Monitor

A monitor is a slow warship without strong armour, but armed with guns disproportionately heavy for its size. Its shallow draught let it come close inshore and sail on rivers. In the First World War monitors bombarded coasts and supported troops ashore, but they were unfit to fight a fleet on the open sea.

Ships with guns from anywhere

The name comes from USS Monitor, which John Ericsson designed in 1861 for the Union navy. The British monitors of this war had little in common with her beyond a shallow draught, heavy guns in turrets and poor seaworthiness. The first three, Severn, Humber and Mersey, were being built by Vickers for Brazil as river gunboats for the Amazon, and on the outbreak of war the Royal Navy took them over. They drew less than two metres and carried 152-millimetre guns.

At the end of 1914 Winston Churchill and John Fisher ordered a whole flotilla of new monitors. Fisher wanted to use them to strike at German bases on the North Sea and the Baltic, and when the ships were sent to the Dardanelles instead, he considered his plan buried. Guns were taken from wherever they could be found, most often turrets from old battleships. The turrets for the Abercrombie-class monitors of 1915 were offered by Charles M. Schwab, head of the American firm Bethlehem Steel, and their hulls were fitted with anti-torpedo bulges. The ships were very slow, though: Raglan, one of them, made little more than 6 knots.

Belgium, the Dardanelles, Africa

On 18 October 1914 Rear-Admiral Hood’s three monitors shelled German columns on the Belgian coast, and their fire deterred the Germans from forcing the Yser at Nieuport itself.

Later the monitors from Dover shelled the Flanders ports, in May 1917 also the locks at Zeebrugge, and patrolled the waters behind the mine barrage off that port and Ostend. On 16 September 1918, in Dover harbour, cordite caught fire on the monitor Glatton in a magazine, and the ship had to be sunk with torpedoes from her own side’s destroyers.

At Gallipoli, after U-boats had sunk the battleships Triumph and Majestic, monitors, less vulnerable to torpedoes, began to take their place inshore. In June 1915 the Dardanelles Committee allotted the fleet fourteen monitors with guns of 6 to 14 inches. Havelock supported the landing at Suvla Bay in August.

After the peninsula was evacuated, monitors guarded the mouth of the Dardanelles. On the morning of 20 January 1918 Goeben and Breslau surprised two of them off Imbros, Raglan and M28, and sank both in about half an hour.

In Africa, Severn and Mersey went deep into the Rufiji delta in July 1915 and, directed by airmen, wrecked the cruiser Königsberg. It was one of the first fights in which ships fired at a target they could not see.

River monitors

Austria-Hungary had river monitors of its own. Shortly after midnight on 28–29 July 1914 Bodrog, Temes and Szamos opened fire towards Belgrade, and Bodrog’s salvoes are regarded as the first shots of the war. In the autumn of 1915 the monitors’ fire helped the Austro-Hungarian infantry hold on to the bank during the capture of Belgrade.

The Romanians had a Danube flotilla whose monitors supported the defence of Turtucaia. The armistice of 3 November 1918 required Austria-Hungary to hand over 6 Danube monitors. On the Dvina the British monitor M25 supported the fighting against the Bolsheviks in September 1918.

After the war most British monitors went for scrap. The Austro-Hungarian ones went to Yugoslavia and Romania, and M33 can still be seen at Portsmouth today.