FORTIFICATIONS

FORTIFICATIONS. Throughout the colonial period, fortifications in the Western Hemisphere strongly reflected the origins of the various European settlers. Colonists

of many countries—including Spain, France, England, Holland, Sweden, and Russia—erected defensive structures ranging from small, improvised earthworks and palisaded stockades to masonry works of substantial size.

As a young nation, the United States faced defensive requirements quite different from those of most European countries, whose chief concern was protection of inland cities against mobilized land forces. The United States, instead, needed to protect frontier settlements and outposts and to secure coastal harbors and river mouths against foreign naval forces.

Americans established frontier forts in large numbers until about the end of the nineteenth century. Built to resist Indians equipped with nothing heavier than small arms, these forts generally consisted of timber or adobe construction. Many modern communities trace their roots back to such frontier posts, which have become crucial to the folklore and romantic history of the American West.

The army, however, directed its principal engineering efforts toward the defense of harbors and river mouths. From the 1790s until after WORLD WAR II, constructing fortifications for protection against naval attack constituted a major item in the nation's defense expenditures—and the principal representation of the country's military architecture. Among the best known of these fortifications, all completed before the CIVIL WAR, were Fort Monroe, Virginia; Fort SUMTER, South Carolina; Fort Pulaski, Georgia; Fort Morgan, Alabama; and Fort Jackson, Louisiana.

The appearance of rifled artillery, which had its first widespread test in the Civil War, ended the construction of these massive, vertical-walled masonry forts. The wartime defenses for both North and South were simple, low-profile earthwork forts revested by timber or sandbags. Hundreds of such forts sprang up, in a few cases to ring large cities such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Washington—the one instance in American history of fortifying cities against land attack, somewhat in the fashion of continental Europe.

Following the Civil War, construction of fortifications was limited for a time to new earthwork defenses of a more durable style, although fort armaments developed markedly. In the 1890s a new era of fortification began with the installation of powerful 10-and 12-inch breech-loading rifles, mounted on disappearing carriages that lowered the guns after each firing to protected positions behind many feet of earth and concrete. Along with several hundred 12-inch mortars, which fired projectiles in high arcs to descend onto the decks of naval targets, such armament arrived between 1893 and 1918 in forts along both continental coasts, in the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands, and at both entrances to the Panama Canal.

Between 1937 and 1945, the country carried out a final fortification effort, characterized by concrete and steel emplacements that provided overhead cover for even more powerful guns of up to 16-inch caliber. Included in the program were defenses for several points in Alaska and in the Caribbean area, as well as for the Atlantic bases acquired from Great Britain in exchange for destroyers. Within five years of the end of World War II, however, the country disarmed and abandoned all such fortifications, which were replaced by newer defense systems utilizing aircraft and guided missiles.

FORTIFICATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY