THE MYSTERY GUN.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue LXXIV, 30 March 1918, Page 2

THE MYSTERY GUN.

COMMENT OF A ROYAL ARTIL LERY OFFICER.

Captain E. T. Perkins, of the Royal J^ ield Artillery, who has been with, the guns since those dread Gallipoli days and who is now on furlougn in Wellington, is inclined to hold that the report of the big gun which is said to hurl its projectile 62 miles, is not theoretically impossible, says the Dominion. He saw the Queen Elizabeth throwing 15-mch shells twenty-five miles at the Dardanelles, and if ifcat was done by a gun placed on a warship with no elevation but the freeboard of the vessel, it should not be impossible to construct a machine throwing a light and specially-rifled shell from a rifled gun with a very high velocity charge from an elevation of some hundreds of feet Captain Perkins does not hold"' that shel s thrown from such a distance would be of any real military value, as the projectile could not, necessarily be a heavy one, and the^difficulty of correcting errors would be enormous In the case of an ordinary 18-pounder field gun, firmg at 4000 or 5000 yards, the errors were often hundreds of yards but in that case good glasses and a balloon or 'plane could correct, but a gun firing a projectile sixty miles would need a squadron of aeroplanes to correct errors. In his opinion the gun had been probably designed to inspire terror in the hearts of the Parisians, and ravage the morale of the French troops at tfcfe outset of the big push, neither of which contingencies were likely to hanpen. r

Captain Perkins also noted that the British gunnels had been given a point blank range by the massed Ge.-mans in tW attack. That, h Q says, would mpan temiic slaughter. Point-blank range for 18-pounders meant that the shells were bursting in the barrels. Each she"contained 375 bullets, and *.t a 400 or 500 yards range they would be trayVt^+t +a I T elocity- He calculated that each bullet would pierce six or seven men one behind fehe c'ter. That is probably what happened and was desenbed by the correspondent* Tvnen they said that great > bathes of the enemy were cut down is they advanced in massed formation.