“Take these at once to the telegraph room. This one goes to the commander of the Southampton Naval Station. This other one must go out at once to the commander of Tilbury Fort.”
“What fort is that, sir?”
“The telegraph men will know, you idiot. Give that back — I’ll write it here. Now run!”
Before the man was out of the room, Somerville had forgotten him and was engaged in drafting messages to the armed forces now spread across the length and breadth of England. Changing all their orders. God — how he had been fooled! Then he stopped and drew himself up and took a deep breath. It was thought not action that was needed now.
He wiped the nib of his pen dry and took out his penknife. He preferred old-fashioned quill pens to the new steel ones. He carefully cut a new point on the quill while he ordered his thoughts. The attack up the Thames was surely aimed at London. He realized that his first priority was to look to the defenses of the capital. The household regiments had to be alerted. The Seventh Company of the Coldstream Guards was in its Chelsea barracks — they would be the first soldiers sent to the defense of Buckingham Palace. There were troops in Woolwich Arsenal; they must be sent for at once. Special trains had to be dispatched to Wiltshire for the troops encamped on Salisbury Plain there. The Prime Minister had to be awakened and informed. Thank goodness that it would be the PM’s task to inform Buckingham Palace — not his.
He drew over a fresh sheet of paper and began, clearly and slowly, to write out his commands. Only after they were dispatched would he have the Duke of Cambridge awakened. Time enough after the proper orders had been issued to suffer his choleric wrath.
Admiral Spencer knew exactly what must be done as soon as he read the telegram. Enemy fleet including warships now entering the Thames. They were there with only one possible target in mind. London. A strike at the heart of the empire would have a terrible effect if it were successful. It was obvious now that the various other landings and acts of harassment around the country had just been diversions. Ever since the attack on Plymouth every ship under his command had been manned and on the alert.
Now, at last, he knew where they must go. The enemy could get no farther upriver than London Bridge. Undoubtedly their troops would be disembarking there. The household regiments would see to them all right! There would be warships protecting them, he was certain of that. They would have to face the guns of his own ironclads. The enemy was stuck in a bottleneck — and he was going to drive in the cork. There would be no way out for them: they faced only destruction.
General Bagnell ordered the sergeant who had brought the telegram to throw open the curtains, then squinted at the sheet of paper in the morning light. He was still half-asleep and it took him some moments to understand the purport of the message.
An attack.
Even as reality struck home he heard, through the open window, the bugler sounding assembly. The officer of the day would have read the message and have had the intelligence to sound the alarm. The general’s servant, who had let the messenger in, was already bringing his uniform. The many parts that formed the military machine were moving into place. Whenever the attack came — they would be ready. He pulled on his trousers and was stepping into his boots when he thought of the late Lord Palmerston. It was through his intervention and enterprise that Tilbury Fort had been rearmed and expanded. As had the many other fortresses that defended England. It was that great man’s foresight that might save England yet again.
It was a clear, fine day. General Bagnell stood beneath the flag, on the topmost battlement of the Water Gate, looking downriver at the placid Thames. The curtain walls of Tilbury Fort, to the east and west bastions, were built on arched counter forts, solidly constructed of Portland stone. The stout walls and parapets beyond were made of brick and had been reinforced with dirt ramparts strong enough to resist an enemy siege barrage, while the large guns concealed in the forts returned their fire. And there were the other defenses; the gun lines outside the walls, safe behind their own parapets, stretching out to east and west of the Water Gate. Six-inch and twelve-pounder guns. All manned, all ready.
There was the sound of heavy guns firing downriver. It must have been the batteries at Coalhouse Fort. The thunder became intense — then died away. A few minutes later the enemy came into view. Coming around the bend in the Thames between East Tilbury and Cliffe. Strange-shaped armorclads like black beetles that crawled on the surface of the water. They had high, sloped sides with armor plate covering above that. But no gun ports that Bagnell could see.
“Prepare to open fire as soon as they are in range,” he ordered his aide, who passed the message on to the waiting gunners.
The four ships were closer now — but separating. One of them was moving away from the others, toward the gun positions at Gravesend, on the other side of the river. Good, the gunners there would make short work of her — while he could concentrate his fire on the remaining three.
The gunnery officer shouted “fire” and the Tilbury Fort guns roared out. The peaceful surface of the Thames turned suddenly into a maelstrom of waterspouts as near misses crashed into the river. And there were hits — many of them. Solid shot that hammered into the enemy’s iron armor.
And bounced away. Bagnell saw the blur of the ricocheting balls as they hummed into the air.
From this distance the ironclads seemed to be unharmed. And something strange was happening to them as they anchored, their chains running out fore and aft. They were facing broadside to the fort with their upper armor moving, apparently rising. No, not rising, opening up as the metal plates that covered the vessels were swung wide.
His cannon were firing again, but the raised plates deflected the cannonballs as well as did the armor. Then the first ship seemed to shiver and sink deeper into the water, throwing whitecapped waves out in all directions. A dark cloud of smoke welled up and he had a brief glimpse of a large projectile rising high into the air. Drawing a dark line in the sky that ended on the bastion beside the Water Gate. There was an immense explosion, and when the smoke cleared away, to his horror, the general saw that three guns had been dismounted and destroyed, the guncrews obliterated in that terrible explosion. A single shell had wrought this carnage.
And more of the large shells were falling, until there was an almost continuous roar of detonating high explosives. Unlike normal cannon that fired shells directly at a target, these mortars arched a giant missile high into the air, to plunge down almost vertically onto the target below. Battlements and walls that faced the enemy were no defense against this kind of attack.
But General Bagnell was not aware of this debacle. He, and all of his officers, had been blown to pieces by the third shell that had landed on the fort. He did not live to see either the destruction of his fort or the obliteration of the gun emplacements across the river by the fourth mortar ship. In thirty intense, destructive minutes, all of the defenses of the river at Tilbury had been destroyed. Even as the firing ceased, the first of the long line of ships nosed into sight around the bend in the river and moved, unharmed, toward London.
USS Atlas had been idling her engines to keep position in the river against the tidal current. When the mortar ships had ceased firing, her captain saw that the boat that had been shielded by the bulk of the Thunderer was now pulling away from her flank. Good. Admiral Farragut was transferring his flag to the Mississippi — and taking the Thames pilot with him. Everything was going as planned. As soon as the boat reached the ironclad, Captain Curtin ordered the engines slow ahead. Three blasts on her steam whistle signaled the rest of the waiting ships to follow her upstream. As they got under way, USS Mississippi surged forward, passing the slower cargo ship and taking her position in the lead. After the successful landings at Penzance, she had proceeded to the mouth of the Thames to join the attacking squadron. Now she raced ahead, guns loaded and ready, to seek out any other river defenses.
Beside Curtin on Atlas’s bridge, General Sherman looked at the smoking ruins of Tilbury Fort as they moved slowly by. “Utterly destroyed in less than half an hour,” he said. “I have never seen anything like it.”
Curtin nodded understandingly. “That is because you are a soldier and see war as something to be fought on land. But you must remember the success of General Grant’s mortar ships in the Mississippi at Vicksburg. No railway gun can match one of these sea-battery mortars for size — and no team of horses could ever move one. But put them into an iron ship and you can cross oceans with them. Just as they have done. But it took the genius of a nautical engineer to design and manufacture them as well.”
“I agree completely. Mr. Eri
csson is an asset to our country — and most certainly will lead us to success in this war. Are you pleased with the ship you command, Captain? This is also his design.”
“Not pleased — ecstatic, if you will permit me to use a word with many connotations. I believe that Atlas is the most powerful ship that I have ever commanded. With twin engines and twin screws, she is in a class by herself. And like her namesake, she cannot quite carry the world on her shoulders — but she comes mighty close to it.”
The Thames curved in great loops as they made their way upriver. As they came into the Dartford reach, there was the flash of guns from the Mississippi ahead of them.
“That will be the arsenal at Woolwich,” Sherman said. “They have some batteries facing the river there, but nothing much to speak of. Tilbury Fort is the major defense of the Thames, and no hostile fleet was ever expected to get by her armaments or reduce her by siege.”
“Perhaps that was true of yesterday’s wars,” Curtin said. “But not today’s.”