5 Inch 38 Caliber Anti-Aircraft Guns

welcome to the land of the damage control assistance the reason I call it that is because with these guns our reward ships during world war ii they really try to protect this ship to keep the damage control people from working so any of you that may have been in deputy control thank the gunners make for keeping you from having to do a job right now i'd like to talk about five inch gun and one of the things we want to talk about is what the various members of the gun crew did and for those of you that may not know me my name is Alvin Brodie I normally work on Mondays and Fridays as a docent and if any of you have any questions about the gun feel free to contact me by phone I have an email address and feel free to contact me and ask the question I'll try to answer anything you want to know in addition to what we're going to talk about here we have a handout that's available down in the flight suit mess that fully describes the gun and every position on the gun and what those crew members did in the performance of their duties so take advantage of that and when you have an opportunity to pick a copy of this up and it's yours to keep it's about twenty pages but it talks about the gun as well as the project goes how they exploded in a various acts best aspects of it in message first of all I want to talk about one of the main positions on the gun is the person that operates this area right here he's called a pointer the pointer is a person who fires the gun and he looks through conside up here and he has to be in coordinate with the trainer who is on the other side the pointer is a person who elevates the gun that's up or down and a person where the trainer traverses a gun right and left and this is what the pointer when we do it you sitting here and operating these handles with fidelity or depress the gun looking through this side this view this is a firing trigger when they're on target he closes a trigger which in electrical current and that will fire the firing pin which will then hit the primer on a powder case causing it to burn which was a projectile to fire of the barrel of the gun the person right here called a few setter he's sitting down in this unit right here and he operates these handles he has a side pump some powered phone which is connected to fire control they're giving him the number of seconds in which to set the fuse on a projector so the turns of cranks and what it does it revolves the unit which turns the lug on the projectile itself sort of like weighing up a clock on the spring which says the time fuse board will talk about the reason of what that's for later the projectiles are loaded into these few centers you see it here keep in mind this is a dummy and the powder cases would be stored on a bulkhead in which the product cases are passed to the powder Minh which is standing about where I'm at right here it had a powder case to him placed up your cognition tray it gets this Spade if it look like that then the projector one takes to protect the lab with the fuse set takes it out play some role in front of the powder case and then goes down this handle and it rams the powder and a projectile into the breech and now the gun is ready to fire and of course will be fired by the pointer that sits over here now you're going to have to imagine that this happiness has been rammed into the breach and now the guns been fired as it's fired the gun will recoil and you can see right in this open space that's the length of the recoil of this gun it's about the twelve and a half thirteen inches so don't ever put your hand down here when you're fired is gunner you're going to lose it but is it recoils the breech opens the powder case is ejected and it the Spade of course is up here at that time the powder case comes out and a hot pot oven or hot shellman has a pair of last mrs. glove they hold his hand here and as the powder case comes out it hits his hand and he catches it here and then throws it out on the deck now it's ready for another round to be placed into it over on this side this is the trainer and recall I mentioned he traverses the gun to the right to the left and he sits up here these are the handles that he turns and in doing so it will move the guns to the left or the right depending on which way is revolving the handles the meantime he's looking through the sight and this is a coordination it comes in between a pointer and the trainer crosshairs on behalf through here I pointed at a target they they haven't missed a method of diving in the amount to lead the aircraft and we'll show you how they do that in just a minute but when the crosshair gets on to the target remember the pointer is a guy that fires it so these two people have to learn to work together and if you'll recall over on the site that's on a pointer sight there's two eyepieces one is for the pointer one is where another person who's in training to become a pointer so he learns how to use that sight system so that they can be effective of firing at aircraft get it back up here and right here are two dials one is these are for the range adjustment dials one is used for the angle that will as you turn it it changes a prism in the site either raising and lowering the crosshair the Torah's out this one is for the asthma setting which will be used to move the crosshair that's vertical right or left this is the one that they'll use to dial in the target distance or leave that information to sit down this way what operates is I sound crosshairs besides Meghan Trainor would UC Berkeley cross line just a prism so they'll get the correct elevation here behind they're shooting a distance to the target when Kristen and Justin beat ya I'd be remiss if I didn't explain what this panel is for the one is painted red we walked right by the Gulf a tiny what this is is the manual method of opening the freaks keep in mind before you can fire this gun to breach has to be opened so the ammunition can be rammed into the breech so the breech block has to be open in a downward position and this is done manually after that first round then it's all taken care of automatically because of the truck as a gun recoils is a track in there on the breech itself and that makes the breech come down as he gun its fire we went by this particular station a couple of times and it is an important part of this gun especially the member that runs it on some ships the person that stands here is the Gunners make and he has a function to perform at this particular station on this ship on the Hornet and the guns that were on e like this that were not didn't have Kurt's around them the Gunners make stood out on the deck and they had a person up here called the projectile Minh and what he did was whenever the gun recoil this Spade remember that we talked about the Ramzi ammunition in what it does when the breech is opened and rather when the breech closes it hits the bottom of this space when the breach closes up enough is at the bridge it raised a brief clock racist is spayed up on this truck up here you see it in there and so this Spade is in a position above the ammunition tray and it reverses a hydraulic system so now this thing comes back in this position except it's up here so this person here does two things he looks through the barrel to make sure the barrel is clear and he pushes this lever and this Spade drop down into the best position you see it now ready for the next mode and I say this is kind of important because one of the things you want to make sure is that there is maybe in the barrel prior to the next round being fired we talked about some of the gun positions and I'd like to really get down to some of the nitty-gritty what kind of numbers of people that took to operate this gun on this diagram and by the way this is included in your handout and it's a diagram or a schematic indicating where each of the gun crew is placed in what the term is that they use for the work that they're doing for example here's the trainer sight setter and the shell guardmen the first powder man that puts a powder case in the ammunition tray the projectile one it takes to project a lot of the few setters push the ammunition tray in a few Center and the pointer and again this is that sight checker who is now learning how to be a pointer later on and in addition to the seven people on the gun platform itself there are eight people out here on the deck and that those other eight people serve this gun there's a mount officer who's a officer they one of the gunnery officers over here are the powder men that take the powder from this particular container and handed up to the person over in the gun platform and then there's a placement and a second Parliament amount captain and the Gunners maybe would stand out here on this particular ship back here is where the ammunition would be picked up and these are simulated powder cases and normally if the gun was in action these ports would be open the small ones for projectiles to be brought out from the handling room which is on the other side of this bulkhead the longer ones are for the powder cases our casing be taken out and hand it to the bottom and on the gun platform itself the projectile we pick picked up and placed a few setter for the projectile when to pick up it's kind of an interesting thing to talk about the projectiles standpoint that this is a real one and they weigh 54 pounds if you would please for up here with the public don't handle this because it is heavy and a person is slipped out of their hand it's going to hurt like blazes when it hits their foot so what's that the other ones would but this is a real one but there is some differences this is a general-purpose or high explosive projectile this will be used to fight another ship if you are bombarded but we're going to talk about this gun and which its actual purpose was on the Hornet and ships like the Hornet in fact all the aircraft carriers this gun was really developed to protect the ship not to fight another ship or bombard the short for example the same gun was on battleships on cruisers and destroyers in those purposes they were use to fight another ship or bombard the shore the carrier's had airplanes to do that function so these guns were strictly for use for any aircraft defense now you look at the guy too you say well good lord how does that gun hit an airplane flying way out there for five thousand yards that's the purpose of those sights they are used to provide the operators with the lead on them for the gun to the aircraft as well as for the elevation but again this protector is not actually what hits the targets how it works there's three ways that this gun just protect will explode first is by him passing when the nose of this projectile hits a it's an object it will cause a firing pin to penetrate and cause the projector to explode second way is with the few Center that we talked about how to define a projectile there would be some lunch protruding from this note and it was done in a few setter and the Pew Center is to revolve it turns this portion what is doing simply whining to spring on a clock in Reverse it winds it up for let's say 20 seconds when the gun is fired and it makes so many revolutions through the barrel because is that spring to work or unwind when it reaches the end of that it releases a firing pin which then goes down and fires a primer that explodes the projectile and destruction that's the old way they did it prior to 1943 and if you've ever seen any movies of air battles you'll always see the big black puffs of smoke out there usually behind the airplane so didn't shoot down very many aircraft in those days however in 1942 the American Navy British Navy engineers worked on what was called a proximity fuse we're not going to go a lot of detail of how it works with a couple of exceptions that is just to say what happens is in the hand up there is a schematic showing you how it's constructed and it will decide how it works maybe that how it is inside this nose of the projectile itself what's called proximity fuze there's a small radio that radio is powered by battery the battery development of that battery was a critical part of development approximation we're not going to detail other than to say I may end up with a battery that when the projector rotated through the barrel of plates little allowed an electrolyte to win to let cells which produced electrical power the reason they went to that method is because dry sound is actually news and on that situation out many times the projector set and magazine for sound the batteries were dead so it didn't work so they come up with this liquid system which worked fine so anyway with this particular type of battery a plate slid open like the right went down into to do some blood cells and produce enough electricity to power radio inside this cause when the gun was fired then it sent out a radio frequency signals the cone-shaped effect when that signal touched an object it would bounce back to the projectile and cause an electrical impulse then the projectile would explode the shrapnel is what hits the plane not to protect you now that had to still be within about 50 to 75 feet of the target that proximity fuses he affected so you still had to be pretty close again this method using a manual pointer manual training creates a problem because the coordination it took to get the gun to lead and have the correct distance of the target to hit it so the Navy come up with radar control guns that was originally in World War 2 color mark 37 directors and it would control again and whenever the director he control again the gun was slayed to it in other words they replaced the radar moved the gun would follow it and in that case the point and trainer just said there didn't have anything and so the loading had still had to be done but the gun was slaved to the director and it was fired by the director the personnel in his director control so the follow the target an adequate pewter that would pick up the information for the distance from the ship to the target the elevation the speed of the ship how high the ship was from the water to get all of that programmed in the computer then I would come out and adjust the gun to lead the target by a sufficient amount of fire then they would fire some the fire control and hopefully it would hit planes which he did in a lot of cases but the development of proximity fuze probably increase a success in this gun by 75% as a guess I'm not sure exactly but it was around there someplace six they did away with the old mark 37 director came out with an approved version and this you can see right here is a mark 56 director and one of the things that you might want to think about doing is our Johnson puts on a class about that director because that's he's a fire control man and by the way he was on this ship and he will talk to you and tell you about the director and how it worked how the computer work and he'll give you a complete explanation of that but just for the benefit of how this gun would work when they put the director on that director what control is gun and actually like we said it would be slave to it so the corner and the trainer did have to work with the gun so this particular director that class board it usually follows this one other words you'd be coming to a five inch 38 class or going to the fire control system for the gun in any event I recommend that you attend that one so you get a feel of how it worked and what its function serves we talked a lot about you know the gun crew and projectiles that I could talk about the gun itself for just a minute in the describe various aspects of this for example this is a 5h 38 caliber gun and I've had people ask me can't be a 38 collar that's it's a little system well the Navy uses caliber to designate the barrel lengths on the various guns that it carries for example every Navy gun that's over three inches in diameter has a caliber for example of 350 the five is 25 the 5-inch 38 and the new guns for the ship today are climbing 50 Fords what that caliber is used for it designates the length of the pedal and how that's accomplished we multiply the diameter the board is gay exciting times the calvert which is 38 we multiply that it comes out a hundred ninety inches divide that by twelve and then we gives you a barrel that's approximately 60,000 about fifteen point eight with approximately sixteen fields that's the length of this for my ego to might be 16-inch guns see there are two calibers though see the old ones were sixty to forty five the new 15 a foot from the Missouri the Iowa and Wisconsin New Jersey those are sixteen eight fifty to begin because unlike the very multiply the diameter of the bore times the calendar caliber and that disabling for the barrel this gun for his purpose in World War two was excellent one of the problems it has though was its firing rate if it's only fire pretty much you will say a maximum of about twelve rounds of message which is he's hot around every five seconds and that's may not sound like a lot but keep in mind you're lifting a fifty four pound projectile into that ammunition tray and we always pick the strongest guy in the gun Koon to do that but initially when you start firing about twelve rounds a minute is about as fast as you can go now that being gun crews that can fire faster than that but we say the average maximum is about twelve rounds a minute after a little few minutes of firing get down to about eight rounds a minute and that's more of a reasonable figure to use when you're talking about the firing rate of this gun is about eight rounds the range of the gun is 18,000 yards at a horizontal or we'll call it a surface target that's ten and one quarter miles so everything you see from his gun sponson this gun could hit including San Francisco he went as far you'll hit it but you might not know word it but he'll hit it any event and will also shoot at 85 degrees the reason 85 degrees is the limit vertically is because if it went any more than that the ammunition falls out of the tray so 85 degrees the mountain elevation it will shoot 37,000 feet which is 7 miles where World War two is a perfect example of what was required because planks didn't fly much more about 30 30 mm and um today's eaten that was about the max probably maybe some little more than have a double spout of maximum height for that create time these guns look great this ship in addition to the 5-inch guns also had 59 20 millimeter and 40 40 millimeter guns and they were spread throughout the ship and 12 of these 5-inch guns ada we're up on the flight deck in twin closed mounts that means they can sometimes were all covered with steel inside of a housing and a twin barrels that can out of each one we're too forward of the island and two paths of the island and there were four these times during world war two here on a port side and after the war of course things were changed around they ended up over here with today we have just four of these courtship any bed this that would make a total of twelve of these guns and with the total number of 20s and 40s and I figured out an estimated the firing rate of this ship if every gun on it fired at the same time that would include the 20s authorities the 5-inch and we would get approximately a total of twenty thousand obviously you think it all that's a lot of rounds but amazed with half of that say ten thousand rounds a minute from one side of media how those planes would get through it they would get through and hit a ship especially the kamikaze what would happen with kamikazes at 20s and a forty millimeter guns would hit sometimes kill a pilot but usually they're diving on you when that happens they're diving on the ship and you could kill a pilot you can set the plane on fire but unless you blew a part of the pine away a wing tail or some assembly which which would cause a plane to lose direction it would continue right into the ship and blow up when it hit but with your head with a five-inch is usually tore a wing off or damage the fuselage Madinah then it would explode an air or fall so during 1943-44 the Navy worked on working on another gun a three inch 50 which would be an automatic and that gun was specifically designed to use against kamikaze because it had a heavier projectile it had fired 20 rounds a minute that's 10 out of each borough because they were twin and he were automatic which means was fixed ammunition that ammunition would be loaded into the breech automatically and fire reason they did that because they wanted to protect the oil with enough power though in a blue it would blow something up tearing up Tara tail for do something so that plane cannot continue in a forward direction but the only fault was the gun didn't get to the fleet till 1947 that gun by the way then replaced all of the 40 millimeters on this ship they took all 40 of those off and replaced it with 14 23 and fifty so that guns on with 3-inch 50 and still had about I think it was 20 20 millimeter and then eight of these who broke two and four on this side of before on the other side not kidding me 19th it was seven I keep thinking of a mountain 54 back there at being a two guns Becker but there's only one so there was three on the port side and four so but today we've only got the four and that's it by the way these guns are all demilitarized the breaches are melted so they can't be opened in addition to that the perils for concrete so the kit will never fire you're inside the handling room that contain the ammunition for the gunner we just left which is on the outside see these parts remember those are the ones that are outside where the projectiles and the connotations are stored when the guns in action these ports are open so they can pass the ammunition out to the crew on the outside of this bulkhead the long ones again for powder short ones for projectiles the guineas would be open one things we asked you to pay attention to whenever you have visitors up here we actually never open these ports the reason we want to close because of weather you don't want rain coming in here because it needs to be kept away it is it gets wet in here and it just difficult to maintain the integrity of the bulkhead because really soundproofing material on it in this compartment there are two ammunition poisons as one of them and what they're used for is to replace the ammunition that's been fired by the gun out there if you mind it was period of time there were two 5-inch guns out there and they would carry about 75 rounds for each gun so it'd be about a hundred and fifty rounds in here when they fire they use on fire foam that's connected here down to the magazine the magazines for this gun are down on the fifth deck it's about seven decks below us and this hoist is used it's like it's a dredge type voice where both the powder and projectiles come up toys and they're taken from the hoist to replace the ammunition that's been used so the ammunition comes up is picked up and brought over here the powder cases here and the projectiles stored in this compartment projectiles have just stuck sack on top of each other with the bottom in one direction and then reversed so they stacked up so they will get as many as a cannon or about 75 rounds as the ammunition is used up these plates are taken out so they can just get the ammunition bring it out these are here to keep the animation from falling out and the ship is under way over here the powder cases that you see are stored just like that on here and then just stacked up again there's a plate here it goes down behind them so they don't slide out just for your information these are actually off the Missouri in Pearl Harbor we had a fellow that worked on that as a volunteer on the on the Missouri and he came to Laura one day to visit lo and behold he brought us two of these so that's the actual size of the powder case anyway 28 pounds when they're full of powder fourteen pounds of powder the rest weighting roughly fourteen pounds as a publication sup and this is being kind of a nice place to work because this is the only ready room on the ship today that has the ammunition stored in a compartment like this all the other 5-inch guns had ammunition lockers just outside on the deck and you have to open those up to get the ammunition out to satisfy the needs of the gun one of the aspects of being a gun is made you have the opportunity and the privilege to clean those barrels after you get through firing to do that we had cleaning rods and let me guarantee you this is not like a 22 rifle these are heavy I'm going to put three sections together to get it through the barrel so to do that you'd assemble it outside over the gun down to where you could get it in and then work it back and forth back and forth condition this is also had what was called a star gauge star gauge nazies round piece and it had extensions that fit into the grooves of the barrel and that's what would cause the projectile to twist as it came out being at the rotating band on those projectiles are copper that they sometimes you build up in that groove area and that star gauge has to fit through that barrel because if you get a too jammed up the projectiles get ruined sometimes it will actually tear the rotating a band off of them you don't want that to happen so event they're hard to clean but it takes time and effort to keep them clean but that's our job that's what we love to do anyway I hope that this information from this short video will provide you enough information to talk to visitors aboard the ship and again I do want you to pick up a handout down in the wetsuit mess it's in that steel set of drawers right with a garbage can currently where the garbage can is that don't mix the two up but in any event is there for you to have in about 20 sheets in addition to that there's a handout specifically tells you how the proximity fuze was developed for the projectiles and with that thank you very much for viewing this and I hope it will be a some help you

Channel: CV-12 Docents

Views: 33,519

Rating: 4.9402986 out of 5

Keywords: USN, United States Navy, CV-12, USS Hornet, Anti-Aircraft Guns, 5 Inch, 38 Caliber, Alameda, Museum, Docents, Damage Control

Id: PUNztxos5Qk

Length: 32min 42sec (1962 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 20 2013