A score of serving devices in the defenses were slaves to the steel champions. Searchlights in armor waited like men-at-arms to point with a long white finger at their prey. Mine fields and emplacements and cable conduits were there to force the ships to steer where the guns could strike them most surely. Masked by trees and mounds, concealed by every device against betrayal, were range-finders and fire-control stations.
Here sat experts who had studied the most occult questions of arithmetic, geometry, surveying, navigation, and cartography for one purpose—to direct those long guns true. They were provided with exquisite instruments for calculating angles and distances to an inch, though the point to be ascertained were ten nautical miles and more away.
Before them lay charts of the sea-area that they were guarding. Let a ship come within the limit of their apparatus, and in the time required to speak into a telephone the gun-pits miles away down the defense-line would crack with the explosion of tons of smokeless powder.
They were nearly perfect, those works—as engineering works. They were fully armed with the engines to make them malignant to the ultimate fatal degree. The ten-mile area of sea that lay so bright and dimpled that morning might well have been black as the Wings of Death; for a few little motions of the waiting men under the pretty grassy mounds would unfold those pinions.
The Joint in America’s Armor
But under the iron visages was weakness. In none of the defenses on this morning when the time had come for their test, were there more than one-half the number of men required to hold them.[39]
They could fight the guns, so long as the action remained a ship-to-fort action; but if the enemy attacked at the rear, from the land, they were not in sufficient force to meet him and throw him back. Attacked from the land, the men of the defenses would have to retire to the inner keep and fight from shelter with rapid-fire guns. And when the defenses thus began to defend themselves, their hour would have struck.[40]
Still, for the time they were deadly. The enemy fleet paid them the supreme tribute of scrupulous respect. Not a vessel ventured after dawn into the deadly circle of their reach. To make sure that no vessel should expose itself by accident, the mine-layers of the enemy fleet were even then moving well outside of the zone of extreme fire, and laying immense steel buoys, painted a vivid scarlet.
These scarlet buoys outlined an area of safety that was shaped somewhat like a pentagon with its apex at Block Island and its base on the Rhode Island coast between Watch Hill and Point Judith.
It was a base marking out five miles of beach that was safe both from the fire of the Long Island Sound defenses and from the shots of the Narragansett defenses.