Naval warfare

[Kosmo]

Naval warfare does not seems too specialized in Antiquity. Sparta defeated Athens shortly after starting a fleet, in a similar situation Rome raised a fleet and defeated the experienced carthaginians, Caesar made ships on the spot when besieging Massalia, Genseric created a naval power from nothing etc.

How was this possible?

[caldrail]

By hard graft and plenty of cash. Rome of course built a navy from scratch against Carthage after capturing a beached carthaginian vessel (thus reverse engineering how such ships should be made, even if they weren't too clued up as to how to use them in war. It was by using the Corvus, the droppable ramp, and fighting sea battles with land troops in a way that Rome understood well, that gave them an opportunity to fight Carthage with some advantage.

 

There are other instances of ships built in a hurry. Germanicus had one hundred coastal vessels put together for an expedition to penetrate Germania by river for instance, not to mention the two seperate fleets assembled for Caesars invasion of Britain.

 

The creation of a fleet of ships at short notice is an exercise in logistics that the romans excelled at. Ships of these kinds did not need permanent shipyards or dock facilities. You might just as easily put them together on a convenient beach. The larger galleys I'm not sure about, given the sizeable weight these vessels must have displaced. However, apart from the knowledge of form and design, the actual construction wasn't especially complex and required the sort of artisans commonly available in coastal areas. Your soldiers might also be employed in logging for instance.

[ASCLEPIADES]

Naval warfare does not seems too specialized in Antiquity. Sparta defeated Athens shortly after starting a fleet, in a similar situation Rome raised a fleet and defeated the experienced carthaginians, Caesar made ships on the spot when besieging Massalia, Genseric created a naval power from nothing etc.

How was this possible?

Salve, K.

 

I think such impression would be mainly explained by 1. - Imprecise definition and 2.- Perspective effect.

 

1.- Imprecise definition, because some of their respective naval forces, especially at the beginning, were probably allied or auxiliary forces sailing under the Spartan, Roman or Vandal flags.

 

2.- Perspective effect, because the development of these Navies would have been actually not so fast; vg, the Ist Punic War took place over a 23 year period.

 

I'm just in a little hurry now, so I will try to find source's support later.

 

Vale.

[Pertinax]

Pantagathus is the man to speak out here , but he is otherwise engaged.However I can add that the working life of vessels at this time was very short, and (as we have touched upon before in related discussion) a good idea is to envisage warships as beng similar to a quality car kept in a garage . If a warship were not patrolling or actively engaged, it would be out of the water to preserve its hull . The fabrication of vessels (of all types, but especially the more mundane transport types) from local resources was a skill that the legions possessed. The sailing season was also tightly constrained, so actual activity would be truncated within any given year (this especially regarding transports).Perhaps the Japanese wilful assimilation of Western technology(especially ) in the late 19th C is a not unreasonable modern model of the Roman attitude to assimilation of unknown , but apparently effective technologies (somewhat akin to their practical assimilation of local deities).

[Kosmo]

Naval warfare was in the last 1000 years a specialized brunch of warfare. Never a country became a naval power in a short period. You need not just to build ships on a model, but also to train crews and officers. The japanese followed Royal Navy models with the help of british naval missions and also used ships made in the UK.

If somebody could create a fleet without traditions this means that neither the skills needed to make a ship, nor the skills to use it effectively were complex. Naval technology and warfare had to be rudimentary.

 

PS I believe that the story with romans duplicating a carthaginian ship it's a propaganda piece. Tarentum and the other greek cities of Italy were under roman power and they knew how to build a ship. But there is no evidence that they manned and lead them and also none for the other examples.

[caldrail]

What we see a lot of in naval history, as pointed out above, is development of other peoples ideas. Rome got their warships by copying carthaginian vessels, the saxons got their ideas on ships from roman vessels, and quite possibly saxon ships inspired those of the vikings etc.

 

Building ships, or rather efficient and safe ones, requires knowledge and experience. The romans were building trading vessels before the punic wars, but I don't think as a nation they knew how to build them. rather, there were people in those places with the requisite skills if you understand my point, and given the relatively slow build requirement of civilian trade, then these skills weren't in hot demand so logically there might be few naval architects around to oversee construction. When the punic wars begin, suddenly the romans need naval vessels. They don't have the necessary skill pool to build a war fleet from scratch, although as previously pointed out some ship building skills must have been available. They knew how to build ships, but not in those numbers nor ships of that type. The story of capturing a beached carthaginian warship may not be entirely hype, though I suspect some exaggeration is involved. After all, we see this sort of thing highlighted in modern warfare, where technological secrets of enemy equipment are vital intelligence. Back then, the situation wasn't fundamentally different. The story goes that ship crews were trained to row on dry land before their ships were available. Note that slaves were not employed to row galleys in most cases, rather they were professional sailors, or soldiers in the case of war galleys.

Edited October 22, 2007 by caldrail

[Kosmo]

I generally agree with you. I only doubt that both shipbuilding and naval warfare required to much skill.

I have some questions on this subject:

Carthaginan warships were different then the hellenistic ones?

How naval warfare in Antiquity was different compared with the medieval italian pre-artillery one?

Did romans kept the wood several years for drying like it was done later?

Thank you!

[caldrail]

Well, it doesn't require much to build a ship, but if you want to arrive dry and unruffled it helps if the vessel is designed to be seaworthy in the first place. No, it does require a level of skill to create ships (the vikings proved that didn't they?). A ships design dictates whether it pushes through a wave or rides it, whether it can turn easily or not, whether it can weather a storm or not, how much load it may carry, how comfrotable it is to travel in, how easy it is to sail... There's all sorts of considerations not obvious to those without sailing experince (which includes me I have to say - any ship I designed would probably founder in calm seas!) and this is why certain vessels are thought to be 'special'.

 

I'm not sure there was a huge difference between greek and carthaginian warships since the mediterranean cultures were all building similar vessels as far as I'm aware.

 

I'm sure that the romans used seasoned wood although I notice at times they built large fleets in a hurry which must have dug deep into stocks of seasoned timber if not wiped it out. Actually, I wouldn't be suprised if some of these vessels were barely seaworthy due to unseasoned timber, and if built in such a way then leaks must have been a constant worry.

[Bryaxis Hecatee]

Some notes about greek naval warfare of the classical era, and mostly the peloponesian war warfare :

 

Athens had a fleet which trained itself hard through constant operations and training around Attica and in the Egean sea, while Sparta's fleet had almost desapeared in the first half of the 5th century BC. Yet the Athenians suffered two disasters of a major impact : the first was the Sicilian expedition where some 20 to 30 000 experienced sailors were lost. Why ? Because the athenian navy was built to use special tactics that exploited a vulnerability of the time and superior seamanship and tactical mobility on the field where other fleets simply made a line and rushed the enemy. When they came to Sicily they won all the early engagements but then were trapped in a series of inshore battles ( the most famous being the one in the great harbor ) in confined places where they could not use their seamanship superiority and their tactics and against ships that had been especially modified to nullify the Athenian's superiority. Also the athenian ships themselves are by then in bad condition.

 

Then Athens would loose a second battle after which it will have to build a new fleet from scratch but the events which follows ( Alcibiade's campaign and the Arginusae - the battle of Notion is not included because losses were due to incompetent leadership that negated Athens tactical superiority ) shows that Athens keeps a superior fleet even if crews are much less trained.

 

Sparta on the other hands begins with a fleet that will use mainly foreigners for it's ships ( Corinthian for example but also Sicilian and others coming from Asia Minor ) and has a better ship producing capacity due to a larger gold income and the fact it pay foreign labor forces to build the ships, thus keeping it's forces fully available for battle ( while Athens must both man it's shipyards and it's ships with the same pool of peoples and do it with less gold income than what the Persian give the Spartans )

 

Thus a fleet is not so easily built from scratch and it is only through numbers that the Athenian lost the war. Here are some numbers for the period between 433 and 411 from Neil Morpeth's "Thucydides

[ASCLEPIADES]

Naval warfare does not seems too specialized in Antiquity. Sparta defeated Athens shortly after starting a fleet, in a similar situation Rome raised a fleet and defeated the experienced carthaginians, Caesar made ships on the spot when besieging Massalia, Genseric created a naval power from nothing etc.

How was this possible?

Salve, K.

 

I think such impression would be mainly explained by 1. - Imprecise definition and 2.- Perspective effect.

 

1.- Imprecise definition, because some of their respective naval forces, especially at the beginning, were probably allied or auxiliary forces sailing under the Spartan, Roman or Vandal flags.

 

2.- Perspective effect, because the development of these Navies would have been actually not so fast; vg, the Ist Punic War took place over a 23 year period.

 

I'm just in a little hurry now, so I will try to find source's support later.

 

Vale.

Gratiam habeo, Lady BH, for that wonderful post.

 

With a little more than one thousand words, it seems like you really found "some notes" for us again.

[Kosmo]

Thank you both.

It's amazing to see the high level of losses in some battles, sometimes even for the winner.

So, the skill did make a difference, but it can be compansated by numbers.

[Bryaxis Hecatee]

What is interesting to see in Corvisier's table is that the winning force could ( and often was ) smaller than the defeated force. Sybota is probably one of the best example of that and it must be noted that this battle united the fleets of Corcyra and a force from Athens against a crack attack force from Corinth which had better ships and which had trained especially hard to fight the second largest fleet of the time ( Corcyra ) but in the end was still defeated by the rushed out corcyrean and a small athenian TF sent around the whole Peloponnese ( thus having spent more time at sea ). It must also be said that Corvisier's table is not truly complete and that I don't always agree with him, but as I said I lacked time and this was a short quick and dirty post on the subject. I'll try to to post more later.

[caldrail]

In considering the actions of ancient fleets you have to bear in mind how the ships handled. Roman vessels, even the ones copied from Carthage, were notoriously unwieldy at sea and one reason why they were so reliant on the Corvus during the first punic war, a device which in itself made the vessel even less wieldy, so although it was responsible for some early victories it was generally regarded as a liability for general use.

 

A larger fleet is constrained far more than a smaller one, because more of the ships are inside the formation and therefore with less room to manoever. It might be possible also that a larger fleet has a tendency to close in together more and therefore vulnerable to fire? Signalling for larger fleets must also have been more difficult with more room for human error, buts I don't know how good naval signalling was at this time, even for the romans who had a talent for such things.

 

The advantage of oared vessels is their manoeverability at low speed (at ramming speed forget it, everyones too busy rowing like crazy to steer from below decks and the rudder probably wasn't too effctive?). However, you must also realise that warships were designed to ram and therefore the design favoured straight line speed. The width of these vessels is suprisingly large - there are remains of roman 'dreadnoughts' some 24 metres wide. A point made by Peter Connelly is that there are no survivng portayals of vessels with more than three banks of oars. From that we might assume that the trireme was popular, but we also know that quinquremes were in common use by the greeks, whose ship building skills the romans relied on.

 

These large vessels survived in use until the mediterranean became a 'roman lake', with a few left over for ceremonial purposes in later years. In fact, one reason for the rise in piracy was the reduction in naval power, as the romans preferred to rely on smaller coastal ships that were far more cost effective, and it was only until the Augustan military reforms that a permanent navy was established at all.

[ASCLEPIADES]

What is interesting to see in Corvisier's table is that the winning force could ( and often was ) smaller than the defeated force.

Dealing with military figures on ancient sources, we have the eternal bias of Propaganda; your own army (the heroic one) is almost always outnumbered by its evil enemy, both at victory and at defeat.

 

You have simply to check Caesar or Herodotus.

 

In fact, the unusual figures at Carrhae (the victorious Parthian Surena outnumbered by the Legions of Crassus and Cassius in pro-Roman sources) might very well be considered as negative propaganda against the defeated Roman commanders.

[Marcus Caelius]

The story of capturing a beached carthaginian warship may not be entirely hype, though I suspect some exaggeration is involved. After all, we see this sort of thing highlighted in modern warfare, where technological secrets of enemy equipment are vital intelligence.

 

FWIW, there's a parallel story from World War 2. As a diversion during the battle of Midway, the Japanese sent a small fleet to attack the Aleutians. A damaged Zero attempted to land on what proved to be muskeg rather than solid ground; its landing gear caught in the mud and the plane flipped over its nose. Several days later, the wreck was spotted by the Americans and shipped back to the States where it was reverse-engineered. The result was the Vought Corsair.

 

There's another story, this one from the War of 1812, that may apply. The British/Canadians held a virtual naval monopoly on Lake Erie, yet the Americans managed to build at least two brigs out of wood that was growing in the forest just a few weeks before. The shipmaster remarked to the effect that they would be good enough to win and poor enough to be captured. In the event, they won, and one of those "fir-built" brigs is still sailing the lake as a floating museum for the State of Pennsylvania.

 

Edit: Completely irrelevant, but it's 11:30 at night, just a few days before Halloween, there's an almost-full moon out, and a pack of coyotes (wild dogs, for non-North Americans) howling outside my window. "The children of the night, what music they make!"

Edited October 29, 2007 by Marcus Caelius