Hitting the target

[jimlongley]

Back when I was in the Navy, a long time ago, the policy was NOT to hit the targets, they were just aiming points.

A floating towed target was two pontoons joined by an expanded mesh deck, with another expanded mesh "A" frame built over it. This target was towed behind a tug or other ship several hundred yards back at speeds up to about ten knots, and fired at by other ships while observers judged whether shots hit within strictly defined areas.

The defined target areas were the shape of a ship, height, length, and width. Hits were scored on the basis that a round hitting in a certain area would have hit a vital area of a ship, and that a round hitting in another area would have hit the ship, but not in a vital area, and a round not hitting in those areas was a miss. A vital hit was scored as a one, a non-vital hit was scored as one half.

Based on this scoring system I once scored six hits for five shots, one of my hits splashed within the vital area, skipped and hit within the vital area again.

The floating targets were not particularly expensive, but they were a chore to haul in if they got sunk - after all there is an official naval term for a large object under the water at the end of a line attached to a ship - AN ANCHOR! So the rules against sinking the "sled" were pretty strictly enforced, the only time a ship wasn't penalized for sinking one was when it was pretty obvious that the sinking of the target was accidental. There wasn't a bunch of spares carried along either, if somebody sank the target, the shoot was pretty much over for everyone.

One trip down to the Caribbean we had been cooped up in our mounts in pretty high temperatures, with poorly functioning blowers serving as the only thing close to A/C (this was a WWII destroyer after all) and we were getting pretty tired of the whole thing.

Communications within the gun mount were supposed to be over headsets, but they were not the most reliable things,, so we had a set of hand signals that we used to flash back and forth. I, as "pointer" would be aiming the guns vertically pulling the trigger when I saw the crosshair in the right position, and my counterpart, the "trainer" would concentrate on keeping the target centered horizontally.

As mentioned in a previous post, the sight setter sets the sights so that the shots fall some yards aft of the target.

Well, having grown tired of being cooped up in what we considered intolerable conditions, when it finally came our turn to shoot, I leaned down and signalled the trainer that I wanted to hit the target. My signal was just a simple finger point and a motion indicating something sinking - he nodded that he understood.

We fired our first shot, and the mount captain shouted down his corrections to the sight setter. The next shot, the trainer offset his sights an appropriate "Kentucky Windage" amount to adjust for the shot splash and the sight change, and I carefully times the roll and let fly.

PERFECT SHOT!!!

My BL&P (Blank Load and Plaster, inert, essentially a sixty pound slug) round penetrated one of two pontoons of the target and it almost immediately turned turtle, ending the shoot for the day with the squadron heading for home almost immediately while we stuck around to help the tug recover the target.

Of course the sight setter in question already had a reputation for some problems with his job, it was indeed the Short Round that I have spoken of so fondly before, so despite his sincere protestations of innocence, he was tacitly held responsible, if not officially.

Of course there were at least two people who knew the truth, and maybe a couple of others, after all there was also a sight check officer looking through the sights, so he had to have noticed that the vertical crosshair was off from the target - but he claimed that after he had given me clearance to fire he had moved off the sight to wipe sweat from his eye, and that he hadn't observed the actual shot, just my prep for it, and the splash afterward.

I have always considered that one of my very best shots, ever - the pontoons were about two feet in diameter, and our range was about three thousand yards, so I hit something one quarter of a minute of angle in size from a rolling ship with less than optimal sights and WWII ammo.

Of course inspection of the target revealed that my shot really had hit the frame of the A frame and deflected just enough to nick the top of the pontoon, and the nick did just enough damage to sink it. The actual damage was slight enough that the target was repaired before we actually got back to port. Of course a nick from a sixty pound five inch projectile is pretty big in nick terms, but I still hit the thing.

Our new Gunnery Officer was a pretty savvy guy, a mustang (an officer who rose from enlisted) and he got the gun crews together the next day before that day's scheduled exercise, and let us know that he would consider the sinking to be a one time fluke if it did not reoccur, so it didn't, and Short Round never suffered for his "mistake."

Of course it was much cooler the next day, anyway.

[DoubleJ]

Of course it was much cooler the next day, anyway.

Good thing, for Short Round's sake at least!!!