The Pre-Dreadnought Revolution: Developing the Bulwarks of Sea-Power by Warren Berry

Author:Warren Berry [Berry, Warren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9780752457949
Google: -ULQygAACAAJ
Amazon: 0752457942
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-08-01T21:00:00+00:00

9

THUNDER OF THE GUNS

In the competition between armour and ordnance, the naval gun, except for a few brief interludes, led the race. Armour had to be distributed over a large area, and any increases in thickness meant that there was a corresponding increase in weight, and to meet this additional burden, larger warships would need to be built, or weight savings made in other areas such as machinery, numbers of guns, etc. Attempts to anticipate future developments in ordnance by increasing armour protection were naturally very costly, whilst a warship’s armament on the other hand formed a much smaller proportion of the burden each ship carried. Guns could for example be doubled in weight with an associated huge increase in power, without greatly increasing a vessel’s loading, but to make an equivalent increase in the armour of a particular ship would have likely been beyond the realms of practical shipbuilding as it existed at the time.¹

In the later pre-Dreadnought battleships ordnance increasingly comprised of three classes of gun. First there was the main armament of strongly protected heavy guns that alone had the power to attack the vital parts of an enemy ship by what was known as ‘belt attack’. Then there was the secondary armament usually mounted in casemates, and these guns could deliver many more, smaller, projectiles in a given time, maybe thirty-two shells as compared with three from guns of the main armament. Lastly there was the third division, consisting of light quick-firing guns placed behind shields. Designed to defeat ram or torpedo boat attack, and as anti-personnel weapons, these guns were intended to deliver a hail of fire at close quarters. The development and use of this third category of naval artillery, though having appeared at a later date than their larger counterparts, soon accelerated to a marked degree, and they were considered an essential asset in late-nineteenth-century warships.²

For a period of some hundreds of years prior to the 1850s and indeed right up to the Crimean War, very little development had occurred in naval ordnance. In fact Duke of Wellington, a large steam line-of-battle ship commissioned just before the outbreak of that war, carried smooth-bore guns that although much larger, were in essence similar to those used in Nelson’s flagship Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. These guns were merely heavy blocks of iron roughly cast to the required dimensions and form, and the only machining to which they were subjected consisted of rough finishing of the bore and drilling of the vent hole. The wooden carriages on which many of these guns were mounted were equally crude, initially built of oak, but more latterly of teak and mahogany. These carriages were moved on four wooden trucks or wheels, the rear pair of which was frequently replaced by wooden chocks to ease movement when laying or aiming the gun. The recoil once a gun of this type was fired was initially controlled by the friction of large wooden axles and big wedges under the

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