Coastal artillery
Coastal artillery is the branch of the armed forces concerned with operating anti-ship artillery or fixed gun batteries in coastal fortifications.
From the Middle Ages until World War II, coastal artillery and naval artillery in the form of cannons were highly important to military affairs and generally represented the areas of highest technology and capital cost among materiel. The advent of 20th-century technologies, especially military aviation, naval aviation, jet aircraft, and guided missiles, reduced the primacy of cannons, battleships, and coastal artillery. In countries where coastal artillery has not been disbanded, these forces have acquired amphibious capabilities. In littoral warfare, mobile coastal artillery armed with surface-to-surface missiles can still be used to deny the use of sea lanes.
It was long held as a rule of thumb that one shore-based gun equaled three naval guns of the same caliber, due to the steadiness of the coastal gun which allowed for significantly higher accuracy than their sea-mounted counterparts. Land-based guns also benefited in most cases from the additional protection of walls or earth mounds. The range of gunpowder-based coastal artillery also has a derivative role in international law and diplomacy, wherein a country's three-mile limit of "coastal waters" is recognized as under the nation or state's laws.
History
One of the first recorded uses of coastal artillery was in 1381—during the war between Ferdinand I of Portugal and Henry II of Castile—when the troops of the King of Portugal used cannons to defend Lisbon against an attack from the Castilian naval fleet.The use of coastal artillery expanded during the Age of Discoveries, in the 16th century; when a colonial power took over an overseas territory, one of their first tasks was to build a coastal fortress, both to deter rival naval powers and to subjugate the natives. The Martello tower is an excellent example of a widely used coastal fort that mounted defensive artillery, in this case, muzzle-loading cannon. During the 19th century, the Chinese Qing Dynasty also built hundreds of coastal fortresses in an attempt to counter Western naval threats.
Coastal artillery fortifications generally followed the development of land fortifications; sometimes separate land defence forts were built to protect coastal forts. Through the middle 19th century, coastal forts could be bastion forts, star forts, polygonal forts, or sea forts, the first three types often with detached gun batteries called "water batteries". Coastal defence weapons throughout history were heavy naval guns or weapons based on them, often supplemented by lighter weapons. In the late 19th century separate batteries of coastal artillery replaced forts in some countries; in some areas, these became widely separated geographically through the mid-20th century as weapon ranges increased. The amount of landward defence provided began to vary by country from the late 19th century; by 1900 new US forts almost totally neglected these defences. Booms were also usually part of a protected harbor's defences. In the middle 19th century underwater minefields and later controlled mines were often used, or stored in peacetime to be available in wartime. With the rise of the submarine threat at the beginning of the 20th century, anti-submarine nets were used extensively, usually added to boom defences, with major warships often being equipped with them through early World War I. In World War I railway artillery emerged and soon became part of coastal artillery in some countries; with railway artillery in coast defence some type of revolving mount had to be provided to allow tracking of fast-moving targets.
Coastal artillery could be part of the Navy, or part of the Army. In English-speaking countries, certain coastal artillery positions were sometimes referred to as 'Land Batteries', distinguishing this form of artillery battery from for example floating batteries.
In the United Kingdom, in the later 19th and earlier 20th Centuries, the land batteries of the coastal artillery were the responsibility of the Royal Garrison Artillery.
In the United States, coastal artillery was established in 1794 as a branch of the Army and a series of construction programs of coastal defenses began: the "First System" in 1794, the "Second System" in 1804, and the "Third System" or "Permanent System" in 1816. Masonry forts were determined to be obsolete following the American Civil War, and a postwar program of earthwork defenses was poorly funded. In 1885 the Endicott Board recommended an extensive program of new U.S. harbor defenses, featuring new rifled artillery and minefield defenses; most of the board's recommendations were implemented. Construction on these was initially slow, as new weapons and systems were developed from scratch, but was greatly hastened following the Spanish–American War of 1898. Shortly thereafter, in 1907, Congress split the field artillery and coast artillery into separate branches, creating a separate Coast Artillery Corps The CAC was disbanded as a separate branch in 1950.
In the first decade of the 20th century, the United States Marine Corps established the Advanced Base Force. The force was used for setting up and defending advanced overseas bases, and its close ties to the Navy allowed it to man coast artillery around these bases.
Russo-Japanese War
During the Siege of Port Arthur, Imperial Japanese forces had captured the vantage point on 203 Meter Hill overlooking Port Arthur harbor. After relocating heavy howitzers with 500 pound armor-piercing shells to the summit of the Hill, the Japanese bombarded the Russian fleet in the harbor, systematically sinking the Russian ships within range. The Japanese were attacking the city and the Russian ships were trapped in the harbor due to mines, making this one of the few cases of coastal guns being employed in an offensive action.On December 5, 1904, the battleship Poltava was destroyed, followed by the battleship Retvizan on December 7, 1904, the battleships Pobeda and Peresvet and the cruisers Pallada and Bayan on December 9, 1904. The battleship Sevastopol, although hit 5 times by shells, managed to move out of range of the guns. Stung by the fact that the Russian Pacific Fleet had been sunk by the Imperial Japanese Army and not by the Imperial Japanese Navy, and with a direct order from Tokyo that the Sevastopol was not to be allowed to escape, Admiral Togo sent in wave after wave of destroyers in six separate attacks on the sole remaining Russian battleship. After 3 weeks, the Sevastopol was still afloat, having survived 124 torpedoes fired at her while sinking two Japanese destroyers and damaging six other vessels. The Japanese had meanwhile lost the cruiser Takasago to a mine outside the harbor.
World War II
Poland
On September 1, 1939, the Wehrmacht began their attack on Poland. The Artillery Battery No. 31, part of the Coastal Artillery Division, immediately took over a huge part of the burden of defending the Polish coast, preventing German ships from approaching the Hel Peninsula.On September 3, an artillery duel took place between the Polish coastal batteries, ORP Gryf and ORP Wicher, and the German destroyers Leberecht Maass and Wolfgang Zenker. After a 15-minute exchange of fire, Leberecht Maass was hit in the gun mask, with several wounded sailors. The German destroyers set up a smoke screen and withdrew from the fight.
On 19 September, the battery of the Heliodor Laskowski fired at a group of units trawling and shelling the defenses on Kępa Oksywska: M 3, "Nettelbeck", "Fuchs", S.V.K. Verband, 1st Minesweeper Flotilla.
In the morning of 25 September, the battleships SMS Schleswig-Holstein and SMS Schlesien began shelling the Hel Fortified Area with 280mm shells. One of them hit the concrete platform of gun no. 3 of the Heliodor Laskowski battery, killing two sailors and seriously wounding several others. The explosion damaged the camouflage, and debris and shrapnel blocked the gun mechanisms. Another shell temporarily immobilized gun no. 1, and one of the shrapnel wounded the fire director on the unprotected turret, Captain Przybyszewski. The remaining two undamaged guns of the coastal battery fire continuously, obtaining cover for the German battleship SMS Schlesien, which is laying a smoke screen. The Hel battery transfers fire to the battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein. At 11:18, both German ships break off the duel and withdraw beyond the range of the Polish battery. The German ships fired a total of 159 shells of 280 mm caliber and 209 shells of 150 mm caliber. The two damaged guns of the Laskowski battery were soon put into operation, and the wounded commander was replaced by Captain Bohdan Mańkowski. On September 28, Captain Przybyszewski leaves the hospital against the doctors' prohibition and returns with his hand in a sling to command the battery.
In another artillery duel, which took place on September 27, Laskowski's battery scored a direct hit on the battleship's starboard artillery casemate, SMS Schleswig-Holstein, wounding 14 members of its crew.
Norway
During the Battle of Drøbak Sound in April 1940, the German navy lost the new heavy cruiser Blücher, one of their most modern ships, to a combination of fire from various coastal artillery emplacements, including two obsolete German-made Krupp 280 mm guns and equally obsolete Whitehead torpedoes. The Blücher had entered the narrow waters of the Oslofjord, carrying 1,000 soldiers and leading a German invasion fleet. The first salvo from the Norwegian defenders, fired from Oscarsborg Fortress about 950 meters distance, disabled the center propeller turbine and set her afire.Fire from the smaller guns swept her decks and disabled her steering, and she received two torpedo hits before the fires reached her magazines and doomed her. As a result, the remainder of the invasion fleet reversed, the Norwegian royal family, parliament and cabinet escaped, and the Norwegian gold reserves were safely removed from the city before it fell.