"...pressures both external and internal to be more aggressive. Sims' position had always been that using the Atlantic I Squadron to defend the key ports of Philadelphia, New York and New Haven from attack as well as escorting commercial shipping in and out of the central Atlantic was its best use; though there had been sporadic commerce raids by the Confederacy in the first year of the war, it had not been severe, a circumstance which both supported Sims' belief that his strategy was working and the notion amongst his critics in the War Cabinet and elsewhere that he was overly cautious and conservative. The successes of Mayo's squadrons in the Pacific (at least up to Iquique) weighed on this, too; the weight of American naval forces were, after all, in the Atlantic and pressing this considerable advantage against the Confederates and Mexicans was seen as a strategic imperative, even if an outright blockade would be extremely difficult to maintain with the Triple Powers of Europe making clear that they would not tolerate their shipping being interdicted.
Despite his misgivings, Sims finally relented and agreed to an offensive in late September of 1914 against the Hampton Roads. Strategically, such a move was beginning to make sense for the first time since the war began exactly a year prior. Confederate forces had been forced south of the Potomac and on September 28th were driven south of the Occoquan River in ferocious fighting, and the Port of Baltimore was once again in American hands. The twin ports of the Hampton Roads, Norfolk and Newport News, controlled access to the Chesapeake from the Atlantic and the James River; holding it would deny trans-oceanic shipping and supplies to the industrial crescent of Virginia that stretched from it to Lynchburg via Richmond and Petersburg, as well as create strategic pressure against the Confederate capital from the east as well as from the north. It was also the largest naval base and shipyard in the Confederacy - for that alone, it was one of the most important strategic targets in the war.
Though not as infamous of a debacle as the attempted Iquique Landings, the Battle of Hampton Roads nonetheless quickly went awry for the Navy. The Confederacy had developed a surprisingly robust network of spies in the United States, primarily Canadian and French sympathizers in New York and other major cities, and Canadian merchants in Philadelphia noticed that a surprisingly large squadron was being concentrated there on September 29th and duly warned their allies. Confederate Admiral Nathaniel McClure ordered all ships to evacuate Hampton Roads and be put to sea near Wilmington; they would return when advantageous.
The squadron that attacked Hampton Roads contained one dreadnought, two pre-dreadnought battleships, six cruisers and six destroyers, and four thousand Marines were attempted to be put ashore. The attack of October 3rd immediately went to hell. The Confederacy may have evacuated its fleet in being to avoid being caught in port as they had done to the US at Baltimore thirteen months prior, but they had left behind a large contingent of submarines and the shore batteries in their control (the Delmarva had been entirely taken a year earlier) had been reinforced and improved for exactly this type of event. The USS Wisconsin took two torpedoes below the waterline and began to sink, forcing the New Jersey to break off of its offensive tasks to rescue sailors from the listing vessel; as many as a hundred were unable to make it off, and the loss of a battleship was no small blow. The young and modern cruiser Hartford took a battery shell to its magazine and detonated in a massive fireball at the heart of the III Squadron, peppering the decks of her fellow ships with burning shrapnel, and the Maine saw one of its forward batteries blown clear off. On shore was not much better; the submarines made quick work of the landing boats that had to be physically rowed to shore, with as many as seven hundred Marines drowning in the Hampton Roads while an additional four hundred were captured either from the water or when they came up on shore.
Hampton Roads would have been a considerably larger failure were it not for the quick thinking of III Squadron's commanding officer, Admiral Reggie Belknap. The sinking of the Wisconsin and massacre of the first wave of Marines put out from their boats led him to conclude from the deck of the New Jersey within twenty minutes that the efforts were for naught and it was best to cut losses and regroup to fight another day. Three thousand Marines were held in reserve rather than put out into the firestorm and despite various levels of damage only two ships had been lost, a bad but not insurmountable result for an attack on the naval stronghold of the Confederacy which included the home of their Naval Academy and most important strategic yards. The III Squadron sailed up to Baltimore and anchored there for repairs and to guard the harbor against any potential counterattack.
On paper, the debacle seemed worse than it actually was. Unlike Iquique, where Mayo and Murdock allegedly left Marines and regiments of the AEF behind to die, Belknap had prevented further loss of life and tonnage. The re-routing of such a substantial force to Baltimore after it had been carved off of defensive positions across the East Coast ports also served its own strategic value; there was now an American fleet-in-being in the Chesapeake, foreclosing any attempted harassment on the Potomac or its environs by Confederate vessels of the US Army's supply lines into Virginia, and making the prospect of the Confederate First Fleet returning to Norfolk anytime soon at risk of exposure. This in turn placed the First Fleet in Wilmington moving forward, further away from American shipping across the Atlantic, and changing the calculation for commerce raiding at the Confederate Navy House. Belknap's reports also proved valuable in for the first time determining the doctrine and strength of the Confederate submarine force, since the chaos of Baltimore had left it difficult to determine what exactly the CSN was capable of in that space.
In the immediate aftermath, though, it was not seen that way. The twin losses as Iquique and now Hampton Roads led to a considerable amount of recriminations in Philadelphia about the top-down oceanic command structure, and CNO Knight signed a directive giving squadron admirals and even individual ship captains considerably more initiative in their motions and general orders. Sims' star in particular dimmed within the War Cabinet, as unlike his comrade Mayo he was not half a hemisphere away unable to answer for the muddled result; though he was not and would not be sacked as Atlantic Command Chief, his cachet within the War Cabinet would be severely limited, and despite his role in its planning, it was Belknap and William Rodgers who would earn the majority of the credit for the coup de main at Hilton Head the following spring. The year of centralized Naval planning was over, and Hampton Roads played a significant role in the development of the embittered but respected William Sims who would run an infamously reactionary and inflammatory failed campaign for President ten years later..."
- Hell at Sea: The Naval Campaigns of the Great American War
(Authors Note: it was obtrusive to try to get this in the narrative, but the CS being limited to land reinforcements in Hampton Roads is actually a big deal even if there’s grumbling in Philly about what could have been. Limiting the CSN’s ability to safety use the shipyards there is a victory in and of itself, and forcing another division or so to get deployed to defend it against future attacks is one less division you have to worry about in the emerging no-mans-land between the Occoquan and the Rappahannock
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