Historical Perspective

The Royal Navy's Tutorial on the Fine Points of Firing

By DAVID F. WINKLER

The dawn of the 20th Century represented one of the most transformational periods in American naval history. With Theodore Roosevelt, a proponent of sea power as the commander-in-chief, the Navy acquired new battleships and cruisers and introduced destroyers and submarines to the fleet. The introduction of wireless communications would revolutionize how commanders could deploy and maneuver their ships.

One area that needed to improve was gunnery. While the Navy fitted its new warships with guns of greater caliber and sophistication, the methods used to employ them had not changed since the days of sail. As a result, the shots-fired to hits-registered ratio during the Spanish-American War was appalling. Fortunately for the Americans, the Spanish gunnery was even more dismal.

A portion of the problem dealt with measuring the effectiveness of the gunnery. For training, a float was placed in the water and nearby observers plotted the fall of the shells in the vicinity of the float. Scoring was quite subjective. Enter Lt. William S. Sims, who had served as a naval attaché to France during the time of the Spanish American War. An astute observer of foreign naval developments, Sims sent back voluminous reports on everything from armor thickness to the French use of carrier pigeons. (On that latter topic he jokingly inquired on the possibility of crossbreeding a pigeon with a talking parrot to create an even more efficient messenger bird!) Noting the European navies used sleds with erect targets to simulate an enemy combatant, Sims urged this practice be adopted within the U.S. Navy. It was. Suddenly gunnery effectiveness could be better gauged. Exercises using the new targets only confirmed the severity of the American sailors' poor aim.

The real problem with the gunnery is that aiming techniques had not changed since the days of John Paul Jones. As the ship rolled with the seas, the gunner timed the gun to fire as the target fell through his sight. A split-second timing error could cause a shell to fall yards short or beyond the target.

En route in 1901 to the monitor USS Monterey in the Far East, Sims met Capt. Percy Scott of the Royal Navy and learned of a new approach dubbed "continuous-aim" firing. Rough seas presented the same challenge to the Brits as well as the Yanks, but there was a gun pointer on Scott's ship, HMS Scylla, who consistently put the iron on the target. A dexterous fellow, this gun pointer cranked the gun mount's elevation mechanisms to adjust for the ship's rolling, keeping the target continuously in his telescopic sight. Meanwhile the rest of the gun crew loaded and fired at will. Sims became a disciple!

With a follow-on assignment as the Inspector of Target Practice within the Bureau of Navigation, Sims had a pulpit from which to preach to the masses. He visited numerous wardrooms when the fleet assembled in the Caribbean in the winter of 1902; to his pleasant surprise, he found his presentations well received.

Embracing the new continuous-aim method, gunnery officers drilled their gun crews using a variety of training aids and bred a competitive spirit. Scores climbed as gun crews strove for perfection. The success of USS Indiana particularly pleased him. One of that battleship's eight-inch turrets scored 87.5 percent, firing at a rapid sustained rate. In his report, Sims observed that the gun pointer had put the last four shots through a 50-square-inch bull's eye at a range of 1,600 yards to the jubilation of his shipmates. Sims observed when he came out of the turret that "he was seized by as many men as could get a hold of him. In spite of his struggles, in which his clothes were pretty well torn off him, he was taken to the pilot house and presented to the Captain."

With his enthusiasm, Sims had injected a meaningful training regimen that instilled some fun into the ship's routine and, more importantly, contributed to the effectiveness of the U.S. Navy.

Sources: Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942; Edward L. Beach Sr. with Edward L. Beach Jr. From Annapolis to Scapa Flow: The Autobiography of Edward L. Beach Sr., Naval Institute Press, 2003.

Dr. David F. Winkler is a historian with the Naval Historical Foundation.