Ask any historical gamer about the contribution of the French navy to the 1870 war with Prussia and the answer will probably be gunners and naval infantry for the defense of Paris. Ask about the Prussian navy in 1870 and the answer is likely to be "What Prussian navy?".
Gloire (left) and Prinz Adalbert
This article will look at the contribution of the maritime activities of both the French and Prussian navies to the war effort.
THE OPPOSING NAVIES
First let's look at the two fleets. France had a longstanding, if not always victorious, naval tradition. In 1859 the Gloire was launched. Gloire was the first seagoing ironclad steam-powered warship. In the years before the start of the war Napoleon III had conducted a naval arms race with Great Britain. At the start of the war with Prussia the Imperial navy had 49 ironclads, 188 other warships, and 28,000 sailors. The ironclads were from several large classes and were mostly deep draft, ocean going types. These ships had been built to face the old enemy, Britain's Royal Navy.
The Prussian navy, officially it was the Navy of the North German Federation, was only just starting to expand. During the 1864 war with Denmark, Prussia had first felt the need for ironclad warships. By the start of the Franco-Prussian war the North Germans had purchsed five ironclads abroad. Ironically, some of these ships had been built in France. Most of the ships were either built as speculation by the ship yards or for other countries and obtained by Prussia when the original orders fell through. The first ironclad, Prinz Adalbert, was the sister ship of the CSS Stonewall that France had refused to deliver to the Confederacy. The five ironclads were each of a separate design. Prussia also had 42 other warships, mainly gunboats, and 6,200 sailors. The navy's primary mission was coast defense.
The ships available to both sides were generally similar. Steam power had been around for about 30 years. After its initial appearance as an auxilliary power source, steam had replaced sail as the main way to propel warships. Ships of this period still retained masts and sails. The sails were now used to conserve coal while cruising and in emergencies.
The first armored warships, Glorie in France and Warrior in England, were laid out very much like their Napoleonic predecessors. The guns were mounted in broadsides along the length of the ship with the exception of one or two chasers at either end. The armor was in a belt over the broadside and in the bulkheads fore and aft. The bow and stern of the ship were not armored at all. This layout had one main weakness, with the guns spread along the side a given mass of armor had to be spread thinner to cover them.
The first use of ironclads in ship to ship actions was of course in the American Civil War. The European navies watched these actions closely, to try to find out how these new weapons worked. From a European viewpoint the ACW answered only some of their questions. Most of the battles were between limited numbers of ironclads on enclosed waters. The question of what would happen when two ironclad fleets met in the open ocean was answered in 1866 at the Battle of Lissa when the Austro-Hungarian navy defeated the Italian navy in the Adriatic.
Naval architects and tacticians drew several lessons from these wars. Both the ACW and Lissa saw several instances of destructive ramming attacks. At the same time gunnery did not appear to be very effective against armor; the CSS Tennessee at Mobile Bay had been pounded by the Union fleet for hours and was still fully serviceable when it surrendered. Several navies, particularly the French, concluded that the ram would be the deciding factor in future battles. Most French ships built after 1866 had a heavily reenforced ram bow, even ships without rams were expected to ram the enemy if gunfire proved futile. One change that had occurred and not yet been tested was the widespread use of rifled breechloading guns as the main armament. The main armored warships of both fleets used these new guns. The French still retained some older smoothbore muzzleloaders but they had been relegated to secondary armament and ships.
The other lesson learned was that an extensive but thin covering of armor was of very limited use. Designers quickly learned that the armor had to be concentrated over the vital areas of the ship. One simple way to improve the armor for the engine spaces was to rearrange the coal bunkers so that a shell would go off in the coal instead of hitting the engines. Improving the protection of the guns was not so simple. The two main methods that developed both involved concentrating the guns into a limited area. This concentration was made simpler since the breechloaders did not need space to be run inboard for reloading. One method, taken to its extreme in the Union Monitors, was to mount one or two very large guns in a heavily armored turret, that by revolving, would give the ship a large field of fire. The only ship with true turrets in either navy during the Franco-Prussian War was the Prussian Arminius. An alternative favored by the French, and in use on the Ocean class ships, was the barbette. This simplified the mechanics by only rotating the gun and leaving the armor as a stationary breastwork.
The other method was to mount a larger number of guns on the broadside but to place them close together and limit the area needing to be covered by the armor. An early example of this type was the Confederate's first ironclad CSS Virginia. This layout was called a central battery and most of the French and Prussian ships were of this type. One of the problems noted at Lissa was the severely limited number of guns that could fire straight ahead. The solution that was adopted involved building the central battery out from the side of the ship so that some of the guns could fire fore and aft. This was being done on several of the ships under construction when the war started but none of these ships were ready in time.
More The Franco-Prussian War at Sea
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