If the search-lights were effective, the ships should have to flee to the farthest limit of the coast guns’ range. At that distance they, in turn, could not deliver an effective bombardment of the land so long as it was dark. So, then, all the ferocious game of war centered for the time on the search-lights. The death-laden ships, the death-laden guns on land, had to wait till it was learned what the lights would do.[94]
The enemy knew that the American defenses had only about one-half the search-light installation that was needed. The hostile sailors had not been forced to depend on spies for this information. It was in American reports that had been made to Congress session after session.[95]
They had prepared for their game of blind man’s buff by long consultations over charts. Every ship’s officer was provided with minute instructions for every contingency that human wit could forecast in the headlong game of chess that is played with cannon.
Defenders Stand Prepared
The defenders were ready, too. In the human chain that began with the battle commander, and reached from him through links of district commanders to fire commanders and battery commanders, each man had his orders for any one of a hundred things that might occur, however quickly it might come.
They knew what batteries to fire and when, at the extreme fire zone, at the intermediate zone, and at the third fire zone which commanded the mine fields. They had before them, worked out to the ultimate detail, the order of fire if the enemy ships should come in column, in double column, or in scattered formation. Far down the beaches, north and south, they had every range plotted, that the great guns might be turned on landing parties if the secondary shore defenses should fail to hold them.[96]
The ships struck simultaneously all along the line of defenses. They fired close in north and south, and from battleships out at sea. A plunging fire went over Nahant and across into Winthrop. The speeding ships missed the defenses and their bursting shells wrecked the town instead. As its flames reddened the sky, the flames of Hull, at Point Allerton on the end of the southern peninsula, made a red reply.
The quick search-lights caught the ships. Again and again the white light-shafts fell on veering, speeding vessels and made them hurry to get away before the fire-control of the defenses could cover them.
Still they returned. Each time they approached at a new point in the hope of developing a defect in the light-system. Each time they fired all the metal that they could throw in the one instant before the beams fell on them.
There were few hits made by these running ships; but they could afford to waste ammunition, since their continual attack forced the defenders to use their own insufficient supply.