Very happy to announce that the New York Times has published my first piece for their website.  Ironclad Fever is about the armored warship building frenzy in both North and South after the Monitor and Virginia (Merrimack) battle in 1862.

I’m extremely pleased to be able to put all of the historical research I’ve done while building models and writing stories into this format.

“…I heard an explosion from the Cairo, and on looking up (from a small boat on the river) I saw her anchor thrown up several feet in the air.” – Ensign Walter E.H. Fentress

“…just as we were training on the battery (gun emplacement or torpedo), we were struck by a torpedo, which exploded under our starboard bow, a few feet from the center and some 35 or 40 feet from the bow proper just under our provision store room, which crushed in the bottom of the boat so that the water rushed in like the roar of Niagara.  In five minutes the Hold was full of water and the forward part of the gunboat was flooded… One of our heaviest bow guns had been dismounted by the force of the explosion, injuring three men. ” -George Yost.

On December 12^th, 1862, the  American Civil War saw yet another military first: USS Cairo became the first warship sunk by an underwater mine, or torpedo as they were known at the time.  The Union Navy had known of Continue Reading »

After the Battle of Antietam, the Union Army took time to lick its wounds.  President Lincoln and many in the Washington command structure champed at the bit and wanted McClellan and the army in pursuit of the Confederates to follow up on the victory.  McClellan, though, stood by his decision to rest his battered forces and regroup.

The men of the 19^th Indiana and the Iron Brigade rejoiced at the break.  They’d been roughly handled in their first three battles, and their numbers depleted drastically.  Immediately after the battle the unit camped on the battlefield near the Dunker Church, their objective the morning of the battle.  As the fortunate began to trickle in from the hospital, the survivors walked the fields, burying the dead men and feeding huge bonfires to burn the dead horses and mules; inky black smoke towered skywards for weeks afterwards while Gardner’s photographers walked the battlefield and photographed the carnage.

As they sat in camp, Continue Reading »

With power out for nearly a week and subsequent clean-up from Sandy, I haven’t done much modeling lately.  Yesterday evening I scheduled time to work on the remaining sheeting for Chickasaw, and today I trimmed and sanded the result.  A little filling and sanding is left, but then I believe I can prime the two hull halves, do a final check for blemishes, and then assemble the two and begin scribing.

The sheeting continues, but with the sheet for the main deck, it gets tricky.  Holes for the turrets, the pilot house, and the stack have to be cut.  Initially I drove myself nuts for a day or two trying to figure out the center of the circles, then realized that the camber of the deck makes the circles not entirely of the perfectly-round variety.  An email to Dean, the designer, resulted in a template the the centers marked.  I glued that to styrene, and away I went…

I’d lived in Hoboken for a half-dozen years before I realized that Stevens Institute of Technology, right down the road from where we live, has a collection of original USS Monitor drawings.  It took a bit longer for me to get it together and query the school about visiting to view the plans.  Since then I’ve been going through their original letters and log books on the Stevens Battery, looking for elusive drawings of that cursed ship.

Yesterday, though, it was back to the USS Monitor, as I helped staff, students, and another volunteer, pull all of the drawings and begin photographing them.  Our photos are mere reminders of what is there, and their present condition, before they are to be packed up and sent to the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, VA, for full digitizing, so that others can see what is there.  And there are some amazing items: several drawings done in pencil by Ericsson himself, two plans that were obviously used in the machinist shop as they’re covered with fingerprints and spots of oil and dirt, and two color inked drawings of what appear to be Swedish gunboat prototypes that Ericsson designed and drew.

I’m really looking forward to finishing up the project and getting the plans to the Mariner’s, and I’m really hoping we’ll find some more cool stuff in the process.

Wars are about attrition.  They start out with patriotic slogans, promises to protect those who can’t protect themselves, or the notion of righting horrific wrongs, but the series of battles themselves come down to attrition: each side kills as many of the other side until one has lost too many lives or they’ve expended all of their resources in the contest, and they then surrender.  That’s it, and it’s rarely more evident than in the Civil War (although World War I has my vote for the most effective campaign to thin humanity’s population), and there’s no greater monument to the loss of life in the Civil War than the Battle of Antietam.

Following the Battle of South Mountain, Union General McClellan had the Confederate armies on the run.  Continue Reading »

The Battle of South Mountain is obscured and ignored by history, so much so that it’s difficult to write about it.  The reason to bring it up in discussion of the Iron Brigade is that they earned their permanent moniker during the battle.  While that happened, men fought there, died there.  No small skirmish — large portions of both the Union and Confederate armies engaged throughout the day of September 14^th in and around the three mountain passes named Fox’s, Crampton’s and Turner’s gap – the battle claimed over 2300 Union and 2600 Confederate casualties.

Unlike Brawner’s Farm, Antietam, or Gettysburg, Continue Reading »

Little slow on the build lately.  Work got busy, came down with a cold, and my writing has taken an uptick lately as I work on some novel edits.  Another delay came from spending time in testing glues with styrene sheeting and the plywood/putty surface.  Gorilla Glue, surprisingly, didn’t work at all.  Plastic pulled off like it had been stuck on with Scotch tape.  The Gorilla Super Glue Impact-Tough (formulated with rubber particles for elasticity), worked the trick, though, and it holding like nobody’s business.  Progress photos below.  I hope to have everything sheeted and ready to prime and scribe within a week or so.

Yesterday evening, August 28^th, I sat on our deck in Hoboken, New Jersey, right before sunset.  I watched the sun sink below the horizon and thought about what was kicking off down in Virginia, 150 years ago.  The battle at Brawner Farm began just before sunset, at about 6 p.m. in 1862, but now with time zones and other factors, it was nearly 8 p.m. here by the time the sky had turned to a gradient of orange upwards to dark blue, and everyday objects replaced their hard lines with shadows.

Brawner Farm was the first battle for the Union unit known as The Iron Brigade, a unit I’ve developed a particular fondness for.  They didn’t have that name 150 years ago at Brawner Farm, though, not yet.  They’d earn that at the battle of South Mountain in less than a month.  On August 28^th, they were known as the Black Hats.  The unit was made up of entirely “western” soldiers, men from Wisconsin and Indiana; the only brigade in the eastern theater to be made up so.  In order to further distinguish them, their commander John Gibbon outfit them in the regular army uniform of tall black hats, long blue frock coats, and even dress leggings.  Imagine going into battle wearing that.

The unit was formed in late 1861, Continue Reading »