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RE: Gun duels with shore establishments?
Posted by: kurt ()
Date: June 18, 2001 04:02PM

<HTML>We had a discussion on this awhile back - I don\'t remember if it was before the great Gumi crash or not.

No, it really wasn\'t. A single small 8.8cm (3.5\") gun could do very limited damage. A sub is a lousy gun platform because it roll so much. Accuracy would be terrible. And the boat would be at great risk from shore batteries.

The German attempts at this did little damage, and were mostly a waste of time. One U-boat crew blew up their deck gun when they forgot the muzzle plug in the barrel.

Both Japanese and American subs did a lot of shelling in WWII, but it was pretty inconclusive, even when using the Argonaut and Nautilus, which had 2 6\" guns - about ten times the power of a single 8.8cm gun. A real bombardment just takes a lot more firepower than anything a sub could muster.

The USS Barb used a salvo of 5\" bombardment rockets, fired from a special launcher, near the end of the war - now this is getting to be a lot of firepower, equivelant to several destroyer broadsides, and they destroyed a large paper factory, but it was so near the end of the war it probably had no strategic impact...It would have been too risky if tried on a defended port</HTML>

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Subject Written By Posted
Gun duels with shore establishments? Sean 06/18/2001 11:20AM
RE: Gun duels with shore establishments? kurt 06/18/2001 04:02PM
RE: Gun duels with shore establishments? Rich Mickle 06/19/2001 11:26PM
RE: Gun duels with shore establishments? Tim 06/20/2001 01:35AM
RE: Gun duels with shore establishments? adrian 06/20/2001 02:27AM
RE: Gun duels with shore establishments? Vin 06/20/2001 08:48AM
RE: Gun duels with shore establishments? adrian 06/20/2001 09:21PM
RE: Gun duels with shore establishments? Vin 06/22/2001 07:44AM


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