THE MYSTKRY GUN

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 162, 28 March 1918, Page 6

THE MYSTKRY GUN

COMMENT OF A ROYAL ARTILLERY OFFICER.

i Captain E. T. Perkins, of the Royal ! Field Artillery, who has been with the ■ guns since those dread Gallipoli days, land who is now on furlough in AVel- - liiigton, is inclined to hold that the jreport of the big gun which is said (to hurl its projecti.'jj 02 miles it- cot j theoretically impossible. He Kiv the ; Quesn Elizabeth turowkg, 15-inch shells I twenty-nvo miles at the Dardanelles, and ii that was done by a gun placed on a warship with no elevation but the freeboard oi the vessel, it should not be impossible- to construct a machine throwing a light and specially-rifled shell from a rifled gun with a very high velocity charge from an elevation of some hundreds of feet. Captain Perkins does not hold that shells thrown from such a distance wguld be of any real military value, as the projectile could not, necessarily, be a heavy one, and the difficulty of correcting errors would be enormous. In tile case of an ordinary 18-pounder field gun, firing at 4000 or 5000 yards, the errors were often hundreds of yards, but in that case good glasses and a balloon or 'plane could correct, but a gun tiring a projectile sixty miles would need a. squadron of aeroplanes to correct errors. In his opinion the gun had been probably designed to inspire terror in the hearts of tho Parisians, and ravage the , morale of the French troops at the outset' of the big push, neither of which contingencies were likely to happen. Captain Perkins also noted that the British gunners had been given a pointblank range by the massed Germii)]S in their attack. That, he- s.'iys, would mean terrific slaughter. Point-blank range for 18-pounders meant that the shells were bursting .in the barrels Each shell xontained 375 bullets, and at a 400 or 500 yards range they would be travelling at a great velocity. He calculated that each bullet wouTel pierce six or seven men, one behind the other. That is probably what happened, and was described by the correspondents when they said that great swathes of the enemy were cut down as they advanced in massed formation.