A NEW WAR DEVIL.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12409, 26 November 1908, Page 1

A NEW WAR DEVIL.

d COULD RIP A BATTLESHIP TO >t' .. PIECES. j A new terror has been added to • war in the shape of deadly torpedo ■ gun, which is the invention of- a : young American naval connr.snder, > and is claimed to h<- the most mo- ! raontous advance in nay.".] power for :s ' many years. In Boston harbour iihis terrific piece of war mechanism was pu: to c the test, the object of which was to determine the effectiveness of i!b.e new piece of ordnance over which the - 8 ! young inventor, Lieut .-Commander j Cleveland Davis, has been so long at work. 1 1 The assembled officers pretended 3 that a huge oil tank, ballasted with f forty, tons of scrap iron, and built 3 into three interior bulkheads, was an f attacking party that had by strategy [ entered Boston Harbour and was H about to shell the city. As she roll- | ed on the surface a streak of steel ■ gleamed through -inn water fiy« feel, p below the surface., hit her amidships* ' threw a shell into her vitals, and L sank her straight to the bottom of tl'e sea. Had the tank, the eye-' ■ witnesses say, been the warship of an ■ onemy she could not have escaped I the same fate, ; so swift, so sure and i effective was the new infernal machine. i To give a full idea of the importance of this new deai-h dealing mii sirument of war, the nature and coni struefcion of which has been guarded • i with so much secrecy by the Navy Department, the words of a naval officer who was present on the occasion of the official test may be quoted. .They are in the true stylo of American sanguineness and exribcranen:—"The whole British navy," he said, "will lie theoretically at the mercy of a Davis gun. Heretofore the torpedo nets that were thrown out around a warship and are a part of every British battleship, were an effective screen between them and the average .torpedo attack, but this new penetrating gun, now iihe property of the United States, will son d a shell, through a torpedo net as it it .were made of the flimsiest cotton, and it will not only go. through the steel net, but it will penetrate the warship below the' armour plate, 'and explode a charge of. .dynamite, the most powerful high explosive known, the .effect, of -which will bo to disable and perhaps sink any 'ship which.it happens to strike." . • ■ The secret of the'deaiih dealing power of the Davis gun lies in the fact that it hurls a projectile at terrific speed, from the torpedo going at sky-rocket swiftness, and carries through the plates and into the vitals of a warship forty pounds of this high explosive material, enough to rip a ship to pieces and blow it into tho. air in spit? of all precautionary measures and defensive construction known to the navies of the world.