| NAVAL ORDNANCE AND GUNNERY, VOLUME 1 HISTORICAL FOREWARD |
| Introduction The usefulness of a Navy rests primarily upon the fact that it can use offensive and defensive weapons effectively at sea. Ships of the Navy are often referred to as floating gun platforms. This definition is too limited, as the experience of World War II indicates that ships are equally effective in carrying and employing torpedoes, mines, depth charges, rockets, and guided missiles, as well as airplanes, which with their weapons greatly extend the fighting range of the ship. The importance of weapons to the Navy is indicated by the fact that most line officers serve at least one tour of duty in a gunnery department and that much of the professional training of line Naval officers is occupied with the study of ordnance and gunnery. The detailed story of the development of weapons from the caveman’s club to the guided missile of today is beyond the scope of the present book, but, for the purpose of establishing perspective, a brief review of some of the most significant steps is presented here and in certain of the later chapters, as appropriate. Ancient weapons Although man, compared to most animals, is a fairly large and powerful creature, he is weakly armed in proportion to his size. He lacks not only horns and claws, but even the big canine tusks owned by his cousins the apes. A million years ago, when be began his climb towards civilization, he probably knew how to throw stones and to hit with a stick. All his many weapons developed since have had the same purpose; to kill, wound, or otherwise subdue his enemy. These weapons enable the warrior to attack his opponent at a greater distance than if he had to depend on hands and teeth alone, and, storing energy which is released all at once when the weapon strikes, to damage the victim more severely than is possible by biting and kicking. The bow, invented at the beginning of the Neolithic Age, fulfilled both these functions. Before that time men used a device called a spear-thrower, a stick with a hook or spur at the end. They held the spear-thrower in the same hand that held the javelin or throwing-spear, with the hook of the thrower engaging a hollow in the butt of the javelin. Then they threw with an overhand motion, letting go the javelin so that the thrower acted as an extension of the arm. The bow, having much greater range and accuracy, spread over most of the world and drove out the spear-thrower except among a few isolated tribes. A few peoples developed more specialized missile weapons, such as the boomerang, the sling, the pellet-bow, and the blow-gun. The natives of Borneo not only make a blow-gun for shooting poisoned darts, but also equip it with a sight and a bayonet. The discovery of metals about 6,000 years ago brought about a revolution in weapons, since they could be made of copper or bronze more quickly than of stone, and since the material allowed a greater variety of forms. For instance, swords became practical for the first time though some peoples had previously tried to make them by edging a flattened wooden club with sharpened stones or sharks’ teeth. A typical bronze-age battle comprised a few well-armed nobles on each side, each protected by a helmet and a big leather shield, poking at one another with bronze-pointed spears, while behind them howling mobs of the common people hurled stones and insults. The nobles’ swords of bronze or (later) of iron were so soft that after a bit of hard fighting, the swordsman had to take time out to straighten the kinks out of his weapon. As metallurgy improved, not only did the quality of the weapons improve, but also more men could afford armor. Thus began the long conflict between armor and armor-piercing weapons that has continued ever since. When King Darius of Persia sent an amphibious expedition against Greece in 490 B. C., the Greeks beat the Persians at Marathon, not because they were braver, but because they had good bronze armor. The unarmored Persian archers had always been able to mow down their enemies from a distance; now, however, their arrows merely bounced off the helmets and breastplates of the Greek soldiers, and when the latter got in among them with spears there was nothing for the Persians to do but run. Although nowadays science and invention are closely connected, this was not so in former times. Science was the vague speculations of priests and philosophers, while practical inventions were created slowly and under great handicaps by unknown common men. Moreover, most societies were very conservative about new ideas, so that brilliant inventions were often not adopted because of inertia, ignorance, or distrust, or because they might impair somebody’s vested interest. For instance, the ordnance department, a group charged with improving weapons and devising new ones, was invented as early as 400 B. C., but failed to become an established institution until modern times. At that time Dionysios, the dictator of Syracuse, was planning to attack the Carthaginian colonies in Sicily. He therefore hired philosophers and skilled artisans at high wages, entertained them with wine, women, and song, and told them to devise something to beat the Carthaginians, or else. The experts accordingly invented the first catapult-a kind of overgrown crossbow on a pedestal, shooting 6-foot arrows. After the war one of these arrows was taken to Sparta as a curio, where a certain Archidamus, seeing it, cried: “0 Heracles, the valor of man is at an end!” That is the first recorded protest against the mechanization of warfare. Although such outcries have been heard with increasing frequency ever since Archidamus’ time, they have done little to retard the evolution of weapons. When the crossbow came into general use in medieval Europe it was considered such a fiendish weapon that in 1139 the Catholic Church issued an edict against it, but with little effect. Similarly, objections have been raised more recently against submarine warfare, gas, and the atomic bomb. Transition to modern weapons In the Classical or Greco-Roman Age warfare reached an extraordinarily high degree of organization, with phalanxes of 20,000 spearmen, archers and slingers, war-elephants, armored siege-towers, catapults, incendiary bombs, and warships with crews of a thousand men or more. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries, the art of war declined in Europe almost to the howling mob stage out of which classical warfare had grown. For several centuries really skilled warfare was found only in the Byzantine Empire, that revived eastern half of the Roman Empire in Asia Minor and the Balkans. This superior military skill enabled the Byzantines century after century to roll back waves of Huns, Arabs, Russians, and other invaders before they finally went down before the combined attacks of Turks, Slays, and Western European Crusaders. The 4 or 5 centuries from the fall of the West Roman Empire to the rise of Western European civilization, though known as the Dark Ages because of its political disorganization and general illiteracy, witnessed a number of important inventions such as the wheeled clock, the iron horseshoe, and the rudder. In the 13th and 14th centuries appeared two of the most important inventions in the history of warfare: the iron-casting furnace and the gun. Until the 13th century all iron was wrought iron, with a low carbon content and hence too high a melting point to be cast with the types of furnace available. Gunpowder and early guns Near the middle of the 13th century, Friar Roger Bacon gave the western world its first useful formula for gunpowder. This formula, which probably came from the Chinese by way of some Arabian manuscript, was followed by the discovery of the principle of the gun, a weapon which revolutionized the art of war. Early books on gunnery attribute the discovery of the principle of the gun to Friar Bertholdus, nicknamed “The Black,” of Freiburg, Germany. The friar was trying to turn mercury into gold, according to report, when he put a quantity of saltpeter in his mixture. The resulting explosion blew the top off his kettle, and probably some of the overhead with it. He repeated the experiment often enough to get the idea of the gun. Early guns were crude and unpredictable, often more dangerous to the gunner than to the enemy. For a long time after the invention of the gun, many persons argued quite sensibly that bows were more efficient. They probably were. The crossbow bolt could penetrate the knight’s armor; the early gun couldn’t. The archer with the long bow could shoot several times while the gunner was loading and firing a single round. The ballistics of early guns, which fired stone projectiles, was largely a matter of guesswork and observation. Powder was mixed on the spot by the gunner; artisans fashioned projectiles from local materials; and the mount was built at whatever spot it was needed. The only part of the gun carried on early campaigns was the barrel. The ineffectiveness of the early guns is indicated by a record of an attack on a European town which says, “A knight besieged the town and fired at it with thunder guns. It did no harm.” The noise, the smoke, and the flame of the guns undoubtedly had a disastrous effect on the enemy. The horses were gun-shy, as a matter of record. An eyewitness to the battle of Crecy in the 14th century spoke with enthusiasm about the performance of “divers wooden and leathern tubes, called bombards, which with a great flash of light and a noise like God his thunder, threw little iron balls to frighten the horses.” Stone projectiles were replaced by bronze balls early in the 14th century, and these in turn were supplanted by lead or iron balls by the middle of that century. The mortar, which hurled a projectile a short distance on a high trajectory over hills or walls, was invented by 1354. The mortar required less powder, was less likely to burst, and required fewer horses to transport it. Canister shot, which later won battles for Napoleon, was first used about 1400. Balls, bottles, knives, and random items of small hardware were put in a container and fired from a gun. The container opened in flight and sprayed exposed parts of the enemy’s anatomy with considerable effectiveness. Grape shot, also an antipersonnel weapon, was a later development. The first exploding shell was used prior to 1418, but this type of projectile did not become popular until the reign of Henry VIII of England. Heated shot was used at Cherbourg in 1418. Although guns appeared on ships for the first time in the 15th century, firepower had been a factor in naval battles since well before the Christian era. The tactics were to maneuver a galley close to the enemy and attempt to ram him, overturn him, board him by means of grappling hooks, or shave off his oars by a close run. An alternate procedure was to catapult flaming sulphur, pitch, niter, or petroleum on the enemy ship, row away, and watch the fire. The first recorded naval use of a tube containing gunpowder which, when ignited, shot out a projectile occurred in 1453, when the Spanish opened fire with cannons and arquebuses at point-blank range on the Moslem fleet at Preveza. The Turkish fleet fell apart. Although such incidents awakened the slowest thinkers to the importance of naval gunnery, the pike, the cutlass, and the grappling hook were not to become obsolete until the 20th century. The battle of Pavia in the early 16th century further proved the usefulness of guns as weapons of war. The Spanish put a few “firebearing” troops among their pikemen and proved to the French that a knight’s armor was no longer a protection. The usefulness of the gun was evident. The French equipped their troops with arquebuses and returned to defeat the Spanish at Serisoles in 1544. Victory favored the army with the most effective combination of guns and other weapons. Two and a half centuries later, Napoleon could say “Le feu est tout.” (“[Gun] fire is everything.”) Henry VIII of England was the first ordnanceman. The number of different sizes and kinds of guns in use in his army and navy annoyed the good monarch to the extent that he issued an “ordnance” which catalogued and attempted to standardize the types used. The title of this directive, corrupted to “ordnance,” is the modem term that includes weapons of all types, ammunition, and associated equipment. The Flemings had an international monopoly in the munitions business in the time of “Good King Hal.” Coming from one of Europe’s habitual battlegrounds, they turned early to the manufacture of ordnance and were artists by Henry’s time. Every king who wanted a good gunnery department imported gunners from Flanders at the gunners’ own prices. The Flemings formed a guild of “master gonners,” who jealously guarded the secrets of gunnery and sold their services to the highest bidder. Henry’s “gonners” wore billowing pantaloons and hats with flowing plumes, and were a swashbuckling, proud, and clan nish lot. These “gonners” earned their pay and prestige; they lived a dangerous life. An early book on gunnery opened with the maxim, “A gonner must love and serve God.” The wick fuses they used burned “as long as it taketh to recite the Apostles’ Creed.” The guns most used at the time were the culverin and the demiculverin. A later version of these guns pounded the Spanish Armada into the sea before the Spanish could get within their own battle range. The early land version of the culverin weighed 4,000 pounds and required 16 teams of horses to move it. The seagoing demiculverin weighed 3,600 pounds and could shoot 1,950 yards, although its effective battle range (point-blank) was about 80 yards. The muzzle velocity of these guns was on the order of 500 foot-seconds, whereas our modern big guns launch projectiles at about 2,500 feet a second. The demi eulverin took a 4 1/2-inch iron shot, and the tube was 10 1/2 feet long. Loading the big guns was at best a dangerous operation, especially when “bombes” or fused projectiles were used. To get the picture of an early operating condition let us rephrase an old manuscript to reproduce an Ordnance Pamphlet as Henry’s “gonners” might have written it: “To charge ye peece of ordnance Gonner-like, set ye barrel of powdre on ye windward side of ye peece, have ye helper hold ye same at an angle and thrust ye Ladle into ye powdre, filling it half full. Fixing ye thumbe just over ye staffe of ye ladle, thrust it into ye muzzle of ye peece, causing ye powdre to turn out of ye Ladle cleanly. Shake ye Ladle thrice, so that no powdre returne in it-for that be a foule faulte in a good gonner; then thrust ye powdre home with ye tampion on ye other end of ye staffe. Have ye helper holde his thumbe over ye touch-hole whilst tamping. Then taking a rounde wadde of hay or raveled rope, thrust it on top of ye powdre, again tamping home. Then place ye shoote atop of ye wadde.” The gunner was warned to stand to one side when he loaded a gun, lest stray sparks from a previous loading ignite the powder and “spoile” him. Soaping out the gun solved the problem of stray sparks, but added further steps to the loading operation. Firing the gun was even more dangerous. Resuming our Ordnance Pamphlet: “In giving fire to any great peece of Ordnance, such as Cannon, Culverin, or such like, it is requisite that ye Gonner thereto appointed first see that ye peece be well primed, laying a little powdre about ye touch-hole as a traine, and then to be nimble in giving fire, which as soon as he espieth to flame, he ought with quicknesse to retire back three or four yardes out of danger of the reverse of ye wheels and carriage of ye peece; for oftentimes it happeneth that the wheels or axle-tree doth break and spoile ye Gonner that giveth fire, not having ability to move himself from the danger of ye same; yea, I did see a Gonner slaine with the reverse of the wheele of a culverin, which crushed his legge and thigh in peeces, who, if he had had a care, and nimbleness withal, might have escaped ye misfortune. Also, if ye burning powdre be dankish, or ye cole of ye matche not cleare, ye Gonner can not speedily give fire; and therefore behooveth he fore-see it; or if he hold ye linstocke in which his fired matche is tied long over ye touch-hole, ye violent flame issuing thereout is liable to spoile him, or some thereabout, throwing ye linstocke or staffe wherewith he gives fire out of his hans. I have seen ye linstocke and matche blown out of a Gonner’s hans more than 80 yards from ye peece by ye violent blaste of ye fire issuing out of ye touch-hole of ye peece in giving fire to ye same. And it is to be noted, that ye wider ye touch-hole of ye peece, ye greater ye flame that doth issue out thereat, which causeth ye peece to work lesse effecte than she would having a lesser touch-hole.” Is there any wonder that the early gunner was cautioned to be a God-fearing man? By modern standards, the “master gonner” didn’t know much about the science of gunnery. Asked to explain what happened to the powder in firing, one expert of 1540 replied, “The powdre mixture, when burned, changeth into a strong wind.” This theory was not improved upon from his day to the 19th century. It has been said that hardly a single Ordnance Pamphlet would be needed to fit one of Drake’s men to serve aboard one of Nelson’s ships. The culverin and the demiculverin weren’t the only big guns that the early gunner had to handle. An old report tells of a gun made by the Moharnmedans from a Flemish design. The “Big Bombard,” fired at Cairo, threw a 400-pound stone projectile more than two miles. The reporter adds, “By God, if I had not seen it myself, I should not have noted it in my history, so unbelievably unusual and great was it.” Early gunners were not military personnel, but served as civilian advisers, like our modern technicians. Gunnery officers were not given military rank in France until 1732, and in England they remained civilians until 1790. Less than 200 years ago, naval guns were fired at point-blank range, and fire control was largely a matter of skillful seamanship. The captain of the ship had to maneuver his vessel within shouting distance of the enemy to make a hit probable. Range of early naval guns was spoken of as “pistol shot” and “half pistol shot.” Not only were fire control devices nonexistent, but the dispersion of the guns was such as to make complicated sighting mechanisms useless. The development of fire control in the modern sense had to wait until the 19th and 20th centuries, when refinements in the manufacture of guns and a detailed study of the trajectory made possible accurate long-range shooting. Today it is possible to hit a moving target many miles away. The foregoing pages give a brief description of some of the steps in the long history of the development from the primitive tools of the savage warrior to the complex technological developments used by the gunnery department of today. Many minds have played a part in this development. Discoveries in one branch of the science have necessitated furious research in other branches. The greatest improvements in the gun itself have consisted of increases in range, accuracy, and destructive power. These improvements have been accompanied by development of fire control equipment and operational procedures. War has been the major factor in the development of the science of gunnery. Every war necessitates not only the development of new weapons, but the improvement and adaptation to new uses of existing ones. World War I resulted in the development of accurate methods of surface fire; World War II perfected the vastly more difficult problem of antiaircraft fire control. Similar developments were made in mines, rockets, torpedoes, and bombs, as well as the unique device of the carrier-based airplane as an extension of the striking power of the ship. Many interesting devices are on the Bureau of Ordnance drawing boards now, and some are ready for evaluation by the Fleet. If the science of ordnance and gunnery continues to develop at the pace of the last 50 years, we may well stand in as much awe of it in the near future as would one of Henry’s “gonners” if he were ordered to man a modern fire control radar. |