FIRING A TORPEDO

Hokitika Guardian, 9 May 1927, Page 4

FIRING A TORPEDO

THE NAVY AT WORK SCIENTIFIC CHORUS. (From J. M. N. Jeffries, on H.AI.S. Benbow.) MEDITERRANEAN, March 5. For the vast majority of us the Navy is as much a mystery as it is our salvation. Its doings have always lain rather beyond the ken ot the average citizen. Even the Great War itself, which provided' the able-bodied population or the country with an excessive acquaintance with military customs and Arm.v routine, left the same population Little wiser about naval ways and methods. From far away we saw the Royal Nemesis slowly and incalculably closing round our iocs, and that was all.

Here, in the midst of a fleet aboard the Benbow. which is a shrine of old traditions and a composer of new, one sees at close hand something of the way in which the Navy works. It is not always very easy to gi'asp, for the technique of miracles is elusive. But above all others one thing dues stand out, and that is the intricacy. the delicacy and difficulty of what to the lay mind would appear tiic most simple of son operations. j

Take, for example, the firing of Imipcdocs. People, ii they think cl it at all. think of a torpedo as fired in seme sort of'gun, ft large, ingeniously swivelled tube pointing through (Hi opened port or something of the kit.d.

CIIA NTIN G R ECO RLERS. It is a more complicated story really than all that; torpedo-lieutenants would wish it as simple. Between Gibraltar and Malaga this squadron carried out some torpedo practice; it was in the nature of a competition between the battleships composing it. In turn, with some destroyers flanking them, they provided marks lor each other, and a morning of anxiety lor all their torpedo-lieutenants. It may ho said of torpedo-lieutenants that they have a right to all the anxiety they feeJ. though.

Jl you were to see one ol them preparing the discharge of his great fishes you might be inclined to ask to he shown something less involved, such as the calculations of the Astronomer Roval. There stands “T'orps” as he is familiarly called. He is far from his torpedo-tubes in tin? depths ot the battleship. He stands in an eyrie between walls scarce visible for the contraptions which cover them. Dials and tubes and telephones and handles ami voice-pipes and flickering needles and gauges and mirrors of Shallot surround him, shining and speaking and recording in a steady frenzy of repetition. Midshipmen and sailors stand by him. calling out numbers and scientific ejaculations and repeating numbers ami scientific ejaculations which are transmitted to them from voices heard without in some other eyrie and repeating for these unseen the minivers and scientific ejaculations they themselves are emitting. Chanting recorders stand at liL elbow with dockets and charts, inscribing apparently from time to time the dominant numbers emerging like high notes from the medley. The torpedo-lieutenant listens to them and asks for repetitions of now one and now another cry from the chorus, which surrounds him. makes his own notes on tablets close to his band, peers through lbs glasses at the “enemy” ships six miles or so away, gives corrections, receives correct ions, keeps by admonition and inquiry bis finger on the pulse of bis men in the distant torpedo-flat, walks a puce or two, thinks, and commands those around him.

20 MINUTES FROM SHOT TO IIIT. And while carrying on this sort of campaign in outer portions ol lus brain, he, so to speak, clears a central portion ill which be calculates the speed of the far-off enemy and the course the enemy is steering, calculates some ratio between the depth of the cm my craft and the depth of travel of his yet undischarged missile, and calculates not for the moment but for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes ahead. And he doo.s this, with his vessel and the enemy vessel changing course in that interval, for a full halfhour, with tin* scientific hackcliat, to an outsider’s ears, growing in intensity around him and the general strain deepening every minute.

But he keeps cool and at last gives the order and the men in the torpedofiat, who can see nothing, follow the scientific prescription which is this final order with their instruments, and the first of the torpedoes is discharged. You see the target-battleships miles away and the bubbles of the torpedo speeding through the water irom the submerged tube aimed not at them but at where in the third part of an hour they will most probably be; when the torpedo lias done its long run. Could anything on earth, I trust you now say to yourself, be more difficult? It follows in battle, of course, that torpedoes are best discharged in shoals if fired from a great distance. Aet the torpedo-lieutenants of battleships will reach theii indicated mark with one. two, three, or even four successive torpedoes, as I saw during our very practice.