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Read Ebook: The Invasion of America: a fact story based on the inexorable mathematics of war by Muller J W Julius Washington
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Ebook has 1218 lines and 68635 words, and 25 pages
I THE BEGINNINGS 1
II THE COAST BOMBARDED 24
IV THE COAST DEFENSES FALL 100
V NEW ENGLAND'S BATTLE 135
VI THE RISING OF NEW ENGLAND 167
X THE PRICE THAT HAD TO BE PAID 315
"Days Before, the American Fleet Had Steamed Out of Long Island Sound" facing 14
"There Were Ships Moving Toward the Long Island Coast as if to Threaten New York" 28
"There in Connecticut Lay the Army ... Miles of Tents Separated by Geometrically Straight Rows of Company Streets" 33
"Up Mounted a Hydro-Aeroplane" 46
"The Dragons of Twelve-Inch Mortars that Squatted in Hidden Pits" 48
"Destroyers Moved Straight for the Harbor in a Long Line" 60
"He Steered His Craft, Awash, from Behind Fisher's Island, at Dawn" 83
"For Miles Beyond that the Enemy's Patrols Had Occupied Points ..." 92
"They Flew over the Tall Municipal Building of New York" 100
"The Efficient, Prepared, Resourceful Invader Was Landing His Army, Not Only Without Losing a Man, but Without Getting a Man's Feet Wet" 109
"The Forward Turret of a Battleship Turned and Spoke with a Great Voice" 129
"The People Had Gone out to Tear Up the Railroad Tracks Leading into the Town" 152
"Entirely Raw Volunteers, Who Had Everything to Learn" 160
"There Had Been Firing from Mill-Buildings, Which Had Been Destroyed for Punishment" 183
"The Quick Searchlights Caught the Ships" 208
"A Landing Was Attempted in Greater Force, with the Assistance of a Destroyer Division Lying Close to the Beach" 213
"The Country-Club Had Been Turned into a Brigade Headquarters" 243
"The Army of Madmen Went Forward to the Connecticut River to Hold the Western Bank" 260
"The Only Activity that Remained in Full Progress Was the Activity of the Bulletin-Boards" 291
"The Big Guns Behind Them Made No Despicable Sentinels" 331
MAPS
The Landing of the Enemy Forces 123
Boston Harbor 201
The Attack on the New York Defences 300
THE INVASION OF AMERICA
THE BEGINNINGS
"Washington, D. C., March 20.--The President, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, has ordered a grand joint maneuver of the fleet, the regular army and the Organized Militia of Divisions 5, 6, 7, and 8, comprising New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia."
No comment from official circles accompanied this dispatch when it was printed in the newspapers. None was needed. Ever since the Great Coalition had been formed, America had faced the probability of war.
In the White House there was a conference of the Cabinet, attended by the Chief of Staff of the United States Army and the Admiral who was President of the General Board of the Navy.
"The regular troops are moving," reported the Chief of Staff. "Every last man of 'em is on the way east." He laughed grimly. "I take no credit for it. The trains of the country can do it without changing a schedule. Do you know, gentlemen, that even the smaller roads often handle an excursion crowd as big as this whole army of ours?"
The Secretary of War shrugged his shoulders. "Despite all the talk of recent years, despite all our official reports, I doubt if the people realize it."
"Make them!" said the President. "Drive it home to them, before war is brought to our coasts." He turned to the two chiefs of staff. "Give the newspapers a statement about the 'maneuvers' that will give the public the cold truth."
"The fleet," said the Admiral to the newspaper correspondents an hour later, "is assumed to be an enemy fleet too powerful for opposition. It will attempt to land at least 100,000 fighting forces somewhere on the Atlantic Coast. It is conceded that an actual enemy planning invasion would not come with less than that number. It is conceded also that a sufficiently powerful fleet can transport that number, and more, safely across the ocean. The Navy, further, concedes the landing."
"But our coast defenses, Admiral!" spoke the correspondent of a Boston newspaper. "We've been told that those affairs with their monster 12-inch rifled steel cannon and their 12-inch mortar batteries, and mines and things, are as powerful as any in the world, and can stand off any fleet!"
"They are not coast defenses, sir," answered the Chief of Staff. "They are harbor defenses. They can stop warships from entering our great harbors. They cannot prevent an enemy from landing on the coast out of their range. And on the Atlantic Coast of the United States there are hundreds of miles of utterly undefended beach where any number of men can land as easily as if they were trippers landing for a picnic. All those miles of shore, and all the country behind them, lie as open to invasion," he held out his hand, "as this."
"Then what's the use of them?"
"They furnish a protected harbor within which our own navy could take refuge if defeated or scattered," said the Admiral. "They make our protected cities absolutely secure against a purely naval attack. No navy could readily pass the defenses, and probably none would venture so close as even to bombard them seriously. Certainly no fleet could bombard the cities behind them.
"Therefore," he continued, "if an enemy wishes to bring war to us, he must land an army of invasion. Our harbor defenses force him to do that; but--having forced him to bring the army, their function ceases. They cannot prevent him from landing it. We have to do that with OUR army."
"And could you stop him, or is that a military secret?" asked one of the party. He did it tentatively. He had been a war correspondent with foreign armies, and he did not expect a reply.
"My dear boy," answered the Chief of Staff promptly, "there probably isn't a General Staff in the world that doesn't know all about us, to the last shoe on the last army mule. We've got 88,000 men in the regular army, officers and privates. Of these, you may count out 19,000. They are non-combatants--cooks, hospital staffs, teamsters, armorers, blacksmiths, and all the other odds and ends that an army must have, but can't use for fighting. Now, cut out another 21,000 men. Those are fighting men, but they're not here. They're in Panama, Hawaii, the Philippines, China and Alaska--and we wish that we had about three times as many there, especially in Panama. How much does that leave? Forty-eight thousand? Very well. That's what we've got here at home. But you'll please count out another 17,000. They're in the Coast Artillery, and have to man the harbor defenses of which we've been talking. Now you've got our mobile army--the actual force that we can put into the field and move around. Thirty-one thousand men."
"A pretty straight tip," agreed the Washington correspondents when they left the War Department. And as a straight tip they passed it on to their readers. So the Nation read the next morning how their army was being made ready. They read how four companies of one infantry regiment were gathered from Fort Lawton in Washington and another four companies from Fort Missoula in Montana. They read how still four other companies of the same regiment were at Madison Barracks in New York State.
Their fifth Cavalry regiment, they learned, was being assembled like a picture puzzle by sending to Fort Myer, Virginia, for four troops of it, to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, for four more troops and a machine-gun platoon, and to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the remaining four troops needed to form a full regiment.
There was field artillery whose component units were scattered, guns, horses and men, from the Vermont line to the Rio Grande. There were signal troops in Alaska, Texas, the Philippines and Panama.
This was no such mobilization as that giant mobilization in Europe when a continent had stood still for days and nights while the soldiers moved to their appointed places. So far scattered was the American army, so small were its units, that only a few civilians here and there could have noticed that troops were being moved at all.
More than one un-military citizen, looking over his newspaper that morning, cursed the politics that had maintained the absurd, worthless, wasteful army posts, and cursed himself for having paid no heed in the years when thoughtful men had called on him and his fellows to demand a change.
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