Milne turned back to the flag lieutenant and put down his tea. “I prepared a plan that would have driven their Navy and commerce off the sea, broken their blockade, and thrown a counterblockade across their own ports. But then, the gentlemen in Whitehall never answered my question of ‘what next’ if the Americans did not sue for peace immediately.”
“Oh, surely that would not happen, sir,” Hall replied. “What country could survive such a blow? The shock alone would bring them to their senses.”
“Really, Hall? And how many times did we do just that to the French and still have to fight long, grinding wars of exhaustion?”
Hall hesitated.
“And the Americans are not the French by any means. They spring from our own blood, as rude and arrogant a people as so many of our countrymen prefer to see them. In our two wars with the Americans, may I remind you of the number of ship-to-ship actions we lost?”
Hall began to look unsettled at the analogy.
“Cheer up, Hall, it is my job to see things without illusion. It is yours to be my sounding board. Now let me tell you of the improvements I have in mind for the war plan.”
Milne first reviewed the original plan. It was based on the strength of the North American and West Indies Station that currently had a compliment of forty-two ships (totaling 70,456 tons), 14,551 men, and 1,319 guns. Of this number, there were eight battleships or ships of the line and thirteen frigates and corvettes. Every ship was steam powered. All of Milne’s ships, however, were purpose-built warships whereas most American warships were converted commercial ships of one sort or another and armed with lighter ordnance.
Milne noted that the most common gun in the fleet was the old 32-pounder, outclassed by the new Dahlgren guns the Americans had been producing in great numbers. That brought him to the problem that had been gnawing at him for months now. In 1861, the rifled Armstrong gun in various calibers had been issued to the fleet. It was hailed as a technological innovation of profound importance with a 1.5-mile point-blank accuracy and a reach of 5 miles for the 32-pounder Armstrong, seven times better than the comparable muzzle-loader. It had solved the problem of the great stress in the powder chambers of old cast-iron guns by shrinking wrought iron spirals over a wrought iron barrel. Being a breech-loader, the Armstrong did not have to be run out, reducing the movement of the gun in action. It had proved in practice, however, to be a profound disappointment. For such an advanced concept, the Armstrong guns were useless against the armor on American monitors for which they had never been designed. There were technical deficiencies as well that made the guns unreliable. The gun carriages were too low and forced the crews to stoop to operate the gun. The breeching bolts in the ships’ sides were unable to resist the recoil of the gun, which Milne said was “so exceedingly violent that the gun and carriage was lifted bodily from the deck and came in with a crash, enough to tear everything to pieces, and the men were obliged to retire from near the gun.” The lead shell covering, which was meant to mold to the rifling grooves, sometimes “puffed out,” making it impossible to load. The heat of the tropics in which the ships of the station rotated tended to deteriorate the rubber fuse washers and the tallow-filled lubricators.
The biggest problem was the poorly designed vent piece that frequently blew out when the gun was fired. As one observer noted, “I believe it occurred more than once that the block [vent piece] found its way into the main top to the discomfort of the men there.” Milne had been unhappy when the Royal Navy purchased one hundred of the 110-pounders without trials, even though the manufacturer had stated that he did not think them suitable for such large calibers and for use at sea. Milne had more reason for his dismay with the guns as their deficiencies manifested, believing them overcomplicated and prone to malfunction in quick firing. He pointedly noted, “Americans won’t look at them.” Even Lord Lyons had noted to Russell that Union authorities relied on the “simplicity and stolidity” of Dahlgren’s guns and had no confidence in breech-loading weapons.
Milne had kept by him the report of Capt. George Hancock of the Immortalité, who had toured American ordnance facilities and spoken extensively with Admiral Dahlgren. The report was already eighteen months old but that only added to his disquiet. Even then, the Americans were producing more than thirty of the Dahlgrens a week. Milne had complete confidence in Hancock’s judgment, and when the captain characterized the American guns as the “most efficient weapons of the day,” he took it very much to heart. Dahlgren had devised a method to avoid the great weakness of all guns, the manner in which the trunions, on which the gun pivoted, were mounted. The shorter American gun carriage allowed the guns to be fired at a greater elevation than comparable British guns. The guns’ soda bottle shape also meant that their center of gravity was not so near the ship’s outer wall and reduced the ship’s rolling, especially in heavy weather. The muzzles also extended beyond the gun ports more than British guns, reducing the chance of igniting the wooden sides of the ship or, when on the upper deck, of setting fire to the rigging. That last danger was the subject of special complaints Milne had made to the Admiralty. Hancock also noticed that the Americans had cut a hole behind each gun up through which powder charges were passed, thus eliminating the frantic rushing up and down the main hatchways of men carrying powder charges.
With all this in mind, Milne was preparing a report to state that although the Armstrong guns were “admirably manufactured and of great precisions,” they were “not suitable for service afloat.” That conclusion was a constant worry for Milne. The Armstrong guns were a large proportion of the station’s guns. He had decided to request that they should be replaced with more reliable muzzle-loaders with particular emphasis on the 68-pounder that British testing had indicated would penetrate the 4.5 inches of side armor of American ironclads at two hundred yards.
The backbone of the fighting power of the station was its ships of the line with their three decks of guns, which seemed from another world, and indeed they were. Most were laid down more than twenty years before. They were typified by HMS Nile, Milne’s flagship. She had been laid down in 1839 and converted to screw in 1854. In 1862 she had been up-gunned with sixteen Armstrong guns of various calibers, though she still carried sixty-two of the venerable muzzle-loading 32-pounders.
Milne’s war plan had three basic elements: to destroy any American fleet or ship that dared to oppose the Royal Navy; to blockade the Union coast from Cape Henry, Virginia, to Maine; and to conduct powerful raids against coastal targets. He also wanted to seize sites in the vicinity of Martha’s Vineyard as coaling stations. Inherent in this plan was breaking the Union blockade of the South at Charleston and possibly Galveston. The First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Somerset, had written him as the Trent Crisis mounted, “In the event of war I do not send from here any plan of operations as you have probably better means of judging what to do, but the first objective would probably be to open the blockade of the Southern ports and without directly co-operating with the Confederates, enable them to act and to receive supplies.”
Milne had also expressed a strong desire to control the Chesapeake Bay and make a descent on Washington itself, a tactic that the Royal Navy had used successfully in the War of 1812. An Admiralty report on the feasibility of attacking Northern ports concluded that the “intricacy of the channels and the strength of the forts made such attacks unfeasible.” Except for his pet project to strike at Washington, Milne himself did not favor operations against ports despite an Admiralty assessment that control of New York Harbor would probably end the war. As Milne went over these points with Hall, he explained, “The object of the war can only be to cripple the enemy-that is, his trade and merchant and whaling fleets.” He realized that Great Britain could never truly destroy the North. “No object would be gained if the ports alone are to be attacked, as modern views deprecate any damage to a town. If ships are fired upon in a port the town must suffer; therefore, the shipping cannot be fired upon. This actually reserves operations to vessels at sea.”