YET TO COME

I begin our story not where it began, nor, unfortunately, where it ended. Instead we begin just after eleven in the morning, Friday, June 20, 1913, with 29 year old Heinz Schmidt bounding up a staircase, carrying a heavy briefcase in his left hand. In his right hand he carried a gun.  The first person Heinz met at the top of the stairs was Maria Pohl She had never seen him before but he looked agitated, so she started to ask what was wrong. Without a word, Heinz pushed a Browning semi-automatic pistol into Maria's face. Instinctively Maria ducked, and when the gun went off it sent a .9mm lead pellet at 1,150 feet per second a quarter of an inch past her right ear. Maria continued her ducking movement, pushing open the door of classroom 8a. She locked the door behind her. Frustrated, Heinz pushed on the unlocked door of classroom 8b. He burst in upon 60, five to eight year old girls of Mrs. Pohl's class. He was the only adult in the room. He opened fire.

In 1884 French chemist Paul Vielle (above)  mixed nitrocellulose with a little ether and some paraffin and produced what he called pourdre blanche – white powder. When ignited it was three times as powerful as black powder, gave off very little smoke, left little residue behind to clog machinery, and would not ignite unless compressed. Thousands of gunsmiths scrambled to take advantage of Vielle's smokeless powder, in particular a mechanical genius, the son of a gunsmith, living in Ogden, Utah: John Moses Browning.

In Mrs. Poole's classroom, on the mezzanine level of the St. Marien Shule (St. Mary's School) in the Bremen, Germany, the Catholic girls were screaming, and diving under tables. One was heard to cry out, “Please, Uncle, don't shoot us.” But Heinz was not listening. He fired until his gun was empty, then reloaded a new clip, and continued firing. Two of the girls were shot dead on the spot, Anna Kubica and Elsa Maria Herrmann, both seven years old. Fifteen other girls were wounded. When his gun jammed,  Heinz pulled from his bag yet another Browning model 1900 semi-automatic pistol. In the momentary lull, the girls rushed out of the classroom, trying to escape down the stairs.

When John Moses Browning's own son asked if the old man would have become a gunsmith if his father had been a cheese maker, John pondered the question for a moment before admitting he probably would not have. Then he burst out laughing and assured his son, “I would not have made cheese, either.” But John's Mormon father had been a gunsmith, and a good one. And John was a better one, so famous he would eventually be known as “The Father of Automatic Fire.” He would hold, in the end, 128 patents and design 80 separate firearms. One website contends, “It can be said without exaggeration that Browning’s guns made Winchester. And Colt. And Remington, Savage, and the Belgium firm, Fabrique Nationale (FN). Not to mention his own namesake company, Browning”  John Browning developed the Browning Automatic Rifle (the BAR), used in two world wars, as well as both the thirty and “Ma-Deuce” fifty caliber machine guns still in use by the US military, almost century later, all of which he sold to the U.S. government for a fraction of their royalty value. But in the beginning, his most profitable work was his invention of semi-automatic pistols.

Heinz ran after the girls, firing from his fresh pistol - he had eight more in the bag, and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Eight year old Maria Anna Rychlik died at the top of the stairs. In her panic, little seven year old, Sophie Gornisiewicz, tried to climb over the stairwell banister. She slipped and fell and when she landed, Sophie snapped her neck. Following the screaming children, fleeing for their lives, Heinz ran down the first flight of stairs to the landing.

John Browning never worked from blueprints. In his own words, “A good idea starts a celebration in the mind, and every nerve in the body seems to crowd up to see the fireworks.” John would sketch rough designs of the tools he would need to make his gun, to explain them for assistants and lathe operators. Between 1884 and 1887, he sold 20 new designs to Winchester firearms. Explained one of the men who worked with him, “He was a hands-on manager of the entire process of gun making, field-testing every experimental gun as a hunter and skilled marksman and supervising the manufacturing. He was also a shrewd negotiator. He was the complete man: inventor, engineer and entrepreneur.”

On the landing, Heinz paused to lean out a window and fire at boys, who were running away from the school. He wounding five of them. A carpenter working on a nearby roof was hit in the arm. Several apartments in the line of fire were penetrated by shots from Heinz Browning guns. But as he paused to reload, the gunman was now interrupted when a school custodian named Butz landed on his back. The two struggled for a moment until Heinz shot the janitor in the face. Grabbing his brief case still heavy with guns and ammo, Heinz ran back up the stairs.

Browning's design philosophy on reliability was simple. “If anything can happen in a gun it probably will sooner or later.” In his new ingenious blow-back pistol, the breech which received the bullet's propelling explosion was locked in place by two screws. Instead, the “action” which converted the recoil was a reciprocating “slide”, attached front and rear to the gun's frame. When the gun was fired the barrel and slide recoiled together for two-tenths of an inch, and then the barrel disengaged from the slide. The barrel swung downward clearing the breech, so the spent shell casing could be ejected.

As Heinz reached the top of the stairs again, stepping over the bodies of the wounded girls, he was confronted by a male teacher, Hubert Mollmann. They struggled for a moment before Heinz shot him in the shoulder. Mollman fell, but the teacher still clawed at the shooter, tackling him and bringing him to the floor. Kicking free, Heinz sat up and shot Mollmann in the stomach. Heinz then stood over the moaning instructor, reloaded, picked up his brief case, and waked quickly down the stairs for a final time. Outside, a crowd of neighbors and parents had just reached the school.

The retreating slide compresses a recoil spring. Once fully compressed, this forces the slide back. As it does it strips a new round off the top of the magazine and rejoining the barrel, slides the new round against the breech. The gun is now ready to fire again. All that is required it to pull the trigger again. When the Belgium firm Fabrique Nationale tested a Browning prototype in 1896, it fired 500 consecutive rounds without a failure or a jam, far superior performance to any other gun then on the market. In July of 1897 FN signed a contract to manufacture the weapon, and over the next 11 years would sell almost one million of the small lightweight pistols to European military - and some 7,000 to civilians.

Cornered at last on the ground floor of the school, Heinz was swarmed by men, pummeling and beating him to the ground. The briefcase was wrenched from his grip, and the Browning pulled from his hand. The crowd dragged him outside and there the beating continued. It seems likely he would have been lynched, had not the police arrived to place him under arrest. As they dragged him off to jail, Schmidt called out, “This may be the beginning, but the end is yet to come.”

The United States Army liked the Browning 1900, and its improved model 1903. But they wanted more stopping power. So John Browning went back to his work bench and within a few months redesigned the weapon to fire a larger, forty-five caliber round. That weapon, the Browning model 1911 pistol, would be the standard American military pistol until it was replace by a 9mm weapon in 1985. Interestingly, when John Browning died of hear failure at his work bench (above), on November 26, 1926, the weapon he was designing would evolve into the gun that replaced the Browning 1911. In his obituary, it was said of John Browning, “Even in the midst of acclaim, when the finest model shops in the world were at his disposal, he preferred his small shop in Ogden. Embarrassed by praise, indifferent to fame, he ended his career as humbly as it started.”

The attack on the St. Mary's School in Bremen lasted no more than fifteen minutes, from first shot to last. During that time, Heinz Schmidt had fired 35 rounds. Eighteen children had been wounded, and five adults. Three girls had died instantly of gunshot wounds. Little Sophie with the broken neck, died within a day. Four days after the bloodbath, the four little girls were buried. Three thousand marched in their funeral procession (above) . Four weeks later, the fifth victim, five year old Elfried Hoger, succumbed to her wounds an died. All that has changed since 1913 is the technology used to design and make guns.  And yet we continue to pretend that nothing has changed.

“This may be the beginning, but the end is yet to come.”

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VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - One

As his flotilla broke through the last of the rafts moored across the Yazoo River at Liverpool Landing,  28 year old Lieutenant Commander John Grimes Walker (above) was pleased to see white smoke rising above the tree line.  He could not yet hear explosions from the Yazoo City dockyards 15 miles upstream, but he knew he soon would - if not before his 3 ironclads and infantry filled transports arrived, then shortly there after. The smoke meant two things to Walker. First it meant he would not have to fight his way through the batteries on the heights above the town.  And once ashore, Walker had been ordered to destroy the three warships under construction in the dockyards of Yazoo City, and all of the equipment required to build them. But the smoke meant the rebel engineers had started Walker's job for him.

The man who had dispatched Walker on this mission was 49 year old Acting Real Admiral David Dixon Porter (above). Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had promoted Porter over many other officers because his ambition made him “...fertile in resources (and)...great (in) energy...” But that energy and ambition almost got Porter sidelined before the shooting had actually begun. Late in March of 1861, then naval Lieutenant Porter received an unusual invitation from the new Secretary of State, William Seward.

Porter knew what the New York politician wanted to talk about; “The Forts” – Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and Fort Pickens (above), at the entrance to Pensacola Bay, Florida.  Both brick fortifications were isolated and were under siege, but neither rebel nor Federal wanted to shoot first. 

But when Seward asked, “ Can you tell me how we can save Fort Pickens?”, the ambitious Porter could not restrain himself. He immediately answered, “I can, sir.” He then set to work, secretly drawing up a plan to fulfill his hasty promise.

At some point during the next few days it occurred to Porter that his hubris had put him far out on a limb which his boss, Secretary Gideon Welles, was likely to cut off. Still, a week later he assured President Lincoln and Secretary Seward that all he needed was the 16 gun steam frigate USS Powatan  (above) and “...a good-sized steamer and six or seven companies of soldiers...and the fort would soon be made impregnable.”

It was the amateur Lincoln who asked the key question. “Is this not a most irregular mode of proceeding? What will Uncle Gideon (above)  say?” Porter warned that disloyal clerks in the Navy Department would betray the expedition. “But if you will issue all the orders from the Executive Mansion,” Porter told Lincoln, “I will guarantee their prompt execution to the letter.” Lieutenant Porter then handed Lincoln four orders to sign. And one of those orders was so curious, Lincoln told Seward, “See that I don't burn my fingers.”

Two of the orders turned the USS Powhatan over to Porter and relieved the current captain. A third instructed the New York Navy Yard (above) – Commander Andrew Hull Foote - to secretly fit out the Powhatan and not tell the Navy Department when it sailed. 

But the fourth order relieved the commander of the Naval Bureau of Detail, the service's personal office, replacing him with 53 year old Virginian, Captain Samuel Barron (above).  He was a curious choice, certain to draw Gideon's attention. Barron was so pro-secession he would soon be named Secretary of the Confederate Navy.  The rest of Porter's fleet sailed in secret on the last day of March, 1861 - the frigate USS Sabine, the steam sloop USS Brooklyn carrying 200 infantry, and the sloop USS St. Louis. But all four orders were delivered to Secretary Welles along with a stack of routine paperwork, late on the afternoon of April Fools Day, 1861.

When the diligent “Uncle Gideon” read the order on the Bureau of Detail, he was furious. His anger was so great that when Lincoln saw him storming into the White House, the President innocently inquired, “What have I done wrong?” Welles launched into a tirade about Barron, but then added that he recognized the handwriting the order. He had uncovered the entire plot, and pointed out that Porter's intervention had left his transport, “The Star of the West”, which had already sailed to resupply Fort Sumter,  without the support of the USS Powhatan, as Welles had intended.  After an hour's discussion, Lincoln agreed to reverse the order concerning Barron. But by then it was too late to recall Porter, although Welles tried. Welles admitted to his diary, “I therefore pressed for no further disclosures.”

While Fort Pickens was reinforced even before The Powhatan arrived, Porter's political maneuvering had left “The Star Of The West” as an impotent threat trapped outside of Charleston Harbor. But that ships appearance inspired the rebel forces surrounding Sumter to demand it's immediate surrender. When the commander , Captain Anderson,  refused, the rebel's opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on Friday, 12 April, 1861, and the American Civil War began.

Porter (above) could claim he had tried to warn Welles about Secretary Seward's conspiracy. But Welles was not fooled. He could have treated Porter as a possible double agent for the Confederate states. Or he could have simply refused to advance him. But Welles was enough of a patriot that he found a way to overlook the ambitious Lieutenant's machinations. At least, Uncle Gideon told his diary, “Mr. Seward...committed (Porter) at once, and decisively, to the Union cause.” Welles felt comfortable in jumping Porter several ranks to an Acting Rear Admiral, and putting him in charge of Grant's “Brown Navy” after it's first commander, Andrew Foote, was promoted. And because of that, Vicksburg was doomed.

By Monday, 4 May, 1863, the port of Grand Gulf had been secured and Sherman's Corps had begun ferrying across the river. Porter was now free to press his advantage. One ironclad, the Mound City, was sent north to close off the Mississippi just below Vicksburg. Meanwhile Porter steamed south with the rest of his little fleet - The ironclads USS Benton and USS Pittsburg, the side wheel ram the USS Lafayette, the wooden gun boat USS General Price, the river boat USS Switzerland and the tug, USS Ivy. On Thursday, 7 May, these ships rendezvoused with Admiral Farragut's blue water ships at the mouth of the Red River.

Loading coal and ammunition, Porter's flotilla then steamed up the Red River to Alexandria, Louisiana. Here they made contact with Major General Nathaniel Prentiss Bank's Army of the Gulf, (above) finally returning to the Mississippi River after his Bayou Teeche adventure. Farragut could now provide shipping to transfer Bank's men to Port Hudson, which had been Bank's original assignment.

Beginning on Friday, 8 May a Union mortar flotilla, supported by the screw sloop USS Richmond, began a 2 day bombardment of the other remaining Confederate hold out on the Mississippi River, Port Hudson. It was largely ineffective, but gave the garrison a taste for of things to come. Meanwhile, by Friday, 15 May, Porter himself had rejoined his fleet anchored in the mouth of the Yazoo River above Vicksburg.

The very next day sailors reported hearing cannon fire off to the west. Unaware this was the distant echoes of the battle of Champion Hill, and not knowing the outcome of the battle, Admiral Porter ordered a tug to steam up the Yazoo River, looking for Grant's army. Finally, after making contact with the Iowa Cavalry on 18 May, Porter ordered the occupation of Snyder's Bluff,.

He also instructed the transports at Milliken's Bend to make steam, and begin landing food and ammunition at the Johnson Plantation a mile east of Chickasaw Bayou.

Grant and Sherman reached Snyder's Bluff on that Tuesday afternoon of 19 May. It had been 52 days since McClernand's corps had begun building the road south from Young's Point. Seeing that rations were already being landed, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman (above) admitted that until this moment he had doubted Grant's plan would work.  In fact, Sherman's XV Corps marching toward Vicksburg behind him would that evening consume the last of their rations. Had Snyder's bluff held out for even a few days, Grant's army might have been forced to retreat into the interior to seek food. The nearest ammunition depot was back in Grand Gulf. But even there the army did not hold enough to supply a single battle. But now Sherman had no doubts. 

He told Grant this was “one of the greatest campaigns in history.” Grant accepted the compliment, and announced his intention to attack Vicksburg in the morning.

In fact, the Federal supply problem was not solved – not yet. On Wednesday, 20 May, two Missouri units, two companies of Major William Tweeddale's Engineer Regiment of the West, and Captain Herman Klosterman's Pioneer Company from Sherman's XV Corps, set 432 men to work rebuilding the road from Johnson's plantation, up onto the bluffs, and 6 miles beyond to the rear of the new Federal lines hemming in Vicksburg.  

Although the first wagons moved off that morning, full rations of food and ammunition would not supplied until 24 May.  But improvements to the supply continued to be made until the end of the siege, including over 500 feet of bridges, first pontoons and then more permanent structures.

On the afternoon of Thursday, 21 May, the federal ironclads Baron DeKalb and Chocktaw, the tinclads Forest Rose, Linden and Petel, dropped anchor in the Yazoo River, off Yazoo city.  Under their powerful guns, Lieutenant Command John Grimes Walker landed troops. 

They found the burned out hulks of the rebel ironclad rams which Admiral Porter had been so concerned about for so long - the Mobile, and the Republic, as well as the remains of a 3^rd even larger vessel, as yet unnamed.

The dockyard's 5 carpenter and blacksmith shops had also been burned down by the rebels before their retreat.  It seemed obvious that 45 year old Confederate Naval Lieutenant Isaac Newton Brown, in charge of the construction of the rams, had received little or no warning of Pemberton's decision to abandon Snyder's Bluff.   The federal tinclads spent the next day prowling up the river for a few miles, burning buildings, boats and bridges. The shore crews destroyed a sawmill and lumberyard north of Yazoo City. 

All public property in Yazoo City itself was burned down, but leaving the  private businesses along main street (above) untouched.  One hundred fifteen military patients at a hospital in town were given paroles And on Saturday, 23 May, 1863, Lieutenant Commander Grimes steamed his little fleet back to the mouth of the Yazoo River.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty

While the oarsmen steadied the dingie, two young ensigns – one barely fourteen - clambered over the gunwale and splashed into the knee deep river. It was broad daylight, ten minutes after 1:00 pm on Tuesday, 12 May, 1863. 

With extra pistols and knives jammed into their belts and boot tops, stripped of their jackets and hats, carrying no symbols of rank, the would-be buccaneers rushed up the muddy bank and struggled for a foothold in the cotton stockade wall, until the elder lad pulled the smaller onto the top of the barricade. Turning, they discovered, laid out before them as if in a Brady daguerreotype....

...the entire garrison of the cotton fortress of Warrington, Mississippi.  Three hundred drowsy men, playing cards, cooking ersatz coffee, sewing worn garments, in the building heat of the day, but every man within arm's reach of their weapons.

There was a long moment of stunned surprise, while each side examined the other, and processed their own shock. The only sound was the panting of the two Yankees. The only movement were the wisps of wood smoke rising from the occasional smoldering fire. Then, an instant before rebel gunners managed to uproot their legs, the bareheaded pirate ensigns shouted, pulled their revolvers and began blazing away.

The gunners dove for cover behind their massive cannon. And after a frenzied moment of shouting and shooting, like schoolboys caught in a prank, the Yankees disappeared, tumbled back down the bank, and into the dingie, screaming for the oarsmen to PULL AWAY!  Minnie balls cut the muddy brown river surface.  Chipped paint flew off the off the dingie's stern, and even clanked off the iron slope of the black behemoth lurking far too close in shore. And after a moment, a great blast of white smoke erupted from the monster. The crew of the dingie instinctively ducked while the shell tore the air inches over their heads, and the ground rattled as a it slammed into the cotton facade at point blank range.

It was a grand and foolish adventure, inspired by 2 weeks of unremitting boredom. Aboard the black ironclad - the very type of ship which had rendered pirates "romantic"  -  reveille sounded at 5:00 each morning, and the Jack's spent the next 3 ½ hours swabbing decks and bringing the 13 cannon and 2 engines to a spit shine. At 8:00 came breakfast, and at 9:30, inspection. In the forenoon they had to replace the 6,000 pounds of black dusty coal burned each day, just to keep up half steam, It was the always burning engines which earned the ironclads the nickname, Federal Bake Ovens. The lunch mess was at noon, and in the afternoon the crew ran drills. The dinner mess was at 4:00, followed by the dog watches and battle quarters again at 5:30. The 8:00 p.m. tattoo darkened and silenced the ship, except for the constant rhythmic thump, thump, thump of the sweating engines. Day after day . Four hours on and four hours off, until the crew were desperate for anything to break the monotony.

This raid – if you could call it that - had been conceived by Mound City's 25 year old Ohio born commanding officer, Lieutenant Byron Wilson (above). Lurking below Vicksburg over the past two weeks, the Lieutenant was intrigued when gunners in the newly built fortress of Warrenton, 3 miles south of the Vicksburg docks, had ceased firing at his ship, The new fort was built of cotton bales covered with logs,  And while clearly not finished, it was already extensive and maned. But the soldiers inside had even stopped showing their heads above the parapets.   It seemed unlikely they would evacuate such a recently invested position, but when they remained hidden this morning, Tuesday, 12 May of 1863,  Wilson decided to give the “Johnny Rebs” a poke.

One after the other, all 4 starboard guns of The Mound City (above) blasted the into the rebel bales, splintering the logs and shaking the entire fortification. The ship's engine room went to full speed, and the hidden stern paddle thrashed at the water, trying desperately to push the 510 ton ironclad out of range.  A brave lad remained on the stern deck long enough to toss a line to the dingie, and secure it to an iron toggle. And for a few minutes the landlubbers and seamen aboard the dingie enjoyed a 9 knott taste of a Nantucket sleigh ride, with the added thrill of 30 pound rebel cannon shot skipping across the water, threatening to decapitate or obliterate them at any moment.

Painful death was the ironclad crew's constant companion. The year before, in June of 1862, under 52 year old Lieutenant Augustus Henry Kilty, the Mound City had suffered what was generally agreed was the “deadliest shot of the war” (above, center). Probably through a hatch left open to lessen the suffocating heat inside her iron shell, a rebel shot cleanly penetrated to the metal water jacket enclosing the ship's engine. No other damaged was sustained. But in an instant the entire vessel was filled with pressurized steam. Over a hundred men were instantly scalded to death. Another 45 crewmen suffered 2^nd and 3^rd degree burns. Many jumped overboard, only to be shot by snipers along the Arkansas shore. Lieutenant Kilty's left arm was so deeply charred, it had to be amputated.  Towed out of danger, the ship was quickly repaired, but the psychic wounds were not fully mended until the Mound City escaped the rebel guns of Warrington, without a scratch.

But what capped the legend of the adventure of the two ensigns was what happened next. One of Mound City's cannon shots - perhaps the first - ignited a smoldering fire within the splintered wood and cotton bales which proved impossible to extinguish. Within 15 minutes the work was ablaze, and in less than an hour the entire fort was destroyed. 

Rebel gunners dragged off their ordinance, to strengthen defenses closer to the city. And without losing a man the Yankee navy won yet another victory over the Confederate engineers.  Before the army had even laid Vicksburg under siege, the navy was tightening the walls around the defenders.

As a reward for his initiative, Lieutenant Bryon Wilson would be promoted a grade, to Lieutenant Commander. And within a year he would be given a semi-independent command, of the captured southern sidewheel steamboat renamed the USS Ouachita. With it came a share of the prize money from the sale of any rebel ships and cargo which he captured. After serving in the Asiatic Squadron  post war, in 1893 Byron Wilson would retire as a full captain,  and would die 3 years later.   One of last swashbucklers in the United States Navy.

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