 At right, a Royal Navy 9.2"/40 cal. breech-loading rifle (BLR) at Armstrongs Eskmeals Proving Ground, around 1905. This wonderful old photo shows the splinter shield which was one of several mounting options. The 9.2" gun was the standard armored cruiser main armament (also used on KE VII and Lord Nelson class battleships as a secondary weapon) from the 1890s through WWI. Though considerably smaller than the 12", 13.5", and eventually 15" guns that came to be standard on Royal Navy capital ships, they illustrate exactly the same procedure as that used in the battleship main gun turrets. For a detailed set of drawings of the 9.2" Vickers-Maxim single mount, click here.
Here, in rare photos shot by a British tar, are views of the ammunition handling and loading chain on a British armored cruiser at the turn of the century.
In the photo below, cordite propellant charges (which replaced black powder in the 1890s) are placed into the hoist which will take them up to the gunhouse. Two bags of cordite have been placed in each metal container in the inner magazine. Located at the very deepest level of the barbette, the magazines were protected by several inches of steel armor on the barbette tube, by an oblique armored deck above, and again by belt armor and sea-water from the sides. As from time immemorial, precautions were taken to prevent any chance spark from igniting the store of ammunition and propellant.
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 Flash-proof doors prevented explosive gases from entering the magazine in the event of a hit on the gunhouse. Indeed, explosion-proofing was one of the main safety measures in the design of the barbettes. The cordite propellant was stored in close-fitting leather cases in the magazines and had to be unpacked one charge at a time before loading in the ammo hoist; as the charges were a snug fit in the cases, this decanting was not a fast or easy procedure, so the safety precautions perceptibly slowed ammo handling. British doctrine stressed very rapid fire to smother the enemy's sight lines and ability to fire back; so safety precautions were compromised in order to ensure rapid (though not necessarily accurate) fire. In order to keep a steady stream of charges running to the gunhouses, British ammunition passers unpacked large numbers of ready charges and stored them carelessly outside of the flash-proof turret protection.
It is known that the flash-proof devices were disabled in the years leading up to WWI in order to make a more impressive show of speed in opening fire during drill in Britain's crack battlecruiser and armored cruiser squadrons. Unfortunately, the safety precautions were not reinstated before they went into combat. Divers on the Jutland wrecks have confirmed that large amounts of ready cordite were stacked like cordwood inside the turret working chambers. There are telltale signs of cordite fires slowly moving down the ammunition-passing passages, leaping through opened flash-proof doors and eventually reaching the magazines and dooming the ships. Deliberate and accurate German fire first pierced the turret armor (as seen in Lion, below), setting the ready charges afire. In four of five cases examined, the careless handling of charges turned what should have been only a local hazard into a ship-killing disaster. The forensic evidence thus reveals the reason why three of Britain's dashing battlecruisers blew up in action at Jutland. None of the German battlecruisers suffered a similar fate, though they were hotly engaged for four hours and suffered severe battle damage. One such ship, the brand-new flagship SMS Lützow, was scuttled by the Germans to avoid capture; the remaining four German battlecruisers limped back to base at Wilhelmshaven and were soon repaired. The great tragedy of the British battlecruiser explosions, of course, was the loss of their crews, almost to a man; the awesome pathos derives from this sacrifice being almost wholly unnecessary and driven by that most human flaw, hubris.
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 At the very top of the barbette sat the actual gunhouse (turret). Here we see the gun crew loading a projectile (or shell) into a 9.2" gun. A hydraulic-powered rammer, well seen here, shoved first the shell, then the charge into the gun's firing chamber from a removable loading tray aligned with the gun's bore. The threaded breech-block is visible swung out to your right behind the rammer. When the gun was loaded, the loading tray was wheeled away and the breech-block was swung closed and screwed down tight. The entire gunhouse then rotated to match an indicator dial set from gunnery control, the guns elevated as indicated by another repeater dial in the turret, repeating settings calculated at the central firing control station. When the desired deflection and angle were reached, the guns would be fired. A well-trained crew, working at peak efficiency, could loose a round in just under a minute: HMS Dreadnought's 12-inch gunners could pump out 12 salvos in 10 minutes. German doctrine stressed accurate aiming rather than sheer speed of firing, generally with excellent results when they met up with British units in combat. Part of the German advantage derived from the inferiority of British shells, which tended to disintegrate rather than detonate on reaching the target; the record of British gunnery might have been far better in the Great War had their shells worked as designed. Click here for a detailed view of the 12" gunhouse and barbette assembly on the Dreadnought.
Photographed by available light, the No. 2 turret of USS Oregon, battleship of 1896, showing the breeches of the 13" guns.
Before reloading, the firing chambers of the guns would be sprayed down with compressed air to remove any smoldering remnants of the previous charge -- a wise precaution when working in an environment filled with high explosives.
The French Navy was a hotbed of radical design ideas, often insisting on the alternative apparently just to be contrary. The French favored single-gun turrets and rarely used a twin turret in any of their warships until after 1900. To be sure, the French Canet turret was an elegant and practical design; but the small size of French battleships and the single-mount option meant they had relatively little firepower, and fired lightweight shells to boot. Nonetheless, the French Navy pioneered the use of nitrocellulose propellant charges, which became standard in the Marine Nationale beginning in 1894. Nitrocellulose unfortunately was prone to spontaneous combustion, and the French paid with the complete loss of the battleships Iéna and Liberté. The U.S. and Russian navies also favored nitrocellulose gel, while Germany and Italy followed the British lead and used cordite. The percentage of nitroglycerine in the cordite charges varied from navy to navy, but was settled at 30% in the Royal Navy in a mixture known as "Cordite MD" (1903). But cordite was not proof against accidental magazine explosion; aged propellant in storage was responsible for the loss of two British battleships, HMS Bulwark in 1914 and HMS Vanguard in 1917. Both vessels blew up while riding peacefully at anchor. Full-on magazine explosions generally killed all crewmen aboard in harbor, just as they did in battle. In the case of the Liberté, more than a hundred sailors on nearby ships were killed as well.
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 At left, gunners in special protective clothing watch the surrender of the German High Seas fleet in November 1918, their appearance rendered yet more bizarre by gas masks worn on Adm. Beatty's orders, against the chance of a German double-cross. In technological improvements, starting with the Mark X 12"/40 cal. gun (1905), the entire ammunition-handling ensemble rotated with the gunhouse, enabling all-round loading. This advance eliminated the need to return to a specific loading position after every round, considerably speeding up the salvo-firing process. All-round firing was achieved in the French Canet system more than ten years earlier; the mechanics of doing this in a single-gun turret being considerably less complex than a twin turret.
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13.5" guns of "Q" turret on Admiral David Beatty's battlecruiser flagship, HMS Lion. Fighting at the Battle of Jutland, May 31, 1916, "Q" turret sustained a direct hit. One of the bridge one of the officers noted the armored turret roof peeled back like a sardine can, with yellow smoke pouring out, indicating a cordite fire; yet he had been unaware of the hit until a bloody petty officer appeared out of the smoke of battle, saluted, and reported the station out of action. This photo was snapped while the ship was under repair shortly after the battle. These mountings were very similar to the 12" barbettes of the later pre-dreadnoughts, such as HMS Formidable.
 That day, Lion was only spared a catastrophic magazine explosion by the prompt intervention of the turret captain; the entire turret crew was lost. After the battle, corpses were found in the flooded compartments, their scorched hands clamped immovably on the kingston valves -- frozen in the act of saving their 1,100 shipmates by flooding the magazines before they could detonate. This was eerily similar to an incident aboard the German battlecruiser Seydlitz at the Battle of Dogger Bank, January 24, 1915, in which the prompt flooding of the aft magazines after a direct hit saved the ship at the cost of 159 lives. This close call alerted the German high command to the need to improve anti-flash protection inside their barbettes. No such wake-up call was sounded in the British fleet, with catastrophic results, as described above. But Lion did fight through the end of the battle with three turrets, coming home in better trim than many of the German survivors that limped for the dockyard after upholding their navy's honor.
The Royal Navy convened a Board of Enquiry to examine the cause of the battlecruiser explosions. By the time the Board's report was submitted, Sir John Jellicoe had been promoted from C-in-C of the Grand Fleet to First Sea Lord, and the charismatic battlecruiser commander, Sir David Beatty, had assumed command of the fleet. The report -- pointing at careless ammunition handling and the disabling of flash-proof doors in the turrets -- implicated both men in that they had been in control of the system and had emphasized rapid and rather disorganized fire over safety. Specifically, they had permitted lax explosives handling in the turrets as the necessary enabler of rapid fire in action. Beatty especially was culpable in exposing thinly protected battlecruisers to large-calibre enemy gunfire. After Jutland, somewhat in the manner of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, extra armor was bolted to the tops of battlecruiser turrets, and anti-flash safety was re-emphasized in the fleet. However the official report, so damning to the British system and its top commanders, was quietly buried. The fact that it never was brought forth in the bitter postwar feud between Beatty and Jellicoe, suggests how thoroughly the report discredited both admirals.
Animation of a British 15"/40 Armstrong twin turret operation, introduced 1915 in the Queen Elizabeth class. Although considerably scaled up, this mounting operated almost identically to the later 12" mounts, Mks. X-XII of 1901 - 10.
For a highly detailed diagram of one of the USS Texas' 14" barbettes (c. 1914), click here. This plan shows the actual layout of the handling rooms and ammo hoists for one of the 5 twin turrets in a dreadnought battleship that fought in both WWI and WWII -- and the sole remaining dreadnought in the world today. For the history of the Texas and an image-rich photo portfolio on the ship, click here.
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