After the derision of Harry Harrison's series of 'Stars and Stripes' books last week, a series in which the Yanks conquer the World\Britain and where the civil war era US Navy could take on the R.N. with ease, It was decided to try out an hypothetical scenario based upon them. And so we end up with the USS Monitor vs HMS Warrior in a 'fair fight'.
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| From Furness Wargamers at Sea |
A simple case of blockade running, as two squadrons of equal numbers of ships engage off the US coast.
The British escort splits off from the Warrior, which shields the all important blockade runner. While the Monitor tries and distracts the Warrior, a US escort gets past, but is too late to stop the runner getting off the board despite landing a few telling shots on target. Meanwhile the British escort gets out maneuvered and stranded away from the main combat zone, as the three US ships converge on the Warrior.
The Monitors escorts, now being bashed around by the Warrior a bit, decide they've had enough and depart out to sea. The Monitor soon follows after surviving some close up shots from both the British ships. Whether it could of actually survive out in the open sea given the damage it sustained is another matter.
After that quick exhibition we tried another hypothetical encounter, this time from three decades later, RN vs the French in the channel.
Two lines of equal number of vessels approach each other, but the lines didn't stay straight for long.
The French got beaten as the British closed up negating the Frenches range advantage, and making use of their faster reload speed to outgun the bigger gunned French ships. Having a torpedo boat commander who forgot to fire his torpedoes didn't help the French as well.
A final salvo from a sinking french ship did take out one of the British but it was small consolation for them.
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