In the south, on the Long Island Sound coast of Connecticut, were other ruins almost as big and as costly. They were the wreckage of Bridgeport’s big cartridge factories, blown up as the hostile patrols entered the outskirts of the town.
It was the last source of ammunition and arms supply in New England. With it there were lost, too, three submarines that were on the stocks in the harbor ship yards, and the works that had been manufacturing naval sea-planes and military tractors for the army’s flying scouts.
The aerial motor works of Hyde Park in Massachusetts, the Marblehead factory that made gun-carrying convertible land and marine flying machines, and the Norwich factory for tractor biplanes and hydro-monoplanes had been captured almost in the beginning.[142]
New England’s Conquest Complete
As the army entered Bridgeport, another column advancing parallel with it captured the great manufacturing city of Waterbury in the North. With these two cities, the invader’s conquest of New England was complete. Excepting only Portland in Maine, he now possessed every city of more than 30,000 population. He possessed every source of manufacture. He held every port on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. He held the three great harbors of New England. In addition to the vessels building in Bridgeport, he possessed Fore River, with a battleship and two destroyers on the ways; Quincy, with eight submarines in course of construction, and the Portsmouth Navy Yard with one.[143]
The division that had taken Waterbury turned southerly to the coast after it passed through that town, to join the division that had taken Bridgeport and was pressing westward.
An hour later the American army, apprised by its spies, began to block the rock cuts on all the New York Central systems leading northward out of New York City.
When New York heard this news, it knew that it had been abandoned.
In that moment of despair, the population would have done what every loosely knit, heterogeneous multitude does almost spontaneously in the face of catastrophe. It would have grown into mobs to riot against itself. If the huge population had been organized, if it had possessed a single will, nothing could have prevented it and nothing could have withstood it. But facing the overwhelming numbers were a few thousand men who were moved by a single will and who were firmly welded together for its accomplishment.
The Power of Organized Discipline