Atlantic Warfare Today : 417 



naval warfare had been accumulating for over a century. Some of 

 these remained undeveloped and many had not yet been tested in 

 battle. There is a paradox about military defense that works to the 

 disadvantage of democratic and free peoples and often gives an ad- 

 vantage to the determined aggressor. In times of peace Congress will 

 not vote funds for adequate defense. In wartime, when the ships 

 are essential to the lives of the people and the nation, the funds are 

 suddenly voted but it is then too late to build the best and most ef- 

 fective ships. A warship cannot be hastily assembled; it is the most 

 intricate and complex of all human structures. 



Warship design had been changing. One of the reasons for the 

 changes was an accumulating progress in the art of building and us- 

 ing guns, and the warship and the gun are interdependent instru- 

 ments — the effectiveness of the one depending upon the effectiveness 

 of the other. As early as 1824 a French gunnery expert named Henri 

 J. Paixhans had introduced a revolution in gunnery when he de- 

 signed shells and guns for firing shells. Up to this time guns had 

 fired shot, which were simply solid masses of metal of various shapes 

 and sizes. Shot were sometimes preheated so that they might set fire 

 to a ship or any other target which they struck. The shell was a 

 hollow projectile which carried an explosive charge and greatly in- 

 creased the effectiveness of gunfire. Paixhans shells exploded on 

 impact. The fuse which determined when and where a shell was to 

 explode was a later development. 



Though the shell gun was an important discovery in itself its value 

 was enhanced in 1836 when Johann Dreyse in Prussia developed the 

 so-called needle guns, an important feature of which was a safe and 

 effective breech-loading device. The discovery that rifling in the bar- 

 rel of a gun would improve the range and accuracy of fire was being 

 applied by Sir Joseph Whitworth and W. G. Armstrong in 1855. In 

 i860 the Winchester repeating rifle appeared and two years later 

 Richard J. Gatling patented and developed the rapid-firing gun. This 

 was a clumsy forerunner of the machine gun and its first immediate 

 use was in land warfare, but subsequently the ideas which it launched 

 had an effect on naval gunnery and consequently on the character of 

 naval vessels. 



None of the ideas and inventions that we have mentioned here, 

 and many others that were actually involved in the development of 

 gunnery, found an instant and ready application. All of them went 

 through many stages of adaptation and development. Thus the first 



