Now we were ready to elevate the barrel. I decided to elevate the barrel to 30 Degrees and this would assist us in dragging the buckler bag down the barrel. We had men in the gun pit, at the top of the gun room near the projectile loading cradle, at the turret deck hatch, and on the side of the turret in sight of the rifles.
Then we would call out and relay the elevation movement of the rifle back and forth. It took about an hour to elevate each barrel, but the combined job of closing the breech plug and then elevating each rifle took about 4 hours on each gun. Sometimes even more. Raising the bucklers over the expansion tubes, and attaching them to the turret face was extremely tough. The expansion tubes had to be secured to the buckler with plastic tie wraps or line, and securing the tube to the turret, while at the same time pulling the heavy buckler into position for bolting… it was very hard to do nine different times even when using the chain hoist.
We then secured each buckler under the clamping bands on the face of the turret with bolts, and secured the opposite end to the slide collar which holds the barrel. Then we could tighten the clamping band with bolts. A lot of WD and grease was used for this job. On Turrets 2 and 3, we even had to work with scaffolding — a very dangerous proposition even for young men… and these were not young men.
Young in spirit yes, but not very young in years. After the Bucklers were installed, we then painted them with black spray paint. It took 79 men to load and operate a battleship gun turret:. Kelsey D. Atherton is a defense technology journalist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. MoviePass is back under one of its original co-founders and eyeing a relaunch in Here's what it will do. Plus, it's 70 percent similar in it parts to a Chevy Colorado ZR2 pickup.
Sign up to receive Popular Science's emails and get the highlights. We would secure a line to each corner and tie a rag around my head and I entered the chamber feet first. Someone would pass me a large rag and about a pound or more of grease.
When I said ready men on deck would start pulling me through and I used my hands to spread the grease round and round the barrel. I was glad when my feet came out the other end. The planes had been bombarding for two days. We were sent in to bombard all night, to hold the Japanese down and to keep them from getting any sleep or rest or putting up any fortification. The troops were going to land the next morning after we put an all-night bombardment on the islands Roi and Namur, January We fired at different intervals every 10 or 15 minutes so that the Japanese would not know when the next salvo round of fire was coming.
They would be going by…and they would fire a starboard. Take 20 minutes or so and the next one would pick it up and then the next one and the next one. They would turn and come back and fire port side bombarding the islands. That was quite an impressive sight. The forward turrets were scheduled to be fired so everyone on deck was moved aft.
Red Miller and I were watching the inch shells hurtling toward the island which was quite an amazing sight.
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