A casemate, sometimes rendered casement, is a fortified gun emplacement or armored structure from which guns are fired,[1 ] originally a vaulted chamber in a fortress.
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The word comes from the Italian casamatta,[1 ] the etymology of which is uncertain. Some theorize that it comes from casa, Italian for house, and matto, Italian for mad, but in this case meaning fake; casamatta seems to have been a common nickname given to a medieval siege machine called gatta which had the appearance of a house.[2]
Others (Devic) think that it comes from the Arabic word kasaba, transliterated to kasbah, the word that originated the Spanish word for fortress:alcazaba.[2] Menagio theorised it came from the Greek word for pit, khasma, the plural of which is khasmata.[2] Hensleigh Wedgwood thought that it came from the Spanish casa and matar, making a casemate a house in which killing happens. Others take matto in its archaic Italian meaning of dark, equivalent to the English matt, as in opaque, making a casamatta a dark house. Casematte were also used as military prisons, making use of their lack of light to add to the punishment. This explanation seems to be the most agreed upon.[2]
A casemate was originally a vaulted chamber usually constructed underneath the rampart. It was intended to be impenetrable and could be used for sheltering troops or stores. With the addition of an embrasure through the scarp face of the rampart, it could be used as a protected gun position[3]. In the early 19th Century, the famous French military engineer Baron Haxo, designed a free-standing casemate that could be built on the top of the rampart[4]. Casemates built in concrete were used in the Second World War to protect coastal artillery from air attack[5].
In naval gunnery a casemate is a vertical armour plate with openings for guns. It is less protected than a gun turret and allows for a smaller field of fire. It is however much cheaper in terms of money and far lighter in weight for a given level of armor protection[6]. The American Civil War saw the use of casemate ironclads: steel-built or armored steamboats with a very low freeboard and their guns on the main deck ('Casemate deck') protected by a sloped armored casemate. Although both sides of the civil war used casemate ironclads, the ship is mostly associated with the southern confederacy, the north more relying on turretted monitors. The most famous naval battle of the war was the duel at Hampton Roads between the Union turretted ironclad USS Monitor and the Confederate casemate ironclad CSS Virginia (built from the scuttled remains of the Merrimack)[7]
In 20th century battleships, casemates were used to mount secondary guns for defending the ship against torpedo boats. In practice, these guns were generally quite useless; usually mounted close to the water, casemate guns were often awash in spray, and sometimes swamped completely by the ship's rolling. More modern designs did away with casemate weapons entirely, favoring extra topside turret mounts for their secondary batteries.
During World War II, most purpose-built German Wehrmacht and Soviet Red Army tank destroyers and self-propelled guns essentially had turretless, armored steel casemates mounted onto (or built integrally into) conventional main battle tank chassis to carry heavier, forward firing guns—the German vehicles were dubbed Jagdpanzer and Panzerjäger respectively, while their Soviet counterparts all bore an "SU-" prefix in their designations.
In civilian use a casemate may be a tunnel cut into a rock face with armoured doors, used for storing volatile goods. In civilian architecture the term is also used to describe a hollow molding, used mostly in a cornice.
 Casemate St Lucian Tower, Malta |
 Paired Casemates Fort Delimara, Malta |
 Casemate of the Maginot Line |
 Casemate housing a 5 inch (127 mm) gun on battleship USS North Dakota |
 German Casement at Fort Hommet on the Island of Guernsey |
 The Beehive Casemate was built into this cliff at Obelisk Bay in 1871 |
 Casemate of the battleship USS Texas (BB-35), on display near Houston, Texas. |
 Casemate in Luxembourg |
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CASEMATE (Ital. casa, a house, and matta, dull or dim), an armoured vault or chamber, or in field fortification, a bombproof shelter; in architecture, a hollow moulding, chiefly employed in cornices.
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Categories: CAS-CAT | Defense and armor
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