The commander had succeeded, with desperate labor, by blasting away concrete emplacements and facings, in turning two of his big guns around to face the land and protect the open back of the fort. But the giant steel guns with their 1,000-pound projectiles that could fight 30,000-ton battleships, could not fight little two-legged men. They might, by chance of fortune, find and destroy one of the siege guns that were attacking them. But if they missed a gun and fell merely among soldiers, they would be scarcely more murderous than a little field gun that fires bursting charges or shrapnel. The enemy did not try to rush the works. He had time and means and did not need to sacrifice men. To the heights of the Atlantic and Navesink Highlands, that ascend so strangely out of the sea and out of the flat-sea country there, he lifted guns of great caliber. He placed guns in cover behind every undulation. When he had placed all these weapons with scientific precision, they began to fire. None of the mobile artillery installed for the defense of the fort against land attack could reach the invaders’ heavier artillery with any hope of effect. The men in the defenses, cowering under bomb-proofs and in pits, held out for a day and a night. They held out for another day. Then there was nothing left to defend. Dismounted and broken, their armament was destroyed. The survivors surrendered. New York City did not know that the Sandy Hook defenses had fallen till three light enemy cruisers appeared in the upper bay and steamed through the East River to the Navy Yard. Then the city knew that its harbor was open. _Enemy Invades New Jersey_ The army that took Sandy Hook did not return to New York. The flotilla took the troops and their light artillery aboard at the Atlantic Highlands, and steamed back through Raritan Bay, through the narrow sound behind Staten Island and into Newark Bay. Here other boats met it with cavalry and motor troops from Yonkers. Troops landed at both sides of the entrance to the bay, taking Bayonne and Elizabethport, with their oil refineries and tanks, and their ship yards. Then the flotilla moved up the bay, and put great bodies of soldiers of all arms ashore at the great factory town of Newark. A big city, and a difficult city to control, it kept the commanders occupied for three days before they had made their footing good; but then it was an admirable and a vastly valuable base. From it the troops spread out and took Rutherford, Passaic, Hackensack, and Paterson. It was rich commercial territory that complemented the value of possessing New York, for these factory cities were a part of the Metropolitan District counted with New York City in every National estimate of industrial wealth. This district contained almost thirty-two thousand factories. In wealth and productiveness, it was as choice a prize as New England.[158] _Army Ceases Operations_