O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [16]
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CAPTAIN TOBIAS STORM
The senior Wart-Hog, Tobias Storm, received his commission into the Marines through the established system of political patronage.
His father, Marcus Storm, a Bostonian, had been among the ranks of Andrew Jackson’s troops when they handed the British a sound defeat in the War of 1812 at New Orleans. The war had been over when the battle was fought, but the victory was celebrated, nonetheless, as one of a David over a Goliath.
Marcus Storm took his discharge there, overwhelmed by the allure of New Orleans and its French heritage. The fancy goods and tawdry way of life were of a sort not seen in Boston.
He returned to Boston two years later, with a dozen trunks of silk and wines and aromas and ornate gems. Marcus Storm became a smashing success as a purveyor of luxury imports from France, which filled a hole in the staid Bostonian existence.
His marriage was blessed with four sons, more than enough to carry on the family enterprise; in fact, there was one too many. Marcus selected sons numbers one, two, and four. Number three, Tobias, was odd man out.
Tobias was a spirited young man more given to chasing skirts than to selling the material to make them. He was a contender in every saloon he patronized. It would be best, Marcus thought, to ease him away from Boston, but neither the army nor the navy would take him. As a last resort, he was imposed on the Marine Corps and went on to have an undistinguished career, notable only for the fact that he was present with Admiral Dewey when the latter entered Tokyo Bay to introduce Japan to the glories of Western civilization.
Tobias was left in Tokyo to put together a small railroad, one of the gifts to the Japanese emperor. He had a way with iron and machinery.
On returning to the States, Lieutenant Storm’s value to the Corps came in his assessment of military ordnance. There was no standard for procurement of weapons and Storm’s job was to try to see to it that his little Marine Corps was not handed down everyone’s obsolete cannons and muskets.
In the final months of the Civil War, the Union had cracked through at Vicksburg, Farragut was in Mobile Bay, and the Confederacy was cut in half along the Mississippi.
On the coast side, an enormous fleet of over a hundred Union warships, packing more than a thousand guns, moved toward Cape Fear. Wilmington, North Carolina, one of the last operating Confederate ports, was the objective.
Fort Fisher, twenty miles downriver, stood between the Union armada and Wilmington. This assault plan was to achieve the obliteration of Fisher, by naval gunfire; then an invasion would be led by an entire battalion of Marines.
Second Lieutenant Tobias Storm had remained Second Lieutenant Storm throughout the war, but had been part of the creative planning that improved the accuracy and destructiveness of artillery firepower.
With the war going the Union’s way, Storm needed his piece of it and nagged his way onto the USS Algonquin as commander of a company. The men loved Storm. He was of medium height but powerful build, and jolly comments came through his great mustache. He had, by doubling a navy requisition illegally, gotten a new rifle-bored, single-shot, lever-action gun to replace their pitiful muskets.
More good fortune was his when Sergeant Paddy O’Hara was assigned to him. O’Hara had been seething to avenge the disaster at Sumter, and from the looks of this fleet and a Marine battalion to lead the assault, Fisher would fall.
Fort Fisher was earth and sandbags and logs, surely no match for the Union’s thousand-plus guns.
A Confederate shell hit the powder stores of the Algonquin, blowing Tobias Storm off the bridge into an inferno on the deck below.
Fortunately, he landed at the feet of Paddy O’Hara, who carried him to the ship’s rail, held him, and leaped into the water and swam for another ship a moment before the