REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



March 1, 1913. 



thousand yards, or about five miles. 

 Obviously, if all that is claimed for 

 director-firing is borne out by experi- 

 ■en'^e, naval battles are going to be the 

 affair of a few minutes. The fleet which 

 first gets into battle-formation and 

 brings its broadside to bear, is going to 

 knock its enem)- out without a chance of 

 reply. 



WHAT THE SYSTEM IS. 



The details are, properly, kept a 

 secret. It can only be said here that the 

 principle is, fi.rst, the levelling of all 

 guns on a common denominator, so to 

 speak. It is calibrating carried out ad 

 Jioc mstead of at three or six months' 

 intervals. Secondly, it must be remem- 

 bered that, natural 1}', the fore and after 

 guns of a ship, if trained parallel, will 

 place their projectiles about lOO yards 

 apart. But, with the director, let the 

 distance between the fore and after guns 

 be the base of a triangle, and the direct 

 line of fire of the amidships guns, at a 

 given range, be its apex, the fore and 

 after guns are so adjusted that, at the 

 said range the course of their shot 

 will intersect at the apex of the triangle. 

 If a broadside be now fired with the 

 guns dead abeam, the whole group of 

 shot will fall in the same place. Now 

 all the turrets can be trained from the 

 director position on the same object, and 

 the shot will fall in a bunch. The 

 range, the " error of the day " — tempera- 

 ture, humidit)-, wind, etc., are calculated 

 in the central position, and the speed of 

 the opposing fleets plotted from there. 

 If there is any fault, it can be corrected 

 when the shot fall all together, as it can- 

 not be when they are widely dispersed. 

 The guns can be laid and fired from the 

 director position. 



FURTHER TESTS. 

 Such, without going indiscreetly into 

 detail is the great advantage with which 

 the inventive genius of Sir Percy Scott 

 has endowed the British Navy. It is 

 not new. The director was installed in 

 the Neptune, and gave remarkable re- 

 sults while Sir Percy supervised it. But 

 afterwards the gunnery experts adopted 

 methods of their own, and the system 

 was discredited. Now there have been 

 fresh trials, and it is reported that a 



further test of a ver)- searching and im- 

 portant character is to be undertaken. 

 If this succeeds, the svstem will be 

 adopted throughout the Nav}-. 



No mechanical apparatus, however 

 perfect and however thoroughly the 

 chances of breakdown have been pro- 

 vided against, can in itself give effi- 

 ciency to a fighting Navy. It is per- 

 fectly right for the authorities to adopt 

 the best apparatus which science can de- 

 vise I-t is perfectly right to bend every 

 endeavour to knock the enemy out be- 

 fore he gets near enough to do harm. 

 But if the men get to believe themselves 

 beaten, if the apparatus is out of gear, 

 or if they lose their readiness to take 

 punishment, the loss of moral will out- 

 weigh the gain in material. " Thrice 

 armed is he who hath his quarrel just, 

 but four times he who gets his blow in 

 fust," is a sound maxim for naval or 

 any other warfare. 



But if the first blow fails, we shall 

 part with the capacity of our seamen for 

 half-arm fighting at our peril. The 

 blow at the shorter range will be the 

 more deadly ; but the chance of the ap- 

 paratus being shot away will be the 

 greater, and, should this happen, gun- 

 layers who can fight their guns without 

 being demoralised by the failure of the 

 machine will be indispensable. T say 

 this, not to minimise the undoubted 

 value of Sir Percy Scott's invention, 

 which will give us an untold advan- 

 tage until it is imitated by our rivals, 

 but to put in a plea for the continuation 

 of conijDetitions like the gunlayers' test. 

 which ignore mechanism and prove the 

 human element. If you knock out the 

 enemy before he can hurt you, well and 

 good. That is an end to aim at. But if 

 you fail, then comes a time when nerves 

 are going to be highly tried, and will only 

 be kept steady if the men have some- 

 thing to do. To await in idleness the 

 crash of the enemy's shell ; not to know 

 when your own guns are going to fire ; 

 not to be able to note the effect you are 

 producing on the enemy, is an ordeal 

 which it may well be doubted if the 

 human organism will stand. In adopt- 

 ing, as we should, the very latest scien- 

 tific appliances, the human factor in the 

 equation must not be left out of account. 



