The Training Ground (27 page)
But another fierce norther blew through Veracruz before the heavy ordnance could be rowed to shore. All the Americans could do was sit and wait for the ocean to calm — or for the unlikely possibility that the Mexicans would surrender without a fight. Boredom, that by-product of any siege, set in as the days adopted a sameness: there was intense heat from sunrise until 10:00 a.m., when the sea breeze shifted direction and began blowing onshore to cool the men. The men often passed the time reading, with many of the troops favoring patriotic books about the great George Washington (Washington books had come into vogue during the war) or an elocution primer called the
United States Speaker,
which contained patriotic speeches that fired their hearts with the glory of their cause. At night came thick clouds of mosquitoes and sand fleas. It was the fleas that bothered the troops most of all. “I have never seen anything like those Vera Cruz fleas. If one were to stand ten minutes in the sand, the fleas would open up on him in the hundreds. How they live in that dry sand no one knows,” marveled one officer, who then noted the bizarre extremes some men went to in battling the fleas. “The engineer officers, G.W. Smith and McClellan, slept in canvas bags drawn tight about their necks, having previously greased themselves in salt pork.”
Like Scott, America’s officers and men were clearly eager to be away into the mountains.
On March 17, after five days of stormy weather, the skies cleared. Scott’s force finally received heavy artillery. The ten mortars, four 24-pounders, and smattering of howitzers were set in the sand and aimed toward the castle. Scott had also succeeded in borrowing six large guns from the navy, thinking that he could use the additional firepower. He gave Lee personal command over their emplacement: too far from the castle and they would pose no legitimate threat, but too near and they were within range of the enemy guns.
On the surface it was an unusual gesture. Lee was not an artillery specialist, and his position among Scott’s four-officer “little cabinet” of close advisers (Lee, Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Colonel Joseph Totten, and the general’s son-in-law and chief of staff, Henry Lee Scott) would seem to make him ill suited for frontline work. But the job was actually a test, with Scott giving Lee the opportunity to shine or fail. Lee’s many thankless years of building fortifications and otherwise laboring in engineering anonymity had prepared him well for the challenge. He chose a risky location, high and exposed, but with a clear view down into the city that would effect maximum damage. Lee was boldly willing to risk his reputation on the site and eagerly awaited the arrival of the big guns.
Additional foul weather delayed the arrival of the navy’s thirty-two-pounders. Soldiers instead focused their attention on positioning the army’s cannons a half mile south of the city. There would be four batteries in all. It was rough and sweaty work, muddy at times, conducted amid clouds of mosquitoes and flies, scorpions, biting ants, fleas, and the raging humidity that followed every break in the weather.
At 4:15 p.m. on March 22, shortly after the Mexicans rejected Scott’s demand for a surrender, American mortars dropped the first exploding rounds into the city. The mortars were stamped with the initials GR, for Georgius Rex (King George): they had been seized from the British general Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga, during America’s Revolutionary War, and were still more than effective seven decades later.
U.S. Navy ships opened fire, focusing their guns on the castle and receiving heavy fire in return. Neutral British and French vessels bobbed offshore, watching the action but never joining in. The pounding continued all evening but ceased as night fell.
The six navy guns finally arrived onshore on the twenty-second. Lee, who had almost been killed three nights earlier when an American sentry mistakenly fired at him and singed the sleeve of his jacket with the bullet, got to work immediately. His job was to oversee their emplacement and then turn them over to the naval gun crews for the bombardment. The cannons consisted of three 32-pounders weighing more than three tons and three French-made 8-pounders known as Paixhans. The 32-pounders, which would be the largest guns ever used in a siege, fired a solid chunk of shot capable of knocking down thick walls and crashing through to underground ammunition bunkers. The Paixhans were smaller but perhaps far more deadly. The invention of the French general Henri-Joseph Paixhans twenty years earlier, they were known for their extreme horizontal accuracy and for the lethal 68-pound exploding shells launched from their barrels. During a naval battle, these shells would spray shrapnel across an opposing ship’s decks, maiming and killing sailors, while simultaneously slashing holes in sails and shredding rigging and masts. In close naval combat, they could be aimed directly at an enemy’s gun ports, with the intention not only of killing the gun crews but of ripping open a hole in the side and sinking the ship. Paixhans were so adept at lacerating a battleship’s wooden hull that they would change the course of naval warfare. Gone would be vulnerable wooden vessels; in their place would be warships constructed from iron.
Lee knew full well that if he did his job, collateral damage in the form of dead civilians was likely to ensue. But he had never been in combat or seen the aftermath of a siege. The destructive power of military weaponry was still an abstract concept, to be gleaned from textbooks. He approached the gun emplacement as just another engineering task, albeit with higher stakes.
Lee’s guns were officially known as Battery Number Five. He positioned them seven hundred yards south of the Mexican position. They were carefully concealed within a network of sand dunes just to the left of the army batteries. Working in a driving wind that sandblasted his exposed skin, he supervised several hundred soldiers as they dragged the mighty guns from the beach and then over the dunes. The work was slow and frustrating. At one point a set of railroad tracks that went nowhere blocked their path. As they drew closer to the chosen position, a particularly vile form of mesquite, with thorns so large that they were actually longer than the branches on which they grew, drew blood as it ripped at their clothes and flesh.
Meanwhile, Lee had ordered the construction, atop a low hill and nestled among the mesquite, of deep gun pits that were seven feet wide and covered with a thick protective roof. “The large cannon stand on a high platform, with their muzzles sticking out of the embrasures towards the city,” was how one American soldier described the typical gun pit. He went on to describe a “deep hole in the trench, slanting double roof of plank and timber, upon which are three tiers of bags, filled with earth or sand, to protect it from the bombs of the enemy.”
The naval gun crews were unused to digging. They chafed at building the fortifications, arguing they were so far from the city that there was no need. Lee was sure of himself. He coolly ordered the sailors to take up shovels and pickaxes alongside their army brethren and to lean hard into their labors.
The task was completed within twenty-four hours. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, Lee transferred control of Battery Number Five to the navy’s Captain John Aulick — and not a moment too soon: as the naval artillery crews were sponging the last bit of sand from the guns’ barrels, Mexican scouts spotted the emplacement.
All hell broke loose. Mexican cannons focused their shells on the naval battery, which was more exposed owing to its position atop the dunes. “I wish you could hear one of these huge projectiles in the air as they are coming, and see the scattering they make. The roar they make may be compared to that of a tornado, and every man within a quarter-mile of the spot where they strike thinks that they are about to fall on his individual head. The consequence is, that there is a general scampering to and fro,” wrote one American, “and so deceptive is the sound that one is just as apt to run directly towards as from them.”
Battery Number Five responded in kind, firing alongside their four army counterparts, aiming heavy solid shot and exploding shells into the heart of the city. Blasts landed in the main plaza, and huge chunks of the city’s wall were torn away. The primary purpose of the American barrage was to destroy the Mexican forts within Veracruz, and their powder magazines in particular. But the precise location of those forts was hard for the gunners to pinpoint. It was inevitable that the shells would take the lives of civilians. Most were residents, but the city was also home to visiting diplomats from Britain and France who had foolishly refused to leave, forgetting that there was no diplomatic immunity from a cannonball. These noncombatants huddled in their homes, terrified of stepping outside. Mexican soldiers placed protective sandbags around the damaged walls of their forts and were unable to break away from the fighting to offer relief or protection.
Wrote Napoleon Dana, “Our immense shells would fall through the tops of houses, go through both stories, and then, bursting, would shatter the whole house, throw down walls, and blow two or three rooms into one. Doors and windows are blown to pieces all over the city. Some houses had as many as a dozen ten-inch shells burst in them. One of their splendid churches is completely ruined inside. Several ten-inch shells fell in among the altars, and a number of 42-pounder shot went through it. These splendid altars, costly and old oil paintings, cut-glass chandeliers and large vases and shades, gilt and silver work, ornamental flowers and drapery, priests’ robes and church linen, books, bricks, mortar shot, and pieces of shells formed one confused mass of fragments, the most costly work of a costly Catholic tabernacle, totally destroyed.”
The dying were often left unattended, and the dead littered the streets. Two women breastfeeding their babies on the steps of a church were killed by the first shells of the siege, and all four bodies would go untouched for days. One family of seven took refuge together in their house and were all killed at once by the same exploding shell. Priests would not step into the crossfire to administer last rites, and there was no hospital to speak of. Artillery fire from the army and constant broadsides by the naval vessels at sea made for an endless barrage, slowly reducing the city to rubble. Civilian casualties rose quickly to a hundred and kept on climbing. Veracruz was being laid to waste.
On the night of March 23, American cannons scored a direct hit on a Mexican storehouse, setting fire to the city. Flames shot up into the night, whipped by a harsh norther. Just as the wind abated and the fire had been put out, the American cannons resumed firing. The lethal Paixhans were scoring direct hits on the walls and houses of the city, landing with such force that the effects were clearly visible from a mile away. The only thing slowing the American guns was the Quartermaster Department’s inability to ferry ammunition to the batteries. Mules pulling the wagons were exposed to Mexican cannons and often stubbornly refused to go forward when a shell landed too near. On the night of the twenty-fourth, that problem was solved by a massive resupply effort under cover of darkness, so that on the morning of the twenty-fifth, every American gun was once again clobbering Veracruz. “Nothing but a continuous roar of artillery can be heard,” wrote one American. “Above the roar of the cannon a dense smoke is rising, plainly pointing out the scene of this conflict. For close work — for hand-to-hand combat — Monterey was far ahead of this. But for grandeur and sublimity this far exceeds any attempt that has ever yet been made by the American arms.”
On March 25, the Mexicans sent forth an emissary proposing that women and children be allowed to leave the city. Scott refused. A sharp wind raked Veracruz that night, a gale so terrifying that one veteran U.S. naval commander called it one of the worst he’d ever seen. The city’s homeless residents struggled to find shelter, and the American soldiers camped in the field struggled in vain to stay dry as they lay down upon the sand. Some divisions had tents; others camped in the open. Officers and soldiers alike were filthy and tired and, except for the very busy gun crews, growing grumpy and bored as the siege wore on. “We are out here in the sand beyond the reach of the city and the castle, and we can see all that is going on from our little hillocks without being exposed at all. It is true that we are in a very uncomfortable fix still, having no tents and no baggage,” Dana wrote home that day. “I am now so accustomed to sleeping with my clothes on that I do not know how it feels to go to bed regularly. I have not had off my pants to go to bed for a month, and I pulled off my coat and boots night before last for the first time in a fortnight.”
And still the siege continued. In just four days, the Americans had leveled Veracruz. They did so dispassionately. Between them, the four army batteries fired sixty-seven hundred mortar and cannon rounds — almost a half-million pounds of munitions. Artillery Lieutenant Thomas Jackson was in command of a gun crew, as were fellow West Point graduates A. P. Hill, Abner Doubleday, J. B. Magruder, and Joseph Hooker. Sam Grant was fond of venturing forth to watch the gunners in action and was nearly killed when a Mexican shell struck an adobe building in which he and P. G. T. Beauregard had taken cover. Both men were shaken up, but neither was seriously hurt.
Captain John R. Vinton, of the West Point class of 1817, was one of the few American gunners killed. He stepped from a gun pit and was struck on the side of his body. The cannonball glanced off him and didn’t so much as break the skin, but the men around Vinton could hear the wind being knocked out of him, and then watched as he keeled over.
Four members of the naval battery died far more violently: they were standing out in the open to observe the siege when a single cannonball tore off all their heads.
That lone naval battery had fired a staggering eighteen hundred cannonballs and exploding shells in just two days — this despite running out of munitions at 3:00 p.m. on the twenty-fourth and having to wait until morning before being resupplied by sea.
At sunrise on March 26, the terrifying norther continued to rake Veracruz. The wind was so severe that some twenty sailing ships were ripped from their anchors and run up onto the beach. By sunset, however, that harsh gale was stiffening a white surrender flag: the Mexicans had finally quit. Scott’s terms were just as generous as Taylor’s had been at Monterrey: no prisoners of war; all Mexican troops were free to leave their weapons and march out of the city unmolested. By March 29, the Stars and Stripes was flying over Fort San Juan de Ulúa. Scott had lost just thirteen men, with fifty-five wounded. Mexican fatalities were never tallied but numbered just below a thousand soldiers and civilians. Scott’s invasion of Veracruz was the largest-ever landing of American troops on foreign soil and would not be surpassed until June 6, 1944 — D-day.