You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [40]
Unfortunately the boys had learned their craft too well. Their military service had provided them with the education, and it was now up to them to use it. And they did, for the fun of it, for profit, and for the lost cause, right up to the times of Cole’s and Jesse’s deaths at the hands of other similar craftsmen and professional hired killers who wore the stars of office granted to them by the same powers that be who had condoned their actions when it was advantageous for them to do so back in the war so many years ago.
Quantrill’s Raiders went from a military force to a gang, one in which many of the next decade’s most notorious outlaws had learned their trade.
You Sent Them Out in What?
Sometimes any plan is likely to sink under its own weight. Despite desperation and incredible courage, this is one of those cases.
HORACE LAWSON HUNLEY AND GENERAL P. T. BEAUREGARD
OFF THE CONFEDERATE COASTLINE, 1864
Brian M. Thomsen
The South was in trouble.
The war had dragged on for close to three years, and the Union naval blockade of such ports as Charleston was starving the Confederacy’s resupplying efforts from sympathetic nations abroad. The “damage them all you can” strategy of Robert E. Lee was wearing thin, and the North knew that in a war of attrition, they, home to the bastions of manufacturing in the Americas, need only keep up the battering until a starved and battered Confederacy would have to give in.
Though the South had been the first to use the innovation of protective metal plating (the so-called ironclads), the North had already done them one better with a ship that sat less than two feet above the waterline with a single armed turret midship that provided them with a tactical edge beyond mere armament.
Something had to be done to neutralize the Union navy and allow the outmanned and “out-metaled” Confederate forces a fighting chance.
A wealthy New Orleans planter, lawyer, and privateer by the name of Horace Lawson Hunley came up with a plan. What about submarine technology? Though early versions (such as the American Revolution’s Turtle) had failed to excite the military masterminds of naval warfare, there was an obvious advantage that could be attained through the use of such a craft. When you were outarmed, you had to be sneaky, and as Brian Hicks and Schuyler Kropf said in their marvelous book Raising the Hunley, “For the South the Hunley was simply the best response of a nation that was outgunned, outmanned, and outmaneuvered…. It was stealth technology in embryo,” and it was just the type of equalizer the Confederate navy definitely needed.
Working with two machinists by the names of James McClintock and Baxter Watson, Hunley set about the task of designing a “fishboat” that would be able to get close enough to the Union ships to do their damage before their presence was even recognized.
After numerous experiments and much trial and error, their work came to fruition with a boiler-shaped hull (3½ feet wide, 4 feet tall, and 40 feet long), fitted with stabilizing fins, and a propulsion system that consisted of seven men turning a crank that ran through the ship and turned a propeller in the ship’s aft. Snorkels were also fashioned to allow for occasional air replacement (though they never worked properly) and a ballast pump was affixed that could be handled by an eighth crewman who would probably be the commanding officer. A final tweak by Confederate general P. T. Beauregard (commander of forces at Charleston) involving the mounting of a spar torpedo on its bow, and the so-christened Hunley submarine was ready for business.
After a couple of disastrous and fatal test runs, on the night of February 17, 1864, the Hunley made its successful martial debut and received its baptism under fire. Under the command of Lieutenant George E. Dixon, the sub rammed its torpedo spar into the Union warship Housatonic, which was moored outside of Charleston Harbor in plain sight of Sullivan’s Island under the command of Captain Charles W. Pickering, and sank her within minutes.
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