Cicero

My grandmother was a Holmes. I don't know all of the details though, I need to find out some day.

Solidaire

How long did you serve aboard the Constellation?

I served for 20 months on an Adams class destroyer. Military service is obligatory over here, but I did chose to serve in the Navy because of my love for the sea.

Cicero

The Battle of Lissa 1866

Part of the Third Italian War if Independence which paralleled the AustrioPrussian War, the battle of Lissa took place on 20 July 1866 near the island of Lissa (currently Vis) in the Adiratic Sea. A fascinating naval battle in its own right, Lissa has interest for me in the effect it had on subsequent Naval Architecture over the remainder of the 19th century - it made navies fixated on the ram.

The Austrians were outnumbered ( 7 Austrian to 12 Italian ironclads; and 7 other major ships Austrian to 10 Italian Cruisers) and had inferior firepower in guns, so focused their attack demoralizing the Italians by closing quickly into a melee on a small number of Italian ships with ram and close range fire and sink them.

Tegetthoff the Austrian commander was sucessful and his ship conducted three raming attacks.



Tegetthoff on his flagship Erzherzog Ferdinand Max. Outnumbered and outgunned, he focused on ramming attacks on the Italians and conducted three such attacks sinling two Italian ships.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Romako_001.jpg

Two Italian ironclad warships were sunk mainly due to raming, and the Italians retreated.


The importance of ramming in the battle led to naval designers, over the next 50 years, equipping future warships (especially battleships and cruisers) with ram bows. This aggravated a number of incidents of ships being sunk by their squadron-mates in accidental collisions. Ramming never featured as a viable battle tactic again. The fixation on ramming may also have inhibited the development of gunnery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lissa_(1866)




Artist perspective of the Re d'Italia one of the Italian ironclads sucessfully ramed by the Austrians sinking

http://www.adriaticdiving.com/pics/r...a%3DN%26um%3D1

corrocamino

The Battle of Lepanto, 1571, at the mouth of the Ionian Sea, where the Holy League fleet defeated the Ottomans. Of peculiar interest to me because Cervantes, of later "Don Quixote" fame, participated and was wounded.

tksensei

I'd like to see us return to the use of Greek Fire in dealing with Somali pirates.

Cicero

Lepanto 1571 was going to be my next posting! And I too was going to mention Cervantes.
Some Western historians have held it to be the most decisive naval battle anywhere on the globe since the Battle of Actium of 31 BC.

It has been said that "after Lepanto the pendulum swung back the other way and the wealth began to flow from East to West", as well as "a crucial turning point in the ongoing conflict between the Middle East and Europe, which has not yet completely been resolved."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto_(1571)

Cicero

John “Jacky” Fisher (25 January 1841 – 10 July 1920) British Naval Man Extraordinaire is often considered the second most important figure in British naval history, after Lord Nelson

Fisher spent 60 years in the Royal Navy, entering as a cadet in the age of sail and retiring in the age of submarines as the chief sailor in the navy as First Sea Lord 1910. He was mainly known as an innovator and reformer and not as a warrior. Amongst his accomplishments:

• he fainted on his first day in the Navy when he witnessed a flogging
• Tutored in navigation by one of his captains who was later a Fellow in the Royal Society, Fisher became an expert on navigation and achieved the highest score ever - 963/1000 - for navigation on his lieutenant’s exam .
• He was one of the last Royal Navy officers to receive basic training entirely at sea.
• Fisher was appointed Gunnery Lieutenant to HMS Warrior, the first all-iron sea-going armored battleship and the most powerful ship in the fleet
• He was appointed gunnery instructor at navy's principal gunnery school where he also became an expert on torpedoes which had recently been introduced.
• He became the head of
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  Torpedo
  and
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  Naval_mine
  training for the navy. On one of first commands he had his ship carry out almost as many torpedo practice runs in 6 weeks than was usual for a year.
• During the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War, Fisher took part in the bombarding the port of
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  Alexandria
  and was placed in charge of a landing party. He became famous and a hero when he devised a plan to armor a train with iron plates, machine gun and cannon.
• As
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  Admiralty_administration
  , responsible for weapons and munitions developed quick firing guns as a defense from torpedo boats, and removed wooden boarding pikes from navy ships.
• Third Sea Lord" target="_blank">Third Sea Lord
  Third_Sea_Lord
  , the naval officer with overall responsibility for provision of ships and equipment. He presided over the development of torpedo boat destroyers armed with quick-firing small-caliber guns (called
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  Destroyer
  at Fisher's suggestion).

· Fisher was chosen by Prime Minister Lord Salisbury as British naval delegate to the First Hague Peace Convention in 1899.
· As chief of the Mediterranean station, the most prestigious of the fleet commands, he worked on improving gunnery training effective doubling the expected range of the ships major guns.
· Lord Hankey, then a marine serving under Fisher later commented, 'It is difficult for … to realize what a change Fisher brought about in the Mediterranean fleet... Before his arrival, the topics and arguments of the officers messes... were mainly confined to such matters as the cleaning of paint and brasswork... these were forgotten and replaced by incessant controversies on tactics, strategy, gunnery, torpedo warfare, blockade, etc. It was a veritable renaissance and affected every officer in the navy'.
· Charles Beresford, later to become a severe critic of Fisher, gave up a plan to return to Britain and enter parliament, because he had 'learnt more in the last week than in the last forty years'.
· Appointed in 1904 as First Sea Lord, he was given overall operational command of the Royal Navy and tasked with reducing naval budgets, and reforming the navy for modern war. He ruthlessly sold off 90 obsolete and small ships and put a further 64 into reserve, describing them as "too weak to fight and too slow to run away", and "a miser's hoard of useless junk".
§ He decreased naval spending by 10% while despite new building programs and greatly increased effectiveness.
§ Chairing the Committee on Designs he was a driving force behind the development of the fast, all-big-gun battleship HMS Dreadnought, was a proponent of the battle cruiser, encouraged the introduction of submarines into the Royal Navy, and the conversion from a largely coal fuelled navy into one fuelled by .
· Though his reasoning was off mark, in 1908, he predicted that war between Britain and Germany would occur in summer 1914.
· He retired on 25 January 1911, his 70th birthday though was brought out of retirement in October 1914, as First Sea Lord.
· The failure of the Gallipoli campaign caused a falling out with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, causing them both to resign in May 1915.

An innovative manager, he could get the best out of men under his command.

• As superintendentat Portsmouth he would find out the name of one or two men amongst a work crew and then make a point of complimenting them on their work and using their names, giving the impression he knew everyone personally; he took a chair and table into the yard where some operation was to be carried out and declared his intention to stay there until the operation was completed.
• In the Mediterranean command, he offered prizes for essays on tactics and maintained a large tabletop map room with models of all ships in the fleet, where all officers could come to develop tactics and introduced a gold cup for the ship which performed best at gunnery.

An inspired teacher and organizer, he helped modernize training of Naval officers.
· As Second Sea Lord in charge of personnel he merged the Command and Engineering branches of the Navy (they were traditionally separate with different training).
· Training was extended from two years to four.
· Entrance to naval officer training schools had been historically by examination, which biased the intake to those who could obtain special tuition. Fisher replaced written exams with interview committee tasked with determining the general knowledge of candidates and their reaction to the questions as much as their answers.
\
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...cky-fisher.jpg

sculptingman

After the war we had a whole LOT of carriers. And we had several new carriers on the ways.

At the time, the war was a fresh memory and no one particularly interested in making museums out of old warships.
And to add to that the Enterprise left action with an enormous hole in her flight deck that would have cost millions to repair to a state worthy of a maritime museum.

The Navy scrapped every warship with any significant damage... mothballed those that might have a long service life, and sold off to foreign powers the outmoded or obsolete vessels.


If you look around you will find that, all over the world, the preserved ships are those that survived intact, and stuck around long enough for their former crew members to get nostalgic.

sculptingman

Can non-military ships play?

Here we have the Star of India... a real clipper ship built in 1861, that has survived because she was one of the few from that era built of iron.

She is floating museum here in San Diego... but unlike many others... she is kept fully seaworthy and taken out at least once every year to sail up and down the coast.

Attached Images

star of india15377.jpg (39.6 KB, 1 views)

Cicero

Can non-military ships play? Oh of course sculptingman!
I have visited the Star of India, and she is a beauty. Some say that she is haunted.
http://losangelesparanormalassociati...star-of-india/