The coal torpedo was a hollow iron casting filled with explosives and covered in coal dust, deployed by the Confederate Secret Service during the American Civil War, and intended for doing harm to Union steam transportation. When it was shoveled into the firebox amongst the coal, the resulting explosion would at the very least damage the boiler and render the engines inoperable. At worst, a catastrophic boiler explosion would kill crewmen and passengers, start a fire, or even sink the vessel.
The coal torpedo was invented by Captain Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay of the Confederate Secret Service. [1] [2] During the Civil War, the term torpedo was used to indicate a wide range of explosive devices including what are now called land mines, naval mines, improvised explosive devices, and booby traps. Northern newspapers referred to Courtenay's coal bombs as torpedoes, or sometimes "infernal machines"; Courtenay himself called it his "coal shell". [3]
The torpedoes were manufactured at the 7th Avenue Artillery shop (across the street from Tredegar Iron Works) in Richmond, Virginia, in January 1864. [4] The manufacturing process was similar to that used for artillery shells, except that actual pieces of coal were used as patterns for iron castings. The walls of the coal shell were about 0.75 inches (1.9 cm) thick, creating a hollow space inside sufficient to hold 3–4 ounces of gunpowder. After filling, the shell was closed with a threaded plug, then dipped in melted beeswax and rolled in coal dust, creating the appearance of a lump of coal. [5] Finished coal torpedoes were about 4 inches (10 cm) on a side and weighed 3 to 4 pounds (1.4 to 1.8 kg).
The size and powder charge of the coal torpedo was similar to a 6-pound shrapnel shell or the equivalent of three Civil War-era hand grenades. The explosion of a coal torpedo under a ship's boiler would not by itself be sufficient to sink the vessel. The purpose of the coal torpedo was to burst the pressurized steam boiler, which had the potential to trigger an extremely destructive boiler explosion. Accidental boiler explosions were not uncommon in the early years of steam transportation and could result in the complete destruction of the vessel by fire. In use, the coal torpedo would leave little evidence that a boiler explosion was due to sabotage.
Courtenay was authorized to form a company of men to infiltrate enemy lines and place coal torpedoes in the coal piles used to fuel Union steam ships. [6] It was especially intended to be used against ships of the Union blockade, although Courtenay was authorized to act against any Union military or commercial shipping in Confederate waters. [7] [8] Although the Union blockade and other forms of military shipping were Courtenay's primary targets, he also had plans to use the coal torpedo to attack steam locomotives, although no confirmed attacks are known to have been made.
On 19 March 1864, a Union gunboat captured a rebel courier crossing the Mississippi, carrying a letter from Courtenay describing the coal torpedo. The correspondence was forwarded to Admiral David Porter, who immediately issued his General Order 184, which began
The enemy have adopted new inventions to destroy human life and vessels in the shape of torpedoes, and an article resembling coal, which is to be placed in our coal piles for the purpose of blowing the vessels up, or injuring them. Officers will have to be careful in overlooking coal barges. Guards will be placed over them at all times, and anyone found attempting to place any of these things amongst the coal will be shot on the spot. [3]
In April 1865, most of the official papers of the Confederate Secret Service were burned by Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin just before the government evacuated Richmond, making it impossible to determine with any certainty how many ships were destroyed by Courtenay's shell. Union Admiral Porter credited the coal torpedo with sinking the Greyhound, a private steamboat that had been commandeered by General Benjamin F. Butler for use as a floating headquarters on the James River. [1] [9] Courtenay also took credit for the boiler explosion on the gunboat USS Chenango that scalded 33 men (28 fatally), though the vessel itself survived and was repaired and returned to duty. [1] [10] In the spring of 1865, Canadian customs raided a house in Toronto that had been rented by Jacob Thompson, one of the commissioners of the Confederate Secret Service stationed in Canada. They found coal torpedoes and other incendiary devices hidden under the floorboards. [11]
On April 27, 1865, the sidewheel steamboat Sultana exploded her boilers just above Memphis, TN while carrying almost 2,000 Union prisoners of war home to the North. 1,196 people died. Within a few days, the first mate, who had failed to redistribute the weight on the top-heavy boat once a large load of supplies was removed from the hold, claimed that the Sultana was exploded by a coal torpedo. Three investigative bodies looked into the possibility and refuted it. In 1888, a former Union prison guard claimed that a Confederate mail-carrier named Robert Louden had told him years before that he had used a coal torpedo to sink the steamboat. The mail carrier was long dead and unable to answer questions. Many Sultana survivors and other experts immediately refuted the idea. Captain Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay never claimed the sinking of the Sultana by a coal torpedo. Although the coal torpedo sabotage theory remains popular, it is refuted by most experts. [6] [12]
Courtenay had traveled to England in 1864 and remained there until 1867, trying to sell the "secret" of the coal torpedo to foreign governments. He approached the British War Office, but they turned him down after he would not agree to allow them to examine his invention before purchasing it. [10] When Courtenay returned to the United States, one or more business partners to whom he had entrusted the secret remained in England. The Times in 1873 reported rumors that disreputable ship owners were purchasing coal torpedoes to put in their own ships as a form of insurance fraud, so that over-insured ships and cargo would sink while far out at sea, leaving no evidence. [13] [14] Other reports scoffed at the rumors, suggesting they were false stories planted by supporters of Samuel Plimsoll, a Member of Parliament who was trying to pass a bill reforming the shipping industry. [15] Nothing was ever proven, but the reports stirred up popular interest in various supposed methods of sabotaging ships, and the coal torpedo even made an appearance in the short story, "That Little Square Box", by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in the collection The Captain of the Polestar and Other Tales in 1890.
Various forms of exploding coal, whether directly descended from Courtenay's original idea or independently developed, have surfaced multiple times throughout history.
The Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish nationalist organization operating in the United States in the late 1860s–1870s, reportedly considered placing coal torpedoes in the furnaces of New York City hotels as well as English transatlantic steamships. [16] They were a strong suspect in the destruction of the warship HMS Doterel at Punta Arenas in 1881, but later evidence proved the explosion was accidental. [17] During the Russo-Japanese War Russia's French naval attaché came into possession coals that been hollowed out with the appearance that they could have been filled with explosives and used to attack the russian fleet. [18]
Both the American OSS and the British SOE [19] used forms of exploding coal in World War II. [20] [21] The German commandos who came ashore on Long Island in 1942 as part of Operation Pastorius carried plastic explosives disguised as coal for use against coal-fired electric generating plants. [22] Such a German coal torpedo was given to the British double agent Eddie Chapman (also known as "Agent Zig-Zag") to sabotage the merchant ship City of Lancaster, but he passed it on to his MI5 handler instead. [23] Similar devices were also made by the Japanese during World War II. [24] [25]
Stanley Karnow hints in his book Vietnam: A History that the CIA prepared explosive coal for use against North Vietnamese railways during the Vietnam War. [26]
A modern torpedo is an underwater ranged weapon launched above or below the water surface, self-propelled towards a target, and with an explosive warhead designed to detonate either on contact with or in proximity to the target. Historically, such a device was called an automotive, automobile, locomotive, or fish torpedo; colloquially a fish. The term torpedo originally applied to a variety of devices, most of which would today be called mines. From about 1900, torpedo has been used strictly to designate a self-propelled underwater explosive device.
A torpedo boat is a relatively small and fast naval ship designed to carry torpedoes into battle. The first designs were steam-powered craft dedicated to ramming enemy ships with explosive spar torpedoes. Later evolutions launched variants of self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes.
CSS Scorpion was a Squib-class torpedo boat that served in the Confederate States Navy during the American Civil War. Armed with a single spar torpedo, she originally served guard duty on the James River after being built in late 1864. Along with the rest of the James River Squadron, Scorpion moved downriver on January 23, 1865, and participated in the Battle of Trent's Reach. After performing depth soundings near Union obstructions, Scorpion moved to get a lantern from the ironclad CSS Virginia II, but ran into a hawser and then ran aground. At 07:10 on the morning of January 24, Union fire struck the abandoned tender CSS Drewry, which then exploded. The force of the explosion swept Scorpion out of control downriver. An attempt to rescue her that night failed, and she was captured by Union forces.
H. L. Hunley, also known as the Hunley, CSS H. L. Hunley, or CSS Hunley, was a submarine of the Confederate States of America that played a small part in the American Civil War. Hunley demonstrated the advantages and dangers of undersea warfare. She was the first combat submarine to sink a warship (USS Housatonic), although Hunley was not completely submerged and, following her attack, was lost along with her crew before she could return to base. Twenty-one crewmen died in the three sinkings of Hunley during her short career. She was named for her inventor, Horace Lawson Hunley, shortly after she was taken into government service under the control of the Confederate States Army at Charleston, South Carolina.
An ironclad was a steam-propelled warship protected by steel or iron armor constructed from 1859 to the early 1890s. The ironclad was developed as a result of the vulnerability of wooden warships to explosive or incendiary shells. The first ironclad battleship, Gloire, was launched by the French Navy in November 1859, narrowly preempting the British Royal Navy. However, Britain built the first completely iron-hulled warships.
The Confederate States Navy (CSN) was the naval branch of the Confederate States Armed Forces, established by an act of the Confederate States Congress on February 21, 1861. It was responsible for Confederate naval operations during the American Civil War against the United States's Union Navy.
Sultana was a commercial side-wheel steamboat which exploded and sank on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865, killing 1,547 people in what remains the worst maritime disaster in United States history.
CSS Alabama was a screw sloop-of-war built in 1862 for the Confederate States Navy. The vessel was built in Birkenhead on the River Mersey opposite Liverpool, England, by John Laird Sons and Company. Launched as Enrica, she was fitted out as a cruiser and commissioned as CSS Alabama on August 24, 1862. Under Captain Raphael Semmes, Alabama served as a successful commerce raider, attacking, capturing, and burning Union merchant and naval ships in the North Atlantic, as well as intercepting American grain ships bound for Europe. The Alabama continued its wrath through the West Indies and further into the East Indies, destroying over seven ships before returning to Europe. On June 11, 1864, the Alabama arrived at Cherbourg, France, where she was overhauled. Shortly after, a Union sloop-of-war, USS Kearsarge, arrived; and on June 19, the Battle of Cherbourg commenced outside the port of Cherbourg, France, whereby the Kearsarge sank the Alabama in approximately one hour after the Alabama's opening shot.
A spar torpedo is a weapon consisting of a bomb placed at the end of a long pole, or spar, and attached to a boat. The weapon is used by running the end of the spar into the enemy ship. Spar torpedoes were often equipped with a barbed spear at the end, so it would stick to wooden hulls. A fuse could then be used to detonate it.
CSS David was an American Civil War-era torpedo boat. On October 5, 1863, she undertook a partially successful attack on USS New Ironsides which was participating in the blockade of Charleston, South Carolina.
A limpet mine is a type of naval mine attached to a target by magnets. It is so named because of its superficial similarity to the shape of the limpet, a type of sea snail that clings tightly to rocks or other hard surfaces.
A boiler explosion is a catastrophic failure of a boiler.
The Confederate Secret Service refers to any of a number of official and semi-official secret service organizations and operations performed by the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. Some of the organizations were directed by the Confederate government, others operated independently with government approval, while still others were either completely independent of the government or operated with only its tacit acknowledgment.
Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay was a member of the Confederate Secret Service and the inventor of the coal torpedo, a bomb disguised as a lump of coal that was used to attack Union steam-powered warships and transports.
USS Signal – a small 190-ton steamship – was acquired during the second year of the American Civil War by the Union Navy and outfitted as a gunboat. She also served other types of duty, such as that of dispatch vessel and convoy escort.
Robert Louden, also known by the alias Charlie Dale, was a Confederate saboteur and mail carrier during the American Civil War. He was said to be the primary messenger between General Sterling Price and Confederate regulars and bushwhackers.
The Sinking of USS Housatonic on 17 February 1864 during the American Civil War was an important turning point in naval warfare. The Confederate States Navy submarine, H.L. Hunley made her first and only attack on a Union Navy warship when she staged a clandestine night attack on USS Housatonic in Charleston harbor. H.L. Hunley approached just under the surface, avoiding detection until the last moments, then embedded and remotely detonated a spar torpedo that rapidly sank the 1,240 long tons (1,260 t) sloop-of-war with the loss of five Union sailors. H.L. Hunley became renowned as the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy vessel in combat, and was the direct progenitor of what would eventually become international submarine warfare, although the victory was Pyrrhic and short-lived, since the submarine did not survive the attack and was lost with all eight Confederate crewmen.
The RMS Lusitania was a British-registered ocean liner that was torpedoed by an Imperial German Navy U-boat during the First World War on 7 May 1915, about 11 nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. The attack took place in the declared maritime war-zone around the UK, three months after unrestricted submarine warfare against the ships of the United Kingdom had been announced by Germany following the Allied powers' implementation of a naval blockade against it and the other Central Powers.
CSS Squib, also known as CSS Infanta, was a Squib-class torpedo boat that served in the Confederate States Navy during the American Civil War. Squib was laid down in 1863, and was launched in early 1864. Her design was a form of launch armed with a spar torpedo. Initially serving on the James River as a flag of truce boat, she snuck into the Union Navy anchorage at Hampton Roads and attacked the steam frigate USS Minnesota early on the morning of April 9, 1864. Minnesota was damaged but not sunk, and Squib was able to escape back upriver. At an unknown time in mid-1864, Squib was moved by rail to the Wilmington, North Carolina, area, where she served on the Cape Fear River. Records of her service at Wilmington after November 1864 are not extant, but she may have resupplied a Confederate fortification during the Second Battle of Fort Fisher in January 1865. The next month, the Confederates withdrew from Wilmington, and Squib was scuttled off Cape Fear.
The Squib class torpedo boats were built for the Confederate States Navy during the later stages of the American Civil War. After the torpedo boat CSS David attacked and damaged the ironclad USS New Ironsides, the Confederates continued building torpedo boats with hopes of breaking the Union blockade. Four vessels of the class – CSS Hornet, CSS Wasp, CSS Squib, and CSS Scorpion – were constructed in Richmond, Virginia, in 1864. All were armed with a single spar torpedo and were powered by steam engines. Squib damaged the gunboat USS Minnesota in an attack on April 9, 1864, and was later sent to Wilmington, North Carolina, where she was scuttled in February 1865. The other three vessels of the class were all part of the James River Squadron and participated in the Battle of Trent's Reach on the night of January 23 and 24, 1865. Scorpion ran aground during the battle, and was forced downriver and out of control after the tender CSS Drewry exploded on January 24. She was later captured by Union forces and may have been burned. Hornet was sunk in a collision with another vessel on January 27, and Wasp was scuttled on the night of April 2/3, as the Confederates were abandoning Richmond.
