There are 1437 users online
You can register for a user account here.
Login
Military Photos
Main Menu
Online
Past Articles
Military Quotes
I feel that retired generals should never miss an opportunity to remain silent concerning matters for which they are no longer responsible. -- General H. Norman Schwarzkopf |
Seven of the Navy's gunboats were of larger types, displacing over 1300 tons. They represented five different basic designs: Dolphin, built in the mid-1880s as a dispatch vessel; Concord (Gunboat # 3) and Bennington (Gunboat # 4), sea-going ships with relatively heavy gun batteries; Nashville (Gunboat # 7), a seagoing gunboat of relatively shallow draft; Wilmington (Gunboat # 8) and Helena (Gunboat # 9), lightly armored and intended for service in rivers; and Topeka, an older ship purchased in England just before the war started.
With two exceptions, these ships performed their war service in the Caribbean. Concord was in the Asiatic Squadron and took part in the Battle of Manila Bay. Her sister ship, Bennington, spent the war in the eastern Pacific and Hawaii. The latter ship was lost to a boiler explosion in 1905, Concord left active service before World War I, but the others lasted at least up to the 1920s. Remarkably, Wilmington, then nearly fifty years old, remained on duty throughout the Second World War. |
Military History
Forum Posts
This Day in History
1865:
Confederate General Joseph Johnston officially surrenders his army to General William T. Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina.
1865: John Wilkes Booth is killed when Union soldiers track him down to a Virginia farm 12 days after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. 1865: Joseph E. Johnston surrenders the Army of Tennessee to Sherman. 1937: The ancient Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain is bombed by German planes. 1952: Armistice negotiations are resumed. 1971: The U.S. command in Saigon announces that the U.S. force level in Vietnam is 281,400 men, the lowest since July 1966. 1972: President Nixon, despite the ongoing communist offensive, announces that another 20,000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Vietnam in May and June, reducing authorized troop strength to 49,000. |