Only on a fixed-forward mounting! At least on the Fairmile, firing abeam would risk capsizing the thing.
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Sir John Valentine Carden Survives. Part 2.
- Thread starter allanpcameron
- Start date
I get the impression from reading various memoirs that the official armament of coastal motor forces was whatever the bosun or the jimmy could blag.
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Aussie Engineer: wait, actually give it back and get me another. I'm gonna need a few for this one.
I seem to remember it spending some time as a gate guard at Duxford.
Britain's Monstrous Green Mace AA Gun -
Today's subject is going to cover the Green Mace anti-aircraft gun, a rather odd project, one that had a lot of potential, but found itself intankhistoria.com
The Grand Slam was at Scampton. Had it gone off, it would have levelled Lincoln Cathedral several miles away.
Ramontxo
Donor
Thanks so it was a Grand Slam and not a Tall boy... around 4 metric tons of torpex... There is a TL waiting there
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Yes, the round was fully rammed home before the gun finished moving back forward from the recoil stage. Rate of fire seems to have been about 80 RPM.
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The navies had been playing with the auto-loading for a long time. A bit more money in the 30s could have got it there by the war. That said the systems are heavy compared to hand loading in a weight conscious Treaty era ship. Also, until radar is a thing, how the guns are aimed provides a reasonably hard limit on how useful a high rate of fire is. There are a bunch of other little technical details that work against automatic cannon until after the war.
Meanwhile the Americans concluded that high altitude defense could only be done with missiles, but guns still could be effective at middle altitudes, above the ceiling of the Bofors L/70...so they developed the fully automatic 75mm Skysweeper.
My understanding is that its development went fairly well, and it worked as intended pretty much straightaway.
It certainly wouldn't have had the lethality per round of a 4" or 5" gun system, but bits didn't fall off it and it regularly achieved proximity kills against (straight-path) test targets.
My understanding is that its development went fairly well, and it worked as intended pretty much straightaway.
It certainly wouldn't have had the lethality per round of a 4" or 5" gun system, but bits didn't fall off it and it regularly achieved proximity kills against (straight-path) test targets.
Lincoln Cathedral is 5 miles away, Little Boy or Fat Man going off wouldn't level the Cathedral, a Grand Slam definitely wouldn't, they are big bombs but not super weapons.
Just for lols I put it into a nuke effects simulator:
NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein
NUKEMAP is a website for visualizing the effects of nuclear detonations.
nuclearsecrecy.com
You’d need a multi megaton class nuke to be the gate guard to level the cathedral.
Derek Pullem
Donor
Wouldn't put it past the fly boys - do like their toys.Just for lols I put it into a nuke effects simulator:
NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein
NUKEMAP is a website for visualizing the effects of nuclear detonations.
You’d need a multi megaton class nuke to be the gate guard to level the cathedral.
Just for lols I put it into a nuke effects simulator:
NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein
NUKEMAP is a website for visualizing the effects of nuclear detonations.
You’d need a multi megaton class nuke to be the gate guard to level the cathedral.
You'd need a 25 mt airbust to reliably do the job, from Second World War experience Medieval Cathedrals are surprisingly bomb resistant.
NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein
NUKEMAP is a website for visualizing the effects of nuclear detonations.
nuclearsecrecy.com
ITTL Singapore has so far been untouched and I think the window where the IJN could have launched a damaging attack to the harbour/ base has mostly passed with the significant reinforcements that have been sent. It really doesn't need anything further. It's a really interesting project. We all know how starved for funding British forces were in the 20s and 30s. Yet the expenditure on Singapore base was huge. Sixty Million pounds. That's back when a million pounds was a lot of money not just a crappy 2 bed flat in south london. Now while construcion was approved in 1923t, not much was done until Japan invaded Manchuria and that 60 Million quid was mostly spent between 1932 and 1938...but keep in mind the entire British defence budget in 1932 - everything, equipment, wages, boot polish, spam was 102 M pounds. We scoff at the French for their foolishness at the Maginot line... yet singapore was handed over like a gift wrapped present.
It has 2 out 3 of the biggest dry docks in the world. Pearl Habor was later expanded in '42 and it's huge dry dock (of similar size to Singapore two) came online just in time at end of '41. But Singapore was more modern, better defended, better equipped than Pearl in 40/41. Rememebr the Carriers weren't based at Pearl - they were based in San Diego as Pearl couldn't support them full time in 41. The only thing Singapore lacked..... was ships! Howvere since they are inherently quite good at moving on top of the sea, the Plan was built up a Gibraltor of the East and if the shit hits the fan ( oh and HMS Terror - the main base - had air conditioning, a rare luxury in the RN) send the entire RN over and it can be based. It had huge fuel facilities.
There's really no need to upgrade it much ITTL at all. Bolt some modern radar in. Besides Britain even ITTL is skint. Perhaps if the American's start basing Carriers there and the war with Japan carries on until '45 (and I can't see how it can) then they might. Singapore base became the heart of the modern commercial shipyards and docks in Singapore and even aprt of it is leased to the USN today and can operate the 7th Carrier group. There's a link to a map of it here. It even includes handy Bus routes to get around it's 21 Square miles. 14 Berths which could each dock a capital ship or several destroyers each. Multiple Fuel Depots, well laid out in case of air attack, same with multiple Ammunition depots, torpedo stores, sports grounds, dedicated training school and damage control stations, forward medical stations and a modern new hosptial, 15 inch guns positioned to overlook the approaches with mutliple smaller guns and AA mounts. All painted beautifully white and new and shiny in 1938!
Naval Base Singapore
Naval Base Singapore Singapore Naval Base & HM Dockyard site plan. Extracts from 1920-1925 vote ledgers and site plans. From Admiralty and Ministry of Defence, …
www.nas.gov.sg
Again 60 Millions Pounds. That's more than TWENTY Illustrious class armoured carriers. * Even a tiny fraction spent on Army equipment to defend Malaysia would have gone a long way. The Carden designed 16 ton Medium III (a great tank no, but better than anything than a Matilda II in 1939 and actually those ugly 2 machine gun turrets would have been ideal against light Japanese infantry) was cancelled in 1934 because it cost too much (hard to find exact number but about 8,000 pounds seems about right) - 1 massive Dry dock instead of 2 and perhaps a 1000 or so more tanks spread across the Army in 1939 might have been more wisely spent.... certainly even 50 Mediums IIIs in the - oh what do you mean it's not jungle and actually has lots of flat ground with spaces - rubber plantations of Malaysia might have given the bicycle riding Japanese pause for thought as they pedalled their way down to terrorise Percival. History is unkind and unfair to many leaders, but in Percival's case it is deserved. ( and his oft forgotten, equally out of his depth, commander Sir Brooke-Popham - seriously I think it was the inbreeading that lost the Empire). Both of them would must have wished some MOD planners had been a bit wiser with their money in the 1930s...
*Off the coast of Malaysia - Early morning Dec 9th, 1941, Bridge of Chokai, Heavy Takao Class cruiser
-Admiral Ozawa Sir, 2 British capital ships have been spotted south of our position off the coast of Malaysia by I-65 , confirmed as Prince of Wales and Repulse...
-Excellent, if our Long range torpedo Bombers do not sink them, dispatch the Kongo and Haruna to finish them... (air raid warning siren)
-Admiral Ozawa, 700 Swordfish Bombers are spotted closing in on our fleet.....
Ozawa sighs, reaches for his sword.....
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The unusually high rate of fire , or rather high rate of shells landing on German things, was due to the consistency of the weight of the seperate power charges, the Mark 2 carriage, a focus on calibrated range rather than firing angle. The 25lb was a pragmatic (ahem ..cheap reuse intially and not with new guns until '38) extension of the Great War 18lbr and was big for a field gun but small for a Howitzer.
It did both though and had a very wide range of firing angles.. My Grandad was a Bombardier in the Royal Horse Artillery, they were trained with extensive range and timing tables to fire in combinations of High/ Med / Low depending on the distance. This minimised the time in between shells landing. Then in turn they would offset depending on the relative postion of the guns/ batteries. So you would fire actually at a slightly lower sustained rate - because the gun angle was being changed in between shells - but crucially because of the different time of flights the shells would land very close together in time. This had been tried out in the 100 days of 1918 but by the 1940s was perfected. Since the enemy had a rather unsporting habit of taking cover after the first shell landed , ( Damn it George, the Hun just won't stand still when we keep shooting at him, no manners at all!) getting the 2nd and 3rd shells in almost simultaneously maximised the chances of doing damage before the (insert now culturally inappropriate derogatory term for opposing nation) could take cover. After that they would normally revert to a more stready pace, British doctrine more about covering fire than actually trying to hit anything. But that first 3 (or sometimes more) in 1 salvo was like being on the end of 25lb machine gun. .
Downsides were A) it took a lot of training, - after Dunkirk my grandfather did a 6 month college training course to qiualify on the new 25lbr and even that was expediated B) British bombardiers were a really smug lot (who hated being called Corporals) and thought they were better than everyone.
For nations that were ramping up a lot faster (US, USSR) , using seperate Field guns/ Howitzers or didn't have such precise newer carriages, it made more sense just to have more artillery firing more shells as fast as possible. Quanity has a quality all of it's own after all.
It is worth remembering that the British Royal Artillery also had fine tuned the capability of every gun in range to fire at a target if needed. By D-day the Royal Artillery was firing using codes that denoted how many tubes fired on a target. The rate of fire was pretty good and the sheer number of tubes able to fire on a target was insane.
ww2talk.com
From the 2 links above the weight of fire is as below.
Mike – eight 25 pounders of the field battery
Uncle -24 guns of the field regiment (division level)
Victor - 216 guns of nine field regiments (corp. level)
Williams - 216 guns of nine field regiments, 2 regiments of 16 medium guns 4.5 inch and 2 regiments of 16 heavy guns 7.2 inch and any other attached artillery regiment in the army.
Now the above is directly copied from user Clankypencil and is likely correct. However I once read of a "yoke" target call that was supposed to take every single artillery piece in range and have it fire on the grid co-ordinates with serious consequences. German units wanted to know about the automatic 25lb guns. Inside the links was talk of individual gun crews achieving 17 rds in a minute which is insane considering seperate bag and shell.
The full links and the name of the user on another forum who researched the data is included out of respect for the effort made to make the details available for me and others to find.
What is an 'UNCLE' in Artillery terms?
Can anyone tell me what an 'UNCLE' is with regard to Artillery? Context is as follows from the 2/4 KOYLI war diaries during operations at Salerno....
ww2talk.com
Royal Artillery Methods in World War 2
The field artillery tactics and gunnery used by the Royal Artillery and the artilleries of British
nigelef.tripod.com
From the 2 links above the weight of fire is as below.
Mike – eight 25 pounders of the field battery
Uncle -24 guns of the field regiment (division level)
Victor - 216 guns of nine field regiments (corp. level)
Williams - 216 guns of nine field regiments, 2 regiments of 16 medium guns 4.5 inch and 2 regiments of 16 heavy guns 7.2 inch and any other attached artillery regiment in the army.
Now the above is directly copied from user Clankypencil and is likely correct. However I once read of a "yoke" target call that was supposed to take every single artillery piece in range and have it fire on the grid co-ordinates with serious consequences. German units wanted to know about the automatic 25lb guns. Inside the links was talk of individual gun crews achieving 17 rds in a minute which is insane considering seperate bag and shell.
The full links and the name of the user on another forum who researched the data is included out of respect for the effort made to make the details available for me and others to find.
I think there has been a step missed or the copying went astray. The Fd Regt of 24 guns was at Bde level. The Division had three Regts of 24 guns each so 72 guns. If you look at the corps level listed above, you see nine fd regts, Assuming three Divs per Corps, that would be correct. So I suspect the Mike tgt was the Bde level, ie the whole Regt of 24 guns, and the Uncle Tgt was a divisional level of 72 guns.It is worth remembering that the British Royal Artillery also had fine tuned the capability of every gun in range to fire at a target if needed. By D-day the Royal Artillery was firing using codes that denoted how many tubes fired on a target. The rate of fire was pretty good and the sheer number of tubes able to fire on a target was insane.
What is an 'UNCLE' in Artillery terms?
Can anyone tell me what an 'UNCLE' is with regard to Artillery? Context is as follows from the 2/4 KOYLI war diaries during operations at Salerno....Royal Artillery Methods in World War 2
The field artillery tactics and gunnery used by the Royal Artillery and the artilleries of Britishnigelef.tripod.com
From the 2 links above the weight of fire is as below.
Mike – eight 25 pounders of the field battery
Uncle -24 guns of the field regiment (division level)
Victor - 216 guns of nine field regiments (corp. level)
Williams - 216 guns of nine field regiments, 2 regiments of 16 medium guns 4.5 inch and 2 regiments of 16 heavy guns 7.2 inch and any other attached artillery regiment in the army.
Now the above is directly copied from user Clankypencil and is likely correct. However I once read of a "yoke" target call that was supposed to take every single artillery piece in range and have it fire on the grid co-ordinates with serious consequences. German units wanted to know about the automatic 25lb guns. Inside the links was talk of individual gun crews achieving 17 rds in a minute which is insane considering seperate bag and shell.
The full links and the name of the user on another forum who researched the data is included out of respect for the effort made to make the details available for me and others to find.
Doctrine went something like this. A battery would be linked to a Bn of the Bde. The Battery would supply FOs and signallers and the Battery office commanding would be at the Bn HQ, helping to co-ordinate the Bn fire plan and including the Bn Mortars and any MMGs allotted to the Bn.
The Regt would be allotted to a specific Bde and the same would apply, The CO of the Regt would be at Bde HQ doing the co-ordinating role.
One point to remember about the British system is that the FO was given authority to fire a certain number of guns, normally his own battery but on occasion the whole regt without getting approval from a higher level. Any order for fire from the FO, who was a Capt or a Lt, would be automatically carried out unless a check fire was imposed from higher, who always listened in on the orders. That is the difference between the British system and the US system. The British gave fire orders, the US system gave fire requests, which had to be checked at Fd Bn level or even higher before the battery was allowed to fire the mission.