Quintin Barry, The Battle of Lissa 1866: How the Industrial Revolution Changed the Face of Naval Warfare by Mark Klobas

Today, the clash between the Italian and Austrian navies off of the island of Lissa (modern day Vis) in July 1866 is best remembered for its role in enshrining one of the great technological dead ends in modern naval warfare.At a time when armour enjoyed a temporary ascendancy over the gun in their ongoing struggle for supremacy, the future of tactics seemed to sink into the past, as steam propulsion made it possible once more to use a ship's hull to sink an enemy vessel.First demonstrated in the American Civil War, at Lissa, the Austrians successfully attacked the Italian fleet by ramming, thus ensuring that for the next half-century, warships would be designed with ram bows jutting outward, even if these ended up sinking more friendly ships by accident than they ever would against the enemy in combat.Despite Lissa's outsized influence on naval tactics and design, however, only a handful of books have been written about it.Of these few, Quintin Barry's is the first English-language book dedicated primarily to the battle, which on this basis alone makes it a noteworthy achievement.His approach to describing the battle is also interesting, as he situates it within the ongoing developments in naval technology during the era.In doing so, he broadens his focus from the ways in which Lissa influenced naval warfare to how the battle embodied the vast array of changes that were taking place in during the midnineteenth century, all of which contributed to the unique nature of the clash.The examination of the technological context for the battle takes up over half of the book.He begins with a brief description of the less-famous battle of Lissa that took place in 1811, between a British frigate squadron and a mixed force of French and Italian vessels, using the ships and tactics that were hallmarks of the age of sail.This would prove one of the last such battles, however, as experiments with steam-powered vessels were already underway in Great Britain and elsewhere.Barry presents the technological innovations and the arms race that followed primarily as a competition between Great Britain and France, who from the 1820s onward introduced steam power, screw propulsion, armour-plating, and more powerful ordnance to the designs of their warships.While ships bearing a mix of some or all of these innovations were in commission by the end of the 1850s, it was not until the American Civil War that the navies of the world had the opportunity to witness the full impact of this new technology.The steam-powered Confederate ironclad Virginia made short work of the more traditional warships it faced, only to be stalemated in battle by the similarly equipped USS Monitor.The lessons

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