Shipbucket

This is how a World War I contact mine was laid.



With that in mind, maybe we can do it this way?



I supposed I could use the plumb bob trigger release method and use the suspended buoy saddle down anchor deployment as well without the independent floating trigger.

Fleshing out some of the other ships in Mister McKinley's Navy

When is a tourist not a tourist?
That seems harmless enough for the likes of William H. Hunt, James Garfield's Secretary of the Navy.

There was not enough time for Hunt to really get rolling on his grand scheme to create a center of espionage inside the US Navy to rival the Royal Navy riddled British secret service, which he frankly admired and wanted the United States to emulate. His main sponsor and political patron, President James A. Garfield was shot dead by a disgruntled office seeker who was not even in Garfield's cognition. The summary of that preventable fiasco was that Guteau waylaid Garfield by hiding out in a lady's bathroom in the 6th Street train station of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. Guteau, a gutless coward, shot Garfield in the back. He was such a lousy shot that under ordinary circumstances had an American civil war surgeon been present, that doctor would have dug the bullet out of Garfield's lung, put in a common accepted aseptic (distilled alcohol) on the wound to prevent infection and plonked tree moss and a clean bandage wrap over it to heal it. Garfield would have been wheelchair bound, but he would have been a functioning president within the week. However, a platoon of incompetent civilian physicians, and Alexander Graham Bell ineptly finished off what Guteau incompetently started.

It took several weeks for Garfield to pass on.

Guteau was tried and hung shortly thereafter.

That month and a half delay certainly gave Secretary Hunt enough time to crank up the ONI and create his “corps de debutants”, before Chester A. Arthur packed him off to Russia as consul, where he could “cool his heels.” Chester A. Arthur, a spoils man, hated Garfield the reformer and the like minded men associated with him, so it was no political surprise that Hunt, a Louisianan, turned Republican as a matter of Democrat convenience arrived in Saint Petersburg as the new American ambassador to Russia. He somehow caught [lead?] pneumonia and promptly died.

Meanwhile, like Lyndon Johnson a hundred years later, Arthur found out that a martyred President meant that his successor was stuck with that martyred president's administration programs and policies, no matter what he the successor might think or want to do instead.

Still with Hunt gone, that should have been the end of the ONI and the Hunt corps de debutantes. Fortunately, (or unfortunately from his point of view?) Chester A. Arthur picked the one Republican Stalwart among his allies, who was a Lincoln man trained by the irascible Gideon Welles to love the United States Navy, when that young man served as the Lincoln Navy's Judge Advocate General. Hard to believe that William E. Chandler was the U.S. Navy's chief lawyer and personnel director during the American Civil War, but there you go. Arthur picked the wrong man!

Chandler took up the cause, to modernize the navy bureaucracy, the actual fleet in existence and to follow up on the nutty intelligence service idea that Hunt had.

And here it sort of becomes Victorian era strange, because Hunt thought that young American women of good quality, ladies who went abroad to finish their foreign cultural education could make dandy secret agents. How the ladies were supposed to obtain specifications on the latest armaments fitted to Her Britannic Majesty's Ship Colossus might have escaped Hunt who was a hopeless romantic, but Chandler was the practical experienced man who had seen Gideon Wells and his naval staff use southern female slaves to honeytrap Confederate naval and army officers into spilling their secrets. Those courageous women had spelled doom for Vicksburg and had put an end to the CSS Virginia and the CSS Arkansas with the actionable information they smuggled back to the Union Navy Department in which Chandler had been one of the many people to use, so that kind of dirty rotten espionage by female agents was right in William Chandler's wheel house. He just supplied certain young naval officer “husbands and brothers” to chaperone the corps de debutantes as the young women took up their duties of broadening their minds at Cadiz, Toulon, Plymouth, Wilhelmshaven and some other rather strange places, such as Havana, Manila, Halifax, Hong Kong, and Rabaul. Wherever the desire for foreign culture took them, these young women showed up to enrich their parochial minds. It became a humorous fashionable fad that amused Europeans to see these giddy Yankee flutterbys..

These young earnest women seemed to have an inordinate fondness for painting... seascapes, harbor scenes, ships and sailors. The kind of subjects the debutantes produced, actually created an art movement of a minor sort, called “Maritime Still Life.”

As for the chaperons, who were often ridiculed for being cuckolded or cozened by their foreign hosts as they poorly guarded their charges, well...

The place would not be easy to blockade, as it was dangerously near British Gibraltar, so something special would have to be laid on for the place. That spurred on US Navy interest in a solution they would try in Fleet Problem VII coming up.

Chandler had the honor of having that Hunt Commission to modernize the navy named after him instead, which doubly damned Chandler in the eyes of an isolationist Congress as the commission's remarkable extraordinary recommendations were identified with him. The Congress did not like Chandler's Commission at all for it called for a navy of seventy steel hulled armored and protected cruisers, as well as other sundry miscellaneous unnamed 'support ships' which would put the USN into the 200 hull range. That would cost a lot of money; to which the Westerners and Southerners in Congress (most of them Democrats) objected.

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But inasmuch as we are discussing the strange nature of wayward American youth and not shipbuilding and how in the Easy Morals Eighteen Eighties, the American youth comported themselves overseas to the shock of their elders, let us return to that subject.

That misbehaving youth produced reams of forgettable landscape art, took hundreds of pictures of the oddest seaside attractions, fished far too much in seaports with the wrong kind of tackle for the fish present, sort of developed a strange passion for things nautical and sent back shiploads of letters and telegrams to friends and family, which when decrypted yielded such reams of useless data about tides and bottom mud. This all occurred in the basement of the Treasury Building at the place where the Navy Crypto Bureau ran an office behind the doors of the Bureau of Engraving. These letters and telegrams yielded other details about for example, Plymouth's channel buoys, the British forts' fields of fire, probable minefield sites where the USN could profitably make life interesting for the bored British fleet, the nature of inshore harbor facilities and shipping, British naval manning rates (66%), easily observed material shortcomings (defective gun breeches and shell fuses) and ship's personnel training states (deficient pay and lack of practical time at sea) and if some debutante happened to be fortunate enough to make a close British acquaintance, someone in the know (Sir George Tryon who would surface later as a famous Royal Navy schnook admiral in the 1893 HMS Camperdown HMS Victoria debacle), then the status and political condition of the Royal Navy's officer corps (confused) and the current corrupt crown government (Gladstone's administration has just bungled the Sudan War.) it served would also trickle across with the other mundane data about such tides, currents, harbor mud and states of enemy defenses.

What went for Britain, went for the French, the Spanish, the Germans and anybody else in whom the United States Navy was interested.

Japan was proving somewhat difficult to peg for obvious reasons.

Plenty of busy bees are at work. Lot's of helpful hosts provide unwitting assistance and all that is needed is the honey which is being provided complete with the bustle skirt.

Chester A. Arthur to William McKinley, it goes forward. 1881-1897. Never mind the Grover Cleveland years when he orders that the nonsense be set aside as ungentlemanly and unseemly for Americans to use their young women in such a way. The Office of Naval Intelligence ignores President Arthur and still carries onward as if they are a perennial national secret service instead of the simple adjunct library to the USN officer corps as they were publicly described.

Bordello bureaucrats the ONI are derisively called within their own navy.

Two more armored cruisers for Mister McKinley's navy slide down the ways.

By now the Congress in the House was balking at the money being spent on the New Steel Navy. Prominent representatives such as James Richardson, a Democrat from Tennessee's Fifth District who had led a futile decade long struggle against the New Navy were finally applying the brakes as the US went into the 1893 Recession. As a consequence, the Navy Bills; which hitherto had received the strong backing of the Northeastern and Mid Atlantic states industrialists, especially the steel, shipbuilding, and coal industry magnates; were trimmed back severely.

The American naval designers had to accommodate the Congress and still meet overall navy goals within the reduced budgets and the Populist Democrats' demands for a "purely defensive navy".

Squeezing more seagoing behemoths like the USS Wyoming or new long range submersibles like the USS Fulton was not going to happen without a war. And as this was a time of peace and economic retrenchment, the ships had to be smaller, cheaper, and less threatening. So proclaimed the Congress. So in the same 1893 Navy Bill that authorized the construction of another Fulton class sub, another Haupt class train ferry, and the first Duncan class ocean going torpedo boat destroyer, a pair of coast defense "armored cruisers" was proposed and rammed through to provide the additional numbers the USN said it needed to protect home waters from the threat of a possible European intervention by France or Spain in violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

This did not make the naval architects happy who insisted that the one off Cincinnati class was what the doctor ordered as companion ships to the Wyomings, not the abortions that would be the USS Indianapolis and the USS Birmingham.

Nevertheless, given Congress' wishes, the designers at William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia (USS Birmingham) and Union Iron Works of San Francisco (USS Indianapolis) tendered ship plans and parallel solutions that yielded warships that somewhat defeated Congress' wishes.

Both ships were armed with government supplied main armament of three turrets of 25 cm (9.8 inch) BLNR model 1890 naval rifles. Secondary armament for the Indianapolis was identical to that being fitted to the West Virginia, sister ship to the Wyoming under construction, being Model 1892 BLNR 15 cm guns in two twin waist turrets on each beam. The Birmingham carried but a single such turret per beam amidships.

Other detail differences were that the Birmingham was a funnel less (with engines needing draft and uptake) The fitments supplied by other navy contractors gave both ships marginally the same appearance, but the use of imported Siemens electric engines and Niclause boilers on the Birmingham by William Cramp and Sons meant that the Birmingham would be 2 knots slower and a bit longer ranged in a similar hull, carry her guns differently and was overall a much more balanced fighting ship than the Indianapolis.

Both shipbuilders did follow Construction and Repair (C&R) recommendation that perhaps using the French crackpot ship designer Emile Bertin's scheme for superfiring turrets might be a good idea to shorten the hull length and shoehorn in the USN desired main battery on a reduced notional 10,000 tonne displacement.

This experiment would have to await the test of battle to see if it would work. Because of the weird arrangements of American steam electric propulsion plants, the two ships acquired a rather long uncharacteristic forecastle break (similar to the Trentons) and had their superfiring turret fitted aft instead of forward as you would might have expected. By now the characteristic Fiske Bushnell towers that were a common recognition feature for American men of war were fitted which spoiled an already ugly silhouette. Altogether, many, those connoisseurs of the warship as a work of art, deemed these two abortions as the ugliest examples of the shipwrights' art to yet emerge from the American dockyards.

How do you hit the other fellow?
That was the American reality of 1898. It was also the reality of other navies as well. This effectively limited the engagement to direct fire human estimation little different than the days of Trafalgar.. In practical tuerms, even with assistance the shooting was limited to 1800 meters, or about 1 nautical mile and change; no more than two and one half to three seconds flight time of the American shell, assuming an average parabolic transit speed of 600 meters/second for velocity. Any further than that and the line shot as it was called then would have an excessive over or short component where the arc of the parabola trajectory would fail to intersect the broadside of the enemy ship.

There were a couple of incremental aids (marginal improvements to this sad state of affairs. One was the invention of the ranging stadiameter (this really happened) by one Bradley Fiske, USN about the year 1888. This was not unique or even his invention alone as several other people particularly in Britain, France, Italy and Austria (but curiously not Germany) invented similar angle measuring devices that could give an approximate distance as a function of range if the parallax difference of the target size from end to end was known with accuracy. What made Fiske's navigation and pilot aid unique was that it was a height finder, and not a length finder. This meant that the distance was calculated to a uniform length measured off the target (ship's masts) that was not affected by target angle aspect as to hull length. Waterline to top of the mast was a constant for any aspect angle, so given a good enough stereoscopic telescope and a set of computed heights and angles to read off the instrument once it was focused and the two images coincided by adjusting the image splitter through prism alignments you could now get a fairly good range on the target to the observer horizon, provided the weather was clear, the observer could identify the target type from memory, and the yeoman striker was nimble fingered enough to thumb through the ONI book to read out that the target was the Reina Cristina with a fore mast height of 25.7 meters. The quick read off the angles solution table on the same page and the result could be 5,000 meters, give or take 100 meters.

Great! You can telephone the range to the gun crews and they can elevate their guns' barrels for line shots for 5000 meters. Right? They might have to consult their own gun data books for angle sets (The French method) or they could just read the elevation angle needed for 5000 meters off the elevation gear scale where it is scribed in in 100 yard (meter in this AU version) increments (the British method), and point the gun at the target using local sights to shoot. Nope. That will not work.

First you have the 5-7 seconds for the highly trained gun crew to figure the elevation and point out. Then the gun crew has to wait on the roll to fire when they think or read that the gun mount base (not the barrel elevation) is incline zero to the thing that is even then known as the “artificial horizon” or “ship's zero plane” before they shoot. How long is the ship's roll period? That depends on the ship, the direction of wind and current and the wave size and period. You can be complicated French about it with another data book, or you can read the ship's roll period off an inclinometer clock as the Americans did and shoot when the pointer read zero. That fudge factor could add another 8-10 seconds.

By the time the shell gets there (8.2 seconds for the gun crew to figure out elevation and point, 4.1 seconds for the ship roll and then the shell's flight time is another 8.7 seconds, that is 21 seconds from range telephoned to shell arrival. ) the target will have moved, the firing ship will have rolled, pitched, and yawed, and the enemy ship which is doing the same thing may have started a turn away.

Some things the gun crews did not know are that the enemy ship is receding on a diverging angle of twenty degrees and that its speed is 13.6 knots, (7 m/s) while their own ship speed is 9.7 knots (5. m/s) . The range is opening at a constant rate and at 21 seconds from initial solution received striking the igniter on the good old Model 1888 25 cm. BLNRs aboard the USS Trenton to the Reina Cristina, the final predicted point of impact is off by anywhere from 80-> 200 meters.

That line shot will miss, short and astern.

Some trigonometry comes to the rescue? Okay, but this requires manual plotting with a tracking party taking range and target bearing estimates which they use to plot an enemy's vector To do that, you need to build a mechanical mount under the stadiameter coincidence rangefinder to track rate of change motion between your own ship and the target. This is difficult but not impossible, as range of rate motion telescope clocks are already familiar to American astronomers (Bushnell) but now the silly things have to be variable speed controlled by a man to match target drift in the viewfinder, and the devices have to operate in a tower that pitches yaws and rolls with the ship. The human pointer operator will have to be skilled enough to keep the enemy ship in the eyepiece field of view in 2 axis control, up and down, and side to side in the aiming telescope, while the actual observer resolves the split images coincidentally in the rangefinder viewer proper.. That takes time to lay the telemeter on. You will need three range and bearing estimates to plot such a “target track”.

One good thing comes of this folderoy. The rate of change in target motion can be mechanically read off from that clock through cams and gears to dials that can give you the divergence or convergence rate over time as the ranges change. This mechanical rate change can be transmitted directly to the guns, provided that the ship itself for which all this gimcrackery is designed is factored into the overall director system. The USS Trenton's A and X turret's guns' barrels are going to be slightly higher and ahead of C-turret's guns' barrels and those position differences will affect the fall of shot when she sends forth a six shot main gun salvo at the Reina Cristina.

However the main point is that if you design the cam and gear machinery to follow the rangefinder as it motion tracks the target you can create the mechanical plotter which does this plotting of the differential for you on a pantograph contraption while it also sends electro-mechanical commands to bear the guns at what the rangefinder looks at; with the gun crew only needing the range and the lead angle to fine adjust the lay up-down and left-right..

Those last readings are human fudge factors due to present technological and physical limitations. In 1895 you will not get automatic range gating from timed signal return. All you have available is light and good old human experience. Also while astronomers have motion clocks to correct for carioles' drift effect over time, there is no way that will be ready for ship use before the British invent it in 1908.

Nor will you have good measurements for such thing as weather effects, barrel wear, barrel droop, or mechanical linkage slippage (all French invented and all World War I tech). But with the Fiske Bushnell system described herein (The Argo Clock system, very simplified, it is; and about a decade early.), you will have shooting accuracies that improve from 1% PH at ~ 2000 meters range to about 5% at 5000 meters range if the crews are very good and well practiced in its use.

Of course the rate of fire will be very slow. There is no Jackie Fisher to teach William Sims about the latest British innovation, which is continuous lay on target from the turret in local control. That is there is no equivalent American system of gun barrel elevation stabilization to zero to the artificial horizon to cancel out the error of ship's roll and yaw. The gunner/turret captain will just have to wait on that dratted inclinometer.

The inherent problem that comes with the Fiske Bushnell system is obvious isn't it? It is convergent and divergent range errors between ships for which it was designed that it still cannot quite correct. To maintain shooting accuracy over time, American ships and fleets must fight the parallel order fight; that is they must match enemy courses and speeds as exactly as they can to minimize the in and out range drift of their enemy track solutions. Then their Fiske Bushnell system can reasonably compute a proper lead angle on the Spaniards.

This will show up starkly in the Battle of Tenerife.

Sorry to say, but your ships will need a lot of work still. I don't know about what you wrote in the text, (I am not familiar enough with the time era to really comment on that, nor is it something I feel I should comment on) but a quick look at the drawings made me note the following comments:

I don't know if that is your intention, but your vessels look like toy boats. Quite a few of them don't have any match with what was historically possible as far as I know, and some of them have nothing in common with what actually would work.

your Lake Tohopekaliga for example has an bow that looks like something on an 1940's battleship, has an bilge keel that does nothing but slow the ship down, has non workable rigging and as far as I can see not enough deck height to let people actually be on board. The underwater hull and rudder aft look like the boats I played with in the bathtub years ago.
Your armored cruisers lack machinery space, have block-tower masts and are most likely top heavy, looking at the size of those turrets and their position on the hull.

As for shipbucket style, they actually look unfinished, with unconnected parts, missing black outlines, double black lines or shading that has no reason to be as it is. All by all, while the drawings are not the worst I have ever seen, they are not what I would expect for somebody criticising designs done by many other people

_________________
Drawings are credited with J.Scholtens
I ask of you to prove me wrong. Not say I am wrong, but prove it, because then I will have learned something new.
Shipbucket Wiki admin

Thank you for your professional criticism.

Continuing with the AU...

Where are they?

Scouting for the enemy in 1895 is not going to be easy, quick or simple. Unless you are Great Britian or France you will not have the consular networks, the merchant marine, or the cable reporting stations to track global foreign naval movements. The United States Navy in the real Spanish American War found that it was completely blind to the main Spanish squadron's movements in the North Atlantic. This foe, the Spanish Cape Verde squadron of four armored cruisers and three torpedo boat destroyers was firmly initially located in the Portuguese island anchorage off western Africa. When Admiral Cervera departed that anchorage reluctantly, he disappeared from view and was lost to the USN until he showed up in the Carribean as a surprise, not where he was expected near San Juan, Puerto Rico as a way station headed eventually for Havana.

An article from a New Zealand newspaper.

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bi ... 80606.2.24

And the United States Navy;

http://www.history.navy.mil/research/pu ... adron.html

Now wily Cervera could read American newspapers and he did not have to work hard to see where the confused US Navy deployed its rather limited forces to the expected approach routes that they could cover, especially as due to domestic presence that navy had to split its North Atlantic squadron in half to create a flying squadron to cover the approaches to the American Atlantic coast and act as a mobile fire brigade to prevent a surprise raid on ports from Boston to Charleston.

That was the reality.

Here is what Cervera did about it. He came at Cuba from the south beyond the possible US coverage and frankly surprised the Americans. Only a stop by the port of Fort de France, a chance encounter with a passing neutral merchantman who innocently belatedly reported the position of the Spanish squadron to its own press as soon as it made Fort de France; and then as the squadron passed through afterward and was denied coal. it finally reached the American newspapers via wire service.

Surprise and consternation in Washington is what happened. The original USN estimate of Havana as to the destination was wrong. Hasty redeployments, glossed over in American history, were the facts. The new blockade lines were not along the coasts of northwest Cuba, or along the Windward Passage or along the Florida Straits. The new deployment was to unite the whole fleet at the only rail connected port along the southern Cuban coast where Havana stockpiled coal could be sent by train. That would be Cienfuegas. A nice deep port that was supposedly adequately defended with coast defenses. The problem here was that Cervera did not even do that expected action once the USN found out he was at or near Curacao in the Dutch Antilles thanks to the American consul stationed there who telegraphed that news home. For reasons that still defy logic, Cervera headed next for Santiago de Cuba, slipping past American merchant cruiser patrols along the Venezuelan coast and holed up behind the forts present that defended the anchorage. Now maybe this extremely smart and experienced Spanish sailor knew that the cautious Americans were milling around near Cienfuegas. It could have been that Cervera believed Sigismundo's lies that a ship packed full of coal was on its way to Santiago de Cuba to rendezvous with him. I frankly don't care. The point is that Cervera until he bottled himself up and stranded himself because he ran out of coal, outmaneuvered the American admirals and made fools out of them.

The reason he managed this will o the wisp dance was because the oceans are huge, and steam ships do not have to follow the trade winds and currents by which sailing ships were restricted. The American admirals were victims of their sailing navy expectations.

Cervera had more practical experience than Sampson. It showed in the way fleet movements were managed,

Now I won't debate the ultimate strategic soundness of Cervera's movements. The tactical moves that led to his Santiago de Cuba destination were perhaps sound for an inferior fleet operating as a fleet in being. In the strategic sense, Cervera knew it was ridiculous to play the role of the fool in the Chinese fable of making the journey of ten thousand steps into the American's home waters just so they could finally find him, blockade him, and force him to either surrender or be defeated in battle.

From the Spanish point of view, as Cervera saw ir, the proper place to defend Spain's interest was at the Canary Islands. This was within easy steaming range for his ships of Spain's main base at the Bahia de Cadiz. Make the Americans come to Spanish waters where they would be weak and the Armada would be strong. Cervera was not that big a tactical fool. But he was an obedient government servant and he obeyed the orders of ministers who were not very good at the making of a war in which they believed “that the crews of American ships are recruited from the dock sweepings of the world and that is why they will fail in battle.” Cervera's reply to the Spanish navy minister was blunt to the point of rude; “The British used such crews at Trafalgar.”

So the Americans had a problem tracking Cervera. They had no problem with Montojo since Spain's East Asia Squadron as the Americans quickly discovered had neither the means nor the intention to stray far from Manila Bay. Lack of coal, the types of ships he had, the peculiar geography of the area to be defended and his orders limited Montojo. The Americans knew he was pinned as a grain of sand in the Manila Bay oyster. They just had to go over there and shuck that oyster. Very simple tactical problem.

With Cervera, the Americans could chase him around a bit, or make wrong guesses as to which way he would come, (as they did) or they could force him to come to them and establish a scouting scheme to locate him when he had to come to them within the means they had.

That means seizing the initiative first. Find something the Spanish have to defend and attack it. Now that could be Cuba, and it was, but it was a near run thing on land and it was a closer contest at sea than is taught because Cuba is big with a long coast and many ports and anchorages . A better use of the limited American resources is to attack where the main Spanish fleet has no choice but to seek out the Americans and engage in decisive battle at a spot where the Americans know they have to show up.

That would be the Canary Islands, exactly where Cervera wanted to meet them.

It limits the amount of ocean that the Americans have to scout, especially if the Americans get there first and set up to meet the Spanish rescue expedition. It permits the Americans to concentrate a fleet and a reasonable sized expedition to handle the expected Spanish riposte. This was actually a part of early American war plans as promulgated by Admiral Francis M. Ramsay, the naval barracks lawyer previously mentioned as being not trusted with a row boat out of sight of land. Just because he was a tactical nincompoop did not obviate the soundness of his Canary Islands idea.

So how does the USN scout in this AU?

Most of that answer is how the navies of that era would have done it. The USN would have hired, leased, or bought fast steamers to act as impromptu scouts along a search line ahead of the main battle fleet. This was the policy that the Royal Navy followed clear through to early WW II. At great costs these converted merchant cruisers were sacrificed on scout lines to report contacts with enemy forces.

Now there is no radio as of yet, but there are photophones. Usable range with the technology available and weather limits mean that the patrol lines would be spaced about 6-8 kilometers apart.

And of course there are workable aerostats that can either be towed from ships or operate from land to sufficient heights so that enemy fleet wakes can be seen from as far away as forty + kilometers.

This is how you solve the scouting problem for Cervera. Make him come to you, and spot him as he hunts for you.

Battle Experienced American fleet commanders.

How many people have heard of Henry Walton Grinnell or of Philip N, McGiffen? Both of them were Americans who participated in the Naval Battle of the Yalu River. McGiffen was with the Chinese aboard the Chen Yuan while Grinnell was a staff officer advising the Japanese admiral Sukeyuki (I'm not making that name up .), Ito. Grinnell claimed he was aboard the Japanese flagship Matsushima, but I think he is a liar, since the Japanese tended to put their “foreign experts” ashore and make it an entirely Japanese commanded affair when they went out to sink Chinese and Russians . He did serve the role of fleet inspector general for that squadron, so his comments about material and training can still be accepted as possibly true.
I should add a few corrections to the above account.

According to the Englishman, James Allan who wound up aboard the American fast steamer, SS Columbia, that was used as a blockade runner and later a troop transport fetching Chinese troops from Tsientin to the mouth of the Yalu River before that Battle of the Yalu. The hired transports of the convoy had arrived at their destination and unloaded their ttroops successfully. Under the prevailing instructions of common sense and logic as well as good advice, the now empty transports should have retired under the cover of the Beiyang fleet promptly back to Wei hei Wei or Port Arthur and thereby completed their mission.

This did not happen. Again according to James Allen the Beiyang fleet pulled out during the night leaving the hired transports, 18,000 Chinese troops and three torpedo boats and a gunboat up the Yalu River in the lurch and hurriedly put to sea without telling anybody anything. Whether this idiocy was due to “foreign advice” from an incompetent Prussian named Constantin von Hanneken, imperial orders, or just general cowardice on the part of the Chinese commanders present after a 112 years have passed we still don't know, but the Japanese at sea caught notice of the movement and they being Japanese were ready, eager and waiting to meet the enemy.

The Chinese fleet had therefore split itself into two portions with its lunatic movement and failed to escape the Japanese anyway. The part that fled during the night, the main body of two relatively large “battleships” of seven thousand tonnes, three somewhat misnamed armored cruisers of 2,300 tonnes, displacement, a coast defense monitor of 2,000 tonnes displacement, two 1300 tonne gunboats, and a 1,200 tonne yacht was caught along the coast and was forced to offer battle as it cleared the mouth of the Yalu at dawn.

Under the circumstances, the truism that a cornered rat will still fight the cat hard, held true and the Beiyang fleet did try to fight. I still don't know what was in Ting's mind when he disposed his fleet to receive the Japanese, but apparently (under foreign advice, source McGiffen) he deployed his ships to present a leeward defence in line abreast and let the Japanese come to him. Considering the nature of the ships the Chinese had, someone (probably McGiffen) thought he was giving Ting good advice as this would present minimum aspect target to receive Japanese gunfire and allow maximum Chinese end on gunfire. This would also provide the Chinese opportunities for ramming attacks which considering that Chinese ships were citadel and staggered barbette design ironclad and post ironclad navy types (early 1880s tech) was considered prudent and viable as an option, even among the other expert Europeans present.

In other words that was exactly right out of the American naval academy playbook, circa 1890 which would be where Philip McGiffen as a midshipman learned such idiocy. If you did not catch the idea, someone thought he was fighting a replay of Lepanto. The Chinese admiral put his two battleships in the middle of his line abreast and stationed his “cruisers” on the flanks to anchor his line. And then the idiot advanced out from the lee defense to meet the Japanese in that formation.

But let us not forget the Japanese. These guys had been saddled for years with the hired French lunatic Emile Bertin, the so-called great ship designer and theorist who argued the Jeune Ecole school to the Japanese and after they sent him packing with a “don't let the door hit you on the way out, buddy” after they proved in battle what a fool he was, went on to derail the French navy and saddle them with some of the ugliest and most worthless warships ever designed in the Edwardian era.

As a consequence of what he did, the Japanese had three naval monstrosities called the Matsushima, Itsukushima and Hashidate, (4,500 tonnes) three ships which embodied Bertin's theory of a small ship with a massive battleship destroying big gun. The Matsushima, the prototype, had its 12.6 inch Schneider Canet BLNR firing over the stern The Hashidate and Itsukishima at least had the useless thing which took a half hour to load, pointed forward so that it could fire over the bow. This was kind of important as the Japanese discovered The gun was barbetter mounted to provide forward 180 degree fire but in practice the Japanese discovered that any attempt to fire the gun abeam outside the forward 90 degreed bow arc (45 degrees left or right of the keel line) damaged the otherwise sensibly designed protected cruiser on which the monster was mounted . To add insult to injury, these three “modern” Japanese cruisers were actually slower than the two Chinese battleships they were specifically designed to kill!

These three nigh useless cruisers were paired off with the old rebuilt steam and sail central battery ship armor clads Hei and Fuso and a British built replacement for another Emil Bertin bad idea, the French built protected cruiser Unebi which was overgunned, carried too much topsail, and which had a serious error in freeboard which caused her to heel over and sink enroute to Japan from the builders. The British replacement was a conventional “belted cruiser”, the Chiyoda of 2,400 tonnes similar to the Nelson class off which she was based. Good ship, probably assigned to the slow squadron because she was ideally suited for torpedo boat defense with all of her rapid fire guns, of which she carried aplenty in 12 cm bore also of the Elswick pattern.

That was the “slow squadron”. A gaggle of “Elswick cruisers” and the Akitsushima was grouped together to form the “fast squadron”

Curious ship, the Akitsushima was. She was intended to be a Japanese built repeat of the Hashidate, but someone British got hold of the plans for the projected USS Baltimore and passed those on to the Japanese and that was when Emile Bertin was given the boot back to France..

Anyway, the technology (ships with which they were saddled) dictated the Japanese tactics as much as it did the Chinese tactics.

The battle, itself, was not that special. The Chinese lined up in line abreast as previously described *(actually McGiffin called it a "Z" as it shook out.). The Japanese with the fast squadron in the van formed up line ahead and bore across the Chinese formation as James Allen, the Englishman, describes them going from roughly west to east with the fast squadron trying to get around the Chinese right (the Chinese are roughly facing southwest by his eyewitness account) and the slow squadron trying to get around the Chinese left. Fleet discipline breaks down in the Chinese line. Some of the Chinese captains turn chicken and run for it. McGiffen in his account names them as Captain Fong (of the Jing Yuen, the Chinese state the captain actually is Yeh Tus-kuei), a liar as McGiffen maintains, who claimed his guns did not work, which that lie was proved on him by post battle inspection (for which aforesaid Chinese captain was killed in a most gruesome manner, as the beheading was botched.) and yet another rotten actor named Wu Ching jung, who fled at the first shot and ran his ship, the Kwan Chia aground in his panic, disrupting the Chinese line by ramming another Chinese ship as he fled.

Things did not go according to plan for the Japanese either. The four torpedo boats left upriver by Admiral Ting made their appearance on the Chinese right and while they did not do much, their mere sudden presence caused the Japanese fast squadron to sheer off from their part of the plan to envelop that end of the Chinese line. Meanwhile, McGiffen, now in command aboard the Chen Yuen (Zhenyuen according to the Chinese) left station and formed up alongside with the battleship Dingyuan (flagship) the pair of battleships fighting a valiant rear-guard action that allowed the rest of the surviving Beiying fleet to avoid encirclement and retreat.

The battered Japanese rounded themselves up and allowed the two Chinese battleships to escape after this inconclusive final phase which was in their mind when they were to decisively defeat the Chinese side with an ox horn maneuver. The reason given in the histories for Admiral Tsuboi of the fast squadron aborting his part of the plan was that the Japanese cruisers were low on quick fire gun ammunition and did not want to chance Chinese torpedoes and mines in a close action melee where torpedo boats were present. Bogus reason probably, but there it is. For the most part neither side had achieved exactly what they immediately wanted, but the Japanese had at least attained their long range goal of driving the Chinese fleet from the area so that they could complete their land operations in Korea without facing hordes of Chinese troops ferried across from Port Arthur to the Korean coast. The Japanese army and navy together would soon put an end to the Beiyang fleet now forced to remain in port to repair damage and avoid battle as a fleet in being(this time we can blame the Dowager Empress and her rotten corrupt regime for porting that squadron decimatinmg its command group and otherwise sacrificing it on the drug happy whims of a Mandarin class who needed to scapegoat somebody for their losing of the Sino Japanese War.

But what does this have to do with Mister McKinley's Navy you ask?

MvGiffen (burned half to death and ruined for life) and Grinnell (fat dumb and happy as a "Japanese Admiral" to later serve the United States as a shore billet lieutenant USN in the Spanish American War) came back with lessons learned. They published those lessons. Along with the Englishmen, James Allen who noted the lessons also from aboard his service time aboard the SS Columbia as a blockade runner and hired troop transport. These common sense lessons could be summarized as follows;

As of 1894, the futility of shooting at ranges beyond 2,500 meters is quite apparent as the big guns could not be laid on with the current aiming methods. Rapid fire guns intended for anti-torpedo boat defense actually were the most effective ordnance carried by warships against each other at this date because of this limitation.

Fire is the great ship killer. Paint and wood are definite no nos with that fact established.

No armor is actually better than thin armor which just confines shell explosions after the plate is pierced.. Thick armor is the only effective defense against shellfire. Thick armor can only be spared for guns, magazines, and engine spaces. Anything else, even crew spaces and bunkerage will have to do without. The expected holes can be plugged.

As a corollary, the float bubble is the only important thing to a ship in battle. As long as the float bubble is viable, the ship can fight. Once the float bubble goes it is abandon ship. Hence in damage control it is the float bubble first, last and always. Even fighting fires comes second to it.

Ships boats are useless and or actually dangerous liabilities in battle. Better life preserving measures are needed in the form of personal floatation jackets and perhaps buoyant non-flammable rafting materials as well.

It is anthracite coal, and wet dry storage or nothing. The fire and smoke hazard with bituminous or soft coal is far too great.

Bagged charges are a BAD idea.

Cased charges are a whole lot safer as long as you don't spark or strike the fuses or primers.

Shells have to be inspected for filler content to prevent corrupt armorers from selling off the contents. If cost cutting has to be done on the ammunition, then at least fill the shells with concrete as fully loaded concreted shot does more plate damage by smash than sawdust filled shells which simply shatter into fragments on even the medium thick plates.

Hire Germans to build your ships, but don't use them to tell you how to run them.

Don't hire the French for anything to do with navies! At least not in this era.

Ramming does not work.

Running away does not work.

Torpedo boats do work. Even if they don't do anything, they still work. The enemy is afraid of them.

Don't skimp on training. The Japanese did not. Stuck with some really lousy ships and an incompetent French doctine that produced those ships, the Japanese trained their officers and crews to within an inch of their lives and managed sterling results with that defective doctrine and those lousy ships.

Learn by doing. The Japanese found out the limitations of their Matsushima class ships quickly and adapted to the limitations by using them as traditional cruisers more than the battlship killers that Emile Bertin, the lunatic, claimed they were intended to be. In the Sino Japanese War. These ships were used as cruisers. That did not mean the Japanese did not load up and take the main gun shot at a ship when accident provided such an opportunity, but they did not let the Schneider Canet gun's presence dictate their adopted British style line ahead tactics or how they would maneuver.

Speed is the weather gauge in the age of steam. The faster fleet can dictate the offer or refusal of batrtle. Similarly the faster fleet can dictate who will have position advantage. The Japanese had a hodge podge fleet with many ships slower than the mostly homogenous speed Chinese fleet, but the Japanese had enough faster cruisers to form a fast squadron and thatr was how they dictated the whole battle. They used that squadron to pin the befuddled Chinese on the right while they maneuvered their slow squadron to flank the Chinese on the left.

There is no cure for gallant ships manned by gallant crews except to close and kill them. The Chinese battleships put up one heck of a fight and Ito was too scared to close the deal on them. As a result, the battleships and the surviving Beiyang fleet survived on to bedevil the Japanese as a fleet in being until the final siege at Wei Hei Wei, when the Japanese captured the port and the Chinese fleet with their ARMY.

All other things being equal, end on aspect is a bad idea against a traditional broadside enemy. The fall over and short of the line shot of that age is more likely to hit a ship which presents its length to the direction of fall than its beam. Not only is that a truism of probability, but the end on armor is weak compared to broadside plate.

Finally, if you are in a lee defense close inshore, do not give the enemy the searoon to get around your, line especially if you are slower than he is.

Make of that what you will, the USN of that era ignored these accounts and had to learn those lessons the hard way in battle (mainly because it was too late in 1894 to absorb and act on the lessons by 1898), but then this is an AU and in this AU, the USN does what it can in three years, which is:

a. to install stack scrubbers on its ships to prevent flame flash.
b. where possible, convert over to cased ammunition.
c. make sure that ammunition budgets are priorities and that ammunition quality meets the same legal proof standards that the US artillery ordnance does. (Not seen in US law until the great ammunition scandal of 1944).
d. replace wooden boats with steel ones.
e. teach sailors how to swim, equip ships with life vests and life buoys for the crews.
f. teach gunnery, practice gunnery, and preach gunnery.
g. teach how to maintain a float bubble as part of fighting the ship.
h. teach fire-fighting.
i. remove woodwork wherever possible.
j. paint it for camouflage and not for parade.
l. train in fleet tactical evolutions as well as fleet problems to avoid the fleeing cowards and ship collisions the Chinese demonstrated in the stress of battle at the Yalu.
m. select leaders for their courage as well as their alleged expertise. This may produce a bullheaded Tryon or two, but that's better than winding up with a Ramage or a Sampson when the crunch comes.

Taking in the criticisms received so far, where I found them helpful, I've made some corrections to one egregious error.

I will make corrections as necessary.



As always. constructive criticism is welcome.

But expect it in return. Fair is fair.