Use of the Ram in the Ironclad Era (1862 - 1912)

The Austrian flagship Ferdinand Max at the climactic moment of the Battle of Lissa, 1866; survivors from the sunken Italian flagship cling to floating wreckage as the Max steams triumphantly into history's pages. The artist has taken the liberty of adding in the guns the ship lacked at the time (explained below), but we forgive him. This canvas captures the confusion and exhilaration of battle in grand Impressionist style, with rare realism and empathy.

Ramming each other had been one of the main tactics used in the navies of ancient Greece, Persia, and Rome. Their galleys (right, a modern replica at Piraeus) came equipped with sculpted bronze spurs at the prow for the purpose -- a tactic cinematically portrayed in the battle with the pirate fleet in Ben-Hur. By contrast, in the age of sail the emphasis was on maneuver, firepower, and eventual grappling and boarding; ramming became a suicidal last resort, since it would inevitably result in the loss of spars and maneuverability, not to mention serious hull damage to the attacker. Yet in the age of steam and armor plate the ram was resurrected. What accounted for the revival and near-universal adoption of the ram?

Its genesis can be traced to the technological impasse of the time: when armored ships were first created and tried in the wars of the 1860s, their armor did make them almost impregnable to the weapons of the time, though the sticks, stacks, and ship's boats were nearly always shot to splinters. Since guns could not quickly destroy ironclad ships, but steam power gave them mobility independent of the wind's direction, ramming was turned to as a desperate alternative. The heyday of the ram was in the 1860s, particularly the American Civil War and the Austro-Italian conflict known as the Seven Weeks' War in 1866. Most of the naval actions of the Civil War were fought on rivers and harbors, frequently against vessels at anchor or moving very slowly to avoid grounding in shallow waterways. Confederate vessels such as the CSS Virginia adopted a "David vs. Goliath" philosophy which included a sub-surface ram (below right) attached to the bow -- in this case a 24-foot knife of sharpened bronze. As in the ancient world, the object was to punch holes in the enemy's hull below the waterline by means of direct collision.

This proved effective in the Virginia's first shock offensive against the anchored Union fleet at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in which the Confederate ironclad sank an anchored sloop-of-war and frigate and drove another steam frigate aground. The Virginia's ram broke off inside the Cumberland, however, causing a serious leak forward and cutting the ship's effective speed and maneuverability. (And as the next day's encounter with the Union turret ship Monitor showed, a comparably protected ironclad could maneuver to keep clear of Virginia's lumbering attack and fight her to a draw.) Ramming tactics were adopted when opportune in any number of actions on American rivers, harbors, and bayous during the conflict. Then, in July 1866 at the Battle of Lissa in the Adriatic, ramming again proved decisive. A grey-painted Italian ironclad armada had appeared to invade the Austrian-held island of Lissa (Viz), off the Dalmatian coast of present-day Croatia, also part of the Habsburg Empire. Vis was to serve as a springboard for Italy's reconquest of all the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Following Tegetthoff's exhortation to "Ram anything that's grey," the wooden ship-of-the-line Kaiser rammed and damaged the Italian frigate Re de Portogallo, and several other Italian vessels felt the heat of the Croatian gunners manning the Austrian ships. At a critical moment in the center of a mèlée of ironclads, ironclad gunboats, and wooden warships, the partially completed Austrian flagship Ferdinand Max faced a partially disabled opponent. The Italian ironclad flagship Re D'Italia lay before Admiral Tegetthoff, dead in the water with her steering wrecked. His own ship's main armament lay on a shipping dock at the Krupp Works in Prussia, with delivery embargoed because Prussia and Austria were at war; so Tegetthoff was seriously outgunned. Seizing the moment in accord with his own instructions to his commanders, the scrappy admiral called for maximum revolutions and drove his bow into Re D'Italia's port side at 11½ knots, gouging her side open below the waterline and somewhat crunching his own bow at the same time.

The effects were gratifyingly quick and complete: the Re's wounds were mortal. After Tegetthoff's flagship disentangled herself and backed off, Ferdinand Max's crew could watch the Re d'Italia fill and tilt, vanishing into a whirlpool within minutes along with the greater part of her crew.

When the Italian Admiral Persano failed to exert any influence at all on an eroding position, the 4-hour-old action turned to an Italian rout. An ironclad Italian gunboat exploded; Tegetthoff went on to win the battle, as his disorganized enemy turned and fled his furious assault. This was a lucky win, for the Italians had outnumbered the defenders by a comfortable margin. Moreover, the Italians had better artillery and more of it. The invasion of Vis was thwarted and Tegetthoff was acclaimed a naval genius (which he was) and a national hero. In naval circles the rather special circumstances were overlooked and the lesson drawn that the ram was a must-have weapon. It became de rigueur in virtually every fleet unit or coast-protection ironclad built for the next 40-odd years, though curiously it was hardly ever again used to sink surface warships in battle. The last recorded use of the ram to sink a warship was at the Battle of Iquique in 1879 (q.v.). In fact, the trend was all toward more distant combat. Improved guns meant that battleships likely would have been fought at between half a mile and 10-12 miles distance. But of course there were no full fleet actions at sea during the 1867 - 1905 era, the summer and autumn of the Pax Britannica. The ram did prove deadly to friend if not to foe: accidental collisions between "friendlies" sank a number of warships during the period, most notoriously the König Wilhelm's collision with Großer Kurfürst in the English Channel in 1878, and Britain's Mediterranean Fleet flagship HMS Victoria in 1893.

The ram lent its name to a whole category of small warship, in fact. Throughout the pre-dreadnought era, coast and harbor defense warships were constructed, sometimes with one forward-facing turret, and always sporting a lethal ram. The ships' weak engines and heavy armor generally made them so slow they were useless in ramming anything faster than they were -- thus, any seagoing warship of significant military value. This proved immaterial as the rams were never called upon to defend their turf in an era of peace among the Powers; but a surprising number of ancient rams were still on the duty rosters of the Powers' navies when war came in 1914. Examples include the British Hotspur, Hero and Conqueror, and the American semi-submersible rams Intrepid and Alarm (right). All of these vessels spent a comfortable career "alongside the dockyard wall," as the saying has it.

The bulbous forefoot created by a large ram bow actually was a hydrodynamic design, punching a "hole" in the water and reducing turbulence about the hull, as proven in the Royal Navy's testing tank. This invention of the naval engineer William Froude evaluated hull design from 1872 onwards -- another first in scientific design for the Brits.

As ironclad ships continued to develop over the next several decades, there were no significant wars at sea to test the abundant experiments in ship design in the fury of battle. Exotic French battleships adopted the form of beached whales, with armored masts containing electric elevators to the gunhouses at the tops of the masts; Russia launched a steady series of smallish but innovative warships; England led in technology, with an impressive industrial plant to support its efforts and its exports. Britain outbuilt all comers 3 to 1.

But practically every one of these myriad warships, these varied essays in the craft, proceeded magisterially behind the intimidating curve of an arrogantly outthrust ram bow. As a means of punching a hole in the invulnerable ironclad enemy, the ram's days were over, superseded by the self-guided torpedo. For example, in the naval Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 there was no ramming, but plenty of torpedo-play. Still, the predatory prow remained de rigueur on all large warships for another 15 years (at left, launch of HMS Triumph, 1901). Japan and France dropped the convention on their new construction around 1909, but British warships continued with the ram shape through WWI; so did Russia. In the war, the ram proved its potency mainly in quickly countering surfaced U-boats, slicing through the subs' pressure hulls and despatching them forthwith. Such an attack was the 1906 Dreadnought's only kill during the War, although merchant ships with no offensive rams molded proved effective at the same tactics. Indeed unarmed freighters were instructed by the Admiralty to ram surfaced U-boats as early as 1915. The Titanic's sister ship Olympic had one such encounter, one of the 3 collisions that marred her long career (1911-1937). While inbound to Europe and packed with more than 10,000 troops in 1917, she turned sharply to run down a sub which had penetrated her destroyer screen. The sub went to Davie Jones'; the troops went on to fight in France. At the time Olympic was carrying eight 6-inch guns, but had had no special ramming reinfocement added to her vintage Harland & Wolff bow. Yet she had done the necessary thing, and her 45,000 tons had prevailed.

As demonstrated in that incident, ramming has ever been a tactic of opportunity. Perhaps the collision of the Victoria and Camperdown gives the best indication of the sort of damage that could have been done in a close-quarters fleet action between the battleships of 1893. As at Lissa, the effects of the collision were shockingly rapid and utterly fatal. Leaving one to ponder what might have been.

The 1862 ironclad Magenta was preceded by a prodigious proboscis. This "plough ram" shape was popular in France in the 1860s and 70s, and was a common feature of ships built there for sale abroad.	Weihai, China is the homeport for the world's latest pre-dreadnought, a replica of the Chinese flagship Ding Yuen built in Stettin, Germany in 1882. Though the Chinese ironclads fought at closer quarters than most later battleships, they did so with guns; there was no question of ramming in the 1894 Bohai Gulf battles.
Here is a forged ram itself, assembled like a harness, ready for installation on the woooden hull of the Magenta's sister-ship Solferino.	Ready for launch, here is Solferino with the ram at left attached. An over-the-top gilt-bronze figurehead completes the imposing effect.
The can opener approach: Ram of SMS Baden on the ways at Vulkan Werke in Stettin, E. Prussia, 1880. This was the yard that punched out the Ding Yuen and Chen Yuen for China at precisely the same time.	Nearly ready for launch, the battleship Potemkin pokes her nose out of the Nikolayev yard building, 1903. She will launch stern first, of course. Visit our Oddballs Page for More Ramming Madness
Launch of the battlecruiser New Zealand, 1911. Though tactics had advanced beyond ramming distance with 13.5" guns, the stem still follows the conventional outward-curved ram shape, as it did in all British dreadnoughts built through 1917. Americans too continued the shape, though the French had dropped it in the Danton class (1909) and the Japanese from 1910 on. It was with just such a bow as this that HMS Dreadnought sliced open and sank the U-29 near Scapa Flow on March 4, 1915.	The peculiar ram of HMS Polyphemus, an experimental semi-submersible ram commissioned in 1878. The ram's quasi-cylindrical form was no accident: It contained the bow torpedo tube. Polyphemus was, in fact, the first ship to feature submerged torpedo tubes.