Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Talk about cannon cockers!

Am thinking a few of those salvos...... like 100ish..... per battlewagon..... off the Iranian coast, would be well worth the cost and expense of de-mothballing all the big guns we have left.

Impressive! My grandfather told me that when he was in the Navy in WW2 that you werent allowed to be on the deck when they are fired....and that he witnessed a man sucked off the deck by one of the guns when it was fired.
Always wondered if this was true or not or was he pulling my leg.
Does anyone think its possible?

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Exactly, can't beat gunboat diplomacy. Like they say, come big or stay at home. If the US had done that during the Carter Admin. Iran would of released the hostages and wouldn't be running their mouth now. They wouldn't dare of killed them for the retaliation from the US.

who was receiving those volkswagen-sized shells?

mercy!

1991? Should have been Desert Storm, and likely the Southern area of Iraq.

what i figured. couldn't see 'em launching live shells in a demo (urk!)

Nimrod, one of the instructors at Parris Island had been an FO in Beirut and got to call in fire from (I think) the New Jersey.
He said The Jersey could erase city blocks, just sctatch 'em off the map.

I know a gentleman and former U.S. Marine who was assigned to "that" barracks in Beirut. He was out on scout/sniper duty when "it" happened.

He directed a good bit of fire from the NJ, and said likewise.

I actually got to see the Mo' fire once, off San Clemente Isl.
I was able to get a guided tour of the Jersey when she was in San Francisco. My ID card got me to the quarter deck, the two stunning Aussie lass' with me got the us the tour.

Now did I do that right, lass' not lass's. Spellcheck likes both.

"lass'" is correct for both plural and possessive. I suspect both would be accurate......

Back in 1957 they taught us the loading procedure in boot camp. No live fire for me, thank you, but the loading sequence was pretty exciting.

You wanna talk about muzzle flash.. whew.. I also wonder how many shells I could reload with one of those gunpowder bags?

If you will notice, the first thing up the pipe was a Tree trunk size projo.

Each bag was/is 50 lbs. of pure black, IIRC.

Lassies (in Scotland, anyway).

Not quite and way off:

Powder Charge:
The nitrocellulose powder charges were contained in cloth bags that were made from a special raw silk known as "cartridge cloth". This cloth burns without leaving any smouldering residue in the barrel which would present a safety hazard when loading the subsequent round.

The number of powder charges loaded, along with the elevation of the barrel, would determine the range of the gun. Depending on the specific type of gun and the projectile used the powder charge would vary, but for maximum range the charge would be six bags of powder (648 or 672 pounds) for the Navy MkII M1 gun, to four or eight bags of powder (total charge of 832 pounds) for the Army MkII and MkIII guns

VA, each powder bag for a 15"/50cal weighs 110 lbs of cordite with a pad of blackpowder placed between the second and third bag. 660 lbs per load. 2700 lb AP shell or 2000 lb Hicap HE shells

This is information taken from the documentation of the accident in Turret Two on the USS Iowa (BB-61)in 1989 very interesting stuff:


The Commander, Naval Surface Force, Atlantic at once appointed Rear Admiral Richard Milligan, who had been the New Jersey's first skipper upon her reactivation in 1980, to assemble an investigation team. Captain Joseph D. Miceli of NAVSEA formed a technical team that would collect the evidence, interview the survivors, and conduct special tests. These teams were unable to identify an accidental cause for an open-breech, cold-barrel explosion within the 16-in gun. Past turret disasters in U.S. battleships (see appendix C) had occurred in guns where previous rounds had been fired. The ength of rammer chain damaged by the deflagration indicated that an overram of 21-22 inches had taken place. The chain retracted into a semicircular housing that protects the chain from gun blast. It was assumed that the length of damaged chain outside the housing was the distance that the rammer had moved forward after the overram. Therefore, press reports, and Admiral Milligan in his briefing, alluded to a 21-inch overram The final analysis corrected the overram to 24 inches!. Extensive experimentation and analysis of Navy records from the battleship era revealed the remarkable insensitivity of bagged propelling charges to all forms of abuse. Despite exhaus-tive analysis of the physical evidence and post-accident experimentation through September 1989, the Navy was unable to exactly duplicate the accidental explosion that was believed to have occurred in the Iowa's turret. It is important to emphasize in these trials that the D846 propellant and black powder were also tested to determine their ignition properties. For example, a cigarette lighter required more than nine minutes to ignite the black powder through the quilted patch on the powder bags. The powder grains that make up the powder bags took 2.5-3.5 minutes to ignite, depending on whether they were inside a polyethylene wear-reducing jacket or the plain silk material. It proved impossible to ignite the powder bags by ramming or dropping them from heights of 40 and 100 ft. The powder grains were also insensitive to electromagnetic radiation. Post-incident analyses of the charges in the lowa's powder magazines confirmed that they were in a safe, stable condition.

A primer {similar to a 0.30-caliber blank rifle cartridge), fired from the breech block, normally ignited a bagged propelling charge. The gun was designed to prevent the primer from being fired until the breech block was closed and locked. Each bagged charge had an ignition pad containing black powder sewn onto its base and was quilted to spread the black powder evenly so that there would be virtually instantaneous Within milliseconds ignition. Each bag ignited the next in sequence, that is, it burned from the end much like a cigarette, creating a pressure that would propel the shell out of the gun. A test was done to determine if a preignition of the primer could have initiated the explosion, but preignition was proved to have been unlikely with an open breech block.


Tests were done at Dahlgren in 1989 on a 16-in/50 Mk 7 gun, using five bags of D846 propellant and the techniques employed in the lowas to load and fire these guns. Overrams of the type that had occurred in the lowa's turret were replicated without incident.(Note 4) Systematic tests were conducted: charges were initiated at each bag location, and measurements were taken of the pressures and of the movement of the projectile up the barrel. These tests determined that the point of ignition that caused the projectile travel in the center gun was most likely located between bags 1 and 2 or bags 2 and 3. Finally, the investigators decided to remove the rammer and its chain from the center gun of Turret II and take them to Dahlgren, where they were reassembled in a fixture similar to a 16-in gun. As the rammer and its mechanism were taken apart, each part was closely examined for the slightest evidence of failure; nothing indicating failure was found. In May 1989 a test was done with a timing device similar in size to the lead pouch and placed between bags 2 and 3, and the investigators found that this arrangement closely replicated what had occurred on board the Iowa.


The Navy Department and Congress exerted great pressure on the investigative teams to determine a cause for this disaster and the loss of forty-seven lives. After all possible accidental causes had been ruled out, the investigative officer concluded that sabotage was the most probable explanation for the tragedy. Minute traces of residue trapped in the projectile's rotating band (see Figure 7-4) when the shell had been driven into the gun tube, provided strong evidence of sabotage-steel wool, calcium hypochlorite, and glycol were found. Thorough experimentation confirmed that a plastic bag containing a glass tube filled with these everyday materials, positioned between the first and second bags, and then rammed into the breech, could have caused approximately what had occurred in the Iowa's gun. This type of sabotage would have explained the location of the projectile in the gun tube and the residue found trapped in the rotating band of the shell. Tests were conducted with a 16-in gun and a device that had the same chemical properties as those of the residue found in the rotating band of the shell. These tests indicated that it was possible for such a device to trigger an explosion such as the one that occurred in the Iowa.

The findings of Admiral Milligan's team, read before a press briefing in September 1989, were greeted with dismay and disbelief. The identification of one crewman IClayton Hartwigl as the perpetrator of the incident seemed to be the best explanation of the cause since he was acting gun captain. Admiral Milligan commented to the press, "There's an assumption you have to make. He was the gun captain and controlled the loading of that gun." Senator Alan Dixon called the Navy's findings "guesswork."

Chairman Sam Nunn of the Senate Armed Services Committee was also skeptical and requested Sandia National Laboratories at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mex-ico, to go over the evidence and provide a second opinion. Sandia conducted thorough tests of its own. The distance the rammer head had traveled when it was activated to shove the bags of D846 propellant into the gun was important to Sandia's investigation. In February 1990 Dr. Karl Schueler visited the damaged Turret II of the Iowa, which was undergoing repairs at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. He made careful measurements of the spanning tray, which had gouges from the rammer chain imprinted in it. He determined that the overram had been 24 inches, a distance that indicated a severe compression of the powder charge during the fateful ram. Sandia's chemical analysis did not disprove the Navy's findings on the chemicals' presence, but did find the same materials in different concentrations on other battleships-the Wisconsin and Missouri. The investigative team, headed by Dr. Richard Schwoebel, decided to rig a half-scale drop test within a cylindrical chamber that would duplicate, in miniature, the fateful ram. The team determined that with sufficient velocity, the propellant could ignite-but this was only a half-scale charge under very high speed. Could the powder ignite under the high rammer speed of 14 fps?

The investigation shifted to the powder bags, with their eight layers of 225 pellets per layer, plus a tare (or trim) layer, which was used to compensate for the variation in the weights of the pellets. These are inserted into the trim bag during the manufacturing process (Note 6) to make sure that the powder bags weigh out to an average of 100 lb for the 16-in D846 bag and 110 lb for the 16-in D839 charges. There were on average some 15-65 grains per tare layer.

In the full-charge bag, the grains were carefully layered, whereas the reduced charges were simply dumped into the unbleached silk bags. The reduced charges weighed 52.5 lb, about half as much as full charges.


Sandia was suspicious of the trim-layer pellets, which were tubular nitrocellulose, about 2 inches long, with seven small holes in the pellets to ensure quick, even burning. If there had been fewer than twenty, could the powder be ignited under the pressure of the overram7 Sandia answered this question on 24 May 1990 at the Naval Weapons System Center, Dahlgren, Virginia. No ignition had occurred during seventeen drop tests of five powder bags of the 16-in/45 D846 type, replicating the rammer velocity of 14 fps. The last of these drop tests crushed five of the pellets in the trim layer. An eighteenth test was ordered with fewer pellets, which were specially arranged in a circle with one at the center in the vicinity of the black-powder pouch. Upon dropping the charge a bright light was observed coming from the space between powder bags 2 and 3. This was followed by smoke and yellow flames and an explosion that tore the experimental rig apart. On 25 May 1990 Schwoebel and Schueler appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee with their findings and stated that they could neither prove nor disprove the theory that a chemical device had set off the explosion. These men did note that a reduced number of pellets in the trim layer increased the possibility of explosion, particularly if a high-speed overram did occur.(Note 6) This indeed was one of the conclusions reached in Sandia's final report. An actual count and statistical analysis of powder bags on board the Iowa found that there were powder bags with 1 to 65 pellets in the trim layer. Specialists from Sandia determined in subsequent mathematical analyses of the tests that the chances of an explosion greatly increased as the number of pellets decreased. Furthermore, they concluded, unlike the Navy's investigators, that despite the rammer lever's being in the low-speed rammer position, it was possible that the explosion could have moved the rammerman's seat and caused the rammer lever to show a rammer-speed position that was different from the actual speed used for ramming.(Note 7)

There is yet another sensitive configuration of pellets that did not involve the trim layer. The charges were ignited when at high ramming speed a single pellet was misplaced at the rear of the bag adjacent to the black-powder patch. A subsequent examination of the powder bags showed that 3.39 percent of them had a misplaced pellet at the rear of the bag. Exhaustive testing at Dahlgren in 1990 with reduced pellets in the trim layer confirmed that a cold-barrel explosion was possible with a high-speed overram. The probability of this type of explosion was estimated to be 1 in 38,000, but almost zero {a probability of 1 in 1 x 10^-47) if a low speed overram occurred.

The need to properly train gun crews to operate the 16-in guns of the Iowas was a concern to the U.S. Navy before this explosion occurred. NAVSEA had established a 36-42-week course in main-battery gunnery, and companies like RCA had developed the course syllabus. Former battleship officers and crews were hired to teach these courses. One of the instructors wrote, ". . . competent turret crews and main battery fire-control personnel, continuous on-board training with hands on the equipment is the order of the day."(Note 8) According to Tom Meiners,(Note 9) who was a gun captain in Turret II and was discharged from the Navy in March 1989, there were frequent overrams because there was constant pressure from the bridge to decrease the loading time and fire rounds as quickly as possible. Meiners also said that Hartwig was really careful when he rammed the powder. "You could not get him to go fast enough. He was really careful around this stuff {powder)."

I can't even start to imagine what it must have been like to be on a ship like that or on a cruiser, engaged in a night battle with other battle wagons.

Must have been an out of body experience.