Tag Archives: Naval History

History

Confederate Aft End Was a Dead End

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The following is part of Dead Ends Week at CIMSEC, where we pick apart past experiments and initiatives in the hopes of learning something from those that just didn’t quite pan out. See the rest of the posts here. 

Looking for whalers - CSS Shenandoah under sail
Looking for whalers – CSS Shenandoah under sail

The history of the American Civil War has very little to say on the Confederate Navy. What it does say focuses on commerce raiding, mostly by the CSS Alabama, which is well-known enough to be in high school history texts. But others were out there, too, such as the CSS Shenandoah.

Shenandoah was most notable for raiding whalers in the Pacific for months after the war was over (the news travelled to them slowly), and its flag was thus the last to fly in the Confederacy’s name. But for our purposes here the ship’s propulsion, not its politics, are our concern.

As was common in the mid-19th century, Shenandoah had a hybrid sail/steam system. When winds were good, the crew hauled up sails, and when the wind ceased, they lit off the boiler. What made this ship unique was a retractable propeller that (theoretically, anyway) reduced drag and increased the ship’s speed while under sail.

CSS Shenandoah drydocked
CSS Shenandoah drydocked

Did it work any more effectively than opening (or was it closing?) the tailgate on a pickup truck helps fuel efficiency? Apparently sailors of the time thought it did. Whatever the answer, it soon became a moot point as sails disappeared entirely from merchant and military fleets around the world. The retractable propeller truly was a dead-end technology, designed to address what turned out to be only a transient problem. As other technologies and procedures developed, the propeller “hoist” became a solution without a problem to solve.

A note on sourcing: While I did find online references to the propeller hoist, this post is mostly based on my memory of “Last Flag Down,” an account of Shenandoah’s cruise by John Baldwin and Ron Powers – a book I cannot recommend highly enough. For a short description of the voyage, see the family history of the XO, Lt. Conway Whittle (near the bottom of the page).

Matt McLaughlin is a Navy Reserve lieutenant who never quite figured out the tailgate thing and ended up selling his pickup. His opinions do not represent the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense or his employer.

History, Tactical Concepts

Landing Gear is for Pansies

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The following is part of Dead Ends Week at CIMSEC, where we pick apart past experiments and initiatives in the hopes of learning something from those that just didn’t quite pan out. See the rest of the posts here. 

Despite (or possibly, because of) Washington Naval Treaty cutbacks in the 20s and the Depression-induced budget troubles in the 30s, the U.S. Navy experienced quite a period of experimentation during the interwar decades. Without a doubt, the most glamorous example was the airship program, which featured yet another ship called Shenandoah, and culminated in the rigid airships USS Akron and USS Macon (ZRS-4 and ZRS-5).

Imagine riding this up to Fleet Week.
Imagine riding this up to Fleet Week.

But we are not here to talk about those, strictly speaking – we’re here to discuss their parasites. Parasite aircraft, that is. Akron and Macon were flying aircraft carriers, each carrying three or four scout aircraft to serve as the long-range eyes of the fleet below.

The Curtiss F9C Sparrowhawk originated in a 1930 Navy requirement for a small carrier-based fighter. It ended up not performing too well in that role, but was retained in service as the only aircraft small enough to fit through the hanger doors of Akron, then under construction.

Here’s the dead end – the truly daring, truly paradigm-shifting dead end. How many planes have you ridden in that possessed some form of landing gear? I trust that it was every single one. So what do you do with a plane that takes off and “lands” via a hook above the fuselage? If you’re the Navy in the 1930s, you ditch the landing gear. No fixed gear, no retractable gear – simply no wheels at all. The Goodyear company would have been very fearful at the lost business, if they weren’t also the ones building the giant ships carrying the tire-less biplanes. All in all, probably a good deal for them.

Hooking into the trapeze aboard the Macon… the parallel parking of the skies.
Hooking into the trapeze aboard the Macon… the parallel parking of the skies.

But aircraft that never kissed ground were not long for this Earth. The Navy’s lighter-than-air fleet followed the general trend of rigid airships, in which they died violent deaths. Akron went down in a storm in the Atlantic (killing Rear Admiral William A. Moffett) in 1933, and Macon went down in the Pacific while operating out of Moffett Field just two years later. Sparrowhawks lost their niche and paradigms were brought back to normal.

Still, it is worth pondering the lesson of the Sparrowhawk. It took something that every single aircraft must have in some form or another, and just did away with it when the need disappeared. It didn’t end up working out – but it deserves to be admired.

Matt McLaughlin is a Navy Reserve lieutenant who doesn’t usually discuss parasites as frankly as he does here. His opinions do not represent the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense or his employer.

History

You Can’t Get Far Without a Few Dead Ends

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Welcome to Dead Ends Week at CIMSEC, where we will pick apart past experiments and initiatives that just didn’t quite pan out. Some of them you may have heard of – others will be quite obscure. All will be informative, and hopefully a little entertaining.

A couple of ideas inspired Dead Ends Week and inform all the pieces to a certain extent. First, success is an iterative process. A lot of different things will get tried along the way to a winning solution, and many of them just won’t work out – but even those dead ends offer lessons in how to succeed later. Where appropriate, these posts will attempt to capture at least some of the lessons learned.

And second, to invert a famous quote, failure was an option in most of the examples examined here. Obviously no one likes to fail – however, failure in any one of these small initiatives would not have doomed an entire country or military strategy (with a possible exception in czarist Russia, as you’ll see later this week). The point being, if a prerequisite to success is some educational failure, then failure needs to be affordable. And if it’s affordable, then chances are you have the resources to hedge your bets and have a parallel project with a different approach to the same problem.

The paradoxical upshot: if failure is truly not an option at the macro level, be prepared to accept some failure at the micro level.

Over the coming week, you will see genius, idiocy, gallantry, cowardice, sailing ships, steam ships, circles, sonar domes, gun decks, poop decks, trapeze acts and Nigel Tufnel.

And if that doesn’t sound like a parade of spectacular failure… well, I guess my writing ability has hit a dead end.

Matt McLaughlin is a Navy Reserve lieutenant and strategic communications consultant who grew up on a cul-de-sac, which isn’t quite a dead end but is pretty close. His opinions do not represent the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense or his employer.

New Initiatives

Wanted: Innovative Failures

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Oh, thanks... because a normal spoon is SO much harder to use.
Oh, thanks… because a normal spoon is SO much harder to use.

Here at CIMSEC, we’ve featured a number of posts on the nature of innovation recently, mostly focused on ongoing initiatives such as the CRIC. I’d like to take a breather for a few days and take a retrospective look at a critical piece of innovation – failure. And so, CIMSEC brings you Dead Ends Week, starting 24 March.

Dead ends can include ship designs, new technologies, tactics or even something so mundane as an administrative process in the maritime domain. If the initial attempts didn’t go anywhere, it’s fair game. The only exception is aviation – there are simply so many aerospace examples, only a couple of truly unique initiatives can be included, or this will turn monotonous very quickly.

Please, submit your contributions!

A good thought process as you pick topics would be to (very roughly) classify the dead end, discuss why it failed, and explain what lessons came of it. Variation is welcome.

Some ideas for different types of dead ends:

–         Nullified by some extrinsic change (such as new developments in buggy whips failing to gain a foothold in the automotive era)

–         Lost to a rival system (the classic VHS vs. Beta contest)

–         Simply didn’t work as advertised (probably the most fun, and self-explanatory)

–         Ingenious, but with no real application (i.e. WTF?)

Let the parade of failures begin!

 Matt McLaughlin is a Navy Reserve lieutenant and strategic communications consultant who grew up on a cul-de-sac, which isn’t quite a dead end but is pretty close. His opinions do not represent the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense or his employer.