Copyright by A. Dupont
Rear Admiral Robley D. Evans
On the ships the arrival was marked by just the opposite feeling from relief and gratification. The officers and men frankly were not in a placid state of mind. All were under an intense tension. They were what might be called wrought up. What, you say, American men-o'-wars men in a nervous condition—one that actually showed itself in their work and their play? No, not in their play, for there wasn't any. Well, but sea fighters nervous? Not a mother's son of them would admit such a thing. Preposterous! Men with nerves on warships? Well, perhaps not nerves as the ordinary person speaks of these anatomical cutups, but certainly something was the matter with all hands. Evidences of what the cub reporter would call suppressed excitement were plenty everywhere on every ship.
What was it all about? What was the matter? The answer is very simple and short:
The time to begin shooting had come—that was all.
But why get worked up over that, you ask? Shooting is what a navy is for. Of course; and in the old days real shooting was done only in time of war. The navy no longer waits for war to learn how to shoot. Twice a year it has exhaustive target practice—once for what is called record and once for battle practice.
Record practice is at a target at exactly a known distance. Every gun on every ship is fired individually at that target. Battle practice is at a target that simulates in size and distance the ship of an enemy. All the guns of the ship that reach that range are fired apparently helter-skelter for a given number of minutes. The range in that case has to be found out.
Record practice is held to qualify gun pointers, or, as the English call it, gun layers. Its purpose is to find out the best shooters in the ship and to give them practice. Battle practice is to give these gun pointers an opportunity of displaying their skill in what would seem to be slam-bang work, but what is really the result of months, and even years, of scientific training of the eye and hand and of the mind in knowing just when to pull a trigger or snap a lanyard at exactly the right fraction of a second.
You see, the secret of success in fighting on the sea, as it is practically in every kind of fighting, lies after all in what the Western man calls "getting the drop on the other fellow." The way to get that drop on warships is to find out the men who can shoot straightest and fastest and can keep their nerve, and then be prepared to turn 'em loose when war comes. The target practice here has been of that kind, to pick out and train gun pointers. It was record practice exclusively.