Keith Allen (keacla1@aol.com) has provided these excerpts from the 1920 Senate Naval Investigation hearings They are from the remarks of Rear Admiral C. P. Plunkett, who was an assistant to the CNO for gunnery from December 1915 through July 1918. He then went to France to command the 14-inch railway batteries.
At the end of March, 1917, when we were on the verge of entry into the war, the gunnery was at the highest state of efficiency that it has been in the history of the American Navy. In my opinion this was due to two things: First, to the commander in chief of the [Atlantic] fleet, Admiral Mayo; second, to a full realization of the number of men that were needed in any ship of war to fight her efficiently in battle [as designed the ships were undermanned]...
...in 1915 we woke up to the fact that we had built a number of very excellent ships, but we had not found out how to fight them. Before 1915 there was a fire-control board ordered, which went right into the question, not of using the guns of ship one at a time but how to use all the guns at the same time so as to bring the greatest volume of fire to bear upon the enemy, and it was the report of that board that pretty nearly turned the Navy upside down, and was the first step in the direction of showing us what we actually needed in the way of officers and men on our ships in order to fight them in battle and to bring all their offensive and defensive weapons into action at the same time. Naturally the money was asked for at once, but it takes time to produce the instruments that were required to be installed in those ships, and also naturally our latest ships were the first ones to receive them....
Up to 1915 we had been conducting battle exercises by opening the engagement by firing a single gun in order to get the approximate range of the enemy, followed by another gun after that shell had landed, some 20 seconds later, also with a view of getting the range, some correction being applied to that second shot; in other words, a method of approximation. The question of range finding was taken up seriously. Up to 1915 we had comparatively no efficient rang-finding instruments. Those are instruments of prime importance and at the outbreak of the war [apparently meaning U.S. entry into the war] we had only a sufficient number of them for our first-line ships. The ships in reserve had practically no range finders worth mentioning....
But never in the history of the Navy has there been anything more intensive than the gunnery training of our fleet which took place in 1916 and 1917 and 1918. The result of that was that when the war broke out, although we were still undermanned, the gunnery efficiency of the ships that were in commission was higher than it ever had been in my recollection of the Navy. As a a matter of fact, we had just one battleship, the WYOMING, fire in practice at nearly 20,000 yards, the longest range that has ever been fired by the service, and she made the phenomenal score of 20 per cent of hits under battle conditions....
[Much later, after discussion of manning problems, Plunkett mentions ARIZONA, saying that when we entered the war she was new and conducted little or no firing. He then goes on:]
In fact, I do not remember just when we conducted her firings, but we fired all of those 14-inch gun ships, the PENNSYLVANIA, the OKLAHOMA, the ARIZONA, and the NEVADA, in order to find out what caused the tremendous dispersion of our guns; and we have also conducted experiments ever since then--that was, in 1916--and we are no nearer the answer today than we were then. One reason for it, I think, is due to the fact that when Congress practically offered us a proving ground, to cost $10,000,000, the Secretary only allowed $1,000,000. I remember going to him with the Chief of Ordnance. He said, 'We have got to get this proving ground and find out why these shells are flying all over creation instead of where they are intended to go, and we must have a proving ground where we can fire the guns and then go and dig up the shell later and find out why this thing is going on.' We understand the German dispersion is very much less than ours, and the British, even, is considerably less than ours. /
There is one thing sure, that one salvo goes down here, and it is beautiful, and the next one that comes down here, they are scattered all over the lot. I think you were probably shown one salvo that the PENNSYLVANIA fired, and that was published with big headlines on it, 'Wonderful shooting of the Navy,' and that was a case where one salvo that they fired had 12 shots in a very small pattern. As a matter of fact, they have not solved that thing yet.
[Plunkett goes on to describe how Daniels turned down continued pleas for more money for a proving ground:]
That was the time for getting it, if ever; and as a matter of fact, we are still up the stump. We do not know today about the dispersion, and I guess the best standard we got was the firing of this same type of gun, 14-inch 50-caliber guns, that I took over to France, where we fired at ranges very, very much in excess of what would be the battle ranges on the battleships, so that those data could not be of very great value.
But it does show that those guns are phenomenally accurate at very long ranges [of course, it helps to have stationary firing platform, which Plunkett does not mention]. Of course that is where the projectile goes up in the air 17 miles, and comes down. It is almost like going up to the moon and dropping down on the earth again. It is an entirely different problem, firing at those high angles. The angle of firing on the ships at present does not give a range much in excess of 23,000 yards, although with the later types of ships we are building, the range will be up to 30,000 yards because of the increase of elevation of the guns in operation. But, as a matter of fact, we are today right where we were 4 years ago on that. We have not got it solved yet.
[The senators did not seem to show much interest in Plunkett's observations on gunnery and kept asking him about manning issues, but there was a little more discussion on gunnery:]
Chairman Hale: "Now, the gunnery practice of the fleet, you said, was excellent in 1916." Plunkett: "In 1916? No; this was in March, 1917. We had just completed some long-range practices down there off the coast of Cuba, firing at greater ranges than we ever fired at before, and I think that the average percentage of hits of the ships that fired--and there were probably 8 or 10, at least, that fired at this long range--was about 12 per cent of hits, because I remember writing to Admiral Sims, who was at the War College when I came back, telling him what we had been able to do, and that he would have to modify the game-board rules up there at the War College; that we had discovered we could hit at much longer ranges than they had allowed for in their rules for plotting the war games there in the War College, and I believed if we could keep on the way we were going and hold our people for another year, we would double our scores."
[ Unfortunately Plunkett doesn't give any specifics on the ranges or firing methods employed. ]
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