firing guns at sea-- 9/25/24

25 Sep 2024

firing guns at sea-- 9/25/24

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Today's selection-- from Wicked Problems by Guru Madhavan. The deplorable state of gunnery in the early America Navy:

“William Sowden Sims, a 40-year-old lieutenant, was seasick from this dismal state of marksmanship. In 1898, after his return from Paris as an attache at the American embassy, the navy assigned Sims to brand-new Kentucky. The 368-foot, 11,000-ton battleship carried a crew of 500, a library, a gym, a piano, and other luxuries. Despite the pathetic flop of its 70-odd guns in firing practice, a 1900 report declared Kentucky an ‘unqualified success.’ One magazine praised it as one of the ‘Greatest Fighting Machines Afloat’ and as agile as a thoroughbred. But while passing through the Suez Canal toward the Asian waters, Sims's experiments proved that Kentucky was far inferior to its European counterparts. ‘Kentucky is not a battleship at all. She is the worst crime in naval construction,’ he wrote. Kentucky's specialized design may have seemed economically efficient, but Sims knew it was hazardous. The people who built the guns weren't the same engineers who made the turrets, and those who made the carriages didn't speak to the engineers making the guns. Years later, Sims compared these ship-crippling vulnerabilities to pitting a blind gladiator against a heavily armed adversary. ‘We can send as many ships as we wish ... and they will all be destroyed,’ he wrote in his Pulitzer-winning memoir, The Victory at Sea.

“In Hong Kong, Sims met and was tutored by Sir Percy Scott, a pioneering captain and later admiral. Scott had significantly improved British marksmanship by devising a method of fixing and maintaining targets irrespective of a ship's roll. Sims would capitalize on these improvements for the US Navy. With an irascible intellect, a deadpan gravitas, and a Vandyke beard, Scott was notorious for his rum consumption and rough manners. Judged as ‘dreadfully backwards in all useful subjects,’ Scott joined the Royal Navy at 13 in 1866. At a young age, he noticed the deplorable state of gunnery, recalling that in the preceding years, ‘cleanliness of the ship and the state of men's bedding were still regarded as the most important factors of efficiency.’ A decade earlier, another illustrious fleet commander lamented that gunnery was ‘quite a secondary thing.’ Beauty beat out the brutal realities, and practicality bowed to prestige. Knowledge of artillery was considered merely an elective rather than an essential part of officer training. Seamen who pointed out these deficiencies were dismissed as faultfinders. Even the inspection reports neglected to examine the efficiencies—and ultimately, the effectivenes—of target drills, a practice absent until 1903.

“In 1878, Scott was selected as a gunnery lieutenant for HMS Excellent, a disheveled triple-decker destroyer unworthy of its name. Everything about the ship was antiquated, and even firing at close range required extensive maneuvering. On each gun were two V-shaped metal pieces separated by 4 feet. From 6 feet behind the gun, the sailor would fire by pulling the trigger string when the V's and the target aligned. The optical antics required the alignment of both V's and target: one at 6 feet, the other at 10, and another at 3,000. ‘This called upon the eye to do more than any camera will do,’ Scott wrote. Even when the ship rolled the same amount, some guns fired earlier—and more erratically—than others. These problems continued for two more decades.

Vice Admiral William Sowden Sims

“In the summer of 1896, as captain of the cruiser HMS Scylla on the Mediterranean, Scott was once again astonished that the efficiency of housekeeping outshined the efficiency of maritime weaponry. ‘The state of the paintwork was the one and only idea. To be the cleanest ship in the Fleet was still the objective for every one; nothing else mattered,’ Scott wrote. With the ship's roll, poor sights, shoddy gun quality, and pitiable firing rates, he condemned the situation as ‘worse than useless.’

“Scott focused on overcoming the problem of waiting for a ship's roll to align the target. He devised a telescope as a gun sight so the shooter had only one point to focus on distinctively. Scott's crew had little success in early practice rounds with one-inch guns. The crew blamed the telescopes, but Scott knew the fault was in the guns themselves. He installed newer guns using an electromagnetic rig that provided excellent stability. The successive loading-and-firing procedure with improved telescopic sight measure ‘proved to be a great success,’ but the Admiralty rejected the idea. Had they accepted it in 1898, ‘the Navy would have had an efficient instructional weapon and the country would have been saved £40,000 a year’ (about £7 million today) in ammunition.

“Scott also demonstrated that men often fired by keeping one eye open and the other on the telescope. Any quick adjustments to the sight required an extra eye. Scott's solution was to bring in a ‘sight setter,’ another person to elevate or divert the gun per the shifting target. Early demonstrations of this continuous-aim firing method were successful. ‘The Admiralty hauled me over the coals for the innovation,’ Scott said. Instead of implementing his idea, the higher-ups reprimanded him. ‘It was the same with all my proposals. They were all boycotted.’

“On a particularly rough day at the sea, Scott spotted a trainee with a far superior firing record than others. This sailor nimbly adjusted his telescope and the gun-elevating gear to keep the sight steady according to his ship's speed and rolling of the target. Scott's entire idea of continuous-aim firing was being put into action by the remarkable trainee. ‘What one man could do intuitively the others could be taught to do,’ Scott wrote. He codified the trainee's act of dexterity into a disciplined procedure for the entire corps. He also fitted a contrivance called a ‘dotter’ to ensure the gun aligned with the bull's-eye and, if it deviated from the target, to indicate by how much.

“In 1899, Scott returned to England. Call it naval gazing—the Admiralty sat on Scott's training concept for three more years. They demanded more data for the dotter from the frustrated captain and temporarily slashed his salary. The Admiralty transferred Scott to HMS Terrible, a long-range cruiser with a seemingly apt name that was commissioned to China via the Suez Canal. Scott found that the gun sights on Terrible were also unusable. He adapted his ideas and instruments from Scylla, improvising telescope crosswires by plucking long hairs from a midshipman. Now that the sighting appliances were dependable, firing speed became more crucial. It was better to have someone who hit six targets out of eight shots in one minute than someone who scored four out of four over an extended period. The firing accuracy in this new training regime increased by an order of magnitude, and the firing rate quadrupled. Even with these transformative results, the ‘Admiralty remained immovable,’ Scott lamented. ‘Like all authors of new ideas I was laughed at.’

“Sims, the American, was far less patient than his British mentor. He imported Scott's continuous-aim firing innovation to the US Asiatic Squadron by regearing the guns and crew training. He reported his results to the Bureau of Ordnance, which received Sims's claims with disbelief and promptly relegated them to a basement file cabinet. Over the next two years, Sims wrote 13 more reports, and the bureau finally decided to conduct its own tests at the Washington Navy Yard. Unfortunately, the bureau ran the tests on the banks of the Anacostia River instead of on the rolling deck of a ship. This meant that gunners did not need to change their gun gears. The physics and the results were naturally different, and the navy concluded that Sims's claims were extreme and continuous-aim firing was impossible.

“In late 1901, the irritated lieutenant broke the entire chain of command and fired off a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt detailing the moribund state of the navy. The knowledgeable commander in chief, a former assistant secretary of the navy, was perturbed and immediately ordered a target practice for the North Atlantic Squadron. Annoyed by their abysmal firing record, Roosevelt elevated Sims to the head of target practice and demanded that his reports be distributed to every naval officer in service. Sims mandated gun practices for all ships, initiated firing contests between fleet ships, and continually refined the gunnery techniques. By 1905, the firing speed and accuracy in the US Navy had soared under Sims's command. The result was improved marksmanship, with the metric of hits per gun per minute in target practice increasing at least 3,000 percent in three years, a significant step in perfecting fire control. Perhaps inspired by his protege's radical move (and success), Scott sent a letter to the Lordship in late 1904. Scott demanded an overdue upgrade on all the gun sights across the British Navy. After years of ignoring the crushing weight of facts, the Admiralty finally promoted Scott as the inspector of naval target practice.”