Mobile Artillery In Advance Bases.
By Major Henry C. Davis, U. S. M. C.
All of the present arrangements for the defense of Advance Bases contemplate the use of some form of Naval Artillery as a part of the plan of defense.
The theory is excellent, to oppose attacking artillery with guns of equal or nearly equal power.
If, however, the Advance Base is to be at all mobile, and it is conceded such bases must be mobile, then some other form of artillery must be used. At least it must supplement the semi-permanent mounts and guns of the present outfits.
In the places contemplated in the different schemes of defense gotten up by various boards appointed for the purpose, no attention has been paid to the fact that such places are to be defended by anything other than troops and the naval guns which these different boards have recommended.
These guns range in caliber from the 3-inch semi-automatic to the 6-inch R. F. rifle. The platforms which it is contemplated to be used for the mounts of these guns are to be put in selected places, defending points at which it is thought most likely the enemy will land his raiding party. There they are stuck, and, of course, in the present day their location will not be a matter of secrecy very long, and in any case, that because the most likely spot for a landing is guarded, is the best reason for the enemy not coming to it. One cannot make plans too far ahead in warfare.
These guns are permanently located or they are semi-permanently located, in either case we lose their use at any place outside their arcs of fire. They cannot be used for defense on the landward side of the work they occupy, and they are a terrific strain on the personnel which places them in position as in the Naval service the personnel of the defense is to be used to place its guns.
In addition to this strain of getting guns, weighing as high as six tons, from a ship or transport, there is the greater strain of handling them on shore by man power assisted by such blocks and tackle as are sent along or at hand.
Even the most rapid and untiring work on the part of the men engaged will not compensate for the time lost with such a type of gun; nor will its power be so much in excess of a more mobile type as to make the trouble of placing it worth while.
It seems beyond doubt that the mobile gun, which means a gun with a carriage not so heavy but that it can be hauled around by man power, is the gun we must have for our advance bases.
What should this gun be? It took from ten to fourteen yoke of oxen to haul around the 4-7-inch gun used by the English in the South African war; and yet we have guns heavier in weight and no more powerful which we are to use in our landing operations and our advance base work, and which we, so far as 1 w. able to find out, are to haul about by man power.
It does not enter into our scheme of advance base work to transport a gun for any such distances as this English gun travelled in the Boer war, but it is possible that a landing operation from the fleet may take a gun, from necessity, much further than is thought at the time of landing. We must have, therefore, a type which can be handled by some motive power which is easily transported on the ship or the transport which carries the gun and its limber.
The fire department of the city of New York are about to fit out their old horse-drawn engines with a tractor which has been perfected by an automobile expert by the name of Christy. This tractor is the solution of the rapid transport of heavy- vehicles which are not outfitted with an engine as an integral part of the vehicle.
By means of a modification of the fifth wheel, the front wheels of the engine are removed and the tractor placed. The space taken up adds very little to the original length of the engine and the speed and power are greater than they got out of the three horses which formerly pulled the same machine.
One of these tractors fitted to the front wheels of the present 5-inch gun and limber will haul it any place horses can haul it will take it there faster and will not be placed out of action by having its horses shot down.
Does it not seem that some such scheme as this gives a very easy and logical solution of the otherwise impossible problem of providing an ever-ready method of transportation other than that supplied by the men?
There is ample room to store this or a similar type of tractor on board ship; or even two of them. They occupy only half of the space which a 3-inch field gun and carriage occupy.
The use of such a machine means also that stores and such things as are needed by a force on shore can be hauled from the wharves by some other means than by man propelled carts.
Certainly it is well worth the trial. Fitted to a gun as heavy as the 5-inch field gun we have an ideal gun for advance base work. A gun which can very easily take the place of the present 3-inch gun, and which will be more than twice as useful for landing and advance base work, but such a gun must have power to move other than that supplied by the men.
There is a case in the author's mind where guns are being placed for the protection of a harbor which may some day be used as an advance base. These guns are set on platforms of 18 x 14 x 18 timbers and the whole is set in a concrete bed. The guns were transported six miles by man power assisted by block and tackle. They were 6-inch guns and when placed offered no better defense than a mobile howitzer would have given, in fact not as good, because they were placed, and could only shoot towards the open sea.
Suppose an enemy had made a landing on the opposite side of the place these guns were in position? There is no means by which they could be used in their own defense, whereas, with mobile guns, they could be concentrated into a battery which would play havoc with any land attack approaching them.
In addition to the fact that a mobile gun could be rapidly taken from place to place when needed, they can be more easily concealed than a permanent gun mount, and they can be concentrated when needed, a feature which has been entirely overlooked in the case above mentioned where four guns are widely scattered.
It does not require a very profound knowledge of tactics to realize that at such a wide separation is faulty and more particularly when the widely separated guns form the only artillery defense at present provided or contemplated.
But we cannot confine ourselves to one case. It is none the less true, however, that the same principle holds in all cases. Permanent artillery defense must have mobile artillery for its defense as well as infantry. The minute we contemplate the u-se of guns which are not mobile for advance base work, that minute the base is not a mobile base, and therefore should not be considered as an advance base so far as naval warfare is concerned.
If guns of this type are to be used, then we must assuredly add to the outfits for advance bases mobile guns and the means to make them mobile in fact as well as in name.
Even if we have no other means of transporting these guns than that supplied by the men of an advance base force, we must none the less have the guns and hope for the powers that be to give us some means of getting them about, which is practical for a naval outfit. Draught animals do not provide such a means for the navy, and so we come to the question already mentioned, either an automobile gun or a tractor to be used with the guns we need.
The naval guns at present used in the advance base work arc not placed in their positions for use against the artillery of a stop but are to be used against the landing parties from a ship. This work can be done in much better style by a mobile gun for two reasons; first, the attacking ships will not know the location even approximately of such guns, and secondly, such guns can do their work and get away after exposing their position, or they can use indirect fire and not be located at all by the enemy.
With such a target as a modern gun emplacement makes, and with our knowledge of the quality of marksmanship of the navies of the first class, a gun or two of the type now used could not hope to do anything against a ship. The ship, on the other hand, could stand out of range and make things very warm for the crew of the gun mounted, as it would necessarily be, for advance base work.
Guns in permanent or semi-permanent positions could not keep small craft from coming in close enough to cut cables or shoot up store houses, etc., because their fire could be kept down by the heavier guns from the protecting ships. Mobile guns of a sufficiently heavy caliber could do this because they could change their position or, as stated before, could use indirect fire, and not expose themselves. The wonderful work done in the present day with this indirect fire must not be forgotten, and the observers would not want a better place to observe the fall of their shells than the water of harbor in which all the distances are accurately known.
At the battle of the Yalu, in the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese concealed in one night seventy-two field guns and twenty howitzers from the Russians, and the Russian batteries which were conspicuously placed, were put out of action in thirty minutes. No target could be more conspicuous than boats loaded with men attempting to land, and nine out of ten guns of the type used at present for advance base work are by reason of their mounts very conspicuous.
Field guns or howitzers could be concealed from the ships supporting the landing and would, if efficiently served, put out of action any landing party, while the chance of the landing being effected is much more probable if we have to rely solely on guns placed in permanent positions, guns lacking mobility.
It is not the purpose of this article to decry the use of guns of a type requiring a semi-permanent mount, nor does it enter the author's thought that such guns are not needed, but to make these immobile guns efficient we must add to their defense guns of a mobile type.
We must bear in mind the fact that an advance base for the use of the navy will probably be seized in a night or a day. We cannot waste the time in getting the ponderous naval guns off the ships making the seizure. We must have guns designed for the purpose and they must be fitted so that when the work of assembling them and getting them off the ship is completed, work which would be assisted by all the mechanical apparatus on a warship, they can be run by their own power to their positions. We must not call on men, who will probably be needed on the ships, to go off on such an expedition as dragging a dead weight of five or six tons various distances over unknown country.
We must have guns which can be rapidly moved from one place to another, guns which are not tied down when in place and useless except in a very limited arc of horizontal train.
The design of the naval ship's gun is against it for this work. The extreme elevation for which they are generally designed is fifteen degrees, and it is quite likely that we will want to use a still greater elevation to accomplish anything with indirect fire.
If our contemplated naval bases in the Pacific are isolated by having the cables cut, and if we are to be in ignorance of their fate in the event of war until some news can- be gotten by our scout cruisers or other fast ships, we must certainly give these bases the means of defending themselves against anything less than an army of invasion. They must be provisioned and equipped with all the munitions of war likely to be needed in a siege, and we must above all give them the means to make even, an attack by a small army, a thing of very serious aspect to live enemy. A few guns or many guns which are put down in permanent positions will not accomplish this end. They must have mobile troops, and above all, mobile artillery, because the most powerful battery in the world is helpless in the face of a successful land attack. The rear is a very weak place in their armor.
No determined commander has ever been prevented from entering a harbor by the mere presence of coast defense guns, and no commander worthy of the name ever will be. And once he is in past the defending forts the harbor and all it contains is his. Bui with a land force backing up the coast defenses, the commander is rash indeed who will undertake to ignore its presence and run past the guns. Only defeat awaits him, unless he has his own army to occupy the army of the defenders.
It is not presumed that any naval defense of an advance base will go into the larger operations of war where armies are concerned. Their defense must be a part of the training of the military branch of the navy, the Marine Corps, and in this training we must consider that the service in time of war will be one which must be rendered quickly, efficiently, and we almost say silently. To do this we must have the most powerful means at our disposal considering the peculiar conditions under which we will have to work, and one of the things which will add greatly to the efficiency of our men will be to provide them with an efficient mobile piece of artillery for this special work.
Brief though these thoughts are, I will now leave the subject, but I feel that it cannot be done without making a powerful appeal to the powers at the Department to design and put into service for this most important work of advance base defense, the mobile gun we need. It may have been done but it is not within the knowledge of the writer.
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