War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor

Abstract

Professor David A. Mindell has written a rather longheaded study of USS Monitor's place in history, claiming that the shock of Monitor's dramatic deflection of CSS Virginia in history's first ironcladtoironclad clash made it immediately obvious that naval warfare would change drastically. Certainly Monitor's very shape, almost all g eometric forms, emphasized the point. But Mindell's work is flawed by a major oversight, factual errors, and a striving for profundity. Although Mindell refers several times to the Royal Navy captain Cowper Coles, he does not seem to know that Coles's turrets were far superior to those of John Ericsson, who had designed and built the Monitor. When the Coles turret was married to moderate freeboard, the resulting seagoing war engine, HMS Devastation, would prove the template of all future armored capital ships. Many historians, including this reviewer, have dealt with this point at some length. Yet Mindell writes of “the innovative, yet conservative [?] British solution that the Monitor challenged” and that “the British Admiralty embraced technological change, albeit conservatively,” etc.