Remember the Maine:
Armored Ram Katahdin
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2024

Shocking as it may seem to some, there have been times when the United States’ defense budget has included wasteful projects intended solely to enrich some politically powerful constituency, or reward a donor. The effort in the early 1890’s to rebuild the United States Navy provided a cornucopia of corruption, and the grifters took their full share.

The armored ram Katahdin, seen in our Great War at Sea: Remember the Maine game, was not the only such boondoggle. The “dynamite cruiser” Vesuvius was on about the same level of high-priced futility, and even the useful projects like the battleship Indiana came in at almost exactly twice the originally-quoted price tag.

Katahdin appears, as a game piece, to be utterly useless. Mostly because it is.

Katahdin was authorized in 1889 as a political sop tossed to those who preferred that the United States build a coast-defense navy rather than the deep-water fleet represented by the three battleships of the Indiana class authorized a few months later. Rear Admiral Daniel Ammen, head of the coast-defense faction, designed the ship himself. She was named for a mountain in Maine, a name also sometimes used for a giant-bird-like monster said to roam the north woods. Maine’s Congressional delegation pushed the $970,000 project (about one-third the cost of a full-sized battleship, before price-gouging) through for for the sake of home-state Bath Iron Works. The idea was to build many such rams, but only one actually appeared.

Katahdin under construction.

Katahdin’s design was inspired by a misunderstanding of the British torpedo ram Polyphemus. While Polyphemus did have a ram, this was an afterthought and her primary weapons were her five torpedo tubes and the 18 reloads she carried (an unusually high number for the day). Her basic hull form was curved (a unique design feature for the time) and protected by thick armor. In essence, she was intended to operate much like surfaced submarines would a few years later, as a semi-submerged torpedo boat. Polyphemus was completed in 1882, and attracted a great deal of international attention - she even serves as the inspiration for the armored ram Thunder Child in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

When Congress authorized Katahdin, the U.S. Navy had not yet adopted the self-propelled torpedo. Therefore, the American version carried only four light guns to repel boarders and no torpedoes. Just before action, she would take on extra water ballast into her double bottom (yet another unique feature) to lower her profile even deeper into the water, and then attempt to ram enemy ships. Her usual “whaleback” hull form would help lower her profile and give added structural strength. She had a heavily-armored conning tower and very few deck fittings; only the conning tower had significant armor protection, with relatively light plating over her upper hull, but only the conning tower would in theory be vulnerable to enemy fire during a ramming run. Katahdin resembled a submarine more than a surface warship and in many ways was a very technically advanced craft. At 2,300 tons full load, she had a crew of 97.

A rather fanciful sketch of Katahdin in action; in reality she had no guns.

But while Polyphemus was slightly faster than the battleships of her day, by the time Katahdin was commissioned in February 1896, most foreign battleships were fast enough to run away from her pretty easily. Katahdin came in a full knot short of her contracted 17-knot speed on trials and had trouble making 14 knots in normal conditions, and the Navy refused to accept her. But Bath Iron Works, then as now, had enormous political pull and a special bill was rammed through Congress forcing the Navy to accept the ship. She spent only a little over a year in commission, almost all of that tied to a pier in New York, before going into reserve.

When war with Spain broke out a year later, the green-painted ram came back into service, but now the admirals refused to take her with them to Cuba. Instead she steamed from city to city on the East Coast as part of the North Atlantic Squadron, reassuring citizens that the Spaniards would be kept at bay. In June 1898, Capt. George F. Wilde received orders to report to the blockading squadron off Santiago de Cuba, but the Spanish fleet exited the port and met their total destruction before Katahdin arrived to provide a diversionary target for Spanish gunnery. In October, Katahdin once again was decommissioned. She rusted for another 11 years at Philadelphia Navy Yard before being towed out into the Atlantic and finally providing the Navy a useful service, as what the New York Daily Tribune called “The Million-Dollar Target.”

Katahdin at sea.

In the game, Katahdin is of little use. There is an optional rule for ramming, and a number of ships are eligible to try it. She appears in none of the game's 32 scenarios, something we’ll address in an expansion book.

You can order Remember the Maine (Second Edition) right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his new puppy. His Iron Dog, Leopold, could swim very well.

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