Clearing a squib in Naval 16" gun?

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FrankenMauser

New member
Question:
What would be the procedure for making safe and then clearing a "squib" in a 16" gun?


Background:
Earlier tonight, I was watching some WWII footage in which the USS Colorado is described as firing on Japanese gun emplacements during the Battle of Tarawa. Part of the sequence shows the main turrets firing volleys, and describes them as 16" guns.

However, one of those volleys includes a turret that fires a shot from the left barrel, followed by an energetic puff of smoke and about a full second of continuous off-gassing or pressure relief from the right barrel. The left barrel recoils (or drops for loading?) normally, while this is going on; but the right barrel stays fixed in firing position until the video cuts to another scene and the left barrel doesn't fire another shot. Meanwhile, the turret above continued to fire several more volleys from both barrels.

Everything in me says it was a squib. My experience is only based on small arms, but, in small arms, I've seen dozens of squibs in everything from various rifle designs to semi-auto pistols, from shotguns to revolvers, and even in muzzleloaders. I just 'feels' like a squib to me...



Assuming such... What would be the procedure for making safe and then clearing a "squib" in a 16" gun?



(I watched a whole bunch of WWII stuff tonight, so a lot of it is running together. But, I believe that footage was in World War II: World at War.)
 
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griz

New member
Disclaimer: I've never been in the Navy and although I have stood on the deck of the Wisconsin that is the closest I've been to a 16 inch gun.

If there was smoke coming out of the barrel then maybe the shell didn't get pushed any further in to the rifling than the driving band. If that was the case, and given that "shooting back" is very much encouraged in a war, maybe they would throw some more bags of powder in there and try to shoot it out. If the shell were half way down the barrel I would guess they would have to fight with only eight guns.
 
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BlueTrain

New member
My army training was in artillery (which meant that I never served in an artillery unit thereafter). The principals are pretty much all the same, however. Very large caliber weapons are separate loading and do not use a case. A squib load, as I understand the term, is one in which there is insufficient propellant to at least get the projectile out of the barrel. In as much as the propellant is actually loaded into the breech right then and there, it seems unlikely that they'd make a mistake. I do not know, however, if a 16" gun uses a variable charge like the little 105mm howitzer does. In the case of the 105mm, you don't put the charge in (into the case, that is, after which you set the projectile in the case), you take out what is not going to be used. The propellant comes in little bags that are strung together. It's much easier to use than it sounds like.

Mortars mostly use variable propellants and judging from YouTube videos, they sometimes fail to work correctly.

Very large artillery pieces used to be located in forts all around the country on the coast but they became mostly obsolete when airplanes were introduced. They saw action, ironically, in WWII, in the Philippines and a few other Pacific islands. The Germans still built lots of gun emplacements along the French coast and the ones in Normandy all fought back until they were destroyed or fired off all their ammunition. They're mostly all still there.

There are also some very interesting YouTube videos of coastal guns and mortars being fired. They required very large and active crews. Shooting artillery is fun. Nothing else compares, gun-wise.
 
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Moonglum

New member
Blue train is mostly correct.

I was a 13B20. Artillery ammunition is semi fixed or separate loading.

On semi fixed ammunition (105 mm)the powder charge (which can be varied) is loaded into a brass case that contains a primer and the projectile is place on the case just like a bullet in a cartridge.

On separate loading ammunition the ammunition components are individual pieces. Fuze, Projectile, Powder Charge, Primer (which looks like a 45/70 blank)

The powder charge comes in separate bags and is adjustable but the base charge is enough to put the round down range.

The only possible instance of a squib" that I could see is if in the heat of the moment someone forgot to load the base charge and just loaded the supplementary charges.


I was in a unit on Fort Carson that had a section that loaded a round with the wrong fuze and couldn't fire it. EOD had to come and fill the tube with water and blow the round back out the breech with C4.
 
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buckhorn_cortez

New member
What you're seeing is the "gas clearing" process as the barrel is brought back down to loading position.

WWI and WWII naval guns used separate projectiles and powder bags.

There is a loading tray with a tongue spanning tray and the breech. The projectile is put on the tray and pushed into the barrel by a ram. The powder is in round bags that are the diameter of the gun's chamber -18-inches in diameter and the bags are 18-inches long. Six bags are pushed into the gun in back of the projectile. The breech is closed, and the gun is ready for firing.

In order for there to be a squib, either the projectile was not put into the gun in front of the powder bags, or not enough bags were used to push the projectile out of the barrel.

FWIW - a 3-gun turret had a crew of 79 people to operate with a crew of 13 on the loading deck. You'd think someone would have noticed a gun being loaded incorrectly...

Maybe what you saw in the movie was the gas clearing from the gun. When the gun is automatically lowered into the loading position, the breech is opened and the remaining gas in the barrel is cleared from the gun. A puff of smoke comes out the end of the barrel as the gas is cleared.

If you're interested, here is a LINK to a US Navy training film on loading and firing a 16-inch gun on a three-gun turret.

The film shows the gas clearing toward the end with the puff of smoke coming out of the barrel.
 
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kilimanjaro

New member
I think the word 'squib' when applied to a 16" naval rifle should at least be capitalized. They don't call them capital ships for nothing, you know.

The barrels were cleared after firing by compressed air.

I doubt if a Squib load was possible, given the by-the-numbers procedures in the gun rooms of each turret. Orders and procedures are repeated verbally and verified visually before the next procedure begins. I think there was at least one officer at each gun running the process, his career depends on not screwing up gunnery missions.
 
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Rangerrich99

New member
You guys think they were using Bullseye or titewad there?;)

Seriously, awe-inspiring. Can't imagine what that would sound and feel like if you were standing on deck for that. Real dragon's breath . . .
 
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BlueTrain

New member
The link posted by Mr. Cortez (Sr. Cortez?) was very interesting. I notice the turret crew did not wear flash protection.

The reason for the separate loading was for the simple practical reason that a fixed round of that size would be both unwieldy, making handling even more difficult, as well as unnecessary.

I mentioned the large crews necessary for the coastal guns and mortars that you can see in YouTube videos. In fact, in most of them it looks like there are so many men running around (literally running) that they'd get in one another's way. Pretty much everything was manual, too.

The disappearing guns always fascinated me and there is still a working example in San Francisco at Battery Chamberlain, just south of the bridge, right down on the beach. Back when there were working coastal batteries along the California coast from there on south, local residents really complained when the army actually fired their guns in training. We want an army but not here.
 
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rickyrick

New member
I was not a 13b but my last stretch in the army was in an artillery battery. I can only imagine what those navy guns sounded like. I've spent many nights with paladins doing fire missions in very close proximity to me. Artillery NCOs in the army have very serious jobs, a mistake will cost their career. I'm sure the same would hold true for a naval officer in charge of those big guns.
 
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Emerson Biggies

New member
I was a swab jockey for 4 years. My experience was with Bofors guns.

They did not use black powder, but nitrocellulose just like I do in my 3006. The powder grains, however, are very large. Yes they used 6 powder bags.
They did not want the 1800 pound projectiles falling back on to the powder bags when the gun was elevated so the projectiles were ram rodded in, so to engage the rotating bands with the rifling.
Compressed air was used to force any burning embers out of the bore/chamber and thus avoid a surprise when loading the powder bags.
Boom!
 
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kilimanjaro

New member
There's a disappearing gun battery with one example remaining here in Washington, very impressive to see. The platform will sink below the parapet for reloading, and rotate for initial pointing. Seems to be about 2 feet of reinforced concrete on a 50 foot diameter steel bed over the hydraulics and framework underneath.

There must be a half dozen such coastal forts here along the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the terminal entrance to Puget Sound. Kept out the Russians, British, Germans, and Japanese, all in their turn, I suppose. Couldn't say how many hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on the system over decades, but it was a very great deal.
 
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Sequins

New member
Thank you to all whom have posted. This thread is a gem and artillery is an intensely worthy and fascinating subject. Every time I see a 9mm vs 45acp I mentally add "...vs 105mm". Larger calibers are king and naval guns capable of inland bombardment are the pinnacle. I was sad when manned aircraft trumped the physics of trajectory.
 
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armoredman

New member
Best I can add is I rearmed the New Jersey at sea in the late 80s...there is NOTHING more impressive than a battlewagon at sea. Carriers are giant cities, airstrips, but a battle ship says, "I will destroy you."
 
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FrankenMauser

New member
Thanks for all of the replies.

I was aware that all of the components were loaded separately.

And, to clarify, this video segment shows the barrel in firing position after having been leveled for loading. It fired one or two shots before the 'squib', and stays in firing position until the clip ends. The other barrel on that turret didn't fire again, either (the Colorado had 2-barrel turrets, not the three that most of us typically envision).

The video showing the barrels being cleared with compressed air doesn't match the clip from the show (and what I'm calling a squib), either.

I'll do a little more digging and see if I can come up with a link showing the same footage. Most of this WWII footage gets used all over the place. Though, this was in color, so it's a little more rare.


Anyway....
Whether or not this particular instance was a squib, what would the clearing procedure be if it happened?
 
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barnbwt

New member
Well, the force required to shove out a shell that big and heavy is well into the realm of hydraulics (if the bore was only a little wider, they could just sent in Expendable Speedy with a thermal lance and burn the damn thing out after disassembling it, I suppose :D). No pounding it out the breech with a brass dowel.

So I suspect, just a guess here, that if they forgot to put all the sacks of powder in there (when I visited the Missouri, they had some samples, about the size of a large old-school sack of flour; I recall it was six[?] hundred-pound bags that were required?) and the shell was lodged halfway down, that the barrel was unusable. These are explosive shells after all, that I would have to assume are armed either during firing, or during loading; not something to be messing with in non-ideal conditions, I would think. I'd be surprised if a second load would be used to blow out a stuck shell since that's ill advised on something as small and wimpy as a rifle, but maybe they could do this safely with a reduced charge ("only" one 100lb bag of powder, maybe?). Again, whatever you did to knock the shell out the end, you wouldn't want it near the ship since it'd be armed.

TCB
 
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FrankenMauser

New member
Thinking about this a bit...

I'm thinking it would depend upon the type of projectile and fuse.

Perhaps ranging from "run away!" to 'we're gonna need more air pressure' to "get the big grease gun and have the spare mattresses stacked on the deck"....?
 
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Moonglum

New member
barn bwt said:
These are explosive shells after all, that I would have to assume are armed either during firing, or during loading;
Click to expand...

The fuze is what arms.

They are mechanically armed by a process of rotation and setback. The rotation of the projectile flips a switch in the fuze and arms it. It generally takes a hundred yards or so to arm the fuze.
 
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