Range Operations 



53 



Inspection of a 14" 145 MARK II- 1 gun that exploded after the second 

 round was fired, May 1924. 



The bulk of the range work moved very fast into acceptance work for the 

 production of projectiles, propellants, and fuzes. That got to be the big firing 

 load, but there was experimental work — it had to come along. Mostly, we 

 looked over the armor tests to determine the quality of the armor, reviewed the 

 tests, and determined whether trends in the armor quality were bad or good. 

 Especially, we wanted to identify the bad traits and eliminate them quickly from 

 production armor that was being produced to go aboard ship. 



Armor came in different sizes. If it was for battleships, it was pretty thick. 

 Deck armor would be around 5 or 6 inches thick. Turret armor could get up to 

 maybe 12 or 14 inches thick. We were testing projectiles, too. The trick with the 

 projectile was to build one that would, hopefully, defeat armor, and the idea 

 with armor was to build it to defeat a projectile. 



Then early in World War II, a lot of reserve officers came in, and we had to 

 get people working on armor who hadn't known anything at all about it. They 

 didn't know the terminology, and there's a great deal of unique terminology in 

 armor work. There were things like the plate is dished or it's penetrated or it's 

 perforated or you throw a button out of the plate or it spalled — all sorts of terms 

 such as these. The old-timers got together some good pictures and then said, 

 "This is what we mean when we say 'button,' and this is what we mean when we 

 say this and that." We put out some information for instructional and reference 

 purposes. All of these reserve officers, only a couple of months earlier, were 

 working in offices somewhere, and they had never even seen the Navy. 



Light armor got to be very important. They needed light armor for landing 

 craft and for airplanes and ran a large number of fragmentation tests against 



