When Lord Nelson, after an embarrassing rebuff at the hands of enemy shore batteries, vented his famous dictum on the effectiveness of naval gunfire against shore targets, he established a fixed idea which outlasted at least half a dozen wars and bade fair to survive this one. "A sailor's a fool," he said, "to fight a fort!"
Almost a century and a half later, seemingly reinforced and confirmed by all modern naval and military history, including the fiasco of Gallipoli, this axiom tumbled with a crash when effective naval gunfire support became a decisive factor in American amphibious successes. In this unexpected role, it stands as one of the major tactical surprises of the war.
This upset, wherein ships' fire has been employed to accomplish, missions heretofore exclusively reserved to land artillery or not believed possible at all, has largely been accomplished as a result of three rather diverse causes. The first, of course, is the nature of the war itself: a struggle which has been so largely amphibious—and in which the United States has emerged as the dominant amphibious power among the contestants—naturally focused attention upon the problem of harnessing and directing the potentially massive naval fire power against shore targets. Second, technical advances in design and capabilities of naval fire control instruments threw open hitherto unexplored possibilities for employment of ships' gunnery installations under virtually any set of conditions. Finally, the imagination and experiments of a small group of Marine Corps artillery officers and naval officers of our then embryonic amphibious forces as early as 1940 evolved the basic techniques which are now standard, and formulated the modern doctrines of naval gunfire support.
To understand the nature of naval gunfire, it is necessary to consider the characteristics of ships' gunnery installations, and especially to compare their advantages and limitations relative to artillery.
As designed, naval guns and fire control instruments are essentially direct-fire weapons to be employed from moving platforms against maneuvering targets which are unable at sea to find shelter behind any intervening mask nearer than the horizon. Trajectories are flat, muzzle velocities and striking power high. Rates of fire, aided by mechanical devices and ample sources of power, are very rapid, and the weight and calibers of ammunition are virtually double those of guns employed in similar missions ashore. Located on a movable platform, the ship, guns may be shifted rapidly from position to position so as to find and employ the most advantageous lines of fire. On the other hand, when firing against land targets, naval guns are handicapped by their trajectories which sometimes cannot reach behind terrain masks, and by the difficulties of ammunition resupply at sea. Patterns of fall of shot, while very small in deflection, have considerable dispersion in range, due principally, to the flat trajectories developed. Accuracy, at the extreme ranges, decreases because even the finest fire control computing devices, mechanical "brains" though they may seem, cannot compete from a moving ship with the precision of shore batteries firing from stable positions which have been surveyed in by accurate methods. Finally, a ship can only go so far; it cannot penetrate beyond the beaches. Consequently, naval gunfire is limited in application to the maxi mum range inland of a ships' guns, and frequently to the maximum visibility inland. Compared with shore-based artillery, we find that naval gunfire is somewhat—though not greatly—less accurate, but can deliver much heavier and more rapid fires. Its trajectory prevents it from firing directly over abrupt masks onto reverse slopes, but its mobility frequently allows a shift of firing position which will accomplish the same result. While artillery fire is entirely controlled by human and manual means, naval gunnery is perhaps the most mechanistic of all the gunner's arts.
In terms of the firing technique employed, all ships' fires can be classified as direct or indirect. The former type requires little explanation, as it is the normal way in which a ship's battery is employed. By means of the director and other devices for ascertaining and tracking a target, the guns are brought to bear upon a target which is directly visible and recognizable from some part of the ship. Fire is then opened, and the target is destroyed or neutralized in full view of the firing ship. Until a very few years ago, this was considered to be the only effective means of bringing ships' fire onto targets: i.e., what you couldn't see, you couldn't hit. But modern developments in design of various fire control devices now render it possible for a ship to fire from a located navigational position at a target located only upon a chart or map, and this advance, as applied by the officers who pioneered the technique of shore fire control and naval bombardment, opened an almost limitless field for the use of naval gunfire in support of landing operations.
But the advent of means for delivery of indirect fires from vessels implied other requirements. Who could observe and adjust these fires? How could observers' command be relayed rapidly and accurately to firing ships?
At this juncture, the experience of artillerymen entered the picture, for the same problems confront any artillery battery which is firing against an unseen target (as is usually the case). In the field artillery, an officer called the forward observer—"FO" for short—moves with the most forward elements of advancing friendly troops while a team of communication personnel keep him in continuous telephonic or radio contact with his battery or fire direction center to the rear. It is the FO who acts as the eyes of his guns, recognizing targets of opportunity, calling for fires as they are needed on the spot, and making all necessary spots and adjustments to bring shells onto targets. Subject to differing communication requirements, this system was adapted to naval gunfire, and what we now know as the Shore Fire Control Party came into being.
The SFCP (contraction of the polysyllabic "Shore Fire Control Party") is about as representative of the universal nature of amphibious operations as any unit could be. Basically, it consists of two officers, one of the Navy, the other a Marine artilleryman. Each has a five-man communication team of radiomen and field-telephone personnel; the Marine artilleryman, who acts as Naval Gunfire Spotter in a role similar to that of the artillery forward observer, however has an enlisted assistant, the scout, who aids the spotter in searching for and identifying targets, and who assumes command of the team if his officer becomes a casualty. The naval officer, who commands the entire SFCP, is entitled the Naval Gunfire Liaison Officer. With his team, he remains at the command post of the unit which is being supported by fires of the ship or ships under his control. From this position he advises and assists the unit commander regarding the best employment of naval gunfire in particular situations. Thus the troops ashore are assured of expert assistance in putting naval gunfire where and when it can do the most good.
Communications for shore fire control parties are necessarily maintained basically by radio, except for intra-team telephone nets between front line spotters and their liaison officers immediately in rear. Consequently, excellent radio apparatus and technique are a prime necessity. Nowhere more than in shore fire control does Mahan's famous axiom that "Communications domi nate war" find its application.
But it is only a first step to devise means for controlling the fire of a single ship by a single shore fire control party. In the scale of offensive amphibious operations now mounted, there must be many ships and many parties ashore, and a pressing problem of staff co-ordination arises. How, for instance, to provide an efficient system and organization to deliver the naval gunfire support necessary to a division or even larger units?
Obviously, positive control of each ship's fire must be exercised whenever targets lie near our own troops, not only for reasons of safety, but so that the men who need and profit by the fire, front-line Marines, can secure just the application necessitated by the situation of the moment. However, as we move up the echelons of command, from assault battalions to regiments, to the division, we find that problems cease to be those of controlling and placing actual fires on targets, and become instead matters of coordination, decisions as to priorities of assignment of ships, replacement of personnel casualties in key spots of the SFCP, and the like. These matters must be seen to, in order that the front-line parties can continue to function. Therefore, in each rifle regiment, there exists also a Naval Gunfire Liaison Officer with his own communication team; and at the division headquarters, there is not only a naval officer, who acts as Assistant Division Naval Gunfire Officer, but a Marine field officer of artillery and seagoing experience, as Division Naval Gunfire Officer. In this way, the over-all planning and executing of naval gunfire in support of larger units is correctly directed and co-ordinated.
Like all other weapons, naval gunfire in support of amphibious operations has distinct and proper methods of employment. In order to arrive at these, it might be well to ask what is the basic mission of ships' fires in landing operations. While the answers may seem obvious, nevertheless a distinct formulation is not only generally valuable but important in order to head off the enthusiasts who mistakenly take their own specialty as a sort of military panacea, and who therefore advance extravagant and exclusive claims at the expense of other such equally critical arms as support aviation and artillery.
The missions of naval gunfire support are: first, to destroy, prior to the landing, every known weapon or installation which is capable by direct fire of hindering the movement ashore of our forces—in a word, to clear the beaches; second, to provide all supporting fires for our forces ashore prior to the landing of artillery; finally, after the artillery comes in, to assist further efforts to the maximum by reinforcing and augmenting the organic artillery of the landing force.
Fulfillment of the foregoing missions requires three general stages of firing by the ships designated. Preliminary bombardment, executed before our troops set foot on the beaches, is the first. This firing softens up the enemy defenses, destroys his supplies and dumps, knocks out his anti-aircraft installations so that our planes can further attack the island, and generally fatigues and exhausts the defenders. Depending upon many variables, such as availability of ships, the nature of the target and the necessity for surprise, the preliminary bombardment may last anywhere from a fortnight to a few days. As an axiom, it may be generally stated that there is a close correlation between the duration and intensity of preliminary bombardment and the final casualties sustained in the capture and reduction of the objective. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that those objectives which have been most intensively softened are most readily taken, whereas the converse has sometimes been painfully manifest.
The second stage or phase of naval gunfire support is the pre-landing preparation, and the fires delivered just after the landing. During these missions, the beaches themselves and immediately adjoining installations are primary targets. Under cover of these fires we land, organize, and launch our initial attacks.
The final phase is that in which naval gunfire support remains available on call by the shore fire control parties attached to assault elements. By this time, it is no longer paramount. Air support, always important, is on call, and artillery has been landed. From here on, naval gunfire is one of a trio. Fire missions requested may in this phase be either in close or deep support of troops; naval gunfire may be to destroy or neutralize; or it may harass, deliver counterbattery fire, interdict, illuminate by night, or screen with smoke. As the troop commanders find it necessary, fires will be put down to meet their requests. Until the objective is declared secured, or the troops move inland beyond the range of warships, naval fires will be available to make the job easier.
What the exact future of naval gunfire support will be is of course conjectural. The thing is obviously here to stay, and its development will follow the paths of future technical and technological advance. Its importance in the general field of naval gunnery can be appreciated when one realizes the immense weight and number of rounds which have been fired in naval bombardments since the opening of the war. Along with anti-aircraft and normal surface gunnery, it has become a primary gunnery technique, and it is already being so taught in our gunnery schools, both to Navy and Marine officers. Although scope and details of fleet training are naturally not public, results speak for themselves, and it may be assumed that shore bombardment occupies a high priority in training of ships and crews.
And so Nelson's adage has boomeranged with the grim and irresistible march of our amphibious forces across two oceans. Perhaps if the great Admiral could see our battleships ringing some atoll with flame, he might be happy to reframe his exclamation and declare, "A fort's a fool to fight a sailor!"
