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Updated: June 21, 2025
For every 100 eighteen-pounders turned out in the first 10 months of the war, we are now turning out 500. We are producing 18 times as many machine-guns. Of rifles the most difficult of all war material to produce quickly in large quantities our weekly home production is now 3 times as great as it was a year ago.
Hardly had the battle begun when two of the six old eighteen-pounders forming the battery of the lower gun-deck of the Richard exploded, killing the men working them and rendering the whole battery useless for the rest of the action. Captain Pearson, perceiving his advantage in speed and power of shot, attempted again and again to pass the bow of the Richard and rake her.
Dodd, instead of replying immediately, put his helm hard up and ran under the pirate's stern, while he was jammed up in the wind, and with his five eighteen-pounders raked him fore and aft, then paying off, gave him three carronades crammed with grape and canister; the almost simultaneous discharge of eight guns made the ship tremble, and enveloped her in thick smoke; loud shrieks and groans were heard from the schooner; the smoke cleared; the pirate's mainsail hung on deck, his jib-boom was cut off like a carrot and the sail struggling; his foresail looked lace, lanes of dead and wounded lay still or writhing on his deck and his lee scuppers ran blood into the sea.
"I expect that they are establishing a battery among those trees," Harry said, "and it will not be long before the affair begins." The next morning, six eighteen-pounders opened fire from the wood and, in the afternoon, another battery of eight mortars began throwing shells into the town. The guns on the walls answered, and a brisk fire was kept up, for the next ten days.
I shall have the honour to command the New-Jersey redoubt, which I am now building with the regiment alone. It is situated on the right of the whole, by the water's edge. It is to mount two eighteen-pounders, two twelve, and four nine-pounders. In this I expect to do honour to New-Jersey. I yesterday received a letter from Colonel Dayton, dated the 28th of July, at the German Flats.
Lord North was sending many ships, and the ship-owners were asking high prices for the use of their vessels; for the Yankee skippers of Marblehead, Captain Manly and Captain Mugford, were darting out from that port in swift-sailing schooners, with long eighteen-pounders amidships, and the decks swarming with men who had braved the storms of the Atlantic and knew no fear, capturing the ships dispatched from England with food and supplies for the army.
The batteries would fire a round per gun per minute for days on end, the gunners working in shifts, two hours on and two hours off. So thickly did the shells fall upon the German lines that the British observing officers were frequently unable to spot their own bursts. A field-battery of eighteen-pounders firing at this rate will blaze away anywhere from twelve to twenty tons of ammunition a day.
Their guns were raking her at this time from head to stern in such a way that none of her guns could be brought effectually to bear on them. In this state she remained for twenty minutes, scarcely going ahead, and receiving the fire of seven eighteen-pounders, several of which were pointed down on her decks.
There was the finesse of gunners' craft worthy of veterans in the way that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands. They did not change the location of their battery and their judgment that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another object was justified.
The constant pup, pup, of German machine guns and an occasional rattle of rifle firing gave me the impression of a huge audience applauding the work of the batteries. Our eighteen-pounders were destroying the German barbed wire, while the heavier stuff was demolishing their trenches and bashing in dugouts or funk-holes. Then Fritz got busy.
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