Navy Story #22
Scary Time on a Gun Mount
The USS Pensacola has four 3" gun mounts. Here is a picture that shows one of the gun mounts:
This isn't actually a picture of a gun mount, but if you look in the lower right-hand part of the picture, you can see part of the gun mount's cover and also the barrel of the
right-hand gun of the mount, pointed sort of toward you and off to your "right" a bit. The vertical window on the right side of the mount is also visible in this picture. Each mount has two guns on it. 3"
may not sound like a very big gun, and by Navy standards it really isn't (cruisers and destroyers have 5" and 8" guns, and some are even larger). The barrel of each 3" gun is about, oh, 9 or 10 feet long,
and the 3" means that the bullet is 3" in diameter. The bullet part is about a foot long. Each "cartridge", or "round", including the brass part that holds the powder, plus the bullet, is a
total of about 2-1/2 feet long, and quite heavy.
Anyway, one of my many duties on the Pensacola at one point was as Gun Sight Officer on the forward starboard mount, which would be across the ship (to your "left" in the picture
above) from the mount in this picture. My sole duty was to watch what we were aiming at, and to make sure we didn't shoot at something we weren't supposed to be shooting at. I'll tell you another story later
about a time when we really did almost shoot something we weren't supposed to shoot. For now, let me tell you about a time when one of the rounds (cartridges) didn't fire.
We were just shooting at barrels that we had tossed overboard, on the open sea. There was nothing remarkable about that; we did it fairly often so the gunners could practice aiming.
But when one of the gunners hit the trigger and the gun just went "click!", things got a bit tense. The only way to clear the gun so you can keep shooting is to open the back end of the gun (called the breach),
take the misfired round out, and toss it overboard. That doesn't sound scary to say it like that, but consider that, while the round was being taken out of the gun and carried over to the gunwale (pronounced gun'-el)
(the very edge/top of the side of the ship) to be tossed overboard, it could have exploded. The scary part of a misfired round is that the primer, the part that is supposed to fire when the firing pin hits it, can sometimes
fizzle and sizzle for awhile and then eventually go off. So the standard procedure for a misfire is to try to fire it a few more times, then to wait a minute to see if the primer will fire, and then finally to go ahead and
open the gun and toss the round overboard. That's when it gets scary. While it's being done, everyone on the mount and everyone on the forward part of the ship (the forecastle) gets a fresh dose of "religion"!
So, the only thing for everyone to do is to hold their breath and hope and pray that the round doesn't decide to go off while it's being disposed of! Obviously, since I'm
here typing this, we never had one go off that way, and in all the times we fired our guns, I know of only one misfire in those three years. But it sure was scary! Of course, we had to get the Captain's permission to
open the breach; and I think I remember that the Captain ordered the forecastle cleared of everyone except the gun crew before he gave permission to open the breach. By the way, my seat in the gun mount was between, and just
behind, the breach on both guns! And I had to stay there and watch, since I was the officer on the mount. Also, it's a fairly crowded space inside the gun-mount cover, so it was best for everyone to stay put anyway,
except for one gun mount crew member who became the "runner". The gunner opened the breach, pulled out the cartridge, and quickly -- really quickly -- handed it to the "runner" outside the mount, who hurried
to the gunwale and heaved the shell as far as he could out into the water. Speaking of heaving, we all heaved a sigh of relief, and then we went back to trying to sink barrels!