"Let's not get carried away by our own enthusiasm, Franz," he suggested.
"Yes, sir," Halberstat acknowledged in a moderately chastened tone.
Simpson's smile broadened. He shook his head slightly and stepped to the rear of the conning tower, looking back across the top of the casement to where President followed in Constitution's wake.
All of the ironclads' gun ports remained closed by their heavily armored shutters, and they would remain that way until Simpson's ships reached the precise positions he had selected for them. That, too, was part of the message for Hamburg. The USE Navy would proceed methodically about its own plans, totally unconcerned by-and contemptuous of-any way in which the defenders might attempt to inconvenience it.
Rolf Hempel had better eyes than most. He actually saw the black dot of the forty-two-pound round shot bouncing off of the lead ship's armor like a pea bouncing off the head of a drum. Some of the gunners were cheering at the evidence of their fellows' accuracy. Hempel wasn't. As far as he could tell, it hadn't even marked the American vessel's paint!
Constitution took six more hits before she reached her preselected position opposite the Wallenlagen's exact center. That was actually pretty fair shooting by seventeenth-century standards, Simpson reflected.
"Coming up on our position now, Captain."
"Very well," Halberstat acknowledged the report, then nodded to the conning tower signalman.
"Pass the word to Ensign Gaebler to release the anchor."
"Release the anchor, aye, aye, sir!" the signalman repeated, making certain that he'd understood the order correctly, then bent over the voice pipes.
"Both pumps to zero power," Halberstat continued.
"Zero power, aye, aye, sir."
Constitution's stern anchor plunged into the mud of the Elbe, and the ironclad came to a complete stop. The river's current was sufficient to keep her headed in the proper direction, and the defenders' fire redoubled as their target stopped moving entirely. Several more round shot clanged deafeningly off of her stout armor, and Simpson nodded in satisfaction.
"Very well, Captain Halberstat," he said formally. "You may"-his lips twitched ever so slightly-"fire at will."
Chapter 38
Rolf Hempel found the lead ironclad anchored little more than a hundred yards in front of his battery. So far, the Wallenlagen's guns had been thundering away for almost half an hour. Hempel's battery had joined in ten minutes ago, and the defenders had scored several hits in that time… for all the good it had done. The USE ships, on the other hand, had yet to fire a single shot in reply. Now, as he watched, two ports opened on the ironclad's side, and the snout of a massive cannon slid smoothly out of each of them.
There were three more gun ports between the two opening ones, a corner of his brain noted. For some reason, they weren't opening. Two more round shot from his battery ricocheted off of the ship's impenetrable armor, and he grimaced. Those closed gun ports were like yet another mocking assertion of Hamburg's impotence. Despite the scores of heavy artillery pieces firing upon them, each of those ships was prepared to reply with only two guns. It was as if the enemy was saying "Look-we don't even need to use all of our guns!"
Simpson watched through the view slit as fresh, denser clouds of gunsmoke enveloped the Wallenlagen's batteries. The thunder of the city's guns was certainly impressive, and the clangor of cast-iron round shot rebounding from the ship's steel armor was deafening. Fortunately, the one aspect of the ironclads' construction which had most worried him didn't seem to be being a problem after all.
The greatest weakness of the ships' design, in many respects, was that their "armor" consisted of individual steel "planks" made by running up-time railroad rails through a rolling mill. It wasn't a single, contiguous piece of armor, and the only way they'd been able to secure it to the ironclads' wooden structure was with hand-forged bolts. He'd been concerned that those bolts might shatter as the armor took hits, and they still might, under hits that came in directly on top of one of them. But they seemed to be holding up well to the more general battering the casement was taking.
From his current position, he couldn't see Constitution's ten-inch guns running out into firing position. The conning tower was located at the front of the casement, raised enough to make it possible to see back across the casement top, and faced with its own armored protection. It was also located on the centerline of the ship, which meant that he couldn't see the actual sides of the ship. But he could see President just fine, and his lips drew back in something only distantly related to a smile as the massive barrels of President's wire-wound guns slid smoothly out of their ports. It was easy for him to imagine that he could actually hear the hiss of the guns' hydraulics-adapted from more salvaged mining equipment.
Those guns were the ironclads' true reason for being. Each ship mounted three of the short, stubby, ugly carronades between the ten-inchers, but they were much less suitable for bombarding powerful fortifications. Like the carronades mounted by the timberclads, they were the product of the new sandcasting techniques that had been introduced in Magdeburg. The biggest single weakness of cast-iron seventeenth-century artillery was that even English and Swedish gun founders-universally acknowledged to be the best makers of iron artillery in the here-and-now world-used clay molds. Clay had a very low porosity, which meant that air bubbles in the molten iron were often unable to escape when the guns were cast and, instead, formed dangerous cavities and weak points in the finished guns. Sand was far more porous, which made for much stronger, tougher artillery pieces.
Carronades were also far shorter than regular artillery pieces of their caliber. The original carronade, cast in Scotland during the time of the American Revolution-the original American Revolution, that was-had thrown a 68-pound round shot, but it had weighed less than the contemporary 12-pounder. That had permitted ships to mount far heavier weights of broadside, although the new gun's shorter barrel had given it a shorter effective range. On the other hand, the greater care taken when boring it out had made it more accurate over its available range, and these carronades were rifled, which made them even more accurate and also permitted them to fire something besides simple spherical projectiles.
The fact that their barrels were barely four feet long, as compared to the ten-inch guns' twelve-foot barrels, meant they had a much lower muzzle velocity and a correspondingly shorter absolute range, and shell weight went up as the cube of the increase in shell diameter. Since the carronades had only an eight-inch bore, that equated to a tremendous difference between its penetrating power and bursting charge and those of the heavier, faster-moving ten-inch shell.
Of course, all of the shells in question were cast-iron, with a filling of black powder, not the steel-cased, high-explosive-packed shells of Simpson's first navy. Compared to twentieth-century artillery, they were positively anemic. But, then, what they had to contend with was seventeenth-century artillery… and fortifications.
The enemy fired at last.
Despite his own career as an artillerist, Rolf Hempel had never heard anything quite like it. The ironclads fired in succession, starting with the ship farthest downstream-the one opposite Hempel's own position-and running back along their line. The stupendous concussion of the American guns was stunning, and the ships disappeared entirely behind an incredible gush of choking, flame-cored smoke.
That was bad enough; what happened to the Wallenlagen was even worse.
Explosive shells per se were no great surprise. Mortar bombs had come into use in the Low Countries at least fifty years ago. But any mortar bombs Hempel ever heard of were far smaller than these shells. They were also lobbed at their targets so that they descended almost vertically, and they were inaccurate, low-velocity weapons, fired by crudely timed fuses.