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September 03, 2005
Big guns on the M1
It has to be the silly season (the period when serious news simply doesn't happen because Blair and his chums are away on their hols and the Civil Service cretinature is incapable of generating any) when one of the national daily's runs a story to the effect that HMS Belfast, moored in the Upper Pool above Tower Bridge (opposite the Tower of London) has her still operative forward six inch guns trained on a Motorway Services on the M1 12 miles away!
For most people, I suppose, she is simply an interesting museum piece moored tranquilly in the Thames. Few probably realise that her guns are still serviceable, although I should think that certain safety precautions have been taken, and she has no "live" munitions on board. Fewer still will appreciate that, from where she is, she could hit almost everything inside the M25 and certainly quite a few places beyond it - like Slough, Reigate, Redhill, Barnet, Thurrock and Dartford. She could also hit, and probably devastate, a large part of St Alban's and a few other towns around the capital. Perhaps we should be glad that there are now very few people around who know how to serve and fire these guns efficiently! And just in case you thought that was all she had, think again, she also has pairs of 4 inch High Angle/Low Angle mounts and they have a similar or slightly higher rate of fire and range to match. In the hands of an accomplished, trained, and motivated crew, these will throw bricks which will do just as much damage and have similar penetration.
HMS Belfast's six inch guns are the same type that took on and severely damaged the Graf Spee at the River Plate, that finished off the Scharnhorst at North Cape (one of Belfast's Battle Honours) and which delivered accurate and massive support in landings in Sicily, Salerno, North Africa, Normandy and elsewhere. Properly served a single gun can keep six shells in flight per minute. That's going some for a manually served gun. HMS Belfast has twelve of them, and she was at North Cape, Normandy, and several other intense battles, her "Battle Honours" are quite a list! At the River Plate, it was the two six inch gunned cruisers, HMS Ajax and Achilles, who did most of the damage to the Graf Spee; their high-speed closing of the range and then high rate of fire meant that the Graf Spee absorbed a large amount of damage very quickly and was forced to divide her own fire between the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter and the pair of lighter ships doing most of the damage. It was their shells that knocked out the Graf Spee's after dynamo rooms, her aircraft catapult and hangers, and then destroyed her electric and hydraulic systems to her after guns. The photos taken by newsmen showed little of this damage, possibly because they did not recognise that the smaller puncture holes all indicated deep penetration and internal damage out of all proportion to the size of hole in her armour.
Each six inch gun fires a 112 pound shell which is "propelled" out of the gun by a 110 pound bag of cordite. With radar gunnery control the maximum range of these guns came into play, previously they had been limited to aiming by visual sights which meant you could shoot what you could see from the control top and rangefinders. Radar moved the accuracy up the ladder, but is still more or less "if you can see it, you can shoot it" and the range could be extended by using aerial spotting to direct the guns, with an aircraft flying between the target and the guns to report the fall of shot and make corrections to the aim. Since the introduction of GPS and satelite navigation, these guns, if served by range and direction finding served by a GPS based system, would probably be far more devastating than any missile save a nuke.
Six 112 pound shells arriving every minute would spoil anyone's day. Make that 72 and it's time to get the hell out of the way, or wave a white flag and hope they see it!
Posted by The Gray Monk at September 3, 2005 02:02 PM
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