One of many the forgotten stories of the Great War at sea was that of HMS Ascot. The Racecourse Class minesweeper was cruising east of the Farne Islands in Northumbria on 10th November 1918, one day before the Armistice, when she was torpedoed by UB-67, a coastal U-boat commanded by Hellmuth von Doemming.[1] The damage inflicted on the 800ton vessel was so catastrophic that she sank quickly with all 52 hands. In addition to becoming the last British warship lost during the Great War, HMS Ascot had another distinction; she was a ‘paddler’. The vessel was in fact one of 32 paddle-minesweepers; named after British racecourses; that had been constructed during the Great War. A common assumption made about paddle-warships is that they were little used and ineffective in major naval conflicts, but as the following pages serve to illustrate, paddlers played often decisive roles over more than a century of naval warfare.
Almost certainly the first paddler to go to war was the Diana. Constructed in 1823 for the Honourable East India Company at their shipyard in Calcutta, the 100ft long 130t vessel was fitted with a tiny 16hp Maudslay engine, and, according to contemporary illustrations, carried a single distinctively tall smokestack. Shortly after her completion, she accompanied a British flotilla intent on checking Burmese military expansion towards Bengal. The HEIC forces swiftly occupied Rangoon, from where the Diana was ideally suited to pursue the retreating forces of King Bagyidaw along the Irrawaddy Delta. Although designed as a merchant vessel, the Diana was fitted out for battle with Congreve Rockets. This weaponry, more awesome than accurate, was credited with repelling the Burmese forces’ war elephants at the Battle of Danubyu in 1825.
Several larger and more offensive HEIC paddle warships took part in the First Opium War, the most famous being the iron-hulled Nemesis. The ship took part in the Second Battle of Chuenpi in 1841, her own Congreve Rockets proving especially effective against enemy war junks.
By this time, the Royal Navy had constructed a large number of wooden paddlers. These ranged from sloops of less than 1,000 tons to first-class ‘steam frigates’. The former included HMS Gorgon (1837) and HMS Driver (1840). Gorgon was among four early paddlers that took part in the RN’s Bombardment of Sidon in September 1840, while Driver became the first steamship to circumnavigate the world in 1847. [1] The latter included HMS Terrible and Retribution, which at over 3,000 tons, were the largest paddle warships ever built by the RN. Similar types of steam-powered warships were constructed around this time by the rival navies of France, Russia, and the United States.
Perhaps the most famous British paddler at war was HMS Birkenhead. Constructed as the RN’s first iron-hulled frigate, she had been refitted as a troopship after gunnery trials revealed potentially catastrophic weaknesses when iron hulls were subjected to modern shell-fire. It was in this transport capacity that she’d sunk with heavy loss of life of the coast of southern Africa in 1852. She was at the time on active service during the 8th Xhosa War, ferrying troops as part of Britain’s long-running subjugation of the native populations of the Eastern Cape. The chivalry reputedly displayed by the doomed soldiers and seamen aboard this vessel was immortalised by Kipling in his 1896 verse Soldier an’ Sailor too:
Their work was done when it ‘adn’t begun; they was younger nor me an’ you;
Their choice it was plain between drownin’ in ‘eaps an’ bein’ mopped by the screw,
So they stood an’ was still to the Birken’ead drill, soldier an’ sailor too!
French and British paddlers would combine in a more substantive conflict against Russian forts during the Crimean War. The allied forces were made up of traditional sailing ships-of-the-line, screw-steamers and a large number of paddle warships.
HMS Terrible and the French 20-gun frigate Descartes were key components of an Anglo-French fleet that bombarded the port of Odessa on 22nd April 1854. The operation was carried out primarily by paddlers, as it was thought their engined manoeuvrability would make them less vulnerable to fire from the port’s defensive cannon. This proved to be the case, and in a 10-hour operation, Odessa was effectively destroyed as a functioning military port. The Terrible, whose gunnery was commanded by Captain McCleverty, was credited with blowing up a magazine on the town’s Imperial Mole. McCleverty was said to have remained on the paddle-box of his frigate throughout the engagement, the ship reportedly receiving twelve shot.
Paddler warships performed the vital work of towing larger men-of-war into firing positions during several bombardments of Sevastopol. For the first of these in October 1854, HMS Britannia, the 120-gun flagship of Vice-Admiral James Dean Dundas, the head of Black Sea operations, was towed into battle by the wooden paddle-frigate Furious.
British paddlers also took part in the Bombardment of Sveaborg in the Gulf of Finland in August of the following year. Some of the most essential work, the sounding and buoying of waters surrounding the Russian-held island fort for the larger warships to navigate by, was carried out by the diminutive paddle-packet-boat Merlin. She and another paddler, Firefly were reportedly stuck by primitive Russian mines during these Baltic operations, although these ‘infernal machines’ did not cause significant damage to either ship.
One paddle warship was, however, lost during the conflict. In May 1854, the 16-gun HMS Tiger ran aground south of Odessa in fog, and despite strenuous efforts to save the ship while under fire from shore batteries, she eventually had to be surrendered. One of her raised cannon now adorns Odessa City Hall.
Despite the vital work carried out by paddlers during the Crimean conflict, they were already being phased out by the Royal Navy. Competitive trials carried out between paddlers and screw-steam warships in the 1840s, including the famous tug-of-war between HMS Alecto and Rattler, had already conclusively proved that the latter was a more effective means of propulsion. The position of their paddle-boxes amidships not only made such vessels more vulnerable to enemy fire than submerged stern propellers, but also reduced the available space for broadside weapons. The last of the RN’s paddle warships, HMS Furious, had been commissioned shortly before the War.
Meanwhile, in the Far East, a pair of American paddlers were being used in ‘gunboat diplomacy’ to open up Japanese ports to foreign trade. The USS Mississippi and Susquehanna were among Commodore Matthew Perry’s fleet of ‘Black Ships’ that moored in Edo Bay in 1853 and again in 1854 to effect this policy change. The Mississippi, a 3,200 frigate completed in 1841 and equipped with 10 heavy-calibre Paixhan shell-guns, had been commanded by Perry during the recent Mexican-American War. The Susquehanna, though smaller in tonnage, was more modern and carried the latest American-designed Parrot and Dalghren guns. Although no naval artillery was fired in anger during this diplomatic stand-off, the Japanese authorities and local witnesses were awestruck by the size and power of these mechanical ‘Kurofune’; their engines being likened to ‘iron earthquakes’. This awe was reflected in contemporary Japanese poetry and wood-block prints, one depicting an American paddle-frigate as a demonic entity.
Both of these ships fought on the Union side during the American Civil War. The Mississippi took part in the Union assault on New Orleans in April 1862, where she was involved in the eventual destruction of the Confederate ironclad ram CSS Manassas. The ship was lost the following year, running aground in the river she was named after during the Siege of Port Hudson.
[1] Doemming had recently transferred from the mine-laying submarine UC-52, in command of which, over a four-month period in the Mediterranean, he had sunk no fewer than sixteen vessels, including the Italian troopship Verona, and the fleet messenger HMS Chesterfield. Ascot was his only kill aboard the coastal UB-67.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 