A casemate, sometimes rendered casement, is a fortified gun emplacement or armored structure from which guns are fired.[1] originally a vaulted chamber in a fortress.
Contents |
The word comes from the Italian casamatta,[1] the etymology of which is uncertain.
Some theorize that casamatta comes from casa, Italian for house, and matto, Italian for mad, but in this case meaning fake; casamatta seems to have been a common nickname given to a medieval siege machine called gatta, which had the appearance of a house.[2] Others (Devic) think that it comes from the Arabic word kasaba, transliterated to kasbah, the word that originated the Spanish word for fortress: alcazaba.[2] Menagio theorised it came from the Greek word for pit, khasma, the plural of which is khasmata.[2] Hensleigh Wedgwood thought that it came from the Spanish casa and matar, making a casemate a house in which killing happens. Others take matto in its archaic Italian meaning of dark, equivalent to the English matt, as in opaque, making a casamatta a dark house. Casematte were also used as military prisons, making use of their lack of light to add to the punishment. This explanation seems to be the most agreed upon.[2]
A casemate was originally a vaulted chamber usually constructed underneath the rampart. It was intended to be impenetrable and could be used for sheltering troops or stores. With the addition of an embrasure through the scarp face of the rampart, it could be used as a protected gun position.[3] In the early 19th Century, the famous French military engineer Baron Haxo, designed a free-standing casemate that could be built on the top of the rampart.[4] Casemates built in concrete were used in the Second World War to protect coastal artillery from air attack.[5]
In warship design the term casemate has been used in a number of ways.
The American Civil War saw the use of casemate ironclads: armored steamboats with a very low freeboard and their guns on the main deck ('Casemate deck') protected by a sloped armoured casemate, which sat on top of the hull. Although both sides of the civil war used casemate ironclads, the ship is mostly associated with the southern confederacy, the north more relying on turreted monitors. The most famous naval battle of the war was the duel at Hampton Roads between the Union turretted ironclad USS Monitor and the Confederate casemate ironclad CSS Virginia (built from the scuttled remains of the Merrimack).[6]
"Casemate ship" was an alternative term for "central battery ship" (UK) or "center battery ship" (US).[7] The casemate (or central battery) was an armoured box the full width of the ship protecting many guns. The armoured sides of the box, were the sides of hull of the ship. There was an armoured bulkhead at the front and read of the casemate, and a thick deck protecting the top. The lower edge of the casemate sat on top of ship's belt armour.[7] Some ships, such as the Alexandra (laid down 1873), had a two-storey casemate.[8]
A "casemate" was an armoured room in the side of a warship, from which a gun would fire. A typical casemate held a 6-in gun, and had a 6" front plate (forming part of the side of the ship), with thinner armour plates on the sides and rear, with a protected top and floor,[9] and weighed about 20 tons (not including the gun and mounting).[10] Casemates were similar in size to turrets; ships carrying them had them in pairs: one on each side of the ship.
The first battleships to carry them were the British Royal Sovereign class laid down in 1889. They were adopted as a result of live-firing trials against HMS Resistance in 1888.[11] Casemates were adopted because it was thought that the fixed armour plate at the front would provide better protection than a turret,[10] and because a turret mounting would require external power and could therefore be put out of action if power were lost - unlike a casemate gun, which could be worked by hand.[10] The use of casemates enabled the 6-in guns to be dispersed, so that a single hit would not knock out all of them.[10] Casemates were also used in protected and armoured cruisers, starting with the 1889 Edgar class.[12] and retrofitted to the 1888 Blake class during construction.[12]
In the pre-dreadnought generation of warships, casemates were placed initially on the main deck, and later on the upper deck as well. Casemates on the main deck were very close to the waterline. In the Edgar class, the guns in the main deck casemates were only 10 feet (3.0 m) above the waterline.[13] Casemates that were too close to the waterline or too close to the bow (such as in the 1912 Iron Duke class dreadnoughts) were prone to flooding, making the guns ineffective.[14]
During World War II, most purpose-built German Wehrmacht and Soviet Red Army tank destroyers and self-propelled guns (like the Wehrmacht's Sturmgeschütz III) essentially had turretless, armored steel casemates mounted onto (or built integrally into) conventional main battle tank chassis to carry heavier, forward firing guns—the German vehicles were dubbed Jagdpanzer and Panzerjäger respectively, while their Soviet counterparts all bore an "SU-" or "ISU-" prefix, with the "SU-" prefix an abbreviation for Samokhodnaya Ustanovka in Russian, or "self-propelled installation" in their designations, much like the U.S. Army's designation for self-propelled artillery, and American tank destroyers, as a "Gun Motor Carriage".
In civilian use a casemate may be a tunnel cut into a rock face with armoured doors, used for storing volatile goods. In civilian architecture the term is also used to describe a hollow molding, used mostly in a cornice.
|
||||||||||||||||||||