Booknotes: Five Flags

New Arrival:

• Five Flags: The Warship that Reshaped the World by Stuart Buxton (Stackpole Bks, 2025).

Bridging much of the time gap between late-sail/early-steam warships all the way to the pre-Dreadnought era of the 1880s and early 1900s, the ironclad ram Sphinx/Stonewall/Kotetsu/Azuma existed within a period of very rapid development in worldwide naval ship design that, amidst all the feverish technological progress, also produced innumerable disappointments and evolutionary dead-ends.

From the description: "As wooden ships gave way to ironclads, and sail gave way to steam in the nineteenth century, one warship fought through the civil wars that shaped modern America, Germany and Japan. Its career spanned high politics and secret diplomacy, arms dealers and royal courts, spies, sailors, and samurai across three continents. In a vivid narrative travelling from London to Paris, from Copenhagen to Havana, from Washington to Tokyo," Stuart Buxton's Five Flags: The Warship that Reshaped the World "brings this incredible true story to life."

The book begins with an overview of the vastly asymmetrical contest between Union and Confederate naval forces, and the latter's attempt to use ironclad ram technology, still relatively new at the time, to offset the former's vast superiority in wooden warship numbers and heavy-gun firepower. A major part of that innovative strategy was to supplement the Confederacy's meager domestic industrial capacity with foreign purchases and construction. More from the description: "Strangled by the Union’s naval blockade, the Confederacy needed ships - and turned to Europe to build them. In 1862, Emperor Napoleon III agreed to deliver a unique new design whose 300-pounder cannon, 5 inches of armour, and twenty-foot bow ram made her a threat to every warship on earth."

As several recent books have revealed at some length, the United States countered these Confederate efforts in France and Britain with effective overseas surveillance networks and diplomacy. The result was that the ship was kept out of Confederate hands until it no longer mattered. More: "Before the mighty ironclad was finished, U.S. agents discovered it, and she was sold to Denmark, only to be smuggled back after her defeat by Prussia. Christened (CSS) Stonewall after the legendary general, the ship took on an elite crew with 5 captains among them, narrowly survived terrifying storms, took refuge in Spain and had to run the gauntlet of Union warships and Spanish courts to escape. The Stonewall reached Cuba in May 1865 - too late to change the Civil War - before her sale to the Queen of Spain, and a handover to a newly re-united America."

Though the ship's original mission passed unfulfilled, its naval career was far from over. Glancing through the table of contents, it looks like a bit more than half of Buxton's study is devoted to the vessel's noteworthy post-Civil War service in the Far East. "Though sold to the Tokugawa shogun in 1867, she was delivered to his bitter enemy the emperor and led the brutal and harrowing war at sea that secured the Meiji restoration and set Japan on a path of modernization, industrialization, and expansion that would end in World War II."