awp101 wrote:deafrn wrote:
Pretty far off the beaten path is the Union Army's own "navy," about which is Chester Hearn's book "Ellet's Brigade: The Strangest Outfit of All."
That one sounds mighty interesting as well. I wonder if it's in the public domain and has been scanned by the Gutenburg Project or someone similar? Weren't the river monitors part of the US Army's Navy as well?
Hearn's book was published by The Louisiana State University Press in 2000, so it is probably too new to be public domain, but the 1907 history is available online (at least for the present) at:
http://books.google.com/books/reader?id ... pg=GBS.PP1
(The "family" copy we have is a bit fragile, as can be seen; the sabre was also in the family, but was not actually used by my wife's MMB ancestor... we suspect it was just a memento he picked up right after the war.)
Clarke's edited version of George Currie's letters is a tough one to track down, and as it also covers his reminiscences of Pea Ridge, etc, some of it isn't necessarily RF/MMB related. It does, however, have the best firsthand description of the MMB's brief use of a 20-pounder Parrott as a "sniper's weapon" during the siege of Vicksburg, firing from an MMB-excavated (and railroad iron armored) "hide" across the Mississippi River.
I believe the river monitors, "City"-class ironclads, timberclads and tinclads were all under Navy auspices, with the Army having control of only the Ram Fleet and Mississippi Marine Brigade boats, along with some transports. "Control" is a flexible term when talking about the Ellet organizations, as nobody but Sec'y of War Edwin Stanton seemed to know exactly who was ultimately in charge of what, and he occasionally waffled a bit on the matter himself. The Navy did supply some materials and expertise, but it was continually exasperated by the setup... to be fair, the MMB was almost equally irritating to the Army.
I attached the only photo of an MMB boat I could find on the 'net: the former steam packet "Baltic," shown all planked up to protect from small arms (but not even remotely artillery-proof) and ready for action. The whole MMB concept was quite novel for the time, with each boat theoretically being able to steam up to the riverbank, run out gangplanks and have cavalry, infantry and artillery (!) assets on dry ground and ready to go almost instantly. Sadly, the unit rarely lived up to its potential.
This is as good a place as any to add that Myron J. Smith, Jr has written some interesting books on riverine warfare during the CW (his "Tinclads in the Civil War" even mentions the MMB here and there... that particular book will tell a person as much about tinclad operations as one could hope for).
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