1634: The Baltic War

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.

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.

Rolf Hempel had lost count.

He had absolutely no idea how many of those demonic shells had ripped into the fortifications in his vicinity. A part of him knew the number couldn't have been as high as he thought it was, but it had been high enough.

He didn't know how long this nightmare had been going on, either. It seemed like an eternity, and he cursed his superiors for letting it continue. Surely these horrible ironclads had amply demonstrated their ability to turn the entire city into a smoking heap of wreckage! How many more of Hempel's men had to die before they were allowed to capitulate and save their lives?

He was still asking himself that question when a ten-inch shell exploded three feet away from him and the point, for Rolf Hempel, became forever moot.

"Order to all units." Simpson had to raise his voice to a half-shout to make himself heard by eardrums stunned and battered by a sixty-minute bombardment. "Cease fire."

"All units cease fire, aye, aye, sir!" the signalman replied, and started shouting down the voice pipe to the radio room.

The thunderous explosions tapered off quickly as the order was passed, and Simpson opened the armored door and stepped out onto the bridge wing. He leaned out, looking down at the side of Constitution's casement and saw at least a couple of dozen shallow dents. There were a few places where individual steel planks were dished in more deeply, but there was no evidence of any significant damage, and he turned to look at Hamburg.

The city, he reflected, could not say the same thing.

The Wallenlagen was torn and ripped, half-invisible under a pall of smoke and dust. The good news was that the range was so short, and the trajectory of his weapons so straight, that it looked as if none of his fire had overshot the fortifications and landed in the city proper.

And the other "good news," he thought harshly, is that Stearns' demonstration of Gustav Adolf's… displeasure has just been made abundantly clear.

He surveyed the wreckage one more time, then stepped back into the conning tower.

"Instruct all units to secure their guns, then raise anchor," he said. "I believe we have an appointment in Luebeck Bay."