Review - "Rockets, Tanks and Submarines: The Ingenuity of Civil War Texans" by Edward Cotham

[Rockets, Tanks and Submarines: The Ingenuity of Civil War Texans by Edward T. Cotham, Jr. (State House Press, 2025). Softcover, photos, drawings, maps, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:ix,236/304. ISBN:978-1-64967-027-4. $39.95]

It was patently obvious to every contemporary observer that the Civil War North and loyal Border States together possessed financial, industrial, logistical, and technological resources that the agriculture-based economy of the Confederate South could not hope to match. In attempting to put that vast disparity into stark perspective, it has often been repeated in the sources that New York state alone had more manufacturing firms than the entire South. The only question was whether Union military and civilian leaders and planners would prove able to fully mobilize and manage those resources and integrate them efficiently into a war-winning strategy. There were ups and downs in the process along the way, but it would be difficult to argue that the overall effort was not a stupendous success. It has even been argued, the chief proponent being Thomas Army, that engineering, and with it its major components of education, management, personnel, and technology, was the decisive factor in the Union triumph. Somewhat lost, or at least underappreciated, in all that discussion were the many military advancements and innovations produced by Confederate inventors, designers, and engineers, many of whom hailed from Texas. Their many attempts to offset Union land and naval superiority with advanced weapons and force-multiplying technologies are the focus of Edward Cotham's fascinating new study Rockets, Tanks and Submarines: The Ingenuity of Civil War Texans.

Cotham's study is not the first book to detail the wartime history behind the men and activities of the Singer Secret Service Corps, a highly active group of inventors and financiers led by Edgar Singer and organized at Port Lavaca, Texas in 1863. Best known for their development and production of effective torpedo technologies, Singer agents spread their mine warfare ideas and expertise for deployment to both inland waterway invasion routes and strategic points located along the Confederate coastline from Texas to Virginia. Published in 2015, Mark Ragan's Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War represented a pioneering investigation into the wide-ranging impact the Singer group had on not only land-based and underwater torpedo/mine warfare during the Civil War but also submarines (including the famed CSS Hunley) and torpedo boats. Fully crediting Ragan's groundbreaking research, Cotham's own book both revisits and expands upon that earlier work. Numerous productive Texan men of ideas both inside and outside the Singer group are profiled in the text. Among the most prominent figures are the aforementioned Edgar Singer, Robert Creuzbaur "The Captain Nemo of Texas," Benjamin Whitney, Charles Williams (designer of the Triton submarine plan and a horological torpedo), and Williams collaborator Ebenezer Allen.

Among the innovative secret weapons developed for the Confederate war effort, the Singer torpedo of various designs and triggering mechanisms proved most effective. Relatively cheap deterrents that packed a powerful punch that could sink a capital ship in a single blow, Singer weapons were a horror to Union naval vessels cruising inland waterways or those attempting to breach southern harbor defenses. Army officers and men also came to fear their subterra tactical deployment along strategic roadways, railroad tracks, and land-facing fortifications. As Cotham and others before him have pointed out, though, the Achilles heal of employing torpedoes for coastal defense was their highly uncertain shelf life in the face of strong tidal forces and both saltwater corrosion and sea life encrustation disabling triggering mechanisms. To remain reliably effective, torpedo fields that protected harbors would have to be regularly replaced, a requirement that was perhaps beyond the capacity of local resources.

In addition to torpedo weapons themselves, their means of conveyance to the enemy in the form of submarines and semi-submersible torpedo boats are major objects of Cotham's research. The successful sinking of USS Housatonic by the submersible CSS Hunley and the damaging of the ironclad USS New Ironsides by the torpedo boat David are only part of a wider discussion of the debates within Confederate military, government, and civilian circles over the usefulness and potential of such weapon classes. The leadership of the C.S. Navy is often portrayed as being more open than most when it came to approving new and untested technologies, but Cotham's study shows that getting that approval was more often than not a tough struggle, which was understandable given the competition for limited resources within Confederate military procurement. Nevertheless, the potential merits behind a number of unbuilt designs, such as the aforementioned Triton, and design elements are interesting to contemplate. Assisting in visualizing what weapons described in the book looked like (or might have looked like had they been built) are a multitude of detailed technical drawings and conceptual illustrations.

Though it does not do so extensively, Cotham's study does engage in current debates among Civil War historians over whether expensive, time-consuming, and resource-intensive ironclad squadrons were the Confederacy's best option for port and harbor defense, the other option between reliance on fixed defenses composed of interlocking land batteries, mine fields, and obstructions. While he does not lean decisively in either direction, the author adds torpedo boats to the discussion as an alternative to capital ship ironclads. Smaller in size, and presumably far cheaper and quicker to produce, it is assumed that torpedo boats could have been put into operation in fairly large numbers using the same amount of resources spent on constructing and maintaining ironclad squadrons, with more than a little money and materials left over to use toward other war effort priorities. It's a tantalizing thought to consider, but Cotham also recognizes that the David's attack on New Ironsides was the only proof of concept that we have to go on. While torpedo boat projects were planned at several locations across the Confederacy, Cotham and others note that wild rumor, scant documentation, and mystery all dog any modern investigation of those programs. As an example, in his own discussion of the completed or nearly completed Texas torpedo boat's ultimate fate at the time of the Trans-Mississippi Department's surrender, Cotham's examination of the available evidence was not able to produce much more clarity than what Ragan published on the topic a decade ago. Even more mysterious are claims of a functioning Houston submarine, the existence of which Cotham could find no compelling supporting evidence.

Perhaps the least successful of the Texas weapons discussed in the book that were actually built and tested was the attempt to form a rocket battery. Designed by German-born ordnance officer George Schroeder, and overseen by Swiss-born engineer Julius Kellersberger, the Schroeder rocket system was rushed into production and failed spectacularly during a high-profile test firing. Suffering from the age-old problem associated with military rockets, namely the impossibility of reliably controlling the flight path to target, the battery project was scrapped entirely and remaining rockets disposed of.

For those potential readers wondering about what machine Cotham's mention of "tanks" in the title could possibly be referring to, the answer is mobile railroad artillery. At several points in the book, Cotham credits district commander Major General John B. Magruder for backing promising innovations, and the general brought to the Galveston front his prior rail gun experience from the Virginia Peninsula. At Galveston, Magruder expanded the concept into development of an interconnected system of reinforced casemates linked to each other by tracks that would be used to move a rail gun back and forth between threatened points. While that is certainly an original, and rather commendable, weapon system for Civil War island defense, associating it with a tank is still a pretty generous analogy (even if the turreted rail gun sought after by Magruder had been actually built)!

Popular conceptions of Texas's contributions to the Civil War often involve images of hard-charging cavalry and shock troop infantry on the battlefield, but Edward Cotham's Rockets, Tanks and Submarines effectively reminds us that a small group of enterprising Texas citizens also produced technological innovations that did not lead to victory but nevertheless had an outsized impact on the course of the war. Additionally, several of those developments served as windows into the future conduct of warfare worldwide. Recommended.