Both the great English-speaking nations are immensely proud of their navies. They can, on occasion, produce soldiers by the million of the very highest and most efficient type, but they never feel quite that pride and patriotic fervour over their soldiers that they do over their ships of war and their sailors.
The guns, therefore, with which the ships are armed, always form a subject of great interest, especially those large ones which constitute the armament of the Dreadnought battleships and battle-cruisers.
Let us first consider what is required in a naval gun, for it must be remembered that the naval and military weapons are different in some respects. Experience at the Dardanelles showed that even the guns of the Queen Elizabeth, the largest and most powerful then known, fresh from the finest factories, were not particularly successful against the Turkish forts. The Germans, too, set up what was probably a naval gun and occasionally dropped shells into Dunkirk with it at a range of twenty miles or so, but without causing much harm, and the fact that they only did it occasionally and then abandoned it
altogether seems to indicate that in their opinion they were not doing much good with it.
It must not be assumed from this that naval guns are bad guns or poor guns, however, but simply that they are made for a special purpose for which they are highly efficient, from which it follows almost as a natural consequence that they are somewhat less efficient when used for some other purpose. Their purpose is to pierce the hard steel armour with which warships are protected and then to explode in the enemy's interior, whereas in modern warfare the greatest military guns are chiefly required to blow a big hole in the ground or to shatter a block of concrete. In both cases the ultimate object is to carry a quantity of explosive into the enemy's territory and there explode it, but whereas the land gun has simply to do that and no more, the naval gun has to pierce thick armour-plate as well.
And just think what that means. Many large ships have their vital parts protected by armour-plates twelve inches thick. Moreover, the armour-plates are made of very special steel, the finest that can be invented for the purpose. Vast sums of money have been expended in experimenting to find out just the best sort of steel for resisting penetration by shells. Some time ago I saw several pieces of armour-plate which had been used in one of these tests. They had been set up under conditions as nearly as possible the same as those obtaining on the side of a ship and then they had been fired at from varying distances, the effects of the various shots being carefully recorded. And that is only one experiment out of tens of
thousands which have been tried again and again, while the steel manufacturers are always trying to improve and again improve the shell-resisting properties of their steel. Thus, we see, the presence of the steel armour which has to be perforated before the shell can do its work makes the task set before the naval gun somewhat different from that which confronts its military brother.
These considerations result in the naval gun needing to have as flat a trajectory as possible and its projectiles the highest possible speed.
Now trajectory, it may be useful to explain, is the technical term employed to denote the course of a projectile, which is always more or less curved.
Let us imagine that we see a gun, pointed in a perfectly horizontal direction, and let us also imagine that by some miracle we have got rid of the force of gravity and also that there is no air. Under those conditions the shot from the gun would go perfectly straight and with undiminished velocity for ever and ever. Then let us imagine that the air comes into being. The effect of that is to act as a brake which gradually slows the shell down until finally it stops it. Theoretically, perhaps, it would never quite stop it, but for all practical purposes it would.