NAVPERS 91066

J

THE EVOLUTION OF NAVAL WEAPONS

TRAINING ACTIVITY t .. BUREAU OF NAY AL PERSONNEL

AUGUST 1947 B-2483 NA VPERS 91066

"mE EVOWTICJI OF NAVAL Dl~S

"

Training Acti'rl.ty • Bureau of NaTal Personnel

AWUST 1947 Page No.

Chapter 1, Sticka and Stones 1

Chapter 2, Exploeiv.. 8 a.pter 31 Fuse• 11 Chapter 4, 1rti1181')" 14 Chapte;r 5, 8111.11 Aru 22

Chapter 6, Tdrpedoe~ 26

Chapter 7, ll1na a 31

Chapter 8 1 Depth-Charges 34 Chapter 9, Rocket• and o.ided J8.aaUe1 'P

Olap.ter 10, Belli• 42 Chapter 11, Chaioalllar!'are 46 Cllaptw 12, Sighting and RaneiDg 49

'lhe Na"f7' 1 Future Y•pon• 53 SfiGK S AND SfCNES

1-1. Introduction. We are to study the history of naval weapons, first, in crder to make the study of the weapons themselves more interesting, and second, to obtain an idea of how the whole process of the evolution of weapons takes place so that we can learn what sort of changes to expect in weapons in the futUI"e. Both as members of the armed forces and as citizens, it is our business to be able to weigh the sweeping predi.cti me we hear from time to tire a bout the r.a ture of future warfare and to come out with some sensible result.

1-2. Primitive warfare. About 500,000 years ago our ancestors learned to hunt and fight with pointed sticks and flat pieces of flint sharpened on one edge and held in the fist. ~ 10,000 years ago these simple implerents had developed into an extensive kit of stone-headed spears, axes, bone harpoons, and the like. Then men learned to finish their. stone tools and weapons by grinding and polishing, and to tame the dog to help them hunt. They had then reached the Neoli th­ ic or polished stone stage of culture, like that of the most primitive peoples of today.

As far as we can judge, these hunters and food gathere.rs did not practice formal warfare, not because they were more virtuous than we are, but because the world's human population was so small and thinly spread that no occasions arose for large-scale fighting, though no doubt t..}jere was a lot of individual assault and murder. r'UI'thermore, at that stage of culture nobody ever had enough wealth to be worth stealing. Hence two of the main causes for war, economic competition and the prospect of robbery, were absent.

Real warfare became practical when, between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, men learned to tame food-animals and raise crops. By these inventions they so imreased their food a.tpply that great groups of people became possible, and they could save enough to tempt the plunderers. Moreover, t.""lese inventions allOifed men mere spare time, which in turn encouraged them to make still more inventions. This JrOCess still goes on in the dizzy pace of technological change that confuses so many people today.

1-3. Ancient Weapons. Although man, compared to most animals, is a fairly large and po!ferful creature, he is weakly armed in proportion to his size. He lacks not only horns and claws, but even the big canine tusks Olfned by his cousins the apes. A million years ago, when he began hi:; climb tOifards civilization, he probably knew har to thrOif stones and to hit wlth a stick. All his many weapons developed since have had the same purpose; to kill, wound, or otherwise subdue his enemy in order to compel them to do what the man wanted them to, whether to let themselves be eaten, or to gl..ve up their propercy to the victor, or to lOifer their taxes. These weapons both enable the warrior to attack his opponent at a greater "; '3+-:mce .than if he had to depend on hands and teeth alone, and, by 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 begl..nni~ of the Neolithic Age, fulfilled both these functions. Defore th

The discovery of retals about 6,000 years ago brought about a revolution in weapons, since they could be ITBde of copper or bronze more quickly than of stone, and since the DB ter.ial allowed a greater variety of forms. For instance, swords became practical for the first tirne, though someo peoples ho.d previously tried to llBke them by edgl.ng a flattened wooden club with sharpened stones or sharks' teeth.

A typical bronze-age battle comprised a few well-~rrned nobles on eadh side, each protected by a hellret &nd a big leather shield, pdcing at one another with bronze-pointed spears, while behirrl them hcrling mobs of the coiiDilon people hurled stones and ir..sults. 'rhe nobles' Sl'l"ords of bronze or (later) of iron were so soft that after a bl.t of hard fighting, the swordsman had to take time out to straighten the kinks out of his weapon.

1 As metallurgy improved, not only did the quality of the weapons improve, but also more men could afford ai'IIIor, beginning tr.at long coP.flict between amor lind arrr.or-piercing weapo~s that has continued ever since. llhen KiT€ Iarius of Persia sent an amJi!ibi.ous expedition against, Greece in 4~ B.C., the Greeks beat the Persians at Marathon, not because they were braver, but because they had good bronze armor. The unannored Persian archers had always been able to mow down their enemies from a distance; nO'II', hOifever, their arrows merelY bounced off the helmets and breastplates of the Greek soldiers, and lihen the latter got in among them llith spears there 118s nothi~ for the Persians to do but run.

Although n011adays science and invention are closelY connected, such 118S not the case in former times; science -waa a matter of the vague speculations of priests and philosophers, while practical inventions were created sl011ly and under great handicaps by unknown common men. ~~oreover most societies were velj• conservative about new ideas, so that brilliart inventions were often not adopted because of inertia, ignorance, or distrust, or because they ~ight impair somebody's vested interest.

For instance, the ordnance department, a group charged with improving weapons ano 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 ~ired philosphers and skillea artisans at high wages, entertair.ed there with wine, women, and song; and told them to devise sorcatapult--a kind of overgrown crossbow on a pedestal, shooting six-foot arrows. After the war one of these arr~s was taken to Sp;1rta as a curio, where a certain Archidamos, seeing it, cried: 11 0 Herakles, the valor of man is at an endt" That is the first recorded protest against the nachanization of 118rfare.

Although such outcries have been heard 'ldth increasing frequency every since Archidamos• time, they have done little to retard the evolution of ·"eapons. 'l'lnen the crossbow came into general use in medieval Europe it wa.s considered such a fiendish weapon that in 1139 the Catho­ lic Church issued an edict against it, but with little effect. Similar• objections have been r~ised mere recently against submarine warfare, gas, and the atomic bomb.

In general these protest.s are based upvn an irrational fear of the nell' rather than upon a reasoned humanitarianism, since after all a man is ju"'t a's dead when he has boen beaten to death with a club as when he has been blown up by an atomic bomb. rhe great losses of the two recent Ywars and the size of' the armies than to the destructiveness of modern weapons. Yoreover, the deliberate massacre of eight or ten million prisoners a n:i civilians by the Gel"iTa r.s in World :"ar II was not a na. tter of rra chine-age wa:!'fare at all, but of the Germans' pditical and racial theories. As lollf as trial by battle persists in interr~ ti onal a-ffairs, the precise method by which people are killed is a minor consideration.

1-4. The trans] ticn to mo:iern weapons. In th~ Classical or G:raeco-Roman Age warfare reached an extraordinarily higt degrae of orgadzation, with phalanxes of 20,000 spearmen, archers ard 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 an:l 6th cen­ turies, ho'l'lever, the art of war declined in Europe almost to the howling mob stage out of which classical warfare had grawn. For several centuries ~eally Skilled warfare was fo~i only ir. the Byzantine Empire, that revived eastt!rn half of the Roman Empire in Asia !linor and the Balkans. This ::mperior military skill enabled the Byzantines century after century to roll back waves of Huns, Arabs, Russians, and other invader:!' before they finally went down before the combi.n&d attacks of Turks, Slavs, and Western European Cr-usaders.

The four or five centw:ies from the fall of the \lest Roman Empire to the rise of Western European ciVilization, though known as the Dark Ages because of its political di.sorbanization and general illiteracy, w:i tnessed a number of important inventions 15uch as the wheeled clock, the iron horse-shoe, and the rudder. In the 13th and 14th centuries appeared two of the most impor­ tant inventions in the history of warfare: the iron-casting furnace and the gun. Until the 13th cent.ury all iron was wrought iron, with a low carbon content and hence too h4h a melting­ point to be cast with the types of furnace available. Since the primitive wrought-iron furnace produces !Ill tal in small lumps only, large solid pieces of metal, like the cuirass (breastplate and backplate armor) of a classical Greek soldier, had to be of bronze or brass.

2 Irm armor first took the form of the Roman legionary's cuirass of narrow iron strips fastened togather; later of the mail-shirt of iron scales or ri~s snn to a leather jacket; and later yet, during the ~rk Ages, of chain-l!llil of interlocked steel ri~s. Plate armor, which when properly fitted is easier to move around in and more pro~ctive than chain mail of the same weight, did not come in untU the beginning of the 14th century, just about the time of the invention of the gun that was eventually to drive all body-armor off ·the battlefield. For a time armor outdistanced the gw in d3velopment, just as it did at sea for a ti.ms in the 1S6Qt 8 and 70's. The mounted man 1 s plate armor afforded such fine protection that in one late-lli8dieval battle in ItAly only one man was killed, arxl he fell off his hcrse into a bog and was drowned due to the weight of his armor. A complete suit of plate, though it might weigh 50 to 100 pounds, was so ole:verly lll.de that a strong man could get about in it with fair agility-though he had to be hoisted aboard hie horse by a kind of derrick. The common infantry weapons (bills, poleaxes, glaives, halberds) were essentially big can-openers mounted on the ends of mafts.

The perfection of tha gun as a practical weapon in the 16th and 17th centuries revolution­ ized warfare by substituting the chemical ~nergies of natural substances for the muscle-energy that had theretofore been used by soldiers in swinging swords, drawing bows, and craridng cata­ pults. So much .more power could be imparted to miesiles in this way that in time the gun swept all competition. from other weapons before it. The .fa other weapons that remai::ted in use, lik• the torpedo and the bayonet, were mere occasio~l awdliaries. Only in modem times have the airplane bomb and the rocket begun to make serious inroads on the position of the gun &B ~ weapon.

1-5. The '!rllrship. Although we are concenl9d here with weapons as distinct from weapon carriers like ships, tanka, and airplanes, the development of the warship is wurth l:oci<:ing into briefly. In anci&nt times a ~rship liaS essentially an over grO'IItl rowboat with a beak at the bow. It fought other rowboats by' ramming and boarding. In earlier times, as at tho celebrated <tle of Salamis in 480 B.c., .a warship liaS about 75 feet long and 15 feet wide, with about 90 oars !lrranged in three l:snks on each side, one rower to an oar. Later, as ships grew larger, oars were arrangsd in one or two banks, · but the number of men per oar was_.increased .to as many as ten. After the time of Alexander tb.e Great ships reachetl a length of 200 feet and a weigl1t of several hundred tons, and some mounted catapults. Still, these galleys were by modem standards impossibly fliasy and unseaworthy affairs. A ship squarely rammed might disintegrate into a tangle of floating boards, and, since the oars required a low freeboard, a good gale eometimes sent a great nationt s whole fleet to the bottom. The Romans thus lost four fleets in the First Punic War.

After the Roman Empire beca11.e su.pre111e in the Jlediterranean in the 1st cer1tury B.C., war­ ships declined in size because there was nobody for the Romans to usa l.&rge ships against, and small ships were adeqll!lte for pirate control. For nearly 2,000 years the design of' warships changed but little in Europe and the Mediterranean; Byzantine dromons, Viking longships, and lll8dieval Venetian galleys were all essentially classical warships with a few improvements. The gun brought about a revolution in warship des;gn, psrtly because the galley was so vulnerable to gllllfire, partly because the combination of guns and rowers baffled the designers. Firat the Venetians tried putting a raw fixed Cll,nnon in a fo:nrard deckhouse. However, the gun$ Wl'onght such havoc among hostile rowers that the admirals cl.D.mored for more guns.

For the &ttle of Lepanto in 1571, therefore, the Ven.,tians had prepared eight galleasses, oversized galleys with an upper deck wo-.mting many guns. !n this battle the Chriatian lledi­ terram~an powers brci<:e the Turkish rule of the sea-no s!llll.ll feat, since at that ti111e the Turks wars the world1 s leading milltary pa~rer, being ahead of Europe in such departments as musketry. The guns made the galleasses so heavy that their rowers ware ba!"ely able to move thGIII·. Hence they 1i8re towed into position ahead of the Christian line, and when the Turldsb galleys advanced, the gunfire of the galleasses did g1•ee.t execution among them.

Still, the galleass was not the answer because of its illlliiObility. Some years previously, however, Veniee had build a large heaTily-armed eailing-l!lhip1 the Graat Galleon o.t' Venic?, an enlarged T~raion of the sailing gunboat called a "ne!" that had lately come l.nto use. This ship had gone with a Venetian squadron to demonstrate ott the Turkish-held harbor of Preveza in Greece, and the Turks had coms out and chased the Christians away-11 but the Galleon, iiJIII!Obi,;, .. lissd by a sudden failure of the wind. The Turks rushed upon the Galleon, but their gunfire failed to penetrate the hi~, thick sides of the ship. Those that rammed har stove in their awn bora ani sark, while the rest were elaughtered by the Galleon"s O&nnon. llhen the surviving Turk a drn off, the Christians returned and tawed the Ga1lesm home.

B-2~83 Such invulnerability- made such a ship worth while, even if it stood the ria of being occasionally" becalmed. Therefore in the y-ears following Lepanto ships of the new ty-pe 1n1re built in lsrge numbers; while galleys were retired. One reason for the English victory- over the Spanish Armada in 1588 was that the Spaniards, not having incorporated the revolution in naval warfare, persisted in trying to fight b.r rallllling-and-boarding tactics. As an aarl7 e:xample o! go~ernmental red tape, during this battle Lord Howard sent a messenger galloping from Dover nll the 11111.7 to the Tower of London to lleg the officials there for God's sake to send po~rder and snot--llhich they- refused to do because the request was not made out in proper form.

The new ty-pe of n&val warfare with gunnery sailing ships prevailed until the middle of the 19th century-, llhen the introduction of steam p01n1r, rifled cannon firing explosive shell, armor, and iron construction brought about an even more drastic revolution. Robert Fulton began it with his steam-po~rered catuaran Demologos, a gunboat armored with thick wooden bulkheads and driven by a paddlewheel in a well between the two hulls. Although this ~ip was not finished in time for the War of 1812, steam p01rer was graqually- applied to ships of all kinds, though sails were not finally ousted from warships until towards the end of the century-.

Armor was the next improvement. In the Crimean War (1853) some armored floating batteries were tried out, and in 1859 the British and French navies laid down armored frigates. A few years later the battle of the llonitor and Virgi!Ca (ex-llarrimac) showed how import..ant the n development would be; neither of these strange new stdps could seriously- hurt the other, though either could easily destroy- any other !hip in the h.cstile navy.

The development of neww~pons is an interacting process, since each new ·weapon incites people to try to develop some mRans of neutralizing it; hence the explosive shell begat iron ship-construction and armor, armor begat armor-piercing shells; torpedoes begat underwater compartmentation of lsrge ships; and so on. That is why wo . hear so mch about the conflict between the offense and defense. Each offensive arm stimulates the develoPIIJ!!nt of a defttnse against it, and vice versa.

However, the tel'lll8 "offense" and "defense" are elastic. Strictly- speaking "defense" refers to tactics that involve waiting for the eneii\Y to attack, or to mater.lal things like armor and fortifications that cannot themselves invade or vanquish the eneii\Y. But since unprovcked aggression has long been considered immoral among civilized peoples, nations tend to apply- the term "defense" to their mm military policies, tactics, and weapons for its propaganda value. For instance, during the several disarmament conferences between the two World Wars, each nation referred to the military means 'ftberein it excelled as "deftmsive," anr;i to those it feared in the hands of others as "offensive." The submarine ns considered defensive by France (which had a large su't:marine fleet) and offensive b.r Great Britain (which had a lsrge merchant-marine vulner­ able to sul::IDari.ne attack). During the great 19th centlU']' revolution in warship construction, the worldt s navaJ con­ structors had a hard time incorporating all these changes at once. As a result they built macy woird craft, like the USS Union of the 1840ts, with horizC?ntal paddlewheels revolving in wells in the ship's sides and a speed of three knots in smooth water. When the u. s. llavy Department wanted shallow-draft armored monitors for the western rivera during the Civil War, and E.."'icsson, llho h.ad built the original Monitor, said it could not be done, Stb:ers, a Nuy Department engineer, gual'anteed to do it if given an ind3pendent otfice. He 11as told to build twenty-. Unfortunately- one of his people erred in calculating weights, with the result that when the first ship, tb.e 9l!l!!2, was launched, she immediately sank with a gurgle to 1he bottom of the East River.

If the introduction of rifled Cll'lllOn and explos:l.ve shell increased the pclll'er of guns against ships, the advent of armor likewhe made more po~rerful guns necessary. Dahlgrent 11 experiments to find the distribution of gas-pressures inside a gun made possible greater charges, which meant longer guns, and this in tum led to a switch to breech-loading, since muzzle-loaders had to b6 hauled inboard to be loaded, and that is not practical witb. a gun 25 or :30 feet long. The adoption of cylindrical projectiles meant heavier projectiles in proportion to the bore of the gun. Evt!n after the cylindrical shell had been adopted, 'the solid rounds."lot 'W&.s retained for a while for annor-piercing, Since it. could be given a higher lllllUle-veloci w with the II&XiJmlm safe charge and hence greater energy despite its lesser weight.

4 Another curious result of this revolution ns the reintroduction of r&liJI'ling as in th ~ &ye of galleys. The Virginia wrought havoc with her ram on her first sortie, and that method was used to advantage several other times during the Civil War. Lilcewise in the Fettle of Lissa in 1866, an Austrian battleship sank an Italian battlelilip in this IIIB.nner. As a result, for sevenol decades nearly all large warlilips were built with ram bows projecting fornrd below the water­ line. The 7,000-ton ironclad Dunderberg, begun far the u. s. Navy during the Cinl War, embCJ!tl.ed an extreme form 'Of the ram bow. After this 11ar, when Congress let the Navy go practically out of existence, the Dunderbsrg was sold to France and renamed the RochambeJu. As she praYed V8rf' successful, the French loll: copied her tremendous snout. However, by" World War II guns had so improved that ships would sink one another by gunfire loll?; before they got close enough to ram, except on rare occasions as when the Britil!h flotilla-leader Brdce aalic a Genan destrorer at night in the Channel in this way. Ralllllling is still a good method of attaclcing suC.rinea. As late as 1943 the u. s. Navy strengthened the bows of its destroyer escorts so that th.,- could ram subm.rines without crippling themselves in the act.

'lhe change to iron (and then steel) construction after the Civil War •de poesible IIIUCh larger warships of finer linea, since a wooden ship of over 6,000 tons was apt to break liP in rough weather. In general, the efficiency of ships increases with sise. B.r increasing the tonnage of a ahip 25% one can, roughly speaking, increase its &riBII8nt about 50%, keeping speed, thickness of anaor, and other qualities the same. Hence there ns everT inducement to build larger ships--a process that has cul.::Jinated in the 6o,OOO-ton Japanese battleebips of World War II and the projected u. S. aircraft carrier of an even larger size.

1-6. The mechaniytion of warfare. Ever since the rise of civilization, •n haTe tried to devise an effective fighting vehicle that would comblne mobilit7, pxotection and fire-ponr. Ths or-chariots of the ancient AssYrians and Egyptians were not a veey successtuJ. effort in this direction because the horses nre vulnerable and the vehicles were confined to •ooth ground. EleJi!ants, though tried out for IIIB.ny centuries, made poor tanks because of their sense of self­ preservation. Although like chariots they could 801118tius frighten the en91117 into running away, experienced soldiers could usually stampede them back through their awn 81'11;1 b;r noise and llissiles. Ind1.an ele];ilants beat African ele];ilants at Ra];ilia (217 B.C.) •iDly because there were more o! them.

Some ot the a-.r l;y siege-engines on wheels, pu&hed by manpotrer, suggest modem armored vehicles, though their mobility was much leas-one siege-tower moved a quarter of a llile in two months. The Assyrians had invented the movable siege-tower or helepolis, with a battering-ram on the lower storey and a place for archers above. The art reaclBd its apex with Demetrio. Poliorketes, one of the successors of Alexander the Great. In besieging Rhodes in .305 B.c., Demetrio& tuild a nine-storey helepolis 50 teet square at the base and 100 tee-t h1&h, armored with iron plates. It had catapults shooting stones and javelins through porta provided with abutters on eacn storey. There nre ccmpe.nionways inside for up and down traffic, wat.er-tar*s on each storey for putting out fires·, and eight castor-monnted -.heels for •neuvering. The contraption was pushed by" 3,400 of Demetrios' s strongest soldiers. When it approached the wall of Rhodes, the Jlhodians knoclced ott so- cf the a.l'llor-plate with stones from catapults and threw incendiarf' bombs into the gaps, whereupon the besiegers pulled the tower back and put out the fires. When they had made repairs they atartfd forward. again-but ~is t:llle the crafty Rhodians had turned the seqrs of their t011n into a field in front o! the helepolis, making a bog in ~ich the tower got hopelesaly studc.

DeiiiiStrios also built some other rllllarkable devices during thi.e dege, including batterinc­ rams in wheeled sheds, and monitors made by" tasteni~ two to six Slips together and erecting a large catapult or a siege-tower on the resulting unit. When he final]J" reached an agrM~~~mt with the Rhodiana and sailed allaY, the Rhodians sold his aban~oned a:tgines and used 1he· mone;r to build the famous Coloasus of Rhodes.

During the later lti.ddle Ages the inventive Scots tried to solve the fighting-vehicle prob­ lem. Among othe .1." dni. cea, they expe ri.mentad. with battle-cars, two-store;r sheds on lllheels Yi th a couple of horses tor aotbe-power inside the first storey am a squad o! IIWiceteers shooting through loo];iloles &bore. None of thesa dances JrOVed tractical because ~ElY' depended upon muscle-power, and men or ani.als are too tullcy in proportion to their strength to coablne the necesaa:ry protection and 110bUi tT.

With the application of the steam-engine to transportation in the early 191;b centuq the id• of amored fighting Tlhiclea as revind. An a:nnored train was suggested as earl.7 as 1826 and used in a siege of Vienna in 184S. Armored trains are still Ufed oecaeionl~, though the;r

s B-2~83 are confined to a vulnerable track. The first an to mount a gun on a motor-vehicle was lofajor n..rtdson of the Illinoia 11ational Guard, llho in 1900 combined a machine-gun with a light Dlll7e& horseless carriage.

By the outbreak of World War I several European nations had armored cars, which alc:iraistu;d gallantl7 in the OP«lilJg weeks ot 1he war. After the front becaD too cut up by trenches for cars to be of use there, the Britil!lb a:nnored cars were sent to the deserts ot North Africa arxi the Kiddle East, where they waved useful. Still, l1.ke the armored train, the armored car did not solve the problan, b«i.ng confined to roads or to flat treeless terrain. The problem 11as finally solved by combining guns and armor with the newly invented caterpillar tract

In a sense, the mechanization ot land a:nnies represents a sort of bola ted catching-up 111. th the 1118thods that have al11ays been used at aea. Jlat'IY ot the features of' modern llilitary vehicles and airplanes were worked out long before on ships; for instance, mounting guns in re"9ttlving turrets on the centerline. One might say that sea warfare has always been mechanized, in the sense of being carried on in self'-propelled,self'-sufficient fighti~ vehicles. That fact does not mean that naval JDen are mare intelligent' than others, but that land and air vehicles presented harder problems. Hence one effect of the expansion of air warfare aDd the mechanization of land warfare has been to make warfare in the three ele~~~ents more and 1110re alike.

1-7. WeaPOna and societ¥. Ever since it arose in the Dark Ages, our Western culture has differ­ ed from others in its tendS'lcy towards rapid technical development, so that non-Western societies like the Russian a!Xi the Japanese han had to copy Western 1111thods in order to hold their own against Western pressure. Since invention is a self-regenerative process, it is likely to go on, faster and faster, until lillited by the nhaustion ot natural resources or some other factOr that cannot now be fore~.

The development of weapons and the state of society affect one 11nothar, Some years _ago Silas McKinley, a history wofessor, claimtd to have found a regular correlation-democratic govermaent is stable and succesaful 11hen the furxiamental military unit is a oitizen soldier armed with a cheap, easily-used wupon. He cited the democratization of Greece when improvements in metallurgy mde arms and armor a-yailable to the co-on people, and the French and American revolutions when the cheap fiintlock musket was the universal ara. KcKinley th~bt that demi>­ cracy would be in danger whenever the fundame~al llilitazy unit was a highly trained profession­ al soldier, ar one Uling a coaplicated and expensive weapon. It he is correct, his principle directly affects the people of the tnited States, because soldiers today use the aost complicated and expensive weapons ever seen. ·

1-8. The deyel,oJPnt of W!fP2na._ The evolution o! weapons, like that ot other devices, is a nlf'-acceleratir:Jg process. Henc'8 it is sefe ' to say that weapons 'll'ill bec011e more and more devastati~, at least in the absence of any effective world government or other internatioMl control to stop the process. And no such super-state seems likely as long as the world is or­ ganized into a lllll.titude of sovereign nations grouped into hostile blocs.

However, it is easier to admit that weapons will change than.to foresee the Mture of the changes. For more than half a centU17, ever since the t:ece of modern technical change us appreciated, predictions of future weapons and methods of warfare have been favorite theme of imaginative writers. So• years before submarines bec8llle practical, Jules Verne sent one of' his heroes voyaging the Seven Seas in one, and Colonel Swinton and H. G. Wells both wrote stories predictin~~: the talic. But for f!IVery cc:xrrect prediction there have been many absurdly wrong ones. About halt a century ago Kipling predicted translatlantic air-mail service in his story With the Night Jlail; while his general prediction has been realized, he llllde the mistake of going into technical details, nearly all of which have proved wrong. Before World War I many speculated as to the farm it would take; almost nobody foresaw the trench-11ar!are stalemate except a Polish banker, I. S. Bloch.

Two sources of error in making predictions seea to be what we nay call the Galahad fallacy and the ~Tid-and-Goliath fallacy. The Galahad fallacy is the idea that "IIY strength is as the strength of ten because rq heart is pure." Unf'ortuMtely history does not support any such idea. Some of the most bloodthirsty tyrants have also been ·the ablest and most successful

B-2~63 6 military leaders. "nle David-wnd-Gollath fallacy is the belle! that weakness has solll8 J117Stic advantage over strength, and S~Sllness over bigness. This eent~nt leads people to praiee Slllall military units like the airplane and the torpedo-l?artillery as 11 clUJUT" or "useless." Solleti.Ma, true, a 811811 device will put a big one out of use; but that 1a not always true.

The develop!lllnt o.t -pons 1a b.r no means .tree o.t limit~tions. For one thing, the first steps in the development o! a new -poo are likely to be slOW' and f\labling. The evolution of

weapons is also retarded1 not only by the conservatilllll o! military men (or, to put it more fairly, of men ir1 general) but also by the .fact that .tor every good suggestion there are any impractical or absurd ones, and not even the wisest can always tell llhich is llhich at tirat sight. And even when :m idea is sourrl, years of experiJEnt may be needed to reduce it to wortcing order.

lloreover, the developaent of a new weapon does not at once put all the old ones out o! use. One of the moat atrik~ .features of Jdlltary history is the persistence of old -pon_s alongside the new ones. In .fact it is hard to think o! any -pon that has ever gone eo!!pletel:r out of use .. once it was well established. Thus World War II, with its guided Jdssilea and atom bombs, also saw the use of the "obsolete" sword, spear, longbOW', crossbOW', horae-caTal:ry, Nillng ship, and war-ele}ilantt

•

., Chapter 2

EXPLOSIVES

2-l· The origin of explosives. The Chinese discovered gunpowder about the year 1200 or earlier. Aside from a fn experiments with bCIIIbs and rockets, they used it mainly for firecrackers. Knowledge of gunpowder spread ·to Europe in the 13th century, and in the early 14th century the gun, along wi1h rockets, lllinea, and other militar,y applications, came into use. To be a gunner at that tiae was, if anything, more dangerous than to be shot at by a gunner, si""ee the gunner had to mix his powder himself, without knowing quite what he was doing.

For over six certturies after the Chinese discovecy that a mi..xture of carbon, saltpetre, and sul);hur would explode, gunpoll'der was the only known explosive. As an explosive, however,. it left much to be desired: it was 8111

Chemists illmediatel.:r began e:xplori~ the new field of nitrate explosives. They f'ourxl. that by treating various slbst.anees with nitric acid and other powerful reagents they- cculd nitrate these substances, that is, add to each molecule of the substance one or more nitro (N~) or nitrate (N~) radicals ltlich would come adril't with great violence under certain circumstances. Next year, for instance, Sobrero discovered nitroglycerine, made by nitrating .gl.7cerine, an oil7 liquid that gave, weight for weight, an explosion about eigll ;; times as powerful as that of gunpowdar.

Nitroglycerine proved too unstable for a practical explosive; that is, it went off when it was not supposed to. Alfred Nobel, the Swedieh chem:l.st·who founded the Nobel Prizes, in 1863 discovered how to use nitroglycerine b;y soaking it up in fuller's earth. This trM l;ment, while it impaired the explosive power of the nitroglycerine ver,y little, made it so stable that it had to be set off with a mercury fulminate cap. Thence Nobel went on to invent the even aore powerful blasting gelatine b;y absorbing nitroglycerine in nitrocellulose.

Dynamite proved of little mill tacy use, since it detom.ted too rapidly for a propellant. Whereas a gmpowder explosion is merely a rapid burning, the detonation of the new nii:.rate explosives was the. almost instantaneous breakdown of the explosive into gaseous compounds, tranmtted from •olscule to m lecule b;y shock. Henc~ such an explo~ve, used as a prop9llant, burst the breech of the gun because the projectile could not move fast enough to relieve the pressure in the powder chamber. Neither did dynamite lll!lke a good shell-filling, since a drop of nitroglycerine sometimes accumulated at some point in the charge and exploded from the shock of firing. The u. s. Navy ome tried a compressed-air cannon that would give a dynamite-shell the eaa:r acceleration required. To that end ·it built the Vesuvius, a handsomo little 252-foot gunboat that locked more like a yacht. ~e carried three fixed pnel.IIB tic g\Uls sticking up out of the deck forward, throwing projectiles resembli~ modern airplane bombs. During the Spanim­ .A.merican War the Vesuvius invaded Santiago Harbor nightly during the blockade of that pert and fired her weapons. The guns shrieked and the projectiles went of! with terril'ic bangs, matter­ ing the already- uncertain narves of the Spaniards but doing little material harm.

Since then dynamite has been restricted to the peaceful uses of blastirig and mining, while other nitrate explosives have ousted gunpowder from nearly all military uses. For a propellant, 11 111110keless powder" (invented b;y Schultze in 1865) is used both in small al'll\s and cannon. It consists mainly of nitrocellulose mixed with other substances to retard deteriora­ tion and slow down its rate of explo~D:on, and its various fo:nns are known b;y such names • 3 "cordite" and. "ballistite". Its big advantage is that it makes much less sm

8 naval actions are now fought at night, and bright flashes not only give away one's awn position but temporarily blind one' s own people.

2-2. Modern explosives. The nitrate explosives include many compounds more powerful than nitrocellulose or nitroglycerine, but not necessarily suitable !or general military use. A military explosive l!hould be not too expensive, should not deteriorate rapidly, and should not be too sensitive for the purpose for which it is intended. Tetryl (tetranitromethylaniline) is extremely pOlferful, but too sensitive for anything but percussion caps and boosters. TNT or trinitrotoluene (made by nitrating the coal tar product toluol) is the most widely used all­ around military explosive, since it is both porrerful and so stable that it is almost impossible to set it off except by a tetryl or a mercury-fulminate detonator. For armor-piercing shells, however, TNT is not quite stable enough; it may go off from concussion before the shell has passed through the armor. Therefore the even more stable ammonium picrate is used in such shells.

During World War II another explosive, RDX (made by nitrating hexamine) came into use; too sensitive to be used pure, it was mixed "'l'ith TNT, aluminum powder, and ax to make the powerful explosive "torpex" now used in mines and torpedoes. A mixture of charcoal powder and liquid o:xygen has been used for blasting in E;U'ope since before World War I, and 'lfaS tried out in airplane bombs in the &'panish Civil War. It is a fairly successful explosive, having the advantage that in case of a misfire the oxygen 'Ifill evaporate in half an hour or so, leaving a harmless mass of carbon. On the other hand it has to be mixed shortly before use, and undae delay will spoil the mixture, so that it seems unlikely to replace nitrate explosives in regular military operations.

2-3. Fissionable materials. Before the perfection of the atomic bomb, men had knol!Il for several decades that enormous energies were imprisoned in the atom, and had speculated about releasing these energies. H. G. Tiells, in fact, used atomic bombs in a novel published before World Vfar I, though these bombs were practically harmless com~red to the real thing. Farly in this century physicists figured out that matter and energy were to some extent interchangeable, and Einstein calculated the amount of energy that would be released by the destruction of a given quantity of matter. ·

In 1938, just before ~7orld War II, the German physicists Hahn and Stassmann announced that in bombarding uranium with neutrons they had produced barium. In Denmark Dr. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch inferred from this fact that the neutron bombardment had caused some uranium atoms to split into two more or less equal parts. When ~he celebrated Dani91 physicist Niels Boor reported this fission to a scientific meeting in America, physi<:ists amid much excitement confirmed t.l-J.e eJq:eriuent and added further information.

It transpired that the split occurred, not in the common form of uranium, with an atomic weight of 238, but in the isotope U-235, which occurs mixed with the common form in the propor­ tion of one part in 140. However, llhen an atom of U-235 splits under neutron bombardment, it gives off not only two _or more at.oms of lighter elements, together with penetrating radiations of the X-ray type, but also between one and three neutrons. Hence, if enough U-235 could be concentrated together, eadl explosion would cause (on the average) more than one more atomic fission in the neighborhood, so that the process would proceed through more and more genera­ tions until· the material was used up or the release of energy blsw the mass apart--in other words, a chain reaction.

Since uranium is naturally radioactive, it would not be necessary to bombard the mass "'l'ith neutrons from the outside; the natural radioactivity of the element would start the reac­ I!BSS l tion once a "critical mass" had been brought together. Moreover, some of the of the original U-235 would be converted into energy in the proceas, so that the reaction would release something like 10,000 to 20,000 tiues the energy released by the explosion of a similar weight of TNT. Bringing the mass together slowly would cause a low-order explosion that would scatter the material before the chain reaction got more 1han started. Therefore, a mechani11111 was needed to assemble the critical mass at explosion speeds. The U. s. armed forces showed immediate interest in the possibilities of the new dis­ covery, so that in the sullllD3r of 1939 President Roosevelt appointed an Advisory Committee on Uranium to oversee further investigations. ~ the end of 1941 these and other groups of scien­ tists had determined that,. theoretically at any rate, an atomic bomb would work.. With the entry of the United States into the war, the u. S. Government at once undertook: a large program of atomic bomb· development. A similar program had been begun in Great Britain, but in view of the greater resources available in the United States, the ,British merged their effort with that of this country.

9 Research disclosed that the operation of a uranium pile produced a new eleoent, neptunium, llhich by radioactive disintegratioo. changed into another, plutonilllll, having chain-reactive properties similar to those of U-235. Since the separation of U-235 from ordir:ary uranium 'by gaseous diffusion, separation by electromagnetic mans, and production of plutonium all showed promise, all three methods of obtainil'l: fissionable .mterials were pursued vigorously to the end of the war. The bombs were finallY manufactured between 1942 and 1945 by a special section of the lJ •. S. Amy Corps of Er¢neers, provided with the deliberately misleading tBme of "lfan­ hattan Engineer District" and calling its program "Development of Substitute Materials." Finally, the dropping of tWo bombs on Japan in August, 1945, brcke the deadlock in the Japanese cabinet over peace terms and paved the way to the surrender of Japan. During this great project, Amricana in the know hE.d worried lest Germany complete an atomic bomb first. After the war it transpirt:ld, hOifever, that the Germans had lagged far behind in atomic work. The advent of the Hitler government had caused some of Germny's leading physicists (including Dr. J&eitner) to flee the country, and those remaining were }1_andicapped and discouraged by the conviction of the Nazi leaders, in accordance with their pseudo-scientific theories, t!hat j;hysics was a "Jewish science" unworthy of l>iordic Aryans.

When an atomic bomb is detonated by bringing the components parts of the IIBSS of fissi.

The shock-wave of the explosion, llhile not as sharp as that of a detonant like TNT, is strong enough to knock down nearlY all light structures within a mile or more of the site. Inflammable materials close to the explosion may be set afire by heat-radiation from the cloud. Persons quite close to the explosion are not killed by the shock wave, though they IIIBY be knocked down; on the other hand enormous numbers may be killed by the fall o~ houses in the resulting conflagration. Those llho escape these fates are injured both by the ultra­ violet radiations from the cloud, llhich cause a violent sunburn, and by the higher-frequency radiations of the X-ray and gaDIII8-ray type. The latter cause the victims, if they do not die within a few hours, to linger on with strange sears, growths, and maladies. .Material ob­ jects near the explosion are made so radioactive as to be unapproachable for days or eTen year!!, before their radioactivity declines to a sat'e level.

News or the atomic e;;cplosions cres.ted a world-wide sensation. Thinking pt~rsons eTery­ where recognized that tha n~ weapoo. had enormously increased the destructiveness of warfare and the advantage of surprise attacks. 'l'he success of the atomic project also brought into the reala of poesi.bility the use o! fissionable ll!8tarials to generate electric power in competition with coal and other existing power-sources. Some specl!l.ated about the possibility of dusting areas of hostile countries with niiioactive dust, composed of the by-products of uraniUIIl-pile operation, · though that method presents difficulties in the way of shielding the airple.ne crew from the radiations of their cargo.

Efforts to eoutrol the use of fissionable mterials and atomic weapons since World War II by interra tional agreement have been blocked by profound differences between the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and its satellite nations on Ute one ·hand, and by the other st.atea represented in the United Nations on the other. lleanwhile the United States has continued to manufacture atomic bombs. We believe that the u.s;s.R. is trying .to make such bombs, and that they are undoubtedly behirxl the United States in this developaBnt. At aey rate, it seems quite certain that, in the event of another war, the atomic bomb will not only be used, but also will be the most important sipgle 1n1apoo..

; B-2~83 10 Chapter 3 FUZES

3-1. Evolution of fuzes. Fuzes go back to the earliest use of explosives, · since to set off a mine, firecracker, or similar static charge the engineer must have some means of getting out of the way before the charge explodes, or else of setting it off from a distance. The early fuZes consisted of a tube of soft metal or fabric filled with gunpolfder that 110uld burn down gradually until the flame reached the main charge.

When bombs with fuzes were first perfected, they were first thrown into besieged places by catapults, and later shot frnm mortars. About 16oo it was the practice to put a spherical bomb with a tubular sheet-iron fuze into a mortar with a propelling charge, light the bomb-fuze with one hand, and then touch off the mortar with the other, throwing the bomb into the enemy position just in time for it to go off as it hit.

However, wind, weather, and the general unreliability of early gunpowder Jlllde this a very ticklish operation. The concussion of the gun might detonate the bomb before it left the mortar; or the bomb fuze might go out or come adrift in flight; or the propelling charge might misfire, leavif€ the bomb-fuze sputtering away and the gunner leaping llllldly for cover. Still, the system changed little for over two centuries; the "bombs bursting in air" of the ~ S"oangled Banner refers to mortar-bombs of this kind used at the siege of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.

Explosin projectiles for regular guns did not become Practical U.'1til well into the 19th century, when Captain (later General) Henri Josern Pai:mns developed a- practical explosive shell. ln a couple of minor European wars around the middle of the century, these shells were used with devastating effect. on wooden :!hips, blowing them to splinters and setting the remains on fire. Hence this development hastened the switch to iron ship construction.

The 19th century artillery revolution included the use of the mercUIY-fulminate percussion cap to start the fuze burning~ along with rifling, and the use of a cylindrical projectile with a nose tapered to a rounded point, called a "cylindro-conidal" projectile. All these changes were in progress during the Ame.rican Civil War and the decade following, so that during this period these improveme'rrts were used in all combinations with the older methods: spherical explosive shell, cyllndro-conidal solid shot, and so on.

Fuzes 11ere soon developed in two typesi time fuzes and contact fuzes. In a tillie fuze the discharge of the gun started the fuze burning; either because the flame o£ the propellant had direct access to the fuze, or because the concussion set off a fulminate cap llhicb in turn

ignited the fuze. In a contact(percussion or concussion) fuze, on the other hand1 the cap was detonated by the shell's striking the target and set off the bursting charge immediately. The term "shot and shell" encountered in the literature of the lSth and 19th centU!'ies refers to the fact that bo1h s:>lid projectiles ("shot") and explodi~ projectiles (called "shell" because of their hollowness)· were then in use.

In using time fuzes, 'the gunner adjustedthe time of burni~ to the distance of the tar- get by cutting the fuze with an instrument to the proper length, screwing the fuze into the shell, and firing; or else the shells and fuzes were furnished alreqdy assembled, the fuzes being cut for several times of burning (e.g., 3 and 5 seconds) Which were marked on the shell. Such pre-assembled fuzes could be re-set for shorter periods by taking them out of the shell and tinkering with them, but this was not practical in a battle. As a result, 19th centure artillery­ men were often rendered helpless by having no shells llhose fuzF>s had been cut to the distances at which the ene~ey happened to be.

By the Franco-Prussian War (lSI'J-1871) solid shot had practically disappeared from land warfare, though it lingered on at sea for some years for .armor-piercing purposes. In the latter part of the century solid annor-piercing :!bot us replaced by armor-piercing explosive shell with a delayed action percussion fuze-that is, a fuze set off by the impact of arrival, lighting an extremely short, fast-bumi~ powder train that would explode the shell a fraction of a second after it had passed through th~ armor-plate into the ship's interior. At the same time the time fuzes were 1111.de adjustible on the spot as they· still are. In these fuzes the powder train, instead of following a straight path down the axis of the ehell from the percussion cap to the 118in charge (or to a booster-charge that sets off the 118in charge) pursued a roundabout course about the nose of the shell, running for some distance

B-2~63 11 around it circumferentially. The fuze was equipped with a rotatable section, or fuze ring, 111arked off with numbers like the knob of a combi.mtion safe, so that by rotating this -ring the gunner could set the fuze to be ignited at any desired point, a ncl therefore- to burn, within limits, for any desired time.

Thereafter fuzes changed but little donn to World War I. They were made increasingly complicated by the addition of safety devices to prevent the fuze from going off if the shell were accidentally dropped or jarred, and from bursting in the gun-barrel or just after leaving it as a result of malfunctioning of the fuze.

Between the two World Wars the stringent requirements of anti-aircraft fire led to the development of mechanical fuzes to replace the less exact p01rder train type. This involved very difficult problems, since, if it is hard to design a combustion fuze that will worlc after being shot from a gun, it is that much harder to make a piece of clockwork do so. Vodern mechar~cal fuzes use the several forces that act upon shells -to arm the fuze (that is, get it ready to set off the shell), operate the mechanism, and finally detonate the shell. These forces include the setback (the acceleration in the gun barrel) f the centrifugal force of tl}e shell~s spin, and the creep (deceleration due to air resistance).

Yodern shells usually combine time fuzes with contact fuzes, in case the shell hits the target before the time fuze has operated. Furthermore, anti-Rircraft shells are made self­ destructive; that is, they are ~quipped with a fuze to detonate the shell a certain time after firing regardless of whether any other fuze has operated, to avoid dropping the shell among one's own people. Slells for small-caliber anti-aircrnft guns (37 millimeter and the like) have extra sensitive contact fuzes to detonate them when they strike the thin fabric or sheet metal of an airplane, which ordinary shells would pass through without noticing.

During World War II the Gei'!!Bns specialized in delayed action bombs, which prohibited the use of the area where the qomb fell until it had been disarmed by a bomb-disposal squad, some­ times called an ensign disposal squad or the equivalent by those assigned to that nerve-wracking work. The Germans also provided their bombs with trick fuzes to make them explode while being disarmed. An example of this was a bomb with a photoelectric-cell trigger to set it off when the bomb was opell:ld and light penetrated its interior. The secret of the German magnetic mine was discovered by a British bomb-dlsposal squad which disassembled one found awash at low tide along the shore. The men started bringing the mine to shore with non-magnetic tools. At each step they told the watchers on the shore what they were doing and what they intended to -do next. Thus, if they were blCTtrn up there would at least be a clue as to what they had done wrong and another crew would profit by the knowledge. H01rever, they survived the operation and were decorated for their work.

3-2. The proximity fuze. The most important development in recent fuzes was the proximity or VT fuze--a developmen·t as significant in that field as the introduction of the repulsion principle in aeronautiCs or of uranium products in explosives. Prior to World War II, although mechanical fuzes and optical range-finding instruments were developed to a high degree of perfec­ tion, ti1e ever-increasing speed and ruggedness of airplanes kept them one lap ahead of anti­ aircraft fire, so that in 1940 it was estimated that 2,500 rounds of anti-aircraft fire weJ'9 needed to bring down one airplane. Clockwork fuzes might explode anywhere within 500 feet of the point where they were supposed to, and, since a burst within 50 or 100 feet was needed for a kill, the shells were not very effective.

To improve accuracy of fire, the fuze-s.etter was added to the other instruments of an anti-aircraft fire control set. This was a device with an orifice into which the gunner thrust the nose of the shell before feeding it to the gun. In the fuze-setter, steel fingers turned the fuze ring to the setting that would explode the shell at the point where, the instruments predicted, the airplane would be when the shell arrived. Again, however, this method involved a de~ of several seconds between the setting of the fuze and the bursting of the shell, duri~ which time a fast airplane would have traveled a quarter of a mile or more and might not be where the instruments had predicted. To be sure of making a hit, therefore, anti-aircraft gunners early in World War II had to till the Ei

Inventors had tinkered with the problem for years without solving it. Some i)roposed a fuze with a photoelectric eye to "see" the target; others an acoustic device to "hear" it. None woiiced-, hOIIfever. For instance, the shell itself made enough noise in flight to drown out the sound of airplane motors in the vicinity. Of the several countries wori<:int on proxiJDity fuzes during World War II, ths United States was the only one both to solve the problem and to put the fuzes into actual use before the war ended.

B-2483 12 The American proxill'ity fuze, developed by the Cffice of Scientific Research and Develop­ men t , the National Defense f;.esearcl Council, the i3ureau of Ordn.~r Ordnance Department, ar:d other cooperating organizations, is a small radio br~dcastin t: set that ser,ds out a single hi gh--frequency radi o sic n;U and is

If it was hard·to develop a clockwork fuze that would stand the shock of firing, it ns ever so much more so to build a piece of radio apparatas that would survive the same treatment. The engineers had to resort to many ingenious dodges. For instance, the set was to be battery pmvered, and to keep the battery from deteriorating the electrolyte had to be kept separate from the plates until the set actually came into use after firing, Therefore, the fuze held the electrolyte in a glass ampule along the axis, while the battery plates consisted of radial ring-shaped shelves s-Irrounding the ampule. '.'lren the shell was fired the ampule liaS brdnln by .setback and the electrolyte spread itself out radially amongs.t the battery plates by centrifugal force. ·

After several years of large scale effort proximity fuzes were finally put into action in January, 1943, when the second salvo from the cruiser Helena's after 5-inch guP~ brought down a Japanese dive-bomber whose pilot had thought he was flying out of effective AA range. During the remaining year and a half of the war the VT fuze destroyed hundreds of Japanese airplanes attacking American ships, and stopped the V-1 attacks -,n London.

The VT fuze -was 11.lso employed or. land for exploding shells a few feet over the heads of enemy soldiers, much as shrapnel had beer: uaed in ~orld 'liar I but much more effectively. At the end of the war the fuze was also being applied to bombs, rockets, and mortar-projectiles, and if the war had continued longer it would have proved effective in these applications also,

The biggest single accomplishment of the vr fuze, hOI'Iever, was making the Ckinawa campaign of the u. S, Navy possible in the closing rronths of the war. Because of the fuze, a large American fleet was able to do what had been called impossible-stand close off a hostile shore in support of landing operations, for weeks at a stretch, within easy range of land-based hostile· aircraft. At that time the Japanese not only had qui~e a large n~ber of airplanes left, but were using the unexpectedly effective kamikaze ("divine wind") attack, suicidally diving thei_r bomb-laden aircraft i nto American ships. By this means they sank many destroyers and destroyer escorts, and seriously crippled several large aircraft carriers qy fires, despite the attacks of hundreds of fighter 'planes from carriers and the fire of hundreds of anti-aircraft guns. Had it not been for the proximity fuze, which enabled the guns to shoot down a large number of the kamikazes before they reached their targets, the rate of American losses might well have been so high as to make the campaign impossible.

13 B-2483 Chapter 4 ARTILLERY

4-1. EarlY capnon. During the Im'k Ages Europe forgot JIIOSt of the highly developed siegecraft of classical times and had to learn it all over again. The early-111edieval "castle" was merely a solidly roil t hous-e of stone and timber erected on a mound and surrounded by a wooden stock­ ade. Howev~, when military men reached Constantinople during the First Crusade in the 12th century and saw the ·magnificent fortifications there, on their return to the Yiest they imitated the walls and towers of old Byzantium in their own manor houses.

For about three centuries the new art of castle building gave the defensive s~ch an advantage that most medieval battles were not clashes of a~ored krights, but sieges. The besiegers tried to climb over the wall with ladders, to burrow under it, or to knock it dol!Il with catapult stones and battering-rams, while the besieged retaliated in kind. The siege usually ended llhen the besiegers ran out of food, or the enlistments of their peasant militia expired and the boys went home. Castles were rarely taken except by surprise or treactiery.

This deadlock (comr-e.rable 'IIi th the trench-warfare deadlock of World War I) was fir.all.y -broken by the development of cannon. Ac~arding to tradition, t 'le gun was invented by the Ge:rnan monk Berthed the Black in 1314. Some of.the early guns were strange contraptions indeed-­ ·bottle-shaped vessels to shoot feathered darts. Since nothing was knOII'n about the distribution of pressures inside gun barrels, some guns were made much thicker at the muzzle than at the breech with disastrous results. 'lhe term "barrel,u by the way, commemorates the fact that some early guns were built up of staves and hoops like a real l:arrel. The early gunsrni ths even experimented with breech-loaders, rut they did not persevere when tr:;J· found that breech­ leaders blew up even more often than muzzle-lcaders.

After a few decades of experiment, heavy guns todc two main forms: a long gun for direct fire, and a very short gun, called a mortar from its shape, for indirect fire with exploding bombs. Early mortar bombs consisted of a pair of hollow hemispheres fastened together with straps to enclose the bursting charge.

Muhammad II, the half-mad young genius who was Sultan of the Osmanli Turks, demonstrated tte effectiveness of cannon against medieval fortifications llhen he undertook to clean up the JVzantine Empire, then reduced to COnstantinople and a few outlying scraps of territory. In 1453 he appeared before Constantinople with 68 guns including a monster of JG-inch bore called "Sasilica," pulled by 6o oxen. At that time a cannon was hauled to the scene of operations on a cart, dumped off the cart, rolled on its side into position on the ground, and given the right elevation by wedging boards and stones under the muzzle end. The gunners ml..xed their powder on the spot, and collected boulders in the neighborhood which they chipped down to the right size for cannon balls.

Muhammad's artillery grafortification grew up, based upon a complex of ditches and 1011' ramparts, and culmim tir.g in the great star-s!:.aped fortresses of Louis XIV' s engineer Vauta.n, lilich in plan loci<: like one of those magnified pictures of a snowflake. Vauban used the science of projective geometry, which Descartes h?d just discovered and which the l''rench government tried for a llhile to keep a military secret, to calculate angles and slopes so that no dead spaces were left around the approaches in which attacksrs could huddle out of harm's way.

Guns were early applie~ to field and naval use. In the former capacity they were mere noisemakers until Gustavus Adolji'lus. of Sweden put them seriously to wori( in the Wars of Religion of the 17th century b,y standarJizing their size8 and improving their carriages. The cal·riage had two l:J.rge 11heels and a trail by which horses pulled the guns. This form of vehicle was to last with little change for three centuries. The gun itself had a pair of projecting l45s or trunnions which, fitting into a pair of bearings in the carriage, allO!fed the gun's elevation to be varied. Elevation was ::ontrolled first b,y wedges under the butt, later by a screw. Train was managed b,y hauling the trail right or left with ropes. Since there was no recoil mechanism, the gun bounded to the rear lihen discharged, sometimes squashing an umrary gunner. Then it had to be laboriously hauled back into position for the next round.

14 B-24 6 3 At •• guns were origi~~ally fixed; requiring the whole l!bi.p to be abled. They were mounted on carrlages with !our !lUll whnls !or hauling inboal'd to reload. A tackle or ropes lnd pulleys was developed for runni~ the gun in aDd oul; and hauling it sideways through the few degrees ~ train the port allowed.

The usual llhot was a solid iron ball, which, s:tnee it fitted the gun loosely pursued a wobbling course down the barrel, bouilcing !rom si.de to side and often leaving the ~uszle at an angle quite other then that intended. For close-range work, guns were sometimes "double-shotted"; that is, two balls were fired at ones. Pre-cast iron shot early replaced stone cannon balls, since a battle is no time to go locking for round stones ~ the right size !or cannon balls. Besides the exploding mortar bombs, gunners used other projectiles such as grape shot and case shot, essectially the application of the shotgun principles to cannon, and chain shot, a pair of cannon balls linked by a chain for carrying away the foe's rigging. Or a hard-pressed gunner might stuff his piece with scrap iron, crowbars, or anything else handy.

On land, the standard muzzle loe.ding smooth bore cannon on its two-wheeled carriage beea111e mare and more effective until in the Napoleonic campaigns, in which it was used in great masses, it became almost "the dominant arm. Then for seTeral decades it declined in importance as a result of the improvement of sDBll arms, which forced artillery to move back so far from the firing line, to avoid having the gunners picked off by rifle fire, that the guns ceased to be very effective. Then towards the end of the century the many improvements in .cannon that had taken place DBde artillezy essential again. At sea the effective ra~e of guns, and hence the distances at which naval combats occurred, irx:reased until boording and ramming actions al­ most ceased.

4-2. Modern artillery. The first hal! of the 19th century saw the red:1ction to practice of most of the ideas that go into making the modern artillezy piece-

Shrapnel, originally invented at the end of the 18th century by a Brl tish ~!icer of that name, was a shell pe.cked with lead balls around a small charge exploded by a time fuze. Its function was the same as that of the old grape !!hot and case shot, exx:ept that the cont~iner 1 instead of disintegrati~ as it left the gun1 remained intact until it almost reached the target, giving far greater range. Slrapnel 1111s used extensively in the Boer War and We; ·ld War I. At Gallipoli, a campaign with great possibilities r-uined by bungling, the British ba,tleship Queen Elizabeth fired enormous 15-inch shrapnel shells, unfortunately hitting men of her own side and breaking up an illlpcrt.ant attack. Although shrapnel was important enough in World War I to bring the steel helmet back into use after an absence !roa the battlefield of two and a half centuries, it played little plrt in World War n, high-explosive shell having become more effective.

The use of fi:xed !lllllJU!lition (propellant arrl projectile in:::orpcrated in a single cartridge) was extended from SIIBll arms to cannon, first, in the smallest calibers, thus allaring the French 75-mill.illleter field gun, the best all around cannon of World War I, to be fired almost as fast as a bolt action rifle. Sin:::e then this practice has 'l!leen exteooed to largsr and larger cali­ bers, especially as a result of the need for high rates of fire against airplanes, and there is no telling where it will end.

4-3. Nayal g111s. If by "gun,. is meant merely the tube, breech block, arrl firing 118chani!!JII, ·there is little difference between land guns and naval guns. In !act the same guns with differ­ ·ent mountings are someti.ms adapted to both uses. The differences lie in the mounting, and the metho:ls of loading and ailling. Since in a mobile lam gun weight is all-important, an artillery unit consists of little more 1:han the gun proper, a carriage, and ·a base or standard on which the gun can be quickly set up. Ammunition is carried in separate vehicles arrl loaded into the gun largely by man-power. Special fire control devices such as radar and range keepers are also separate. The shields with whidl field guns were once equipped to protect the crew frOIIl infantry fire have now largely been ablndoned, plrtly to save weight, partly because modern

B-2~ 83 15 cannon usually fire from out. of sight of infant:ry, and PJ.rtly because a modern field gw must be able to shoot in almost any direction at tanks and airplanes on a few seconds' notice. On the other hand a gun mounted pennanently either on land or on a ship can afford a much greater mass of accessories to speed up its fire, DB.ke its aim more accurate, and protect its crew.

Ericsson embodied the main features of the modern naval gw mounti~, the revolving armored gw turret and the parer-driven ammunition hoist, in his original Monitor. Although a few ships after the Monitor were built with the old broadside gun arra~ement, like the USS New Ironsides, an ironclad frigate that saw more action than any other Civil War ship, the new turret system was soon generally adopted for the main guns of large 5lips. For a time the .Briti51 experimented with a "~rbette" 110\lllt.i.ng, in which the guns peeped aver the top of. a fixed circular armor-plate wall. A light horizontal gun shield revolved with the guns. Soon however they ret:U.ned to the turret, wherein the whole structure, guns and all, revolves together. Modem gun mounti~s, in which a turret sits atop an annored handli~ room and all!llllnition hoi_st, may be considered as combinations of the old turret and barbette mounti~s.

Dolm to the er.d of World War I the world's mvies continued to mount the Slllall guns of large ships, and all the guns of small ships like cruisers arxi destroyers, ei"ther in casemates or on pedestal mounts on deck. A casemte is a lightly annored gun position in the ship's side, s01118t.'lling l~e the old broadside mounting. A g\:Il on a deck mounting !light be either bare or protected by a splinter-proof gunshield. In the last two decades the increasing effectiveness of shell fragments and airplane machine guns has led navies to enclose more and· more of their smaller guns in turrets. The need for 11uch mounti~s was shown in the Battle of the Plate.' The Graf Spee had a formidable sec orxia :ry ai'IIB ment of eight 5. 9-inch guns, four on each side in single mounti~s, but got little use out of it because the crews, inadequately protected by open gunllhields, were soon slaughtered by shell fragments.

Turrets have been built for every number of guns from one to four. Down to the 1930's the British and Japanese navies used twin turrets (turrets with two gms) almost exclusively. Before World War I the Italians brought out the triple turret, soon copiai by the Russians and the United States and now the commonest type in the main batteries of cruisers and battlemips. The French, usually favoring the twin, have adopted the triple in recent cruisers, and also a quadruple turret, used both in some unfinished pr~orld-liar-II battlelbips and in their recent battleslips of the Dunguergue and Richelieu classes. The use of a larger number of guns par turret saves weight for a given nU!Iber of guns arxi thickness of armor; on the other hand it introduces mechanical complications and slars the rate .of fire per gun. Therefore., the United States, in its latest 6-inch gun cruisers, has gone from triple back to twin turrets to allow faster fire at airplanes.

!rourrl the turn of the century a battlemip or heavy cruiser carried guns of maey sizes. The USS ~ of the 1890's, for instance, mounted four 13-inchers, eight 8-inchers, and four 6-inchers, not counting analler guns. Such an arrangement DB de organized fire-control difficult, as it was hard to tell which gur:s were JIBlci~ which splashes. Furthennore, the fire of one blttery in erfered with that o! the others.

'lbese probleas were solved in the HUS Dreadnought, begun in 1904 and finished two years later. The Dreadnought was not only larger and faster than any existing battleships, being driven by the newly invented steam turbl..res, but also carried a main a!'IISllent of ten 12-inch guns, a secondary armament of 24 3-inchers to deal with torpedo boats, and another intermediate This revolutionary ship, thougb out o! date by World War I, had the pleasure of sinking a Ger­ man subla rine by ramming. The sligll tly smaller USS Jdc;;higan and USS Soutb Carolina •- time, employed the same idea, so revolutiomry in warship construction that for years blttleahips with main batteries all the same size were called "dreadnoughts·"

The Dreadnoqgbt' 1 12-inchers were disposed in five twin turrets, one forward on the cen­ terline, one on each beam, and two aft on the centerline. For some ;years most navies built ships with main battery turrets on the bea•, despite the reduction in their arc of train, though some sum turrets could ltloot across the deck t

16 4-4. Giant guns. How big can a gun be? Guns can certainly be built in larger sizes than it is clesirabla to build them. On the other hand technological cha ~es may rm.ke it practical to mild a larger gun at one period than at another. For instance, 161ha!I!QI8d II•s "Basilica" has seldoa been surpassed in bore. Duri.~ the Crimean War, Robert Mallet sold the Britilil Army a pair o! 36-inch mortars, firing ton-.nd-a-halt bombs, successful enough on trials though never pnt to use in war. Vihile some Civil War monitors fired 15-inch guns, the developaent of rifled cannon using sm

As soon as the new qualitative developments in artillery had been assimilated, the guns began to grow quantitatively, to 13.4, 13.5, 14, 15, and 16 inches, this growth culllinating in the lS-inch gun. During these decades the u. s. Navy tried to lead the procession in gun size, since American naval doctrine long emphasized lor.g-range fire by guns of the largest siae, mounted on ships with the most rugged annor p.-otecti.on. British doctrine, on the other hand, emphasized bold tactics arxi rapid close-range fire; German doctrine, scientific accuracy at fiN­ co.Jtrol fran smaller guns on minutely comp!rtmen ted llhips; Japanese doctrine, night attacks with torpedoes; and Italian doctrine, hit-and-run tactics lq fast unarmored ships.

A committee urrler Acmiral Sir Joon Fisher, later First Sea Lord(the equiTalent of CNO) bad .fathered the Dreadnought. Fisher, a man of daring idePs, announced as a principle tl'llt "the best protection a ltlip can have is the w611-directed fire of her own guns." On this basis he inspired the building of a new type of S'lip, the battle-cruiser, to comb!.ne battleship ai'!IBIIIent with cruiser speed, at that time ranging from 24 to 28 knots. Sime the ships were about the same size ae their battle!bip contanpcraries, something had to be left out to allow for the big engines. These ships were therefore given fewer big guns and much leDs armor than 1:8ttlel!hips. Fisher tb ought that with guns of the largest caliber and superior llpeed, the battle-cruiser could run away from any ship 'llhose guns outranged its own, llhile against any S'lip whose guns it outranged it could stand off out of range of the SllBller-gmmed S'lip and shoot it to bite wiihout injU%'7 to herself. This theory worked in the Battle of the Falkland Islands, in Decem­ ber of 1914, when the Br1 tish battle-cr·o.d.sers Inyincibl& arrl Inflexible destroyed the German armored cruisers Schp,rnborst and Gneisenau with little damage to themselTea.

Beginning with the Invincible class of 1905 and erxiing with the 41,0<>0-ton Hood, finished after World War I, the Britieh Admir'dlty built a total of 13 of these ships. The navies of Germany, Japan, the United States, Russia, and Italy all imitated the vpe, thougtl only the Germans and the Japanese ever finil!hed any of the battle-cruisers they started. The only sur­ viTor of all these ships is the Turkish Yavuz Sultan Selim, ex-Gel"'ll&n ~.

The German ~ttle-cruisers, built in accordaooe with Aliniral Tirp1tz1 s llllXim that "the first requirement of a warship is that she shall stay afloat urxier fire," wel'e much better pro­ tected than the British. Jutland proved that Tirpitz's maxim 11as more realistic than Fisher's, for there the German 1:8ttle-cruiser squadron saric three ships out of the Britieh 1:8ttle-cruiser squadron, losing only one themselves, though the British had them heavily outgunned. The principle was belatedly u!Xlerllned in World War II when the Hood, which supposedly incorporated the lessons of Jutland, blew up after a few minutes' duel in DeiUI8li!: Strait with the Bismrck of the same main umam.ent (eight 15-inoh guns). The battle-cruiser in the old sense no longer exists as a separate -cy-pe since all modern battlel!hips have cruiser speeds, though the j;erm ill sometimes applied to filips like the ~and JNnquergue, vessels intermediate in size between battle!bips and heavy- cruisers.

Fisher went on from his battle-cruisers to reduce his principle to absurdity in the large , light cruisers Glorious, Courageous, and Furious, called by those who did not admire them the Outrageous clas11. They were fast ships of about 20,000 tons with mere 3-inch armor belts. The G1orious and Courageous each mounted four 15-inch guns in two turrets, one forward a!Xl one aft. Tmard the end of World War I these two ~!hips tangled with Ger!llln cruisers in Heligoland Bight, with the result that one 'IWlS put out of action by 4-inch shells from a little German l~ht cruiser that got into her mchinery, and had to be towed holD!!.

The l•urious, Fisher's msterpiece, was designed to mount two l.S-inch guns, the biggest naval guns built up to that time, firing 3, QOO-prund shells. They were mounted in two single turrets, one fol'118rd and one aft. During construction the Navy became nervous about 1he effect of the recoil of these guns on 1his rather f'liatJy ship. Hence only the after gun wasll>unted, while the f'Ol'll8rd J:Srt. of 1he ship was mde into a flight.-declt. On her triala the firi~ ot the 1!3-inch gun llhodc her up eo badly that this gun, too, was removed and the ship converted ~ a complete airora!t carrier, the world's first. Her quasi-sisters were likewise converted te

B-2l83 17 carriers under the Wami~ton Treav, both being sunk in World War II.

The Adllliraltu", however, still had five of these guns, and also a number of monitors­ wide-beamed, shallow-draft gunbalt8 mounti~ a single bjg-gun turret and minutely subdivided against urrlerwater explosions, llhich they used to bombard the German-held ooe.sts in World lfar I. They mounted two of the 18-inch guns on the fantails of five monitcrs o.t the Earl o.t Petereburough class (Lord Clive, Admiral Howe,etc.) despite the fact that each of these little ships already carried a tllin 12-inch turret fcnrard. The 18-inch guns were set· up on plain pedestal mounti~s with a traverse of only 20 degrees, the gun pointing to starboerd so that· the ship had to sail east in order to bombard the Belgian coast. They erec~ed a l~ht steel gun­ house over the gm, and racks f or ready 18-inch 8!DIIlunition on the deck • . The guns proved very effective and accurate. When the Germans hid one of their 118in coastal batteries behind emoke-screens, the Britim located it on the map, and constructed a nnge-table by llhich ihey could shoot at the invisiblel:attery by shooting at a visible point on shore simultaneouSly 'With their 12-inchers and correcting the latter. The Germans never learned haw the British succeeded in dropping 18-inch shells so accurately on their concealed battery.

After that war the Bri ti!!ih scrapped most of their monitors, and sent the 18-inch guns t o Singapore as plrt of t he fi:Jed defenses there. Unfortumtely they pointed to sea and were useless against i.;he Japanese. who, in 1942, attacked from the land side • The Britifh aleo, i n a mood of plcifism and econOJey", -scrapped the Hood•s three unfinimed sisters, but soon began conatruction again as a result of the large American and Japanese pro­ grams of 16-inched-gur 1ed S:l ips. The Brit ish pla:med a quar tet of •suoor-Hoods," 47, 5Cl0-ton ships eadl to mount n ne 16-inch guns. After their engineers had st~gled with weights, D'Eyncourt, the DirectOl" of Naval Constr uction, suggested putting all the big guns forward and everything else aft to shorten the annor-baH. "It won't lock pretty," he said, "but perhaps that doesn't mttcr."

When these ships and their lS-inch-gur.ned battlemip companions were droppad as a reSUlt of the Washington Treaty, the Admiralty reduced the super~oc.d design to the 35,000 tons allowed by the treaty and produced the Rodney and Nelson. The D'Eyneourt ships certainl:;r did not lode pretty-long foredeck with three triple turrets, great bridge tower slightly 11ft or center, and everything else aft-but the ships wort<:ed well enough. The French imitated that gun arrangement in their battleS:lips of the DUngueraue and Riehelieu classes, which mounted eight guns in two quadruple t trrets forward.

The Wamington Treaty of 1922 limited the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy to ratios, in capital ships and aircraft carriers, of 5•5:3:1.75:1.75. It left the United States, Britain, and Japan with three, two, arrl two 16-inoh-gunned battleS\ips respectiv­ J.y, stopped all capital !!hip construction for a decade, and forbade ships with larger guns. This treaty (a fairer arrangement than any of the signatories as willing to admit at the time) also defined capital ships as ships ot more than 10,000 tons or mounting guns of over 8 inches. Since non-capital ships were not limited, all the leadir:g mval powers built lO,ooo-ton cruisers with eight to ten 8-inch guns, a llltloh larger type than most previous cruisers. The earlier ahipe at · this ey--pe, badly under-anaared for their size, were often called •tinclads."

In 19301 Great Britain and the United States agreed to limit their cruisers and destroyers, and enshrined in this new treaQ' an artificial distinctim between Wheavy cruisers" with 8-inch guns and "light cruisers" with 6-inch guns, though some "lights• were heavier ihan some "heavies.• Japan Nfuaed to enter this treaty on the growxi that her prestige dananded equ&lity with any other parer, so that the world was t:r-.ated to the remart<:able s}Bctacle of the world's two leading naval powers, on acellent terJIB with each other, agreeing to diaant'llhile aggressive govern­ Mota in other plrts ot the world increased thefr armaments as fast as they could. With the eXpiratim of all theae treaties in 19.35, however,. all the powers began buildi~ t'Q.rieual:r in all categcries. --

The u. s. Navy had oe•er r•ll~· been sold on guns over 16 inches, since in that gun-aise the probleu of breech preaSll"e, reooil, rate of tire, and wear on the gun barrel begin to take one into the regi.co of di.UU.I!bing returns. Therefore, the poet-treat:r A111rioan battlelhipa were all desig~d with 16-inch guns; nine each in the twelve !!hips or the !ashingtop, ~ ~. and lS!!A claeae•, and twelve in the five unbuilt 60,ooo-ton Uont&naa. The Britim pr•terred -ller guns, though th«Lr construction o.t five 14-inch-gunned battlemipa at this time aT have been inspired Iartl.Y by a political desire to revive arma-lia1taticn. France, Gen.ny, and Italy all built 15-inob-gun bat~lemips~ an:t sub8equentl,y Great Britain, a~,

18 B-2~63 and Russia all e1 ther planned or began 16.-inril-gunned l!hips, though none of the&e was co11pl.eted.

The Japanese, meanwhile 1 began conatr.lctico of the world's largest battleships: the h!!!!U2, ~~.. and a third, coapleted as the aircraft carrier Shinonu and ignominiously sunk by an American sul::mlrine on her trials. rhe 65,00Cl-ton Yamatos each mounted nine 18.1..;1nch guns. These mighty l!hipe, completed early in the Japaneee-.Anerican phase of World War II, were used so cautiously that they never fought llhen they might have had a serious effect. When they were finally put into the Battle af Leyte Gulf the Japanese position was desperate anyway. Hr­ plane torpedoes sank the l!usuhi; Achir!ll Kurita wi thdrsw Yamato with the rest of his central striking force after she had rather ineffectively shelled some American escort cax-riera, and later she was sunk by airplanes off the ho:ue islands.

Within the last hell-century, remarl<:able as the achievements af mval gunnery have been, they have been surpassed by thoee of the most extreme fcrms of land ordnance. At the outbreak of World War I the Gerll8ns threw the Allies into a panic by demolishing the Belgian forts with eiege howitzers of unheard-of size: first an ll-inch Scoda gun and then a 16.5-inch Krupp gun. (The actual bore af the latter was 42 centinetere. Frenchnen neasure gun bores in millimeters, Germans in CEntineters, Amricans in millimeters arrl inches, and the British, to 118ke thi~s even more confusing, in millimeters, inches, and weight of shell in pounds.) Somebody, locidng at the thick barrel of the 42-ceotimeter monster, -was reminded of the l!hape of the wife of the head af the Krupp works, and nicknamed the gun die dicke Bertha, llhetlce "Big Bertha." This name is sonetimes careless:~¥ applied to the 75-mi.le Paris gun, an entirely dl.fferent piece.

I.eter the British used a 15-inch gun on llheels, and a number of 12-inch and 13.5-inch railroad guns. The moet successf'c1l railroad guns of the war were probably the five 14-inchers originally ordered for the Anerican battle-cruisers of the Saratoga class. The original design of these six ships, as composed before the American entrance into World ''far I, called for strange craft with seven stacks and half the boilers above the waterline. \\ben the United States entered the war, worl< on capital 51 ips was stopped, and after the war these battle­ cruisers were redesigned as 16-inch-gun !ilips af more conventioml type. Under the Wa!ilington Treaty, the Saratoga and Lexirgton were completed as aircraft carriers, 'llhile the rest, not far beyond the keel stage, were scrapped.

These five guns, hOifever, were installed on railroad mounts and sent to France, llhere their 1,400-pound shells and 25-mile ra~e l!Bde them very useful. When one of them began to ~Shoot up Metz in the closl..ng months of the war, th6 French not unreasonably asked the Americans to stop, as Metz would be French after the 1l1ll' arrl they would therefore rather not have it blown off the map.

The record for range is still held by the Ge:man 75-mile gun, or rather guns. Three "'l'ere built, and several extra barrels. In 1918, during the great Gerlllln spri~ offensive, these guns fired 367 shells into Paris from the Forest of Crepy, ?0 to 80 miles away. These extra­ ordinary weapons had barrels over 100 feet lo~, built up of parts of several coast-defense goos. They fired f'rcm permanent emplacements at an angle of 54 degrees to take advantage of' the lO'IWer air-resistance in the upper atmosphere, into 'llhich the shell rose to a height of nearly 30 miles. The long barrels had a bridge-like truss built up on them to stiffen them, were smooth­ bore for the last quarter of thai r length, and, llhen fir ad, quivered like a sapli~ in the breeze for SOIIII seconds.

The calculations required to shoot such a gun were so minute that the shells were 1111de dii'ferent sises to 11.11011' for w•r on the barrel with •ch shot. Thus the first shell of a series had a dia•ter of 8.2 inches, 'While No. 60, the last one that the gun could shoot before the barrel had to be replaced, had a dU.ter of 8. 7 inches. OI'B of the guns blew up because the gunners leaded shell No. 5 (or sa. higher nl.lllber) into the gun in place of' No. 4. The guns produced a lllild panw in Paris, as was intended; but although they killed a few people their ~ge was negligible ooapared to that of a aodern air-raid. Before the end of the war they were hauled bade to the Krupp woz1ca and •lted up.

During World War II Geran ·ordnance engineers outdld even their feats of the previoua war. Besides their excellent 88-ldlliaater !iel.d-g-.m, 1hey produ:ed such wapons as the K5-E 28-centiaeter (ll-inch) gun 'Whicn could !hoot; either an ordlrary mall 38 miles or a rocket­ assisted shell 50 Idles, and the -rttcr• IIICil'tar which thrn 3, ?50-pound projectiles. Thor was used in the first siege of Senetopol, llben the GenBne took it from the Russians.

At Sevastopol, alao, the Genane put into action the greatest gun 8T81' built& "Dcra," an 80-centi•ter (31.5-inoh) raill'Oad howitzer that threw an eight-ton shell. Such a nat gun had

19 B-2483' to r'J.I1, not on one railroad track, but on two parallel tracks, four rails altogether, which meant that the Gennans I'Bd to build a special railway halfllay across Russia to bring their gun

into position. Later in the war1 the Russians retook Sevastopol without any Dora, _and, in view of the danage that can be done by an airplane with. one atornc bomb, or even a large bomb of conventional type, 1h e experinent is unlikely to be repeated.

4-5. Special guns. Men have nade guns for special purposes ever since that Tudor gunsmith who built a multi-barrelled arquebus to shoot square bullets at Turt:s and rourrl bullets at Christians. The out standi. r:g special types of guns that have come into use during the two World Wars are aircraft. and anti-aircraft guns, antitank guns, trench-mortars, and recoilless guns. Of these the most important from a mval pOint of view are the first two.

The airplane saw its first military use in the Italian conquest of Tripoli, 1911-1913. A few Italian airplanes, stick-and-wire contraptions resembling hastily assembled chicken coops, put-putted over the Turt:ish lines while the aviators hung from the structure with one hand and dropped home-made bombs with 1he other. Meanwhile the Turl<:s canted up field-guns in a futile effort to hit back. In World War I ordinary heavy nn chine-guns and field guns were first adapted to anti-aircraft use by special mounts allow!~ vertic~l fire; then special guns of high muzzle velocity were built.

The biggest anti-llircraft actions took place in England, which the Germans raided through­ out t,he war. At first the Germans used rigid airships, called "Zeppelins" after their inventor, a German count who had served as an officer on the Federal side in the u. s. Civil War. Against these huge slow targets, filled with inflanmable hydrogen, the British 3-inch batteries proved effective, so that during the last year of the war the Germans sent Zeppelins on only a few raids, and these at such altitu:les that the airltlips mostly failed to find their targets.

In the latter pact of the war, hOifever, the Germans put more and more reliance on twin­ engined Gotha bombers, against llhich anti-!'lircraft batteries proved comparatively ineffective. The difficul-cy liee in the fact that. the speed of an airplane amounts to an appreciable fracti011 of the speed of the projec-tile, so that the gunner must lead his target by such a wide angle that he cannot count on hits b,y observation and judgment alone, but requires mechanical means to help his calcula tiona.

Throughout the history of anti-aircraft artillery the guns' effectiveness has continually been increased b.Y more advanced range-finders and fuze-setters, though the speed of airplanes has also increased and thus kept the airplanes one lap ahead of the guns. The guns have also been vastly increased in numbers. Thus, whereas at the end of World War I a blttleship' s anti­ aircraft annament might consist of one or two 3-inchers, a modern capital ship briatles with over 100 anti-aircraft guns of all sizes, and large guns are increasingly adapted to high­ angle fire. Finally the proximity fuze and radar in the latter part of World War II enabled the guns for a time at laas·t; to catch up with the airplanes--but 'then the atomic bomb and jet propulsion again increased the effectiveness of airplanes with respect to the guns. Altogether it is unlikely either that anti-aircraft guns will ever become so effeoti ve as to neutralize airplanes, or that conversely airplanes will become so effective as to make the guns useless. Probably they will continue to see-saw, as is usually the case with these contests between attack ~nd defense.

As for aircraft guns, at the start of World War I airplanes were unarmed; aviators popped at each other with pistcls and llhotguns. The Fad<;er interrupter gear for firing a machine gun through a propellor without shooting off the blades, and the Scarff mounting for flexible machine guns, made these guns practical for airplanes, so that by the end of the war most air­ planes mounted one to three I!Bchine guns. After this war the .30 caliber machine guns used in airplanes were augmented b.Y guns of .50 caliber or larger. The number of guns was also increased. The World War I fighter with one or two fixed forward-firing guns became the World War II fighter with four to twelve such guns, while bomber armament was likewise increased from two or three guns to ten or fourteen.

Aircraft guns of .50 caliber or larger made necessazy extra-heavy plating on the upper worl!:s of ships, ever since five American fighter planes sank a Japanese destroyer by .50 caliber machine gun fire alone, and Anerican carrier planes IIBde a shambles of three French destroyers in the Casablanca battle by the same maans. The United States ns successful in mounting fixed 75 millimeter guns in light bombers, one of which sank a Japanese destroyer with,five rounds from ita cannon. However, in view of the increasing effectiveness of aircraft rockets and guided bombs, this development may not continue.

20 B-2483 Altoge~1er, despite the rise of rockets, atomic bombs, and guided missiles, it seems likely that the cannon will continue to be OP.e of the most important weapons for warfare of a!'1Y kind for a long time to come.

B-.;..-.~ 21 Chapter 5

SJ&LL Aruts

5-l. The han,d gun• About 1400, a century after the invention of the cannon, somebody had the idea of a small gun that could be carried by an individual soldier. The early hand gun consisted simply of a tube of brass or iron mounted on a pole which the gunner supported with one hand under his armpit while he applied a piece of punk to the touch-.'1ole 1fi th the other hand. At the range at which such a gun was accurate it was almost as practical to hit the foe over the head with the gun as to try to shoot him with it. Still, they made a fine noise and smell, so that European princes hired German hand gumers as auxiliaries. At the start of a batt.le the hand gunr.ers marched out in front of the arJey", let off one volley, and then filed to the rear Tihile the rest of the force got dO'Im to serious fighting 1fi th swords an:i spears.

Towards the end of the 15th century, however, t he ir.genious Ge:nmms made t.heir :r.and gun into a practical weapon by moving the touch hole to one side, providing it with a firing pan into which a little fine powder could be dropped to set off the main charge, securing the 11 rratch 11 (a punk-like lengtb of tarred rope) 1rl. th a hinged clamp projecting underneatk: tte gun in the form of a trigger, and modifying the pole into a shoulder-otock. Then all the gunner had to do was to measure out his charge, drop it doW! the barrel, pack it down 1fi th his ramrod , drop in a bullet, pack that down too, push dO'IITl a wad of cot ton or paper to keep wllet. and . powder from falling out, raise the firing pan cover, sprinkle ~riming powder into tile firing pan, smooth it down lrl.th his thumb, replace the cover, adjust his 116tch, blow on it to get the lighted end hot, aim (lrl. tbout sights) and pull the trigger. One can see why the quick-firing bow long held its own against the hand gun.

The Germans llho invented the improved hand gun called it a Hackenbuchse, corrupted by Englil!ilmen and Frenchmen to 11 hackbutt" and "arquebus" respectively. A larger version of this gun, a matchlock musket and fired from a forked rest, came into use in the early 16th century, especially in the Spanish arii\Y, then the best in Europe. Matchlocks continued to be nade down to recent years in the remoter FGrts of Asia. Vitelli of Pistoia, Italy, devised a miniature gun to be held in one hand and called a "pistol" after its town of origin. The Ge:rnans invented a mechal"ical firing mechanism, the wheel lock, which wo.rKed like a modern cigarette lighter by llhirling a toothed 'Wheel against a piece of flint or pyrites, throwing a shower of sparks into the firing pen. Although this mechanism was easier to handle (especially for pistols) tilan the matchlock, it ns also delicate and expensive, and if lett 'WOUld up too long the spring lllight weaken and fail to spin the wheel.

The new weapons were not wa~ welcomed, since many oldtime military men felt

"• •• that it was a great pity, so it was, This villainous saltpeter should be· digg' d Out of the bowels of the harmless eart.h, \\hich many a good tall fellow had destroy' d So cowardly •• •"

When Queen Elizabeth appointed a commission to test the musket against the bow, they reported tr..at the latter had the advantage in nearly all respects. It was about -as accurate, lighter, fal!ter-=hooting, and easier to prc.tect from rain. The musket, however, proved to have one advantage that outweighed all its shortcomings: almost any abl&-bodied man could be taught to handle a musket in a few weeks, whereas it took a lifetima of {ractice to mke a good archer.

5-2. From matchlock smoothbore to repeating rifle. Although as early as the 16th century gun­ miths learned to rifle .the barrel with helical grooves to make the bullet spin, increasing its range and accuracy, rifling did not soon become common. For rifling to be effective, the bullet had to fit tightly so that the lands of the rifle would bite into it. Therefore the bullet could not simply be dropped down the l::errel, but had to be driven down by pounding the top end of the ramrod with a mallet, which reant slow fire. Hence the use of rifles was long confined to hunting, where one shot was enough. The rifled IIIUBket first made its mark in ·the American Revolution. '1'/hile most of the rebel troops were armed lrl.th moothbores like their British antagonists, som, like Morgan's riflemen, used the lo~ hunting "squirrel rifle". They made life unhappy for the British by standing up out. of !!llloothbore ra~e, picking off a Redcoat, and running away when the British took after them.

The 17th century saw the invention of the repeating gun and the flintlock musket. The former had little immediate effect: the King of DellliBrk' s bodyguard lf&S equipped with an

B- 2&R3 22 enoi'IIIOUIIl)- expensive three-shot lever-actl.on musket full of delicate little sliding parts to measure out the right amount of powder from the powder chamber, and insert a bullet from the bullet compartmenta not vecy practical. On the other hand the flintlock musket proved much more practical than either the natdllock or the wheellock and for over a century was the univer­ sal infantcy allll. It had a spriz:g mechanism to 811ap the ha~r, whose clamp held a bit of flint, against a vertical piece of 11teel attached to the firing pan cover. The bayonet (named tor Bayonne, France) had been ii"Nented in mid-17th century, first in the form of a dagger with a wooden handle that fitted like a plug into the muzzle of the musket. While this irNention meant that musketeers no lo~er had to be accompanied by pikemen to protect them, the gun could not be fired 'When the bayonet was in place. At the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, the English got off one good volley, but while they were strugglir:g to fix bayonets in their muzzles the Scots swarmed down on them with pikes and swords and routed them. :l!ackay, the English commander, profited from his defeat by inventing the ring bayonet, allowirg fire with the bayonet in place. The bayonet is now strictly a last-ditch weapon, since the modern in­ fantcyman' s fire p01rer ill so great that he seldan gets close enough to his enemy to use cold steel.

In matchlock days musketeers had lined up four to six ranks deep. The front rank would fire, then file to the rear 'While the next rank fired ahd in its turn walked back, and so on. Caval.'ry used a eimilar systan of delivering volleys from horse-pistols. H01rever, if a soldier is given an excuse to start t011'8rds the rear he is likely to keep right on out of danger. The flintlock speeded up loading so that in the 18th cEiltUly t1ro ranks were enough, and they usually fired all at once, when the officers sigl'lllled wi.th their swords; the front raric kneelir€ and the rear rank shooting over their heads.

The complicated close-order drill that prevailed prior to World War II- came down from the time of Frederick the Great, when men act\Blly fought that way. Eighteenth centUl'Y infantry marched onto the battlefield in a colUlllll of squads, wheeled into comJ:anY fronts facing the foe, fired, relcaded, arched forward through their own smoke until the enemy were again in &ight, and repeated the process untl.l one side fled arrl the other ran after them wavir€ their bayonets and cheering.

The 19th century saw rapid evolution in 81811 arms as in cannon. The rifled musket with sightll replaced the old smootll bore. Then the fulmil'llte percussion cap speeded up loadiz:g and •de it possible to shoot in the rain. Then arourrl the middle of the century the breech load­ ing musket replaced the muszle leader--a cha~e much de11ired because muzzle loaders ·had to be lcaded standing up, and the fire power of 1111all a:ms was .Ui~ standi~ up on a battlefield a rash thing to do.

The most promisi'lt of the ~arly breech loaders, the bolt action Dreyse needle gun, was adopted by the invincible Prussian Array for the German Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars. H01rever, breech lcaders suffered from the eiiCape of gases througll the ·cracks in the breech, wt.ich wore out both gun and gun~r untl.l Jacob Snider's 1118tal cartridge sealed the breech against the escape of gas.

llear.hile the repeatir:g musket also came into use. The first reall)- practical repeating gun was Samuel Colt's revolver, patented in 1835, but attempt!! to apply the revolver principle to mul!lkets were not very successful because the t:~scape of gas between the cylinder and the barrel reduced the muzzle velocity. Beginning about the till8 of the American Civil War the modem lever action, bolt action, and pump action repeati~ rifle11 were developed, though they did not become altogether )ractical until the irrrention of smc«eless p01rder ~ )o&Jd.m in the 1880' a, because the residue from black powder gullll!lld . their mechanin. One of the first repeati~ rifles, the Sharp's, was issued to Federal voops in the last year of thf! u. s. Civil War, caus­ ing the Confederate!! to complain bitterly about the unfairness of a gun that permitted a Yankee to "lcad up in the morniq; and shoot all day."

5-4. Automtic guns. The quest tor faster and faster fire led to the development of the nachine gun in the closiz:g decades of the 19th centUl'Y• Back in the days when gune were still competing rlth lances and cro11sbaws, sevaral militacy engineers built great IIIUlti-berrelled contraptions called ribauldquins, mounted on carts and designed to be fired oft all at once or in quick succes11ion. Three mon11ter Italian ribeuldquins built in 1387 had 144 barrels ead'l. Such de­ vices oould be fired only once per battle, since leading them was an all-day job.

8-2U83 By mid-19th cent.ury the rate of fire even of single shot breech loading rifles had become such as to make rre. ssed maneuvers obsolete; wben the Russians tried bayonet charges with squares of massed infantry in the Crimean War, the "thin red line" of British infant:ry rrassacred them with their Mini• rifles. Then infant:ry fire power was multipled still further by the nachine gun, which filled the gap that had long ex:i.Bted bstween the cannon and the musket. The first machine gun was that of Richard Gatling of Chicago in 1862--the original "gat." It had ten be.rrels, a hopper above the breech containing more cartridges, and a crank 'llhich revolved the barrel~:~ and fired them one by one. As the barrels revolved, the spent cartridges were autc>­ a:atically ejected and fresh ones fed in from the hopper. The gm was tried out inconclusively in the Civil War, and used to sonte extent in all the later wars of the 19th century such as the Spanish-American. About the same ti1111 the French Amy developed a larger revolving gun of this kind, the mitrailleuse, with 25 to 37 barrels mounted on a field artillery carriage, with 'llhich they vainly tried to stop the ?russians in the Francc>-Prussian Ylar.

Since all the early !!Bchine-guns, operated by crarics or levers, proved inaccurate, Maxim in 1889 developed the first modern machine gun, in which the recoil of one shot ejected the empty cartridge case; l

Sirx:e the m chine gun increased the .fire power of its crew at least twenty-fold over the same number of riflemen, it gave the defensive a tanporary advantage over the offensive, like that of the Middle Ages o The machine gun also put horse cavalry out of action, sincewen tte most willing horse cannot be trained to erawl on his belly from bush to bush as aey unar­ mored creature must do to advance against a rre.chine gun. Therefore infantry attacks in World , War I took the form of tzying to snother IIBchine guns wi1h living targets. The irmnense slaugh­ ter that ensued had a pro.fourr:i social effect. After the war it caused a great popular revulsion against thi~s military, even in the victorious countries, where strong J:&Cifistic movements i$ibited the governments fran taking any strong act!.on to stop the rise of aggressive and militaristic govemnents in Ger!!Bny, JaJ:&n, and elsewhere.

The increase of infantry fire-power has continued ever since, despite the fact that autc>­ rnatic weapons consume anmunition by the ton and each new one means that more men have to be assigned the job of ru:t1ing ammunition to the gunners. Ideally each soldier na~radays should have a truck l

To combine the fire po!fer of a heavy I1B chine gun with the porta bill~ of a rifle, annies have developed a nll!lber of automatic weapons in the last twenty yearss light mchine guns, submachine guns, and automatic rifles. The Bro-wning aut01111.ti.c rifle, really a light machine gun, was introduced into the A!!E!rican Army in World \iar I, and in the more recent world war infantzy were equipped with the Garand (V-1) ssi-autooatic rifle and a semi-aut01111.ti.c carbi·ne. Other comtries have similar weapons, such as t.he Bren gun of the Britiflh and Czechoslovakian armies. (In a semi-automatic gun the trigger has to be pulled se):llrately for each shot.)

The Thompson sul:ma.chine gun, a light full automtic gun firing .45 autonati.c pistol ammunition in drums and clips of 40 to 100 rounds, just missed service in World War I. A ship­ ment of these gun.:; was sent to France in 1918, arriving too late to be UBed. On t.he way back to the United States a number of these guns were stolen, and later turned up in the hands of crimi­ nals during the era of Pr

Finally, the idea of autoMatic fire has been applied to aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, which have been built in sizes of .50 inches, .6o inches, 20 millimeters, 25 millimeters, 1.1 inches, 37 millimeters, 40 milliiiBters, and 45 millimeters. TM most effect!.ve light ant!.­ aircraft weapons prior to World \'far II were the Swiss Oerlikon 2-millilll8ter arr:i Swedish Bofors 40-millimeter achine guns, both taken aver with little cha~e by the Tlritillh an::! American armed forces. On !bipboard these large machine guns are mounted either singly or in multiple mounts of two ar four g ms. The u. s. Navy also had a 1.1-inch quadruple rrachine gun of which it eJql8cted great things, but these guns proved a disappointll8nt at the start of the war. For instance, the 1.1' s, failed to do their part in checki~ the JaJ:&nese at Pearl Harbor, beca 1se the:re were not enough of thea,

B- 2493 and they jammed frequently, and they were not equipped with adequate fire control. The octuple Vickers 40-ruillimeter p~poms failed to save the Repulse and Prince of Wales in the Gulf of Siam for similar reasons. When the guns were subjected to mchanical and elect.rical fire control, and their numbers- enormously increased, their effectiveness was much improved. N01r the u. s. Navy is developing an au tone. tic 3-inch gun with an unheard -of rate of fire for a gun of that size, so that there is no telling just how big future mchine guns may be.

25 Chapter 6

TORPEOOES

6-1. Early !!lb!!ari.ne warfare. Like so Jlllny "modern" militaiY Jlllthods, the idea of fighting under water goes bad!: a long way. In 1622 Cornelix van Drebbel built a submersible row boo. t in which he on::e gave Ki~ James I of England a ride. In the American Revolution ~vid Bushrell, who had left Yale to become a lieutenant-captain in the Continental Army, mde an egg-shaped submarine with 'Which he intended to attach mines to the bottoms of hostile nrships. It was driven under water cyr two screw propellers; one vertical ard one horizontal, operated by cranks from inside. About 20 years later Robert Fulton tried to sell a similar idea, first to Napoleon's France, and when that !ailed to England.

For the charges that he intended to attach by stealth to en9lllY ships Fulton adopted the name "torpedo," previously applied to a fish, the electric ray that can give a numbing shock. For some decades the word "torpedo" was applied to aey sort of static c.'large designed to be set off in water under enenrr ships. Farragut referred to such charges when he said 11 .fumn the torpe­ doest" at Yo bile Bay. Later in the century static charges became known as "mines" from the analogy of simiJar c.~arges used on land, while "t orpedo" came to mean the self-propelled steel explosive fish, or sll8ll unmanned !'!Ub!mrine, invented by \Thii;ehead .

The American Civil War brought out a ratil of expe r.i.uent s in subnar.i. ne and torpedo warfare. On the Confederate side Raires wilt a sausage-shaped irnn craft called ~vid (after Goliath's antagonist) amed 11ith a spar torpedo. This 1ms a c.l-Jarge on the enq of a long pola projecting from the bOif, with a lanyard running back to the boat to set it off. With this torpedo the David one night dealt the stout New Ironsides a . llop that sent her to the yards for repairs, and the Confederacy set up a secret weapons librertment that blilt a crank-operated sutrnarine called Hundley after its designer. On trials Hundley sank five times, su!focatitt": her crew each time, whence her designers con::luded that she would be more successful as a surface torpedo­ boo.t. As a surface-craft, she sank the Federal corvette Housatonic, and also herself, for the sixth and last time. After that it became too hard for the Confederates to find suicide crews to man their subDBrines.

The Federals also worked on spar torpedoes, their greatest success bei1tt": Cushing's sinking of the Confederate ram Albemarle by a spar torpedo mounted on a little steam-launch. Although the spar-torpedo l'llls used in the Chilean-Peruvian war of 1879-1880, it soon went out of use beca·.1se the development of quick-firing guns made it impossible for the torpedo-boat to get close enough to its victim. Experimnts with torpedoes with fins, designed to be tOifed at an angle from the bow of a torpedo-boot, like a modern Jl!.ravane, were not·very successful.

6-2. The automotive torpedo. A Scottish engineer, Robert Whitehead, developed the first prac­ tical automotive, self-propelled torpedo in the 186o's, working along lines previous~y suggested by Captain Luppis of the Austrian Navy. This torpedo Wlls so successful, and so far surpassed its competitors, that it was soon adopted by nearly all the mvies of the 'fiOrld. Whitehead had combined two essential elements: a compact comiressed-air englne to propel the craft, and a hydrostatic valve mechanism controlling the horizontal rudders, so that t.I-Je torpedo would run at constant depth. Without this contrQl the torpedo would either dive into the mud of the bot­ tom or go leaping about the surface like a hooked tarpon.

As usually happens with a new weapon, the early torpedoes left much to be desired. There ns the case of the British cruiser that fired a torpedo at the Peruvian ironclad Huascar, whose crew harl mutinied and started out on what they hoped would be a profitable career of piraC".f. Since the torpedo's speed was only 9 knots, the Huaacar simply turned away and outran her robot pursu'lr. Then there was the case of the Peruvian war!hip that fired a torpedo whose rudder jammed, causing the missile to loop around tOifards the ship that fired it. A brave officer saved the ship by dl.ving overboard, seizi~ the torpedo in his arms, and guiding it clear.

Although torpedoes sank a couple of ships in the South Alll6rican civil wars of the 1890's, they did not !how themselves really effective until the Husso-Japanese liar of 1904-1905. The Japanese began the war with a surprise attack on Port Arthur, disabling a battleship and two cruisers. At the great Battle of Taushima the Japanese finished off four of the battered Russian ships with torpedoes.

Torpedoes were thereafter mounted both in large ships and in small fast steam-launches which became known as torpedo-boats. By appealing to the ~vid-:md-Golia th prejudice the tor-

26 0 -. liA' pedo-boat acquired an exaggerated importance in the public mind. Although early 20th-century !!hips, lacking modern underwater comi&rtmentation, usually sank when successfully torpedoed the torpedo-boat 11aa largely neutralized by mounting qlolick-.firing guns on large ships .and a~c~ panying them b)r a new type of lihip, the torpedo-boat destroyer--a small fast unarmored ship with enough gun pO'Ifer to sink torpedo-boats. In a few years the old torpedo-boat becalll8 rare; torpedo tubes were mounted on the torpedo-boat de~:~troyer, which tod!: over the functions of' the smaller craft. Cruisers were assigned to the battle-line to keep off' torpedo-boat destra,yers, Which were really torpedo-boats, though they kept their old name, shortened in World War I to "destroyer."

To enable torpedo-carrying ships to deliver their punch from greater di~:~tances, inventors greatly improved the torpedo from V.'hitehead' s 6-knot mchine with a range of' a few hundred yards to the modern torpedo with a speed of over 40 knots and a range of several miles. Torpe­ does have generally been fired from a torpedo-tube, a steel slaev~ from which the torpedo is ejected either by compressed air or by a small powder-charge. Underwater tu~s are generally fixed in the ship's structure; above-'llater tubes may be either fixed or mounted on a turntable in groups of' two to five. Destroyers usually have one, two, or three banks of tubes in tandem on the centerline; cruisers, one or two banks on each beam. The later Japanese cruisers carried their torpedoes in fixed tubes. Prior to World War I battleships and battle-cruisers commonly carried two to four fixed undeM!ater tubes. The last ships to be so armed were the Rodney and ~~ each of which had two tubes for torpedoes of special large size, 24.5 inches in diameter. (The usual size is 21 inches.)

At the outbreak of World War II the heaviest torpedo armaments were 16 tubes in the British light cruisers Emerald and Enterprise and in the u. s. destroyers of' the McCall and ~ classes. Most other cruisers and destroyers carried six to twelve. During this war torpedo tubes were removed from many ships to make room for additional anti-aircraft g\.lns. Many destroy­ ers lost half their torpedo armament, and some, converted to radar picket duty, lost all their tubes. The United States, relying upon long-range gunnery, had takell' the. tubes out of its earlier heavy cruisers and installed no more in ships of' that kind. The Japanese, putting their trust in torpedo action, did just the opposite; they installed no less than 24 tubes (three quadruple banks on each beam) for huge 25-inch torpedoes on the decks of old light cruis­ €:rs of the~. Natori, and Jintsu classes, which already mounted eight 21-ineh tubes. These ships, however, got few chances to use their imposing torpedo armament, for they proved so vulnerable, especially to American sul:Jnarine torpedoes, that by the end of the 11ar all but one of' the fourteen had been sunk.

On the other hand, the Japanese torpedo developments should not be sneered at, for at times during the Pacific war they made better use of them than we did. For one thing they considerably increased the range and speed of their torpedoes by substituting oxygen for part of the air used in the torpedo engines, arrl by means of their superior torpedoes and effective torpedo tactics they inflicted a crushing defeat on Allied cruisers in the Battle of Savo Island at the start of the Solomons campaign.

The original Whitehead torpedo was expected to run in the direction it was aimed, so that its tube had to be aimed directly at the ene~. The gyroscope made it possible to steer the torpedo in any direction regardless of the way the tube pointed by pre-setting the gyro to hold the torpedo to the desired course. World War II saw additional wrinkles in torpedo design, such as an acoustic control that would make a torpedo chase the sound of a ship~s propeller (countered by noise-making devices towed behind ships) and magnetic torpedoes that would explOde as they passed under a ship's keel. The Germans made use of an electric torpedo, which, while slow, had the great advantage of' leaving no wake of bubbles, as ordimry turbine­ driven torpedoes do, and therefore giving no visual warning of its approach. Present u. s. Navy opinion tends towards placing destroyer torpedoes in fixed mountings to eave the space and topweight imposed b,y trainable mountings, on the theory that modern torpedo actions take place at such long ranges that the error introduced by running in an arc while straightening out on the desired course is negligible. -

One more torpedo-craft is the high-speed motorboat armed with two or four torpedoes, called variously the PT-boat. (patrol torpedo boat), coastal motor boat, motor torpedo boat, or torpedo launch. These craft, pioneered in World War I by the British firm of Thornycroft, ~· considerable use in that war, as when an Italian boat sank the Austrian battleapip Szent ~. PT-boats also proved themselves useful in Vforld War II, .but performed most effectively in narrow 118ters and at night, since othenli.se the guns of' a destroyer or a fighter-plane made short wonc of their flimsy hulls.

B-2~83 2?

..... ,..·.. ."' ·~ ,"':.:- 6-3. The submarine. After the abortive Confederate attempts at submarine h.lilding, t he French Navy in the 18801 s and 90's procured a number of small subrnarir:es driven entirely by electric storage-batteries. While not unsuccessful, their ships were, because of their restricted range, thought of as purely coast-defense vessels. The next step in the art was taken by two American constructors, Simon Lake ar:d John Holland; the latter, of Irish birth, motivated by hatred of England. They developed the combination of internal-combustion power for use on the surface and electric power submerged that has prevailed in nearlY all subsequent su\:marines.

Sublll!.rine.s just failed.to get into the Russo-Japanese War. Germaey was late in acquiring submarine flotillas, and at the outbreak o! World War I had fewer submarines than Great Britain, thwgh these were at the most adYanced delri.gn. Fn. a l'llVal point of vin, howner, this war soon beca• IKin! a sul:Jaari.ne and anti-sul:arine war than anything else. Gerwall7 atuck to practical desit;na of II!Oden.te stze, llhile Great Britain experi•nted with radieal aW..rlnea. The latter, for instance, buUt the I class, steaJD-odr1:nn on the surf&C41 a\ the h~ spited or 23.5 knots for f'l~ acti on; the )l class, cr 1110nitor aub•rines, which carried a short 12-inch gun; and the R class which, with extra-large batteries, WU'e faster .u'-rged than on the surface and ~t for stalldng hpstile subErir:es.

When World War I began, the nawWtapon soon proved U.s worth llben the Ge1'1118n suboarine U-9 earit the Britilh antell"ed cruisers A""stir, ~. am ~within lldnutes o! each other. How­ ev.r, during the first year of the ~ the Ger.ans operated their sulaarines in irregular faahicm and to a considerable extent adhered to the international rules o! srr stoppb!g ships and allowing passengers to take ott in boata before sinking thea. Sinking was with gun­ fire or demolition charges llben possible, because a su~rine could carry ofll7 a few torpedoes.

Allied araing of .arcbantaen and e.plo;Jwmt of deco;r ships with concea1ed guns soon lll!lde theae policies iapractica1. When the German Na-yy adopted a poliey of sinking all ships around the British Isles without warning regardlesa of mtionality, the Urd.ted States protested. The Gerun gaverTl!Ent 1D.Vered, twice adopting the policy and twice repealing it, until ita final adoption in 1916 brought the United State~ into the war against Germany without achieving the decisive results that an earlier adoption might have effected.

Even so, German sul:Jr&rine warfare came closer to winning the war !or the Central POIII'ers than any other one thing. At its height, in the spring of 1917, one. out of every four ships that left the British Isles was sunk before it returned. The campaign was on!y put down by an enormous material and technical effort on the pirt of Great Britain and the United States; by the building of great fleets of destroyers and submarine-chasers, the mining of vast tracts of sea, and the development of the hydrophone and the depth-charge.

~4. Recent torpedo warfar-e. The succes11 of the torpedo in World War I led to drastic changes in warship desi-gn. ~ips were more arrl more minutely compartmented below the waterline, until post-Jutland battl.eBhips were built with the equinlent of five or 11ix hulls one instde the other, the space tietween the hulls being dirlded up 1:(r bulkheads like an egg-crate. To give older ships the same protection, naviea added steel blisters called "bul:ges• to the sides of · pr&-Jutland battleships. In World War II the ner-increasing power of the torpedo forced navies to reinforce the undern.ter protection of COJIP&l'8th'ely modem 2hips still further, even at the cost of slowing thEIII down by increasing their beall. The United States, for instance, widened the California-class t:.ttleships and soae o! the Brookl,yn-cla11s cruisers in thi11 mnner.

For a decade and a halt after World War I the United States built no torpedo-craft except for a few large subarines, re!ying upon its large but old !leet11 of destro;rers and lllll:IM.rines lett aver from the -.r. Other powers however built both types of ships. In this construction France was outstanding for her large aublarine neet and her squadrons o! fast large deatroyers an.d with 5.1 and 5.5-inch guns. The destroyer type, in fact, 110on grew to twice the 1,000- ton size it had averaged during World War I. To !ill the gap in stzes several countries re­ Tived the toi-pedo-boat o! 500 to 1,000 tons.

A singular incident of this period was the launching of the Japane11e torpedo-boats of the Chidori type. Prior to the Washint;ton Treaty Japt.nese naval design had been conventional, following British models, but thereafter it became increasingly raaical. Their new ships had undulating decks, sharplY raked tro.lited fwnels, great pt.goda-like bridge tOII'era, and a atch hearler al'lll&-nt than other nations installed on Ehips or equinlent size, llhich caused them to roll al:and.ngly. The Chidoris carried three 5-ineh guns and a triple torpedo-tube tank an their alender 52'J-tCI1 hulls, with the result that on her trials the TOJIIOdzlltll oY this class cap­ aiHd and liii.S !ourrl noating bott0111-up with most o!. her crew drowned. The Japanese hastil7 reduced the arament or thei!MI S1ips to forestall similar accidents.

2S During the Long Armistice, also, several nations experimented with submarines of extreme design. Several submarines of over 2,500 tons were built, such as the Britifh X-1 with four 5.5-inch guns, the French Surcouf with two 8-inch guns, and the American Argonaut, Narwhal, and Nautilus with two 6-inch guns. Japan also built several such giants, and some large S'l:.bmarines were equipped to carry a small airplane. In general, giant submarines did not prove very suc­ cessful. The !::l was scrapped before World War II; the Surcouf was lost in action; and the Japanese submarines Sl.Oifed themselves less effective than had been expected.

hull before it can level off. The longer the subnarine, the more illl!llinent the peril.

Several nations also built midget submarines operated by a two-mn crew and carrying one or two torpedoes apiec~. The Japanese began their attack on Pearl Harbor wlth an ineffective raid by several of these craft, and were building a large nuaber at the end of the war as part of their planned l!!.st-ditch defense. 'nle Japanese midgets developed the unfortunate habit of turning turtle when they fired their torpedoes because of the change in distribution of weights. Great Britain had better success with midget sul:JIIarines when a group of these little S1ips crippled the great German battleship Tirnits in a Nortfegi&n fjord.

Perhapa the most remar'.<:able weapon of this kind in recent years waa the Italian dirigible torpedo, designed to run just under the surface guided by a pilot who eat astride it half in and half :JUt of the water. Although the Italian fleet in general, and the manned torpedoes · in particular, were !lllCh derided during World \far II, they had one accomplishment to their credit. Ocean against the foray by the Japanese in that region in April, 1942.

The most significant torpedo development since World iVar I, however, has been the airplane torpedo. Experiments with dropping torpedoes from airplanes were performed 3S early as 1910 by Rear Admiral Fiske, USf, and some use was made of such torpedoes in World War I - ineffect­ ivel.y, however, since the torpedoes of the time were often damaged by the drop ·and would not run true. After World War I the u. s. Navy led the world in torpedo plane development for many years, developing special torpedoes and special airpl.anes: first float seaplanes, then carrier planes.

Early in World War II the German and Italian air forces llll!.de ineffective attacks en Britil!h -rl!hips with torpedo planes. ll'ith the entry of Japan into the war the true importance of the tcrpedo plane was shO'IIll when the Japanese crippled the American fleet at Pearl Harber and sank the Rerulse and Prince .2!, !!!!.§ in the Gulf of Siaa. Later the United sta~es regained its preeidnence in the use o! this am. Of the twenty-odd Japanese capital ships (battleships, -.:.ttle-crubers, and large aircraft carriers) destroyed in this way, the airplane torpedo ac­ counted for about as aany as guns, b0111bs, subalarine and sur!aee-81ip torpedoes, and mines PJ.t together, though in soae cases the ships sunk by airplane torpedoes had been previous~ crippled by !!hells or bolllbs.

'nle Gerll!lll submarine campaign in this war foll0'119d a course remarkably like that of the previous World War. This time the Gennans acquired the great advantage of the use of ports in France and Norway, from which they could not be soaled off by mining. They also imprOITed their techniques, as by hunting in packs and being guided to their victims by long-range airplanes. In the last year o~ the war they developed the snorkel, s tube that enabled a submarine to "breathe• below the ~r!ace, and therefore to operate oo its Diesels suanerged.

29 escorts, frigates, corvettes, sloops, patrol motorboats, bUmps, a:1d lo:Jg-ra."lge airplanes. They introduced radar. ultrasonic detectors, and improved deT>th charges.

An examination of the data of '{orld ':ler II (aside from the atomic bomb, which m:J.kes every­ thing uncertain) s!10ws that this Vdr did not definitely settle such controversies as those about airplanes I· battleships and land-b~sed I· carrier-based atrplanes. All these weapons proved useful, more or less depending on circum~tances. However, a tally of surface 3inkings (merchant men and auxiliaries as well as warships) shows the torpedo running far ahead of ~~e gun, bomb, mine, and rocket. To this extent the naval pert of the "'ar may legiti:Jat-ely be considered a torpedo wa~ Of the three kinds of torpedo carriers - airplanes, surface-ships, and submarines- all proved effective, with sub=rines leading.

In several cases, warships' unnerworks were reduced to junk by shells and bombs, but the ships stubbornly refused to sink, and either got away or had to be finished off by torpedoes. Such was the fate of the German Bismarck and Scharnhorst, and of the old Japanese rattle-cruiser Hiyel. Aviators went out to sink the last-named with torpedoes after she had been crippled in the fi:rst night ection in the :Battle of O..uul.alcanal. They observed hits, but the ship continued to crawl away. Than it occurred to a torpedo-officer that the torpedoes were set to run shallow, so as not to pass clear underneath small ships, and the Hiye1, because of dacage, was low in the water; hence the torpedoes were exploding against the ar~or-belt with a fine bang but littl~ damage. ~hen the torpedoes were re-set, a couple more sent the ship down.

The torpedo, 1·1e 'JJ2:3' be sure, will not soon become obsolete as a ~eapon. Not only is it the most effective single weapon against ships at -present, but also it stands to be improved in the near future. A torpedo with a target-seeking device to control it, a fuze of the :groxir.1ity type, and possibly n warhead of fissionable material, would, to put it very mildly, present the COrnman de- of any hostile grOU!) of ships ~ti th a serious problem.

30 B-2U83 Chapter '7 MINI:S

7-1. ~ mint!• One of the first applications of gunpowder to w~>rfare, older even than the g11n, wa1 to set off a stationaey charge under the enemy before he knew where it was. This could be done eithe.- by secret~ digging under the foe and planting a charge, or by planting the charge where he was expected to go. The tel"ll nmine" was borrowed from metallurgical minin,p; since ai•llar techniques were used. You may recall H~let'~ remark:

•For 1 ti1 the apert to have the engineer Hoist 11'itl1 his own petard "

A petard was a kind of mine in a bucket-shaped container used to blow in the gates of a besieged· cit7. Naturally the soldiers ~o planted the thing were sometim•s blown up before they could get away, whereu~on the rest of the army, disliking this devilish new weapon-gun~owder, cheered.

The principles of mining were applied to ~~~Prine warfare in 1585, when ~erderi&e Gianibelli undertook to help the city of Antwerp, besieged by the Spaniards. The latter r..ad built a forti­ fied bridge across the Schelde to stop the Dutch from running supnlies into the city. Giani­ belll filled a small ship with gun~ovder and Gent it drifting down against the bridge, where a clockwork fuze exploded it, blowing up half the bridge and a thousand Spaniards. ~w explosion so frightened the Dutch themselves that they forgot to attack as planned, with the result that eventual~ the city fell anyway.

Then in the American Revolution Dushnell, the "submarine-inventor, equipped hi~ H ~ riBt Turtle with a drill by means of which he hoped to attach a 150-pound mine to the bottom of ono of the British men~of-war anchored near New York C~ty. Sgt. Ezra Lee of the Continental Army navi~ted the~ to the Eritish ship all right, but then the drill failed to penetrate the Rrit1sher1 a coyper sheathing and the attempt failed. Later Bushnell tried out mines consisting of kegs of gun~owder with contact fuzes to be sent drifting down the tide against British ships. Poor Bushnell's floating mines proV'8d no more succeaaful than his submarine; Hopkinson the poet wrote a derisive verse beginning:

••twas early aa the poets say Just as the sun vas rising, A soldier stood on a log of wood And saw a si~t surprising ••• •

O.ercome by ridicule, the man ahec.d of hls time retired to the wilds of Georgia where he opened a school under an assumed name. However, experiments with submrrine mines continued. Russia in the Crimean War and the Confederacy in the American Civil War developed contact mines, (•infernal machines,• the British called them), exploded by means of a projecting horn which, ~en struck, caused an ampule of sulphuric acid to break over a mizture of sugar and potassium chlorate. The heat of the resulting chemical reaction set off the charge. Also, Lt. David~

The prototypes of most of the modern types of mine• were developed before :forld r.ar I. ~ines may be eithar li~ter-than-water floating mines, or lighter-than-water captive or moored mines, swaying on the ends of cables anchored to the bottom; or heavier-than-water mines lying on the bottom. Stationary mines ~ be exploded either by contact or by an electric signal from the shore. Floating mines are always contact mines. International law supposedly requires that either floating mines, or captive mines thnt break their cables and bob to the surface, be eo made as to become harmless within a short time, ae otherwise the world1 a ahip?ing lanes vould became meneced by these objeeta.

31 o-:~ A 3 The cotr.:c•onest t;n>e of mine is the moored mine, held to the bottom by a henvy frame called an 1 anchor•, which incorporates a cable on a reel and means for paying out enough cable after the mine and the anchor have been droiJ!>8d together to 1 et the mine float the desired distance below the surface. Against surface-ships mines must be near the surff ce, while against submarines thlV e.re staggered at various depths. The anchor commonly has small 'oheels on which it can be pushed along a railroad on the deck of the minelaying ship. Warships of nearly all the smaller types, including submarines, ha..e been ~:~o~ified for minelaying, and D".any rations have built special minelayers. Britain and France, for instance, have constructed erulser-minelayers. faet ships of good size, 'olhich theoretically could hold off a pursuing fleet by dashing in front of U and dropping floating mines; but this tactic has yd to be tried.

7-2. Mip.es J,a .mJ.4 !£ 1· Mines shoved their importance in the opening weeks of the firet World War, 'olhan a m:ne ,laid by a submarine sank the British b&ttleahip J.udaci9111• Durin« the war enormous numbers of mines were laid by all belligerents. To bottle up German sUbmarines in the North Sea, the British and ~erican navies not only blOcked the English Channel with •ines, but also laid an imrlense belt of mines, 230 miles long, acrosa the .North Sea from the Orkney Island• to the coast of Norway. For this operation they used over ?0,000 mines, aostl.y of a new American type w1 th long wire antennae which detonated the mines electrically when n ship touched them. Allied navies were still laying mines to complete this North Sea Barrage, as it wae called. when the war ended.

Mines also affected the Dardanelles campaign. After the prel1minaJ7 bolllbardllent. the Anglo­ French fleet carefully swept all the mines the Turks had laid to block the strait. The Turks. desperate because of the destruction of their forts and exhaustion of ammunition, sent a little steamez con·n•rted to minelay1nc out at night to lay some more. When the Allies attaclced again. mysterious explosions sank three of their capi~l ships and damaged another. so that the naval attack was called off. :By the time they had reorgenized and mounted an amphibious attaclr:: the Turks had eo strongly fortified the straits that it, too. failed.

To remove mines, first fishing trawlers were sent out to sweep them up by tOYing either one cable between a pair of ships with a weight or kite to pol d it down, or one ship with two cables streaming out at an angle from it by mes.ns of a simiJar kite at each end. At first,mine­ s-epers were blown up at the unecononical r ate of one ship to t~10 mines, but l ater in the war thie rate was reduced to a mere one ship to 80 mines. Devices were also invented to snip the cablee of the mines as the sweep fouled them, letting the mine rise to the surface where it was exploded by gunfire. The parsvane, a minesweeping kite that looks like a model airplane made of boiler-iron, was also developed at this time, and is still carried aboard warships. After the end of the war, several years were required to sweep up all the mines.

7-3. ~ mining. Mining proved important, even 1f len crucial, in lforld War II. The ma i n denlopments were the techniques of minela;ying from the air (with a parachute to lower the mine gently) and complicated trigger-mechan1alll8 to make the mines hard to dispose of. So.e of the special mines developed were the limpet mine (named for a mollusk with great poven of adhesicn) 'llhich lla e held to a ship'fj hull ma gnetically; tho s~ries-:.wl tch mine, exploded by the pressure-changes caused by the passap of ships, and capable of being set tc. go off with t'he firat ship, or the second, and so on. Acoustic mines, set off by the sound of shi~' propellers. were used, but did DOt prove altogether satisfactof7 because they were often exploded pre11aturel.7 by the peculiar noises that some species of fish make.

larl.y in the war the Gel'!llans sprinkled henTier-th.an-vater ~etic mines along the :Br1tis.ll coasts. Dr~mped in shallow -ter, tu,- sank to the bottom were they could not be awept ~ conventional means, end 1.&¥ there un~il an iron-hulled veesel passed onr them and operate4 their aaptic triggers by warpillf: tbe earth's 118gnet1c field. The ~tic mine -.. COWlter­ acted b,- equipping ships with degaussing cables. electric conductors runninc around the ship and neutralizing its magnetic effect b~ an electric current. The minee themselves were deatro,-ed, among other methods, by equipl) ing a large airplane with an electrome.gnet in the fol'l:l of a hU€8 horizonte.l loop of copper ce.ble, and flying low over the infected areas w1 th the current on. ult: rr.i.ues burst beneath and tossed the airplane about by their concuuion. Another method was dragging an elecricall7 charged ~ble along the bottom from a minesweeper.

The mining of the Nor~o:er1an coastal vatera by the Br1 tilh. to etop the :pe.saage of German ships, gave the German• a pretext for their long-planned conquest of lorvay. After that there could be no more North Sea :Barrap. During the Egyptian camps.1gna, the German Air Force •de the Suez Canal practical!~ unusable for a while b7 dropping mines into it faster than th-.r coul4 be swept out.

32 Mines had less effect in the Pacific :phase of the war because most naval <':.Ctivity in that theater took !)bee in water too deep for the purpose. However, the possibility of mines still had to be taken into account in every one of the American ~phibious attacks on islands, and provisions made for sweeping them, All the Axis powers, :!.n fortifying their coasts, used small mines attached to obstacles laid in shallo1~ water to keep off landing craft, and one of the more hazardous ,iobs of some of the attackers was to swim in with goggles and rubber fins on their feet ahead of the boats to disarm these mines. In the closing phases of the war the U, S, Navy blocked the Japanese harbors with series-switch mines, so that at the time of the surrender the J«panese were reduced to sending suicide boats weaving back and forth acrose their harbors until they blew themselves up.

Minea affected the war with Je.pan in a peculiar W8:J". The Japanese had a pair of 16-inch­ t.Wl ~ttleships, the Naa;to and MutsJh built at the same time as our M&rzl.and!. but faster thaa th• giant Yamatos, their best gunnery ships. One dq the~ sailed .out to test new anti­ aircraft guns. ·h'hue she was gone another departmeJlt laid a mine-field. Uobody remembered te inform the captain of the ~:utsu, w1 th the result that on her return •h• plowed into the field at fUll speed, hit eight mines, and sank, while those on shore watched helplessly. Therefore she was not available at Leyte Gulf, and thus Japanese mines helped to win the war for the United States.

33 B-:~A 3 Chapter 8

DEPI'H-CEARGES

8-1. Origin of the depth chflrge. Can one weapon win a 1·mr? This question connot be an­ swered by a simple yen or no. 'lleapons certainly h.?.ve a profound influence on the outcome of a var, and when one side has much more advanced weapons than the other, as c·then Cortes conquered Mexico or Mussolini Ethiopia, they may render any resistance futile. Xet seldom does a single weapon win a vnr by itself, because the other side soon copies it and develops antidotes to it. Thus the atomic bomb did not win World War II for us, since Japan was already in a hopeless position. It nerely induced them to give un the 1-st-ditch defense they had planned, which in­ cluded such picturesque items as men called "fearle£.s dragons• who were to w:uie out from shore in diving helmets carrying mines on the ends of poles, with which they would blow up American landing-craft and themselves as well.

Likewise the te.nk did not win World ':icr I for the Allies because it was not introduced in decisive quantities until the Central ?overs were on the decline anyway. ~ometi~es a new weapon fails to avert defeat because 1t is im!'roperly used, or is not sufficiently perfected, or is not available in sufficient .1t.u1 • ...i • .Jva as in the case of poison gas and the V-2 rocket, introduced by Germany in ';lorld ilars I and II respectively. However, if any of the recent ,.,ars ce.n be said to hnve been won by a single weapon, the depth-charge or depth-bomb won World \~p_r I by avet-t­ ing the imminent def

The depth-che.r£e seems hardly glamorous enough for the role of a decisive wee.pon, being a simple heavier-t!-.an-;rter mine with :re1>.ns for setting it off as 1t sinks. ~lost depth-charges are exploded by a hydrostatic trigser that cen be pre-set to detonate the charb~ nt any desired depth up to 600 feet or more. Some recent types use fuzes of the influence or proxi~ity type, vbich detonate the ch.!).rge •,then it comes within a certain distance of ~he ~uboarine. Fast ships like destroyers can drop depth-charges off rails leading to the stern like mines. This method, ho\·rever, is unsuitable for slo•" ships, which would hrve their O\m sterns blown off unless the char69 is s~t to explode at a considerable depth. The other ~ethod of unloading depth-c~rges is to shoot them fro~ a projector in the form of a simple mortar fixed to the ship's deck. Since the depth-charge is much too l~rge to go into the gun, an accessory called an "arbor• 1s fastened to the charge, having a cylindrical projection that f~s into the gun,

The usual method of using depth-charges is to fire several at once, and drop one or ~re off the stern at the same time, when the ship is thought to be over a submarine. The charges strike the water in a pattern that makes as large an area as possible dangerous to t}~ quarr7. Since the projector cannot be trained or elevated, range is varied by size of the propelling charge. The weigtlt of the explosive 1n depth-charges varies from roo to 600 pounds. The 600- pound charge is damaging at 80 feet and fatal at 30; the 300-pound charge is fatal at 20. If one compares these figures with the size of the average submarine- about 300 feet loill:- one sees that considerable accuracy 1s required. It does no good to sprinkle charges at random about a submarine-infested are1. At the start of 'llorld \"/ar I there was nothing to do against submarines except to lay mines and nets to keep thew out of certain areas, and to shoot or rem them when they appeared on the surface. Someti~es they could be rammed when proceeding at periscope depth, but a periscope is hard to see except in smooth water and bright daylight. SubMrine com:1anders naturally learned to avoid the nets and mines and to avert attacks from surface ships by st~ing below. Once ~ submarine had submerged below periscope depth, there was not~ng a surface ship could do.

The Navy of Great Britain, which suffered most severely from submarine attacks, therefore developed the depth-charge early 1n World \"Tar I. The charges were not very effective at first because the submarines could not be located accurately in nost cases. The pursuing ship had to get a good look at the submarine before it submerged to judge its position. Still, the charges did sink sone submarines, and damaged others so that they had to rise to the surface where.they could be disposed of by other means.

To enable shius to locate submarines under water the hydrophone, a kind of stethoscopa mounted in a ship'~ hull below the ~mterline, was developed. By using special controls the operator could determL,e the direction of the hostile propellers, and several such fixes at the same time or in quick succession would locate the submarine. TQe hydrophone-and-depth ~~rge combination saw its first success the night of July 6, 1916, When the British motor-coat Salmon bombed the sub~~ine minelayer UC-7 and set off her mir.es with a grand explosion. Still the :nenace was not mastered, for 1t took nJ"nth!' to install hydrophone!: in nll the anti-subma.rine ships ond to jack UJ"l · the =nufacture o 1 depth-chnrges to the more tl1c'1.n a thousand a week. Meanwhile sinkL>ge of merchantmen increased to about half a million tons a month in the spring of 1917, nnd when Admiral Si~s arrived from the United States in Dritain to plan Anglo-A::!erican nn.val cooperation, Jelllcoe told him that Britain was losing; they were dovn to three weeks' food-sup?lY and getting lower.

The British Uavy had not used convoy; pe.rtly because they did not think the'J had enough destroyers, pro-tly to get the maxili1W!1 use out of their ships, since convoy ne'\!ls t.t>.at ships have to wait in ports for convoys to form, and the faster are held down to the speed of the slowest. When American destroyers were added to the anti-submarine neet, convoy was tried out, then adopted in full force as sinkings declined. The combination of the depth-chorge, the hydrophone, and convoy finally broke the back of the subm:>rine campaign, or at least reduced sinh."ings to where new construction could keep up with them. The North Sea Barrage finished the campaign, when in September, 1918, mutinous German sailors refused to boc.rd t.he doomed sul>m..-u-ines an7 longer. The final bo~score for destruction of German sub=rines in tha.t war was:

Minetr ••••••.•.•••••••••• 41 Depth-charge ••.•...... •• 34 Rrunming ••...... •.••••.•• 23 Gunfire ••...•••••.•••••• 3:) Other submarines •••••••• l9 Decoy ships ••••..••••.•• l3 Miscellaneoua ••••.••.••• 28

Depth..chArges were relatively more important than this table implies, since some of them forced aubm<>.rines to the surface 'Where they were destroy-ed by other weapons, and many of the mine llinkinge occurred toward• the end of the war when the depth-charge had alread$" saved Great Britain.

8-2. ~ J6a 91, ma-charges. The story of the Ger:!I!Ul submarine crunpa.ign in World War II paralleled thD.t of the previous great war,' with everything more complicated and on a larger scale. Depth-c.hr>..rges were dropped from airplanes and blimps, improved in design, and filled with torpex instead of TNT. The U. S. Navy now has a slightly streamlined depth-charge that looks like an overfed airplane bomb, and sinks more rapdily than the cylindrical •aah..can1 •

The ro~t principle vas combined with the depth-charge to produce two formidable new anti­ submarine weapons, the 1 mousetrap1 and the 'hedgehog." In the mousetrap, so called from its appearance, a set of rocket-launchers 1a welded to the forward deck of an anti-submarine veseel. The proJectiles .xe roCket depth-charges, 7.2 inches in diameter. with contact or proximit7 fuzes. Since the effectiveness of a chm ~e varies more or less tnversel7 as the CU:be of ita distance from the target, a small charge in actual contact with a submarine is worth one several times the size a few feet away; hence with modern fuzes it is profitable to shoot a number of small charges in place of one large one.

The "hedgehog• uses a similar (but not identical) rocket depth-charge, fired in all direct­ ions from the deck of the ship se that the miss~e strike the water in an elliptical pattern. The outstanding accomplishment of this weapon was the eng.agement in which the U. s. destroyer­ escort England sank six Japanese submarines in one week.

The greatest advance of World War II in anti-submarine technique. ho~ever. was the develOP­ ment of ultrasonic detection ap"t&ra.tue during the 1930 1 a. In the previous war. subt:Jarine com­ manders had learned to neutralize the hydrophone, at least in shallow water, by lYi~g on the bottom and keeping the crew from talking or otherwise making noise. Moreover an anti-submarine ship had to slow do1·m or stop altogether to use its hydrophones, Dl8.king itself a fine target for a submarine's torpedo.

The new detector, called a •sonar" or (in Great Britain) an ~asd1c," searches the neig.;,­ borhood of the ship using it with beams of ultrasonic sound, making it possible to locate a submarine lying still. The principle is similar to that used in radar, or in the sonic deptb- 8ound1ng apparatus that for some ywars has been in use on ships. The distance of tile object is measured by the time it takes for the echo to return, and the direction is determined by using waves of such short length that they have beam properties, instead of spreading in all directions like sound in the audible range. Operating the appar~tus is . called "pinging" from the sound it makes. Now it has been combined with a new plotting device called a chemical re­ corder. Ultrasonic detection apparatus and depth-charges accounted for most of t!1e 900-odd

35 Axis subca.rines sunk in ':.'orld ".liar II.

Like most new de>"ices this detector, too, had its shortcomings, one of 'olhich was that it would register whales as if they were submarines, with the result that a number of these rare end inoffensive ani~ls were depth-charged to death by hasty anti..submarine crews.

36 B-2483 Chapter 9 BOCXETS AND GUIDED MISSILES 9-1. !afly rockets. The rocket probably evolved from the fire-arrow, a primitive but effec­ tive incendiary weapon used the world over before gunpowder, and ~en employed by the Britiah in ~thiopia in World War II. As far as is known, the Chinese made the first rockets in the 13th century. In a few years Arab scientists bro~t the knowledge of rockets to medieval ~ope. For instance, l{asaan Alrammah in his .fU ~ ~ J'ightinc: .QA Horstback U4 x.Ull. ~ Rngines told how to make "Chinese arrows" or rockets.

Europeans at once applied the invention both to pyrotec.hnic and military uses. The Island of Chiozsa was taken in 1379 as a result of a lucky rocket hit that set a tower of the defense works on fire. Military engineers were long uncertain about what to do with the new device, as they were for that matter about guns. Some of their proposals showed imagination, as when Jeanes de Fontana about 1420 designed a rocket car on rollers, intended to ram down the gates o_f cities, and a rocket boat or torpedo to perform the same office against warships.

Rockets were used in war in desultory fashion until they were revived at the end of the 18th century as a result of British wars in India. In one series of these wars the British cavalry had been badly battered by swarms of rockets launched at them by the troops of B&idar Ali, Sultan of Mysore, and his successor Tipu Sahib. This unwonted military ingenuity on t~e part of a non-European aroused interest in Europe. Colonel William Congreve of the British Army, having read of the Mysore Wars, built experimental rockets until he achieved a range of 2,000 yards. This so impres.sed the British Navy that it equippeNapoleonic Wars. British rockets also took part in the great Battle of Leipzig, and pro­ vided the •rockets' red glare" of which Francis Scott Key wrote.

Following Congreve. most European armies and that of the United States as well, formed rocket units in the first half of the 19th century, but then' the 19th-century revolution in the design of cannon put the rockets out of business again, despite Hale's invention of the stickles& spin-stabilised rocket. By World War I rockets were restricted to such auxil~ary Jobs as carrying lifelines in sea-rescue work, and signalling. Almost their only strictly military use consisted of fastening them to the struts of French and Russian airplanes and shoot~ng them into German observation balloons to set them on fire. The French shot down the German airship LZ-77 with rockets, and almost got another which they pursued around the coun­ try with a rocket-launcher mounted on a truck. 9-2, The theorY of rockets. The principle of_propulsion by means of the recoil of a jet was known long before the invention of rockets. Back in Cl&asieal times the Italiot-Greek philos­ opher Archytas invented a model bird of wood that flew round and round on the end of a string by means of some sort of steam-Jet, and a few centuries later the great engineer Hero of Alex­ andria designed a kind of primitive steam turbine as a toy. The force created by rockets and other Jet devices was not understood until the time of Isaac Newton. People thought, as some still do, that the stream of gas pushed against the at­ mosphere as a boatman pushes against the bottom with a pole - although a stream of gas, having no structural strength, cannot push against things that way. The gas does not push against surround.ing ( 8 ambient1 ) air except incidentally; it .slsl§JI. push 8€&inst the front end of the com­ bustion chamber of the rocket. The resistance of the ambient air or other fluid slows up both jet and rocket, so that a rocket works better in a vacuum than in a gas or liquid. Newton explained this effect by his third law of motion, stating that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Therefore when two things, such as a rocket and its charge. or a gun and its proJectile, free to move, are forced apart by an explosion. the prod­ uct of the mass and the velocity imparted to one (the momentum) will be the same· as that ac­ quired by the other. In 1680 Newton proposed a carriage driven by a steam Jet. After Newton, several people tried to put the reaction principle to work. In 1721 a Dutch professor, s 1 Gravesande, proposed the same thing, and in the middle of the 19th century Golightly in England, von Siemens in Germany, and others planned flying-machines driven by the same means. The mathematics of rocket flight were worked out in detail in the latter 'part of that century and the early years o! this century, largely by a retiring Russian country school­ master, Tsiolkovski, who died at a great age in 1936.·

B-211&3 3? After Tsiolkovski 1 s articles appeared, a number of technologists, auch as Pyerelman and R!nin iA Russia, Oberth in Germany, Esnault-Pelterie in France, and Goddard in th~ United States, developed his theoriea further. Goddard, who had done som9 engineeri4g on signal rockets as an officer in the U. s. Naval Reserve in World War I, devoted his efforts after tl1e war to the de­ velopment of meteorological rockets for reaching extreme altitudes, and speculated about sending a rocket to the moon where it would mark its arrival by exploding a ma~nesium flare. With ex­ treme secretiveness he tested rockets driven by a mixture of gasoline and liquid oxygen, reach­ ing an altitude of 7,500 feet. Between the two World Wars, such amateur groups as the American Rocket Society and the 8 Verein fUr Raumschiffahrt ("Society for Space-Travel ) or German Rocket Society performed much experimental rocket work. Germany under the Weimar Republic was a hothouse of radic~l engineer­ ing ideaa, some good like lightweight streamlined rail-cars, others mere publicity-stunts like the rocket autoQobiles which the rocket engineer Valier persuaded the manufacturer von Opel to build. (Rockat propulsion is about the most impractical method im~inable for driving ground vehicles.) From 1929 to 1933 the German Rocket Society built and tested high-altitude rocket• and worked on problems of ignition, nozzles, and parachutes for safel7 returning the rockets to earth. Hitler'• accession to power ended the VfR; the anti-l~zi members left Germany and the rest were put to work for the German Army. The aociety1 a youngest member, Count von Braun, eventually headed the V-2 rocket project. 9-3. Modern militarY rockets. Beginning in the latter part of 1941, the armed forcea of Ger­ many, Britain, and Russia, (the United States lagged in ~~is field), blossomed out with mili­ ~ry applications of the rocket principle, all having worked on it for several years before the outbreak of war. Although rockets were still much less accurate than guns, they made up for this ahortco~ing by the fact that they could be fired from a aimple, cheap, light launcher in­ stead of a complicated, expenaive, heavy gun. Therefore they could be used where lightness or a great audden volume of fire waa more important than accuracy. The defenae-minded British applied the rocket principle to anti-aircraft fire, with a Z-gun to fire explosive rockets on land, and a shipborne anti-aircraft rocket that dangled a long steel tape from a little parachute in front of dive-bombers. The Germans brought out their Nebolwerfer, a big aix-b4rreled rocket projector on an anti-~-gun carrisge. The original ~\Yorfer fired 6-inch smoke-rockets; later modele fired high;explosive rockets of that and larger sisea. The Russians beat back the German invasions with rocket-accelerated armor-piercing bombs launched from airplanes at tanka, and massed bombardments by a 30-barral mobile rocket-launcher called the kltYUiha• When the Anglo-American air forcea began he&Yf bo~bing raida on Germany, the German fighters fired salvoes of 8.27-inch rockets from under their vi~s at the boabera, a trick soon copied by the other belligerents. Had the Germane possessed a proxiaity fuze as well, they might have been able to halt the atrategic bombing campaign against Germany with their air-to-air rockets.

The United States began rocket operation• in the Borth African campaign with the Launcher, Rocket, M-\, otherwise the bazooka, a tube designed to be held in \he middle by one man and fired from his shoulder, the exhaust flying out the rear. The projectile was a little 2.36 inch rocket with a hollow-nosed charge. Mining engineer• had long known that an explosive charge presenting a concave surface against a face of rock or armor will blast a hole of aur­ prising depth, since the concave aurface acta on the exploaion-vaves somewhat like the reflec­ tor of a headlight. This phenomenon ia called the Munroe effect from ita diacoverer. The bazooka rocket did not, therefore, actually penetrate the tank; it exploded on i~ct, punched a hold in the tank armor, and ae~t fragment• of ar2or flying about the interior. The Munroe effect has been applied to bombs aa well, and the basooka was joined as an anti-~ weapQn b7 the s1~ilar devices of other belligerent• throwing their charges by means of a spring or a propellant explosive charge. In the last year of the war the U. s. lavy brought into action a variety of formidable rockets: the 3-inch rocket to be fired from aircraft, the 4.5-tnch and 7.2-inch from ahipa, the 5-inch from either, and the rocket depth-charges already discussed. Just before the end of the war the 11.5-inch 1 Tiny Tim1 rocket was put into use, and larger types were in preparation. for ahip-to-ahore boabard8ent the lavy fitted a number of landing-craft aa rocket-ahipt with a dosen or more multiple launcher• that could be fired in various combinationa, plaatering beaches with erplostvea. Rockets proved even more effective from airplanes than from the ground, aince a problem of rocket-fire is keeping the rocket on ita courae during the firat few aeconda when it ia travelling slowly, and a rocket fired from an airplane already haa a velocit7 of aeveral hundred miles an hour.

B-2U83 All other nations• rocket developments, however, were put in the ahade by the German V-2, or ~nr&kete A-4: a 46-foot, 15 ton rocket with a warhead of 2,150 pounds containing amatol, ~ultra-stable mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate. A rocket research group under von Braun, with the technical advice of Oberth, developed this rocket at PeenemUnde on an island in the Baltic Sea in the course of several years• work. During their research the Germans fired the rockets at Polish towns in conquered territory, co~lete with Poles, to test their effective­ ness against civilian populAtions.

About August, 1943 the design of the V-2 and ita companion weapon the V-1 had already been completed. The V-2 waa built to climb verticall7 for the first B seconds. Then control­ vanes tilted it gradually towards the target until it was rising at an angle of 45 degrees. The rocket motor continued to burn its alcohol-oxygen mixture for 71 seconds, at the end of which time the rocket was 22 miles up and going a mile a second. At the proper point the re­ maining fuel supply waa auto&atically cut off. The rocket continued to c~st upwards till it reached a height of 58 or 59 miles, then descended. 7ive minutes after launching it came down on its target, 200 miles away, at a speed of over 1,000 miles per hour. At this velocity the compression of the air in front of the rocket heated its nose dull red. Since it travelled faster than sound it could be neither heard before it hit nor intercepted once it had attained apeed.

The V-2 waa atabiliaed by four large fine on which it stood before firing, and guided by two sets of 4 vanes, a aet of 4 small graphite vanea in the path of the exhauet gases, and a set of 4 large ahee,-steel vanes on the after enda of the fina, which took over guidance of the rocket after it had attained speed. Gyroscopes driven by compressed nitrogen controlled ita direction.

The V-2 proved to have .a nQmber of weakneasea. Ita damage was no greater than that caused by an airplane bomb of the same weight of charge, and ita accuracy far less; if all went well the rocket-aen could juat about count upon hitting Greater London. The mechanisms fre­ quently failed, causing the rocket to fall back to earth, topple over on ita aide, and delU&& the launching area with flaming alcohol. or to nose down and crash iMmediately after takeoff, aometi~es blowing up an adjacent rocket-station. The gyroscopic mechanism deteriorated rapidly. Deapite tbeae shortcomings, however, the V-2 waa a major scientific triumph, and performed about as well as could be expected of a weapon rushed into action before it was fully perfected by a nation already on the road to defeat. The Germans fired 4,300 of them, of which 1,230 bit London, seTeral hundred more hit Antwerp, and the rest went wild.

At the time of the fall o! Germany, the Germans had other rocket weapons under develop­ ment, including a winged rocket for transatlantic bombardment; &n air-to-air rocket guided by a long electric cable that unreeled froa ita mother airplane; an anti-~ircraft rocket like a miniature V-2; and a rocket interceptor airplane that took eff, not horizontally, but straight up by means of a steel launching tower resembling an oil-well derrick.

When Germany fell, the American Army collected a number of rockets and parta. A few montba later an Army-Navy organisation at White Sanda, lew Mexico, began a series of explora­ tions of the upper atmosphere vith these rockets, which, carrying cameras and meteorological instruments, rose to heights over 100 milea and returned their instruments to earth by para­ chute. Rockets designed for even higher altitudes are under development.

9-4. Other uaea of rt~u1s!on. World War II saw the use of jet and rocket devices of many kinde besides thoae mentioned above. Early in the war the Germane used rocketa to aeaiat the takeoff of Junkera 88 bombers with extra-heavy bomb loads. Ot~r powers soon imitated thia acheme, the U. S. version being the now familiar JATO (jet-assisted take-off). Great Britain and Germany developed jet engines !or airplanes: gas turbines driving air-comprsssora to feed air under preuure to the turbine, and derhing their thrust from the exhaust. The Germane led in thia deTelopment too, getting a jet fighter and a light bomber into action in 1944. The British soon followed with the Gloucester Meteor, while the British De Haviland Vampire and the American Lockheed P-80 just failed to aee action. Despite ita high fuel comsumption the turbo­ Jet engine praTed so euccesaful in giving high apeed that in the years following the war the leading powera largely dropped development of propellor-driven fighter- 1planee in faTor of jeta.

Another jet-propelled ~iesile, The German V-1, flying bomb, robot bomb, or busa-bomb,wae a 25-foot craft coapriaing a 2,200 pound bomb with stubby wings. upon which wae mounted an in­ termittent jet motor in the fora of a lone pipe with ita front end closed by a grille of narrow flapper-valves of the type called •reeda," The bun-bomb had to 'be launched by catapult or rocket-aaaiated take-off, but once it had attained 150 m.p.h. the kerosene-burning motor came

39 B-2U83 into operation, accelerating the bomb to a maximum apeed of about 360 m.p.h. A timing de~ · iee shut off the motor when it had flown the required distance, and the bomb dove earthward. Al­ though the bombs did great damage when launched against England in June, 1944, they were soon counteracted by anti-aircraft fire and fighter patrols. In a few months their launching sta­ tions on the French coast were captured, though the Germans continued to harass England by launching the bombs from airplanes. The United States ordered a l~rge number of buzz-bombs for the final campaign against Japan, but never had occasion to use them,

From the turbo-jet it ...-as only a step to the rocket-driven airplane, or man-carrying rocket, Such a craft, unli.k·• the buzz-bomb and the turbo-jet airplane, carries its owr. oxygen and therefore can operate at any altitude as long as its fuel holds out. Although Chi~ese annals tell of an official, Wan Hu, who about the year 1500 blew hiroeelf to kingdom come by trying to fly a vehicle cons1st1!18: of a pair of kites, a saddle, and 47 rockets, tl:.e first rocket aircraft actually to fly was the Rhon-Boasitten Gesellschaft glider, In 1928 this craft made ~ short teet flight in Germany, pushed along by a couple of rockets.

The Germano got a small rocket interceptor airplane, the Messerschmidt 163, into actinn b~fore the close of World War II; a sturdy craft with swept-back wings and no horizontal tail surfaces.• About the same ~ime the Japanese used an aerial suicide-craft, a manned flying rocket-bomb, against American ships. Th~se "~-bombs," as Americans called them, did a lot of dal!Jage, and would have done more except that they were hard to aim at high speeds. It 1s U!\likely, however, that any people but the Japnnl!'nE', whose moral code carried dit

The success of aerial rocket vehicles brings the possibility of navigation outside the earth's atmosphere, or even travel to other heavenly bodi~s. Men have speculated about such journeye ever since cle

For various reasons solid propellants are most practical for s~ll and medium-si~ed rockets, while for large rockets like the V-2 liquid fuels are needed. The usual combinations are liquid oxygen with gasolJoe or alcohol. Equally powerful reactions can be obtained by the union of nitric acid with aniline or with vinyl ethyl ether, and these fuels are preferred for some applicntionc; but it is bard to see how very much more energy beyond tbe;e could be ob­ tained from chemical reactions alone.

9-5. Guided miEs~. Men experimented for many years with torpedoes and other devices con­ trolled from a dietance by cables, but remote control did not become really practical until the development of el~ctric relays and radio communication. During World War I the Germans made one interesting attempt at remote control, They sent a little unmanned motor-boat or surface torpedo against the British monitors bombarding the Belgian coast, controlled electrically from shore by a long cable that unreeled as the boat sped out to sea. The boat hit one of the moni­ tors, but the monitor had such large bulges that the boat skittered up the side of one of these and explod.ed well above the waterline, blowing a hole in the side plates but. otherwi e doing 11 t tle harm.

Various nations experimented with radio control of airplanes prior to World War II, and during this war auch work was pressed intensively. Airplanes were flown under radio control to test them to destruction. Great Britain and the United States built a number of small radio controlled airplanes as anti-aircraft practice targets, and fitted out a heavy bomber as a radio-controlled missile in an attempt to blow up the German submarine pens, This airplane crashed before it could be used, The U, S. Havy built and purchased a number of radio controlled "drones" large enough to be used as torpedo 'planes, either by dropping torpedoes in the usual way or diTing into their targets like a kamikaze. These drones had a television set in the nose, so that an operator in a mother plane at a distance could, by looking at the television screen, pilot the drone by remote control as if he were aboard it. Drones were never actually used against the enemy, however.

By the end of the war several forms of guided mi~siles were in use, though still imperfect like the V-2. There were bombs with or without winga, propelled either by gravity or by a rocket motor, and guided either by radio signals or by a target-Reeking device that gui~ed the missile home by radar. infra-red receptors, or other means. The Germans, for instance, used a radio-controlled rocket-assisted glide bomb against ships. Except for a ease or two where the machinery went wrong and cauJed the bomb to chase its own mother airplane, thia weapon waa

40 quite successful. With it the Germans aank the Italt.n battleship ~on her way to surrender, and wiped out a turret on the U, S. cruiser Sayapp1h,

The United States perfected a si~le radio controlled b~mb, the Azon ("azimuth only") which was steered right and left from the airplane that dropped it. This bomb proved useful in the final Burma campaign against long narrow targets like bridges, The U, s. Navy sank several Japanese merchant ships with the Bat, a gravity-powered glide-bomb guided by target-seeking radar. Greater use of this missile was limited because we were •running out of tar~ets• at this stage of the war. Other devices were under development at the end of the war, such as the Glomb, a s~ll television-operated glider to be dived into the target; and the Gorgon, a 16-foot missile with wings of the canard or tail-first type and ~aniline-nitric acid motor.

These developments will be pushed vigorously in any future war, However, the road to push­ • button warfare is hard, for these devices are so complicated and delicate, and req\ure such critical adjuatmen~ that the utmost effort is required to make tbem work, Moreover their elec­ trical controls, their radar, television, and remote-control meehnni~ms, are subject to hostile interference such as artificial static. We may therefcre assume that the remote-controlled, transoceanic rocket is still some time in the future, and that at the start of any war in the near future most mibsiles will continue to be launched within less than a hundred miles of their target by manned ships, airplanes, and ground installations.

41 8-L,ij~: ChApter 10

10-1. ~All~ ~Qmbt. Throwing or dropping an explosive charge into the midst of the enemy has been known to warfare ever since the defenders of Kai-Fung-lu, in th~ year 1232, lowered a bomb on the end of a chain into the midst of the besieging Mongols, sending the nomads into panicky !light - a aiege action which also saw the earliest recorded uee of rockets. Early hand-bombs, or grecades, ware hollow iron spheres looking just like the bombs that cartoonists used to draw in the hands of a bewhiskered character symbolizing BolsheviPm. In the 17th and 18th centuries special troops called grenadi~rs were trained to use them in siege operations, according to the method described in the famous old march song, ~ BritiaQ ~~:

•we throw them fro~ the glacis About the enemy 1 a ears ••• • the glacis being the forward slope of fortifications of that ti•e. British grenadier regiments have retained the name long after losing their •pecial !unction.

A flying-machine would obviously be an ideal place !rom which to drop bombt. Alttough the balloon vas reduced to practice in the l780 1 s, and Benjamin Franklin had speculated on the poasibility of transporting armies with it, Napoleon declined to make u~e of the invention on the groun~ tt~t 1 it vas undignified for military men to meddle with gas-bags.•

However, balloons were used by both sides in the American Civil W6r, and during the Franco-Pruasian War, when Paris was ringed by the Pruasians, the beaieged kept in touch with the outside by balloon. The balloo~ista dropped a few amall bombs on the Prussians as they drifted over their linPs, while the latter futilely shot at the balloons with the first anti-aircraft gun, a long-barrelled 2.1-centimeter piece. During 'he early monthe of World War I, aviators sometimee harassed ground troops bf dropping handfuls of steel darts about the eire of a pencil on them. Althouth these darts could inflict a nasty wound they proved of little tactical importance. Some of the larger air­ planes carried a few bombs, as they had in the previous Italo-Turkish War. These were pear­ ehaped objecta with a handle for heaving them overboard, and sometimes a long streamer of cloth to stabilise them in their fall. During the latter part of the war, airplane and airship bombn asHumed & quite modern appearance: long, cylindrical, Yith a rounded noee and a tapered finned tail, and a little rotary impeller like a miniature airplane propeller to arm the bomb as it fell. These bomba were small by modern standards, the 110-popn~ German airship bomb& dropped on England be!ng considered large. Still, by the Armistice the Allies had planned bombing raids on Berlin and were making airplanes and bombs for the purpose.

10-~. Mgdprn bolbing. Crude as it vaa, the air bombing of World War I made a profound impres­ sion upon the more thoughtful minds of Western civilization, especially sine~ the speed, aize, and range of airplanes increased rapidly in the years following the war. ~ great war of worde ensued, Some like Doubet in Italy and Mitchell in the United States fore~st the sinking of fleete and the obliteration of citiea, if not of the human race, by airplane bombs, while others called such talk needless alarmiem. When German aircraft levelled the village of Guerniea in the Spaniah Civil War, that vas held to prove the pro-bomber a~gument. When emall­ acale Ge~ raids on Barcelona did little damage, though they badly panicked the Barc~lonians, thie waa held to refute the claime of the 1 air enthusiasta.•

with the opening of World War II, air bombing ehowed vrAt it could do in the ease of Rotterdam. After that city had surrendered to the German force¥ invading Holland against feeble reeletance, the German Air Foree, ae a measure of terroriam, levelled the central section of the city and killed 30,000 people in a single raid.

Then the Germane tried to repeat their Rotterdam performance against Britain, and suc­ ceeded in their raid on Coventry. However, vhile Rotterdam had been undefended, the British brought into action an immense defense organization of anti-aircraft guns, barrage balloons, eearchlights, radar, and their new interceptor fighters, the Hurrican.e and Spitfire, then the world's best. Although the Germane inflicted grave damage on London and other cities, their own losses rose to 185 bombers in one day, at which point they were forced to call off the cam­ paign. Subaequently the Britieh and ~erican air forces vieited similar treatment upon Cologne, Hamburg, Dreaden, Berlin, and many amaller cities. In the RAF raid on Hamburg in July, 1943, euch a large conflagration vas set that thousands of civilians who escaped the bombs were killed

B-2483 by scorching and suffoc.tion.

The lesson of this war with r~gard to the bombing of cities seems to be that air pave~ can, against a weak defense, do eyerythiD& that the •air enthuaiasta• had propheaied an·! mo~e; on the other hand, it is possible t~ defend a powerful country effectively against an air-bomb­ ing campaign, and eYeD when it ia not possible, a nation can still endure immense material dam­ age and hundreds of t~ousands of casualties from air attack and atill go on fighting.

The Germans began their campaigns with high-explosive bombs ranging up to 550 pounds in weight, and incendiary bombs, mostly 2-pound the~ite bombs with thick magnesi~lloy eaainga that continued to burn fiercel7 after the the~ite eharg8 was exhausted. As the war progressed, bombs, like other weapons, got bigger, more eooplieatei, and more varied. The Anglo-American air forces used bombs of 2,000, then 4,000, then 8,000 pounds, called by such propaganda name~ &I "blockbusters• and •earthquake bombs.• While several varieties of incendiary bomb were tried, the thormite-magnesium bomb remain•d the most effectiYe against cities because of its in­ tense 3,000-degree temperature. HoweTer, it had to be used in great numbers because over half the ~rea of a city eonsiats of street• and courts in which bombs fell harmlessly, and even the remaining bombs ~~. 1ekepi under fair control by vigorous civilian !ire-fighting. On the other hand, the United States found a bomb of jellified gaooline effective against the huts and cropa of the Japanese in the Pacific. In the campaign in France, the u. s. Army Air Force was called upon to lay barrages of bombs to cover the advance of troops, since American artillery, which would normally be as­ signed this function, ~s rether weak- at least by Russian standards. Although these "carpet barrages" of bombs proved effective, their success may largely have been due to the lack of ef­ fective Genaan air opposition, and it is doubtful whether this is on the whole an efficient way to use air power. Many other things were dropped from the sky during the war. The showering of propaganda leaflets, ~ old art, reAched new heights of ingenuity. For instance, against the Japanese forces in the Aleutians, the United States did not make the mistake of appealing to the Japanese to "come in and surrender and we'll give you a good hot cup of coffee,• a1nc9 the Japanese sel­ doo surrendered and do not like coffee. Instead the Americana dropped paper cut-outs in the form of leavea of a tree that in Japan is reghrded as a symbol of misfortune, printed with a Japanese poem in correct classical style: "A• these le~ves fall, so shall your fortune• de­ cline; aa they pile up on the ground, so shall your misfortunes be heaped up ••• • thereby ap­ pealing to the Japanese belief in the magical efficacy of a written formula. The British dropped little cards impregnated with wet phoephorus on Ger.sany, which when they dried caught fire spontaneouBly and set woods and crops ablaze; and also counterfeit ration at&mpa to com­ plicate civil administration. Finally the Germans at Sevastopol dropped pi ces of agricultur~l machinery to bewild~r the Russians, tho~h it ia not known whether thia antic had any such ef­ fect.

10-3. ~~ in naTal varf&tl· Life iu the United States was enlivened in the 1920's b7 the great bomber-~rahip controversy, led by Brigadier-General William Mitchell, who pressed the clal~s for air power with such belligerence that he was finally eourt-martialled for insubor­ dination. There were also tests of bombs against ships that settled nothing. They sank the ob­ solete anchored German battleship Ostfr1e~, but proved ineffective against the hull of the Waahington, the fourtl1 of the M&rx1ands, destroyed under the Washington Treaty. Technical developments during the twenty years following brought Mitchell's prophecies true to some extent, but not entirely, because these improvements affected ships, guns, and • fighter planes as well as bombing and torpedo aircraft. In World War II airplanes proved that they could sink any ship aflo&t, if there were enough airplanes or if the ship were a~ ~ die­ advantage.

On the other hand, some air attacks against ships were ~lsastroualy defeated, the supreme example being the Battle of.the Philippine Sea, in which the Japanese threw over 400 carrier airplanes against the U. s. fleet, and lost eTery one of them while inflicting only triYial damages. The Ya;a~ might baTe escaped with sufficient air coverage and the best modern ant1- *ireraft armament, as the German battleships 5cb&rn4orst and Qpeisepau ~seaped from Brest through the foggy ~n&lish Channel despite the best efforts of the British Navy and Air Foree to atop them.

Although an eve~ more vigorous air power doctrine ~ been advanced in late yeara, pro­ testing th• use even of aircraft carriera and calling for winning wars entirely with land-baaed bombers, World War II did not support these argumenta. It showed neither type of airplane all-

43 B-2483 important; the carrier-based airplanes, for instance, proved more effective in attacking a tar­ get out of range of land-based bombers, or concentrating a surprise attack ~in•t a limited tar­ get near the ocean. For many purposes a fleet, which nowadays means a group o! carriers pro­ tected by gunnery and torpedo ships, is still the most useful instrument.

Aircraft bombs for naval use are essentially the same as those used on l~nd. For attack­ ing armored warships there are bomb• with hollow-no•ed charge• and armor-piercing bombs which like ar.nor-piercing shells have thick cases and relatively small charges. In !act, the Japanese improvieed armor-pi8rcing bombs by rigging ordinary 14-i~ch AP ehells with tails and special fuzea. The usual sizes of U. s. Naval Aircraft bombe are 100, 250, 500 and 1,000 pounds, since carrier operation limits the eize of airplane• and their load•. Therefore the very large bombe carried by l~nd-based planes are not ordinarily used in carrier operations, though the v.ry large carriers now ~ontemplated (65,000 to 80,000 tons) would make larger carrier-plane boabs possible. Except for a few speci~l cases like the sinking of the Tirpitz, large land-based bombers proved rather ineffective against warships, since they either must fly high, in which case the bombs usually mias, or low, in which case they are likely to be shot down before they can bomb. Although the United Stat~s made great claims early in World War II for sinking Jap­ 'ftese shipe by high-level horizontal bombing, the Japanese after the war produced records to show that only a few hits had been scored in this manner. The most effective bombing technique against defended ships ie dive bombing, originally developed by the U. S. Navy, in which the airplane dives at an angle between 45 and 75 degrees at the target, releases the bomb at low altitude, and pulls out of the dive. Such tactics re- ' quire airplanes of sturdy construction eo that they will not come apart during ths pull-out. They also involve risk, since ~~ing the dive the airplane makes a fine target for anti-aircraft guns with proximity fuzes. Early in World War II the Germans applied dive bombing to land warfare with the Junkers 87 or~. a alow, strongly built single-~ngined light bomber, sometimes equipped with a siren to frighten people on the ground during its dive. During the North African campaign the U. s. Army used land versions of the Navy's SBD and SB2C dive bombere.

Against large modern warahips,bombs alone were seldo~ eueeessful in World War II because the ships were so strongly built and so minutely aubdivided that they could absorb great super­ ficial damage without sinking. On the other hand, torpedo plane attacks alone often failed be­ cause the airplanes were eo often shot down by guns and fighter planes. The moat effective attack was a good dive bombing to break up the anti-aircraft defense and damage the decks of carriers so that they could not service their airplanes, coordinated with a torpedo attack to open up the shipa under water, while fighter planes kept the defending fighters busy.

10-4. The atomic b~. On tha morning of Anguat 6, 1945, a B-29 of the u. s. Army Air Foree dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima an atomic bomb, developed in profound secrecy at a cost of two billion dollars during the preceding four years. The bomb, lowered by parachute, exploded at a height of something like 1,000 feet. Within a mile of the point below, the bomb killed nearly everyone, knocked down all the lighter houses (which burst into flame) and dam­ aged even reinforced concrete atruetures to the point of uselessness. Within a radius of two and a half miles it killed about half the people, and smaller numbers farther away- about 100,000 altogether. The victims died from various combinations of concussion, fall of houses, fire, penetrating radiation (gamma rays) and sunburn. A few da7s later an improved atomic bomb, using plutonium instead of uranium, was dropped on Nagasaki, with similar results. The following year, a task force of the U. s. Armed Forces conducted tests on two atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The bombs each sank a number of ships, from the l~rge aircraft carrier Saratoga down to submarines. ~ven more important, several ships not sunk were made so radioactive, either by direct radiation or by the radioactive water splashed aboard them during Test Baker, that they could not be manned during the ensuing two years. In 1948 further teats on atomic weapons were conducted at Kniwetok, but no details were released.

The atomic bomb has been compared to 20,000 tons of TNT in explosive force. Aetuall1 its power to kill by radiation, and to contaminate objects in its vicinity with radioactivity, may be even more significant than its explosive power, especially since radioactivity gives no ob­ vious external sign. This bomb is therefore the most important new weapon to come out of World War II; in fact it is the most important single weapon in the world today. The only factors that prevent its being the "absolute weapon," as it is sometimes described, are that it must atill be delivered by a bomber, which can be shot down, (rockets and guided missiles being still much too unreliable for the purpose), and that fissionable materials cannot yet be pro-

e- z•a3 dueed in quantities comparable to those of regular explosives.

45 Chapter 11 CHIMICAL WARFAU

11-1. E&rlx Qbtmical warfatt. "Chemical warfare" ordinarily means warfare by chemical reac­ tions other than explosive ones. In this sense it has been used since earliest times. Primi­ tive peoples, for instance, used ihe fire-arrow and the smoke-screen. When Julius Caesar waa conquering Gaul, the Gauls threw into his camp incendiary missiles consisting of a red-hot clay ball with an iron rod for a handle. One Gaulish &rmy retreated from ita camp facing ~aesar und~r cover of a smoke-screen. Incendiary bottles of crude oil thrown from catapults figured in some classical sieges and naval actions, along with vases full of venomous snakes, and b~n­ ing sulphur was early found useful in smoking engineers out of their tunnels. The Byaantine Empire developed the incendiary art to a high degree, using an inflammable liquid mixture called "Greek fire.• They kept its composition secret, though it probably had a petroleum base. By spraying this substance from nozzles they fired the ships of the Arabs and Russians that attacked Constantinople.

The English fl!"!!-t llh o used chemical warfare in the :Battle of Dover in 1217, wh•rn they beat a French sq>mdron under a sinh ter character called Eustace the Monk by getting to wind­ ward ar,.! throwing quieklirne into the air, which, drifting do..,n on the French. blinded them. In addition, medieval siege engineert made crude attempts at bacterial warfare by throwi~ dead horses and barrels of sewaGe into besieged places from their catapults in hope of startiU€ a pestihnce.

11-?.. ~~....!l).l)dern we..r,. Smoke-screens were improl"ised frorr, tirr:e to tb\e down to World War I. For instance, GuetaYUs Adolphus eet up one by burning wet hay to cover a rr.an­ oeuver in 1632, and Charles XII of Sweden did likewise with burning tar-barrels in 1770. Prior to Worl~ War I, navies had experimented with making smoke-screens by damping their boiler fires so that the fuel was incompletely burnt and the funnel"s gave forth great clouds of smoke. Lay­ ing smoke-screens between larger ships and the enemy became one of the standard functions of the destroyer. Smoke-Rcreens were used even more in World War II than in its predecessor, notabl~· in the battles of the River Plate and Cape Matapan. In the former, the :British light cruieers Achilles and Alo.x uoed smoke in attacking the ~ ~; one would lay a screen, and the other would dash through it to fire· several 6-inch salvoes, then pack out of sight before the Ger:an ship could get her slower firing 11-inch guns on the target.

On Land, smoke wae used a little in the opening months of World War~. mostly by setting haystacks afire and such improvised means. Regular smoke shells came into use in 1916 and thereafter became more and more important. After the war,erperiments were performed with spraying titanium tetrachloride and other substances from airplanes to lay smoke curtains - a military development that found civilian application in the art of sky-writing. Smoke was used on an Gnormoua scale in World War II. The U. S. Armed Forese developed generators that sent up great clouds of "smoke,M (really a mist of oii dropleto), which were used in such operetions as crossing the Rhine in the spring ' of· l945 and capturing Japanese-held islands in the Pacific.

A thousand years after the Byzantines had routed their enemies with Greek fire, the Germane re-introducfed the flame-thrower (German, Flammenwerh;r,) in World War I. This device · consisted of a tank containing a petroleum mixture of about the consistency of kerosene, a flask of compressed nitrogen to ~xpel the liquid from the co~tainer, and the necessaTy tubing, valves, and igniter. In the earlier models a soldie~ carried the apparatus on his back, and stood to be burned if a bullet punctured the fuel tank. Although the weapon was useful in get­ ting at enemies holed up in a dugout where they could not be reached by explosives, it was rather ineffective because it~ range was only 15 or 20 yards and nine-tenths of the fuel burned up before reaching the target. .. In World War II, however, U, S. scientists found that by thickening the oil almost to a Jelly with aluminum oleate and otb.er substances, they could make flue-throwers much more ef­ fective. The range and accuracy were increased, and 90~ of the fuel reached the target instead of burning up prematurely. Flame-throwing tanks mounting a large, high-pr~esuro apparatus, used in the invasion of Peleliu in the Pacific and elsewhere, could burn up anything com­ bustible within a hundred yards. ll-3. ~. Gas, like smoke, has been used since ancient times. Thucydides reported

46 two ca.. • in the PelopOIUleelaA War of the uae of bUl'lliJI& eul.phUl' f••• in de gee, but pohon gae cUd not becoae bportad 11DUl World War I. Lethal gaeee wue outlawed by the International Peace ConnnUon at the Jlacu in 1899. Howenr, within the firat 71ar of World War I llall¥ of the proYiaione of thia treaty were broken, moetly b7 Ger.&n7. and in April' of 1915 the German• launched two attack• wt.t.h chlorine gae released froa container• in the front-line trench11 and blown to Allied poeitiona by a fayorable wind. While the firat attack eent Prench colonial troop• into ehriekiDC flieht., the eecond bad 1111 effect, for the Canadian• on whoa it wae em­ ployed rallied and contained the Geraan attack despite their casualties.

At firat the Yictia of a gas attack had no protection other tb&n a handkerchief wetted with whatiYer liquid wae &Yailable and held to the nose, Soon, howeTer, the belligerent• all proYided their troop• with gae-aaake or reapiratora. !heae contained filters to keep out aaokea and abeorb the true gaeee, Iince a •po1eon ca•• aay be ei t.her a trua gae, the T&por of a Tola­ tile liquid, or a fine emoke. The uaual filter material was powdered charcoal, eince charcoal, like platinum, baa the powar of adaorption. !bat ie, certain gaaea cling to ita surface in a denae fila. Ga1e1 include laChrll&tOrl or te&r-g&111 1 luffQcantl or l'tiDg-irritanta, yesic&ptl or blieterere, and aterpu\ttgre or aneeaing-~aaea.

While many gaeee were tried in World War I, moet turned out to be iapractieal. ~or in­ atance, hydroc7&nic acid (•prueeic acid•) ie one of the faatest killer• known, but becauae of ita low density it rieee and blowa away before it hal a chance to do much hara. Other gases turned out to be too ezpenaiYe, or too bard to make in quantity, or they were destroyed by the explosion of the gae-ahell, or they decomposed on contact with water, and eo forth. Only two gaeee came near to aeetiDC all the requireaentel phoegene (carbonyl chloride, a euffo~t) and muatard g&l (dichloroethyl eul.phld.,, a liquid ndcant). Phoagene, while deadl7 it iahaled, could be «G&rded a&&inat by a good aaek, though by mixing phoagene with a aternuta­ tor it waa eometiaee poeeible to a&ke the enemy remoTe hie aaak to aneeae. Mustard, while ael­ dom fatal, wae a great ine.pacit&tor, &I it blietera any part of the body it touches, and a seYere doee might blind. Gae-ehelle, which did not require a fayoring wind, eoon replaced sta­ tionary gae-tanke.

In the year• following World War I pereone agitating ~lnet war and mllitariaa ..d• tbe public 1 e !leah creep with talea of wiping out whole citiea in the next war with a aingle boab containiJI& a new and deadlier gaa. !he uufea1liarity and etsalth of poieon gaa aade it aore repU«D&Dt to aoat people than more faailiar weapone, ao that gaa warfare, like the croaebow and gunpowder before it, wae denounced aa inhuaane. In 1925 the GeneT& Protocol. forbade gaa war­ fare among the nationa, though the United Statea and Japan re~uaed to ratify th1a treaty.

Actually both the effectiYenese and the crualt7 of g&l were auch e~erated, In World War I, uong well-trained troopa a gaa-attack would not produce more than 2~ caaualtiea, and of theae onl7 a aaall proportion waa fatal, and nearly all the reit recoYered coapletel7. Aaong the total Britiah gaa-caeualtiea of \bat war onl7 about 3.~ were fatal. NoreoTer cAa rarel7 leaYea a Yictia peraanently diaabled - cer~inly far lese often than wounda from bullet• and lhella. While aoae ,aa-caaea died 7e&r1 later from pul.aoD&ry diaea~ea, there ia no proof that they did ao aore often than other people. A war fought without exploaiTee but with gaa would be .are h\lU.De than the other W&7 ro'tiDd. IeYertheleae a horror of gaa pereiated with aueh effect that, although tha Italiana aprayed auatard gaa on the unprotected :lthiopiana and the Japaneu experimented w1 th gaa on the Chineae, gaa waa not used at all in the major theaters of World War II. All the major powera. includin« the United Statea, made large quantitiea of gaa just in caae, and iaeuod maakl to their aoldiera and to ciYiliane in air-raid areaa, but atill gaa waa not uaed, though it would haTe aaYed aany Aaerican u.aualUea in the eaptUl'e ef Japaneae-.aeld hlanda like tarawa. !he United Statea and Britain forebore for fear of political repercuaaione at· home, and Gera&n7 probably retrained for fear of retaliation. aince haYing the weat.r air force, ahe atood to loae aore. In addition, deapite the prophete of doom, gaaee bad iaproTed but little aince World War I. The only aicnificant new sa•e• were the nitrogen auatarda, which though loa• effectiYe in IODI waya than ordinar7 .uatard, haTe the property of blinding the Tictia in ...11 concen­ trations, te~~porar1ly or peraanenUy depending upon the dose. Also pa warfare h le11 uu!ul - in mobile operation• like thoae of World War II than in the static warfare of the preYioua great war. linall7, for sa• attack• on large citiee Tery large quantitiea would be needed, ao that it waa more daaa«inc to drop an equiYalent veight of high exploah"ea and incendiaries, which deatroyed propert7 aa well aa harassed the populace.

Deapite ita lhortcoainga gaa cannot be left out of .acc!l11Jlt in planning for a future w.r,

. 47 B- 2U&J eince U might proTe deciB1Te in a pinch. llat1ons continue to seek gases that v1ll penetrate other countries 1 -•.Ita, and to prMide their ovn soldiers vith masks that v111 stop an;y gas the enUIT might aend a&ainat -·the11.

48 Chapter 12

SIGHTING AND RANGING

12-1. Earl:Y gunsights. The early gunner had no sights. He merely squinted along the barrel of his cannon or arquebus (hand firearm) and guessed. Sights were first applied to sporting rifles in the form of a simple knob on top of the barrel near the muzzle. By the time of the ADIIrican Revolution the rear sight, an open V-notch, had been added, and these sights enabled the colonists to gall the British who had not yet adopted sights holding that the right way to fight was standing in .neat rows and banging out volleys at su~h close range that sights were unnecessary. When the British captured a ~~organ rifleman, complete with coonslcin cap and sighted rifle, they took him to England and sent him on a tour of the island to give demonstra­ tions of martcsanship as part of a recruiting drive. But the sight of the frontierSIIIln•s shooting "Convinced tne alarmed British civilians that war ldth such dangerous savages lllls not for them.

The European powers finally became convinced of the need for sights early in the 19th century. Not without opposition, h01rever. A British officer co~~~J~Bnding Irish troops protested that .if his men were given muskets wi 1:h sights and taught to use them, there soon would not be a landlord lett aliTe in Ireland. ·

In the late 19th century smll-arm sights were improved by making the rear sight ad­ justable so that it could be raised for firing at lo~er ra~ea. In the 20th century sighttng was fur1:her complicated by the combination sight of the modern rifled musket:. an open sight for short ranges comb!..ned with an adjustable peep-sight for lo~er ranges, plus a lateral eeretr-&djustlllent for windage. And for snipers some 1'8tions provided rifles with telescopic sights--smll telescopes with cross-h..airs in the tube, bolted to the barrel of the gun.

Cannon sights, which came into genex:al use early in the 19th century, were at first similar to Sllall arm sights, except that they were usually mounted on the side of the gun barrel instead of on top. The develOPDII nt of recoil-absorbing mechanisms in the 1B601 s and 'iU' s, along with rapid-firing breech lOBders, made it possible for members of. the gun crew to sight the gun continuously as it was loaded and fired, instead of having to roll it back to battery after each shot • . To take advanta.ge of this fact, guns were equipped with telescopic sights.

Although the telescopic sight goes back at least to 1B57, when a British ArlliY officer introduced it, it did not prove pr-actical as loll?; as it was mounted on the barrel because the shoek of firiq; broke the lenses and the telescope. Therefore, it had to be removed from the gun for each round. About 1B90, however, the sight was mounted on the non-recoiling part of the carriage. No lo~er did the gunner have to strain his eye trying to foeus on a near and a distant object at the same time; all he had to do 11aa keep his eye to the eyepiece and the croeshairs on the target, which he could now do during firing because the carriage would no longer come leaping back. In the 20th century, sighting of cannon was further improved by providing two sighting telescopes, one on each side of the gun. Two gun-aimers, the pointer and trainer, sighted through these scopes and moved the gun vertically and horizontally respectively with crank mechanisms.

12-2. Fire control. Unless the gunner is shootinglllthin stone-throwing range he cannot point his cannon directly at the target, because the projectile travels not in a straight line but in a parabo1oid trajectory like a thrown baseball. In shooting with open sights at close ranges with a rifle one can make all01rances for distance by showing more or less front sight in the notch o! the rear sight, but for long range artillery fire such mthods will not do because the gun barrel will be aim:l..q; at the sky. Therefore, sighting telescopes are pointed • straight at the target, and the distance is determined by the angle between tbe line connect­ ing the telescope and the target (the "line of sight") and the axis of the gun barrel •

.A.ssUIIIing that the gun and the target are at the sane altitude abo\te sea level, the gunnery officer knows that for every angle of elevation of the gun barrel the gun has a corresponding nanga. These angles and ranges are recorded. on a table which the commander of the gun uaes. It the target is higher or lowar than the gun, additional corrections are necessary. For ordinary guns the mniml" ral'l?;e occurs when the angle bet.een gun-axis and the borisontal (the "elevation" or "q\Bdrant angle") is between 4J-l/2 and 45 degree's, though for very long range guns the quadrant angle of a:xi..am range may be above 45 degrees.

Prior to World War I few guns were built to be fired at elevation of more than 10 or 15 degrees, because they ll'ltre not. considered accurate enough to IIBke longer range fire worth

49 B - 2~83 while. However, battle ranges have increased from 100 yards in the American Civil War to 5 1 000 in the Russo-Japanese War to 20,000 yards in World War I to 30,000 to 40,000 yards at present, though over 30,000 yards the natural dispersion of shells in flight makes such fire too inaccurate to be profitable agaillSt so small a target as a ship. Now most guns can fire at elevations of mximwn range, or, 1f they are for anti."""trcraft use, even higher. How far is the targett fhe enelcy' will hardly let one ueasure the distance with a surveyor• s tape. On land one can scale off the distance at least approxilll!ltely on a good conto\ll' lll!lP, and then correct one • s aim by observing whether the first shots are over or short. In the early 20th century the increasing range of guns mde it imjll"actical to "spot" ranges in this manner from the gun it.salf; instead, an obserTer near the target sent back word between shots of how the shells were falling. In World War I these observers sat in captive balloons and telephoned their observations to the ground.

At sea optical range-finders came in about 18~, the first type being the stadi.neter, a , wide-angle telescope with index nBrlcs etched in one of the lenses. Knowing th3 length of a hostile mip, one could look at it through the instrUilElnt, obsel"Ve the aagle that the hull aubtended, and deduce the ra~e. 'While this methcrl is still used to soue extent in sublll!lrine periscopes, for slll'!ace gunnery it has been superseded by range-finders based on triangulation.

Triangulation is the jll"inciple by llhich one unconsciously esti.lll!l tes distances with one's eyes. Knowing the base o! a right triangle and the angle 11Bde by two non-perpendicular sides, one can canpute the altitu:ie. Most ra~e-!inders have a base of 3 to JO feet, with lenses (usually in the fonn of lll!lll,Y-aided priama) at the ends and the eYepieca or pieces in the middle. Range-finders for field artillery are of moderate size because they must be portable, a one meter base finder being coiiiDOn. Fixed coast defense batteries, on the other hand, use separate obserTera hundreds of yards apart as the lenses o! thei:t- system, thus attaining extreme accuracy.

The first type at triangulation range-finder \"faS the coincidence type, generally -employed in World War I and still used to aome extent. In the coincidence range-finder the obserTer lodes with one eye and sees a split picture, the upper hal! displaced horizontally from the lower, and by turning a knob he brings the two halves of the picture into coincidence. In the later stere.oecopic range-firrlsr, the obserTer locka wi1h both eyes and tucuses thea upon a set of "reticle martca" which he sees, and b,y turni~ the knob he brings the irage of the target to the same apparent. distance from his own eyes as the manes. This type of range-finder has largely replaced 1he coincidEI'!ce finder.

Sillple range-finding ia not adequate for raval gunnery 1 since both gun and target are moving, and when a llUIIIber of guns are !iring the crew of one gun cannot correct their fire by spotting because they cannot tell which are their own splashes. Furtherm<~re, long-range shooting requires corrections for wind, barometric pressure, and other factors that are not practical tor each gun cre'ir to IIIBk:e separately.

To overcome these obstacles, director fire was adopted in the decade ~;recedill: World War I by the navies of Great Britain (introduced by A

A mudern director is a structure lodcill: like a 1111all turret without guns, 1110unted on the superstructure or atop a mast. The director crew keep their sights on the target, and the position of the dl.rector is transmitted electrically to the turrets and indicated by dials and pointers. The turret crews follow the movEIIIBnt s of the director with their turret controls, trying to mtch the pointers indicating the train ani elevation of thair Olfi1 guns with those indicating the aim of the director. In a more recent system the director crew directly controls the JROYelll8nta of the guns. . In addition a crew in the plotting room of the ship, below the armored deck 9 takes the data SEI'lt down by the director and other obserTers and by aana of calculatill: instriJIEI'lts figures the corrections for the speed and direction at the ship and the target, windage, baro­ met.rtc )ll'essure, rotation at the earth, wear on the gun b!lrrel,.temperature of the powder, and

50 anything else t.ha t might significantJ.y affect the flight of the ahells. They then transnit these corrections to the guns. A large modern battleship MY have tliO main battery directors, several auxilia:ry directors ,in the fire control tower and the turrets, two plotting rooms, four anti-aircraft tattery directors, two main range-filrlers on the superstructure and another in each turret, projecting from the upper rear corners like a pair of ears. Any main battery director can run any or all of the main battel}" guns, and likewise with the anti-aircraft directors and AA guns.

Ships of other types have less elaborate installations. Electrical circuits are in duplicate, and if these are destroyed entire!y the director communicates with the plotting roan alrl the turrets by voice tubes, signals, or enn by messenger. In addition, foll01d!l1; World War -I most cruisers alrl battleships vere equipped with small float seaplanes tl'&t could be catapulted off to spot the fall of ehells by radio.

12-3. Radar. The biggest recent change in methods of sighting am rangi!l1; is that due to the iJJVention of radar, which like most great recent tecnnical·developments 118S the produce of many minds in many laboratories. Several of the pioneers in electrical engineering like Hertz, Marconi, and Tesla noticed that electromagnetic wavos intermediate in.length between short radio waves and infra-red radi.a ti ons could be directed like light beams and reflected from obstacles. Karl F. Braun invented an improved cathode ray tube wherein the stream of electrons could be bent by electromagnetic fields and the point of its impact against the elrl of the tube made visible by coating the glass with a fluorescent m terial. Fran this the radar oscilloscope 1111.s developed. And a detecting instrument similar to radar was "invented" in the early 1920's by Edgar Rice Burroughs for OM of his llartian novels.

During the 1930's the governments of Great Britain, the United States, and Germacy fostered. experiments to create a reliable detector that would locate airplanes not visible to the naked eye. The sound..detectors that had been used for the purpose had become almost useless when the increasi~ speed of airplanes made it necessazy for the gunners to lead the direction indicated by the detector by 20 degrees or more. Although all three of the countries ramed were active in the development of radar, Great Britain perhaps led the others by a small margin, sime she had the most to fear from air attacks.

By the outbreak of World War II Britain •s encircled with radar stations--"rac:liolocation" they called them, "radar" (for ";r:adio detection an:i ranging") having been named subsequently by an American raval offi.cer. These devices sent out pulses ot electromagnetic waves, detected the echo, and mowed the distance of the object p:'oduci!l1; the echo on the oscilloscope. They defeated the German bombing campaign against Britain in the fall of 1940 by enabling the RAF to throw its modest forces against the Germans whenever they appeared, without weari~ themselves out by continuous patrol. Similar apparatus was installed experimentally in Hawaii and the crew of one radar set ac·tually detected the approach of Japanese airplanes for the ~earl Harbor raid, the greatest defeat ever suffered by Amrican anne. In accordame with the ovel'­ confident and unwarille spirit of most Americans at the time, h01rever, this crew assumed that the approaching air fleet must bfl American and disregarded the warning.

Ear!y radar sete in:iicated the distance to the target only by means af a jog or hump in the liminous line that appeared on the oscilloscope--a "pip" or "blip." Later sets ind1.cated direction as well;. in the Plan Position Indicator {PPI) the antenna rotated so as to give a veri table map of the surro11nding area on the oscilloscope. 3-lips blossomed out with ms sses of antennae called "bedsprings" a."ld other IBI!SS from their appearame, and radar 118S installed in airplanes. · The resonant cavity magnetron, a British iJJVenti on, made possible the use of micro-waves, that is, waves 3 to 10 centimeters long, in radar. 'ih1le short-wave radar had less range than the long-wave radar, it gave better definition at.shorter distances and thus enabled the operators to pick up submarine periscopes. A failure of German technology •s that the Germans never made an ef.i';;;ctive•radar of. this type.

Radar was soon integrated with fire control, since it provided a surer method of determini!l1; ranges than optical instrumnts and worked regardless of night, fog, or long ranges. In 1a ter radar sets the operator could watch the shells ot his ship speeding through the air and exploding, and detect shorts and overs by the splashes. As an example of the clarity of radar observation, in the Surigao Strait night action, when some of the Japanese shiiS had been. set afire by shells and tcn,:edoes, the captain of the leading United States ·destroyer called dawn from the bridge to his commodore, who .was watchi~ the radar 'scopesa ''Hey, come up here for the si.ght of your lifet" To which the commodore replieda "No thanks; I can see it batter right heret"

51 B- 2483 The use of radar and the swiftness of modern naval engagements, especially sea-air battles, have brought into existence a new organization, the ere or combat infOI'I!Btion center, on 11arlhipe. The ere filters out the multitude of itans of iP.forJ!Btion that come in over the radar, the· range-finders, from the spotting planes, and so on, and reduce them to manageable proportions to enable the COIIDI'8nding officer to mke intelligent decisions. It is in effect a sort of synthetic !rain with the radar an:i other instruments as sensory organs, the operators as the lower brain centers, and the captain as the cortex or decidi~ part of the brain.

By the end of World War II small radars were being installed on turrets, gun mounts, submarines, an:i airplanes. Elaborate anti-radar measures 11ere in use, such as dropping showers of strips of aluminum foil ("window" or "chaff") from attacking airplanes to confuse the radar 'scopes, and setting up radar decoys like buoys witll kite-like aluminum structures that would show a pip like that of a Ship. Altogetber, next to the atomic bomb, radar 11as perhaps the most important single device to ccme out of World War II, 'and in any future 11ar it will undoubtedly play an even larger }:*rt.

52 B-2'483 'IHE NAVY'S FtJrURE WEU'ONS

The previous twelve chapters have discussed the weapons llhich man has known and generally employed up through World War II. As in the past, each new conflict seems to give added impetus to di. scoveri ng and improving n811' weapons.

Ideas th3.t were in the experimental stage after 1he first World War became operating equipment in World War II. In a similar manner, new ideas and potential weapons for offense and defense have emerged from this past war. Some, such as the atomic bomb and the rocket, have already I!Bde their initial appeararx:e; others are still in the experimental stage.

Constant research and experimentation are nOif being carried on in atomic weapons, guided missiles and other weapons to improve and exploit their potentialities. · Since many of these are in process of development, any discussion of them' nOif would be premature.

When these experiiiJ!lnts result in actual operating equipment and techniques,. it is intended that additional chapters concerning them and their relation to naval warfare will be added as security permits.

53 B-21183