearl Harbor, in the spring of 1942, it was

Rochefort and his staff that would be responsible for tackling the issue of JN-2514. This staff of

Rochefort’s worked many hours out of every day, tearing apart encoded Japanese messages, with

the idea that if even a few characters could be deciphered, the rest of the code would eventually

crumble. Taking apart this code was critical to predicting Japanese troop movements, supply

lines, and plans of attack.

JN-25 was the code that the Japanese used to encrypt their messages when planning the

attack on Pearl Harbor, as such their team suffered “nagging anxiety that if only they had been

given access to the JN-25 intelligence before December 7, they might have been able to predict 14 http://www.navy.mil/midway/how.html . How Cryptology enabled the United States to turn the tide in the Pacific War, Patrick D. Weadon, web accessed 4/13/15

the Pearl Harbor attack.”15 The stakes were high once again. As Rochefort’s team started

disassembling the cipher, it became apparent that the Japanese were planning another attack. To

make a mistake risked another Pearl Harbor. Luckily the team was able to determine that the

Japanese were looking at two targets, and through no small trickery, were able to fool the

Japanese into giving away where in the Aleutian Islands the attack would take place1617 With this

intelligence, Admiral Nimitz, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, was able to coordinate a

surprise attack on the Japanese fleet at midway, which resulted in an American victory. General

George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, during an interview after the victory at midway,

cited their success to the cryptographers of Pearl Harbor cryptoanalitical team Hypo: "as a result

of Cryptanalysis we were able to concentrate our limited forces to meet their naval advance on

Midway when we otherwise would have been 3,000 miles out of place."”18Cryptoanalysts may

have given the U.S Navy the advantage for the Battle of Midway, but it is important to give

credit to another key piece of technology, that which has made the battle famous: the aircraft

carrier. Aircraft carriers saw service as early as the 1920’s, but various difficulties in mechanics,

as well as material manufacturing after the Great War, hampered nations from building large,

true aircraft carriers, instead relying on conversions from large cargo vessels and the like. By

World War II, however, carriers were a dedicated class. Unlike other ships near their

displacement, they were not as heavily armored, and most of their weight came from all the steel

15 Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005., p20516 Ibid, 205 “to confirm the identity of AF, Rochefort’s men sent a message to the garrison at Midway…asking that they sen back a radio message…uncoded…that they were running short of drinking water…two days after this bogus report hit the airwaves, an intercepted Japanese message reported that AF (Midway) was short of drinking water”17 Keegan, John. "Midway." In The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1989. p18618 http://www.navy.mil/midway/how.html . How Cryptology enabled the United States to turn the tide in the Pacific War, Patrick D. Weadon, web accessed 4/13/15

required to create a launch and landing surface for fixed wing aircraft. They were lightly armed

compared to their battleship cousins, forgoing the heavy eight and sixteen inch guns for smaller

armaments designed for anti-aircraft and anti-boarding action. With that reduction in firepower,

however, does not come a reduction in strike capability. A battleship like those seen at the Battle

of Manila Bay had a range of about 2.5 miles, whereas an aircraft carrier could engage the

enemy from as far as 200 miles19. This is far out of visual range, and both ships would be forced

to rely on radar or plotting charts called in by reconnaissance aircraft in order to determine

enemy position, so “Midway admirals were in a sense to fight blind”20 In addition, during the

Pacific Campaign, carriers were not the highly sophisticated vessels we know of today. Naval

historian John Keegan notes “Carrier flight was still an operation conducted at the extreme limits

of practicability. Steam catapults and angled decks lay far in the future”21 So, in order to actually

conduct the Battle of Midway, the navies on both sides faced the same two challenges. First,

aircraft were not always guaranteed to launch successfully, and in the violence of a dogfight,

even fewer were likely to return, especially if they lost their bearings and couldn’t find their

mother ship22 Additionally, both navies had to rely on outside reconnaissance, the Americans

from long range radar located at Midway (their shipboard radar had a very limited range,

probably making them more suited to defense), and the Japanese could only rely on their

reconnaissance aircraft, having no radar at all.23 Admiralty on both sides was forced to fight the

battle in terms of the modern day Battleship board game, using only charting and remote

19 Keegan, John. "Midway." In The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1989. P19120 ibid. P19121 ibid. P16122 Ibid. p 161 “Without radar, aircrew had to plot their course away from and back to the mother ship with extreme care….single seat fighters…all too easily lost track of their positions, failed to rediscover the position of the mother ship, which in the nature of naval warfare altered minute by minute, and ran out of fuel on the homeward flight”23 Keegan, John. "Midway." In The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1989. P188

communication. With technologies such as these, however, commanders on both sides managed

to turn the battle into quite the sophisticated game. Because the enemy was blind, one of the best

methods for protecting one’s own carrier lay in mobility: by constantly changing position, an

enemy without radar would be forced to continuously screen one’s ship position via

reconnaissance in order to properly deploy fighters against them, forcing enemy squadrons to

waste time and fuel finding their opponent with every sortie24. Fighting an enemy without radar

also gave the Americans one final advantage: because the Japanese had no radar, the American

fighters were able to deploy from a fleet hidden on the other side of Midway island, granting

them the element of surprise. The final aspect of using fighter aircraft over battleships of the line

exchanging salvos was that it spared the ships crews the brunt of the assault. Casualties were, for

the most part, restricted to the fighter pilots, and the crews aboard the ships that came under the

sights of the bombers.25 This means the casualties were significantly reduced. Keegan states that

“Midway had been a ‘cheap’ battle for vanquished and victors alike. The Japanese had lost no

more than 3000 dead, the Americans fewer than 1000 – a total of fatalities lower than at either

Trafalgar or Jutland”26

When one observes these events chronologically, keeping in mind the technological

aspects of different events in American naval history, a theme begins to emerge, the Navy is

learning. It is an organic entity with hundreds of thousands of minds at its disposal, constantly

working towards more efficient ways of war. Battles between wooden warships forced navies,

eventually, to evolve armored warships. Armored warships forced navies to advance their

munitions technologies, and true armor piercing rounds were born. These armor piercing rounds

pushed naval combat into longer and longer ranges to cut down on casualties. As a result of this 24 Ibid p 194 “A carrier’s first line of defense was its elusiveness”25 Ibid p 21126 ibid

long range warfare, gunnery was forced to evolve, first with advanced calculations to allow for

accurate fire, then computers to provide targeting solutions. Aircraft carriers were the next step

in defeating battleships, inflicting maximum damage with little casualties, radar had to be

advanced in order to properly track air traffic and rule the skies.

War scholars, tacticians, and commanders all realize that nations and navies cannot afford

to bet on an extremely expensive game of rock-paper scissors, always hoping another nation

won’t innovate a better countersign. With that being said, from the time of Perry to that of

Halsey and Fletcher. Over three hundred years, the navy has come a long way from simply lining

ships up alongside each other and decimating each other’s crews until one side can no longer

stomach the losses (although the battle of Hampton Roads might be noted as a lack of progress,

as the commanders still committed to full broadsides for over two hours). Navies all over the

globe are focusing more and more on long range, precise, and highly destructive weapons, as

well as the logistics required to transport, preposition, feed, and fuel fleets and armies around the

world. At the turn of the last century, the U.S Navy has moved steadily towards fewer and fewer

casualties per engagement, fine tuning its advanced technologies, from cruise missiles to

unmanned drones. With this much progress, it would be unsurprising in fifty or 100 years to see

warfare on the seas conducted with full automation, a vision Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of over

a century ago:

“Human strife is to be transferred from the heart and personality of man into

cunning contrivances of machinery, which by-the-by, will fight out our wars with only the clank

and smash of iron, strewing the field with broken engines but damaging nobody’s little finger

except by accident.”27

27 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Taken from Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History. p137

Bibliography

1. Symonds, Craig L. Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles That Shaped American History.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

2. Seabee (Wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabee, last web accessed 4/12/15

Wikipedia here provides a general definition of the Naval Construction force, the

Seabees.

“A Seabee is a member of the United States Naval Construction Forces (NCF).

The word "Seabee" comes from initials "CB" which in turn comes from the term

Construction Battalions.[2] The Seabees have a history of building bases,

bulldozing and paving thousands of miles of roadway and airstrips, and

accomplishing a myriad of other construction projects in a wide variety of

military theaters dating back to World War II.”

3. The Building of Perry’s Fleet on Lake Erie: 1812-1813, by Max Rosenburg,

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1950. Web Accessed 4/12/15:

https://archive.org/details/buildingofperrys00rose

4. The Battles of Hampton Roads – March 8 & 9, 1862 Anna Gibson Holloway, The

Mariners’ Museum http://www.marinersmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/The-

Battles-of-Hampton-Roads.pdf, web accessed 4/10/15.

5. Rose, Lisle A. Power at Sea Vol. 1: The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918. Columbia:

University of Missouri Press, 2006, web accessed via Google Books, 4/13/15

6. http://www.navy.mil/midway/how.html . How Cryptology enabled the United States to

turn the tide in the Pacific War, Patrick D. Weadon, web accessed 4/13/15

7. Keegan, John. "Midway." In The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare.

New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1989.