When Empires Strike Back

As to the crew, a 100-gunner of the Royal Navy carried about 820 men, comprising experienced officers and veteran seamen -- some of them "impressed," essentially kidnapped -- as well as "landsmen," landlubbers who didn't know a tiller from a touchhole, and about 150 fighting marines. A Nimitz-class carrier operates with a crew of more than 3,200 trained and specialized young men and women, enlisted and officers. An eight-squadron air wing adds another 2,500 people. "Young" is a key word here: The average age of a carrier crewmember is under 20. During routine operations, these sailors work relentlessly, 14 to 16 hours a day; in combat, far more. The nation's most impressive symbols of military power are run by thousands of sleep-deprived, highly disciplined sailors, many of them teenagers.






THE WEAPONS


Ships of the line, from 100-gunners, known as First Rates, to 78-gun Third Rates, carried a roster of cannon ranging from 32-pounders down to 12-pounders (named for the weight of the ball fired by black powder). With a range of over a mile, these were massive weapons, but they were not very accurate, hence the need for broadsides. "The guns couldn't really move from side to side," says Hattendorf. And they could only be elevated about 10 degrees and only by moving a wooden wedge called a quoin under the breech. "So moving the guns meant moving the ship. Aiming was essentially steering." In addition to the plain cast-iron ball, the cannon sometimes fired grape shot (a container of small balls for antipersonnel use at close range) and chain or bar shot (two balls linked by a short chain or a pair of sliding bars that would whirl in flight, the better to tear up the enemy's sails and rigging). Whatever the ammunition, even a superbly drilled gun crew could manage a rate of fire of only one round every 2 minutes. Marines, fighting from the deck or in the rigging, also hurled grenades, fired muskets, and employed pikes and cutlasses.




The array of offensive weapons on a Nimitz-class carrier reads like a list of all the varieties of hellfire. The F-14 Tomcats are armed with up to 13,000 pounds of AIM-54 Phoenix missiles, AIM-7 Sparrow missiles, AIM-9 Side-winder missiles, "air-to-ground ordnance" (bombs) and a M61A1/A2 Vulcan 20-mm cannon. The F/A-18 Hornets can carry most of the above, along with AIM-120 AMRAAM, Harpoon, Harm, SLAM, SLAM-ER and Walleye missiles, plus general-purpose bombs, mines and rockets. Antisubmarine and other offensive missions are carried