I’m not sure how many people know what a special place the “Swamp Angel” occupies in American history. In the summer of 1863 General Quincy Gilmore, after two frustrating years found his joint army/navy force still blocked by Rebel forts guarding Charleston, South Carolina. So Gilmore dispatched scouts into the knee deep muck of the salt marshes that surrounded the city and protected the forts, searching for a few square yards of ground firm enough to support a 16,000 pound 8-inch parrot gun. On August 21st., Gilmore sent a message to the rebels; If they didn’t immediately evacuate the forts that gun would destroy Charleston.
[editor’s note, by susanhu] I spotted Kimit’s fascinating story the other day and asked him to cross-post it here. After I’d written him, I happened to click on his user page by accident. He’s also a journalist, It shows in the composition and ideas in this story here. (Bio at end of story.)
Continued below …
Initially Confederate General Beauregard thought the note was a joke because Gilmore forgot to sign it. But at 1:30 am the first fire shell arched over the intervening 7,900 yards and slammed into a Charleston warehouse. Beauregard was outraged, as were the unarmed residents of Charleston who called the shelling “…barbaric….intended only to spread terror…”
That it was, but it was also ineffectual. At that range the gunners were unlikely to hit anything of military significance. They did manage to kill a handful of people but after only 36 shots the Angle blew out its breach, injuring four of its own crew. The Swamp Angel’s terror attack on Charleston had ended.
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All-in-all it was one of the most inoffensive terror attacks in history. But the only difference between the clumsy Swamp Angel of 1863 and the production line B-29 fire raid on Tokyo in early March of 1945 which incinerated over 100,000 human beings in one night, was the method not the intent.
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General Curtis LeMay, who commanded those B-29’s defended himself the same way General Gilmore did, by saying it is a crime to continue any war one day longer than necessary. But even LeMay had to admit that “…if we had lost that one, I would probably have been tried as a war criminal.” So would Gilmore, and thousands of other generals in history. Vietnam War era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara touched the core of the issue when he asked, “What makes it legal if we win but illegal if we lose?” The answer to his question was obvious to both LeMay and Gilmore.
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There is a charge sweeping the world right now that American soldiers used chemical weapons in Falluja last year, specifically white phosphorus. The situation was not helped when the U.S. ambassador in London spent weeks denying the reports that W.P. and been used, and then had to eat his words.
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He was corrected when the spring issue of the U.S. Army Field Artillery Magazine described the use of phosphorus in Falluja as “Shake and Bake”. According to the mortar crew one HE (High Explosive) mortar shell was used to open a building suspected of being used by insurgents, and that was followed by a “Willie Pete” round to set the structure on fire, driving enemy soldiers into the open where they could be killed with “conventional weapons”, meaning bullets.
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The critics have been quick to charge that George Bush is now no better than Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons against the Iraqi people. It is an allegation that will echo in Islamic communities which still memorialize Crusader Richard Couer de Lion’s execution of 2,300 Muslim prisoners in 1191.
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To Muslims it doesn’t matter that the argument that white phosphorus is de facto chemical warfare is simply idiotic. It is irrelevant to them that a white phosphorus mortar shell could never be described as a weapon of “…Mass Destruction”. And it is of little importance to the vast majority of Muslims that if white phosphorus is a chemical weapon then so is T.N.T., and gunpowder. America’s Western critics may wallow in the legal minutia that if the mortar crew intended to use the toxic characteristics of Willie Pete to kill their enemies then its use may be illegal under an international treaty which we signed, while if the mortar team’s intent was to mask the enemies’ view with Willie Pete’s thick smoke and make them nervous enough to retreat, thus running into the open where they could be then shot, then the use of white phosphorus was – probably – legal. But these arguments are of little interest in those Islamic communities which will now always know that America used chemical weapons in Iraq, and that will inspire generations of fresh terrorists.
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Since 1871 the Swamp Angel has sat atop a stone obelisk at the intersection of North Clinton Avenue and Perry Street in Trenton, New Jersey. A plaque records its weight, its range and even its maximum angle of elevation. You can physically touch the jagged edge of history where the breech was violently ripped from the barrel on August 23rd 1863 after firing just 36 shells at an American city. But the cannon’s role in the history of war crimes remains largely forgotten because “we” won that one, and so the sacrifice of a few lives in Charleston may have been worth the price of shortening the war in some small way. But the story of America’s white phosphorus war crime in Falluja will be remembered not because it’s true – because it isn’t true – but because we are not winning in Iraq.
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And that is the ultimate war crime any leader can commit – starting a war but then not winning it.
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Kimit Muston’s columns ran every Sunday for six years in the L.A. Daily News. He has been published by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the L.A. Times, the S.F. Chronicle, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Detroit News and the Oklahoma City “Oklahomian”.”
