Too Ugly to Sink: Every Monitor the US Navy Ever Built

In 1862, a strange iron raft with a revolving gun turret fought the CSS Virginia to a standstill and made every wooden warship on earth obsolete overnight. The U.S. Navy spent the next century chasing that idea, building dozens of monitors for rivers, coastlines, and harbors. Some were brilliant. Some were disasters. One class of twenty ships could not even float. This video covers every monitor class the U.S. Navy ever built, from John Ericsson's original USS Monitor at Hampton Roads to the armored river monitors of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Over a hundred years of engineering, ambition, and hard lessons learned.