Page:Popular Mechanics 1928 01.pdf/68

 

a thirty-foot target in the sea, eighteen miles away and out of sight of her gunners, the U.S.S. "West Virginia" recently has passed all world's gunnery records. Though the gunners did not have the slightest glimpse of their objective, owing to the curvature of the earth's surface, the co-operation of the fast observation planes resulted in the achievement, which brought a great sum in prize money to the gunners and the control forces.

The system by which this firing was made possible is one of the marvels of modern gunnery. Upon receiving information that their ship would be called upon to fire an unusually difficult schedule, in common with other vessels of the battleship divisions, the gunners were practiced assiduously in the southern drill fields of the Pacific ocean before they entered the Atlantic through the Panama canal. "General quarters" was sounded frequently and the men drilled by day and night at the great guns. The exhibition of morale was astonishing, but one of the most amazing elements of all was the fact that not only the gunners, but the entire ship's company, in a divine service to which attendance was entirely voluntary, prayed for the success of their guns in the firing to come.

"The ship was in high morale that day." quietly commented an officer, who was asked to explain the result of the firing. "All hands helped us," declared a gunner, "they gave us perfect ranges from the tops, the radiomen caught every signal perfectly, the engineers gave us just the right amount of steam and power to the fraction of an inch of ship movement, the plotting room didn't make a single mistake, the "bridge" swung the ship's wheel accurately to keep our guns on the target, our captain trusted us—he knew the ship was right."

This gunner really epitomized the operation of the great ship, by which 1,400 men each performed a scientific task with perfect accuracy—and helped the gunners. He indicated that it is no longer sharp-eyed gunpointers who are solely responsible for hitting a naval target at sea, but 