The Father of Naval Gunnery

America is a huge naval power today, but how did we get to be the foremost naval power?  Largely because of the Spanish-American War.

For most of the 19th century, the American Navy was preposterously weak, especially during the years between wars.  With a few notable exceptions, most of the ships of our navy were of poor quality, smaller than needed, and too old to be effective.  Far too often, the ships were simply left tied to a dock while they slowly rotted.  One naval officer summed it up in the 1870's rather simply:  "We are more of a danger to ourselves than to an enemy."

America's naval history went something like this:  We never had a navy until the war started, then rushed to catch up after hostilities commenced, only to cancel the construction of the yet-to-be-completed ships at the end of the war.  In many ways we were like the little boy on the roof  who tripped and began to slide off the roof. 

"Oh God!" he cried  "Save me!"

Just as he said those words, his slide was stopped when an exposed nail snagged his jeans.

"Never mind, God," the boy said.  "A nail saved me."

And so it was for the U.S. Navy: it was abandoned during times of peace, then would begin furious expansion plans during war, that were then usually not completed by the end of the conflict.  The brief exception was during the Civil War when, in order to effectively blockade the southern states, the Navy expanded dramatically until by the war's end, we had the largest coastal defense navy in the world.  However, this was largely not a blue water navy, since most of the ships could not leave the relative protection of the coastal waters.  During Reconstruction, even this fleet was allowed to fade away.

Steam power would change all of this:  America could no longer wait until a war started to begin rebuilding her sea power.  Not only did it take longer to build the ships, but the days of Able-bodied Seamen, who could do every necessary task on the ship, were over because the new machinery required specialized training and more experience.  Only in the last decade of the 19th century did America begin quickly building a truly modern, sophisticated standing navy.

"Oh, Lord!" cried Assistant Secretary of the Navy Teddy Roosevelt.  "If only the people who are ignorant about our navy could see those great warships in all their majesty and beauty, and could realize how well they are handled, and how well fitted to uphold the honor of America, I don't think we would encounter such opposition in building up the Navy to its proper standard." 

When politicians talk about weapons and honor, it's time to grab your wallet and be worried. 

And since we had a navy, we used it.  It didn't take us long to become involved an unnecessary and useless war.  Luckily, we picked an enemy we could beat: Spain.  During the Spanish American War, there were two dramatic naval battles:  we destroyed the Spanish fleets, first in a battle in Manila Bay in the far-off Philippine Islands, followed by a running fight with the remainder of the Spanish fleet as the ships tried to flee from the harbor of Santiago, Cuba.

When the United States Navy forced the Spanish cruiser Cristobal Colón to beach herself on the coast of Cuba, the war was over, and so was the Spanish Empire.  Think of the irony: five hundred years after Columbus, the Spanish Empire ended back in the Caribbean where it had started, with the loss of a ship named after Columbus.

America, suddenly an Imperial power with conquered territory scattered around the globe, reveled in our new powerful navy.  One man, a rather low ranking naval officer, disagreed.

William S. Sims later recalled that the jingoistic American press liked to depict the Navy of the day as “the hottest stuff that ever came down the pike, that every ship we built was the last expression of naval architecture, and that our personnel was the best in the world.” 

Sims knew otherwise, for he had studied the French, British, and Russian navies as the naval attaché in Paris for a year and a half before the hostilities with Spain.  His tart assessment was that “we were not in it at all, either in design or in marksmanship.”

Sims had some ideas, but his superiors in the Navy refused to listen to him.  So Captain Sims wrote directly to the President of the United States.  Today, such an idea would be almost unthinkable—breaking the chain of command is unforgivable—and it would be almost impossible for such a letter to even reach the desk of the President.

Teddy Roosevelt came home from Cuba a war hero, and quickly used his new fame to win the governorship of New York.  This brash, young Roosevelt worried the leadership of the Republican Party, so a new, and safer position, had to be found for the rambunctious Roosevelt—they convinced him to join the McKinley reelection campaign as the President's new Vice President. 

The job of Vice President is considered a "safe" position, as the job has almost no authority, has no power, and has few responsibilities.  But, when McKinley was assassinated just six months into his new term, suddenly the unpredictable Teddy became president.  As President, he listened to Sims' ideas, and made him the new Director of Naval Marksmanship. 

The US Navy went back to the site of the two naval battles of the Spanish-American War.  Since both battles took place in relatively shallow water, the wrecked Spanish ships could be examined in minute detail.  They examined, measured, and counted every artillery hit on the destroyed vessels, and the results were compared to the naval records of how many artillery shells had been fired.  The results were staggering.

At Manila, in the Philippines, the Spanish ships had elected to fight at anchor, and the weather had been so mild that the sea was as flat as a mill pond.  The navy had fired slightly over 6000 rounds and scored 142 hits.  At Santiago, Cuba, where the conditions were only slightly more challenging, the Navy had fired 9400 rounds and scored 122 hits.

These are accuracy rates of 2.3% and 1.3%.  There is an old naval term used to describe this.  Technically, it is called "missing"!

Sims (pictured at left, after he was made an admiral by Roosevelt) discovered that part of the problem was that while great strides had been made in the design of naval artillery, the method of firing naval guns had not improved as rapidly as the guns themselves.  Gunners still fired them the same way they had during the sea battles of the Napoleonic campaigns a hundred years earlier.

A gunner looked down the barrel of his cannon and waited until the roll of the ship brought the target in line, then fired the gun as the target lined up.  In other words, you tried to fire as the ship rolled up and down instead of aiming the gun up and down at the target.  This was called “firing on the weather roll.”  If the shot missed, maybe the shot would ricochet off the water and still hit the target.   Compounding the errors of this method was a man’s reaction time, something that could deteriorate during times of stress.

Sims was concerned about American warship design and how well US ships really stacked up against European ships.  While stationed in Hong Kong, Sims met a Scottish captain whose ship consistently scored 20% higher than the other British ships in gunnery practice.  (And much higher than the scores for US gunnery!)

The Scottish captain had replaced the ancient open iron sights on cannons with a heavily padded telescopic sight equipped with crosshairs—an American invention that the US Navy had rejected.  Further, his ship did not wait until the target rolled in front of the gun.  Instead, the gunner, assisted by the new hydraulic systems that moved the new massive artillery, continually rotated the aiming wheel, keeping the gun aimed at the target even as the ship rolled.  This was the system of “continuous aiming” and this small change immediately transformed naval gunnery.

Sims next changed the way that marksmanship was scored.  The important factor was not the percentage of hits versus the number of misses. What was now important was the number of hits per minute.  If you are 95% accurate but only fire a round an hour, you will lose the engagement.

Next, the effective range of the guns were changed.  By 1900, even the vaunted British Navy only used its guns to engage targets out to 2000 yards.  This was scarcely better than Admiral Horatio Nelson and the HMS Victory had done at the Battle of Trafalgar a century earlier.  Yet the modern guns were accurate at many times that range.

The solution lay in how far away a gunner could see his target.  A gunner just twenty feet above the water can only see about 7 miles.  Sims helped design a tall observation tower for an artillery spotter that effectively doubled this distance, which made the warships far more deadly. 

It is a shame that today, few people remember William S. Sims, for he effectively became the father of modern naval gunnery.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that all these improvements were adopted by the navies of every country, just in time for World War I.

US Naval forces in World War I were ably commanded by Admiral Sims.  He later said that his biggest problem during the war was the brash young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a young man name Roosevelt.  Franklin Roosevelt.  But that's a different story.