Now the country that had been sick with humiliation because its navy would not fight, thanked Heaven that the fleet had kept itself intact: that instead of going down in glorious disaster, it had worked out a scientific problem coolly. The big navy, intact to its smallest torpedo boat, was lying fully potent under the strong defenses of Limon Harbor.
The guns of the fortifications protected the ships, and the ships protected the fortifications. Three thousand naval officers and sixty thousand sailors and marines, added to the land forces in the defenses, made a force of highly trained, completely efficient men.[149]
The Defenses Perfect
The defenses were perfect. This precious possession was one American possession at least that could be held to the last. Its guns were fully installed. It had ammunition. Its range finding systems and its systems of fire control were complete. Without the navy, it, too, would have been sorely weak in men and would have been open, like America’s continental defenses, to attack from the land. But with the naval forces, it was able to hold out.[150]
The navy was ready to throw men ashore to meet any attempt at landings along the coast. The navy’s torpedo boats and destroyers crept to sea in the night and guarded all weak places. The American submarines, with a safe harbor for a base, worked under ideal submarine conditions. When the hostile navy, freed from the task of protecting its army, at last appeared in force off the Isthmus, it dared not institute anything like a close blockade.
It dared not even venture in to bombard. There were 16-inch guns at Panama. It was an object lesson for the United States. Exactly thus, had there been an army to protect them, the Atlantic coast defenses could have defied any attempt from the sea to force a harbor.
Hostile Navy Powerless
The enemy navy, overwhelming as it was, could do nothing except to wait and watch. It cruised up and down, far out in the purple Caribbean. Its only trophies in the South were Porto Rico and the United States Naval station of Guantanamo in Cuba. It had taken the latter by the simple method of steaming in, for this “naval station” was only an unfortified harbor.[151]
The news of Panama’s safety was the first and only good news that had been given to the country since the declaration of war. The relief that it gave was so great that the people received almost with equanimity the news which followed—that word had come from spies of the arrival of more transports in Boston Harbor and Narragansett Bay, bringing forces estimated at figures varying from 50,000 to 100,000 more men.
Soon after this landing had been accomplished, cavalry and light artillery moved northward through Vermont. They seized and occupied in force Bellows Falls and the White River, Wells River and St. Johnsbury Junctions of the Vermont railroads. This cut the last communication of New England with the United States. It gave the invader absolute command of the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad, the Central Vermont, the Maine Central, the Boston and Maine and the Rutland branch railroads. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were in his power like the rest of New England. Blockaded from the sea, and cut off from railroad connection with the interior, they were subjugated even without the unfolding of forces that now began through their area.