These shells came in on a deadly accurate, flat, high-speed trajectory, and they were much, much heavier. Unlike solid shot, they didn't bury themselves harmlessly in earthen berms or ricochet off of masonry, either. They drilled into their targets like white-hot awls into butter… and then they exploded.
Hempel staggered as a single ten-inch shell crashed into the Wallenlagen no more than forty yards from where he himself stood.
The base-mounted fuse-crudity itself, by twentieth-century standards-was no more than an iron ball, coated in an incendiary compound and supported by a thin wire that was sheared off by the sudden acceleration when it was fired. When it struck, the released ball flew forward in the cylindrical fuse's firing chamber, against still more incendiary compound, and the resultant flash detonated the shell.
The explosion blew a crater deep enough for two men Hempel's height to stand upright in out of the Wallenlagen's face… and it was only one of eight.
None of the American shells seemed to have missed their targets, and bellows of stunned, shocked surprise mingled with the screams of the wounded.
Simpson raised his binoculars. He didn't really need them at this short range, but it was part of the image he'd very deliberately cultivated.
He had to wait the better part of a minute before the gunsmoke dispersed on the brisk breeze and cleared the range, but that was perfectly all right. Even with power assistance to move the shells from the magazine to the gun mounts, a ten-inch muzzleloader wasn't about to set any speed records for rate of fire.
He was glad the first guns had been available well before the ironclads could be launched. He'd had them placed in shoreside duplicates of the ironclads' mounts, and his gun crews had at least been able to practice and perfect their drill before they actually had to perform afloat. Still, this was the first time that Constitution had fired both guns simultaneously in anger, and the shock of their recoil seemed to jar straight up his spine from his heels to the base of his brain.
Then the smoke cleared, and his mouth tightened in satisfaction.
He'd read plenty of accounts of how rifled Civil War artillery had reduced the walls of masonry forts like Sumter and Fort Pulaski to Swiss cheese. Apparently, Hamburg's Wallenlagen wasn't any tougher than they'd been.
Rolf Hempel clawed his way back to his feet. His ears rang, his left shoulder was badly bruised by a hurtling chunk of masonry, and at least three of his gunners were down, unconscious or dead. Two more clutched at bleeding wounds, and Jurgen Esch was on his hands and knees, shaking his head dazedly.
Hempel looked at the sudden gap that had appeared in the parapet, then turned back to his gun crews.
"Don't just stand there like fucking idiots!" he bellowed. "Get back on those guns-now!"
One or two of them simply stared at him for an instant, but his noncoms were experienced, tough-minded sorts, who didn't hesitate for a moment to crack skulls with rammers' staffs when required. Hempel was confident that most of them realized as well as he did how futile their fire was going to be, but-like him-they had their duty.
And doing it may at least distract us from panicking about what's about to happen, he thought grimly.
The ten-inchers recoiled with vicious power. The articulated drive rods automatically closed the gun ports behind them, and the high-powered blowers sucked the choking, incredibly foul-smelling black powder smoke out of the casement. Shell hoists raised follow-up rounds and bagged powder charges from the magazine, and the flanged wheels of the shell carts carried them down the tram line to the gun mounts. The tapered charges, tied with cloth tape around central wooden spindles to retain their shape, went down the swabbed-out bores and were rammed home. Then the gun crew tailed onto the chain hoist that lifted the enormous ten-inch shell, and the gun captain and his assistant adjusted it carefully so that its four rows of soft metal studs indexed into the gun's rifling grooves. As the shell slid home, it rode the rifling, rotating slowly until it settled against the waiting charge.
"Clear the mount!"
The gun captains waited to be certain everyone was clear, then tripped the release, and the hydraulics opened the gun port shutters and returned the guns to battery.
Unlike most seventeenth-century guns, the weapons of Simpson's navy had sights. They were enormously simple-little more than a crude ring-and-post arrangement-but they were far better than anyone else had. Moreover, Simpson had actually test-fired his weapons with carefully measured charges, determining impact points at specific ranges from direct observation. His gunners knew exactly how much to allow for projectile drop, and they'd trained thoroughly with their pieces in the Magdeburg shoreside mounts for months.
"Fire!"
The second wave of thunderbolts arrived in a more staggered sequence… not that that made it any better.
The ear-shattering, earth-shaking, masonry-shredding chain of explosions seemed to go on and on. Hempel found himself back on his knees, spitting out a gritty mouthful of stone-dust and dirt, as the squat, unmoving ironclads flashed smoky lightning yet again.
They were firing independently, a strangely calm corner of his brain informed him. Firing as rapidly as each ship's gun crews could reload their demonic weapons, and every single shell was slamming directly into its target with literally pinpoint accuracy. Follow-up rounds were landing within as little as ten feet of the first craters, smashing even deeper into the fortifications, ripping out their guts in chunks of broken rock and flying dirt. The defenders continued to fire back, but much more raggedly, without the rapid, disciplined fire with which they'd begun the engagement. And his cringing ears told him there were fewer and fewer guns firing.
Another salvo of heavy shells slammed into the Wallenlagen, and a section of wall fifty feet across toppled wearily forward amid the screams of the men manning the guns enveloped in its collapse.
Hempel clawed back to his feet, clinging to the parapet. His thick brown hair was white, frosted with rock dust and pulverized mortar, and he stared out at that mercilessly firing line of ships.
John Simpson watched the breaches appearing in Hamburg's fortifications. If anything, his guns were proving even more effective than he'd hoped they would, and his jaw clenched as he tried to visualize what it must be like in those artillery bastions as shell after shell ripped into them. In many ways, it was even worse than what had happened to the Spaniards at the Wartburg. Napalm had been horrifying, and it must have seemed like a visitation from Hell itself, but the very fact that it was so alien to their victims' experience had provided at least some insulation. The Spaniards had possessed no yardstick against which to measure and evaluate the technology which lay behind that new weapon.
But his ironclads' guns, for all their size and relative sophistication, were something the Hamburgers could grasp. They were developments of weapons the defenders had seen before, used before, themselves. And that made their effectiveness and lethality even more stunning.
The Wallenlagen's fire was beginning to slacken. Two of the defensive batteries had already been thoroughly wrecked, and even through the smoke, he could see that at least one other battery had been abandoned by its panicked gun crews. But others continued to fire defiantly back, and he still heard-and felt-the occasional clang as round shot ricocheted off the casement.
Part of him was tempted to send in a message, demanding the fortification's surrender. His gunners were killing dozens, possibly even hundreds, of defenders who had absolutely no hope of beating off the attack. That much surely had to be apparent even to Hamburg by now, and Simpson took no pleasure in the slaughter of helpless enemies.
But Gustav Adolf wants Florida, he thought grimly, and Stearns wants Hamburg to reflect on the… unwisdom of defying the emperor.