I read somewhere about a Union “torpedo boat” attack against the Confederate ironclad Albermarle, secured behind a floating log barrier.
An officer named Cushing took a steam launch armed with one of those spar torpedoes (14 feet long) up the river and attacked. Cushing stood on the bow with the lanyard in his teeth as his left and right hands held reins he pulled to tell the coxwain to go left or right - afraid his voice would carry.
The log barrier was slimy from being in the water and the launch rode over it and got close enough to detonate the bomb. The explosion sank the ironclad as well as the launch.
All were captured except Cushing who stole a skiff and floated back down the river, barely alive. Talk about men who clanked when they walked.
Since then, one vision of a hero I have is a guy standing on the bow of a wooden boat attacking an ironclad in the middle of the night, with a detonating lanyard gripped in his teeth and only 14 feet away from high explosives.
I had heard that H.G. Wells “predicted” atomic weaponry in THE WORLD SET FREE. This was hard to find, but I got a hold of it and read it. He actually did make such a prediction, or extrapolation, from his knowledge of Rutherford’s experiments with radioactivity. The thing is, he got it hilariously wrong. Of course the very essence of a nuclear explosion is its instantaneity, but as he imagined it, it was very slow to develop, even though inexorable.
He describes a deployment where a bombadier takes a large pot or jug and pulls a cork from it WITH HIS TEETH, and tosses it out of his cockpit. After it lands it develops into a sort of volcano. Wells’ description of this development, if taken out of context, is very suggestive of a mushroom cloud, so even as he was wrong, he was right.