It was in a class by itself

 While doing research on a regiment of African American soldiers who fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, I ran across a reference to the USS Vesuvius, the Navy’s only dynamite gun cruiser.

Artillery featuring high-explosive shells was in its infancy in 1898. You couldn’t use gunpowder to throw one of those early shells at the enemy without risking disaster. So the Navy tried using gigantic air guns to throw “dynamite” shells.

The guns were enormous — 15 inches in diameter, in the days when battleships carried 12-inch guns. The compressed air could throw a 1,000-pound shell about a mile. The shell carried about 500 pounds of blasting gel. Lighter shells did less damage but could travel more than two miles.

To carry such a punch, the ship was tiny: less than 250 feet long and less than 1,000 tons. Vesuvius was a big yacht, rather than a cruiser. Its small size was possible because the pneumatic tubes were much lighter than conventional guns. The “barrels” were 55 feet long. Only the last 15 feet of the muzzle showed above deck.

The guns were fixed at an 18-degree angle. To aim them, you had to aim the ship.

At this point in the war, the Spanish fleet had been destroyed. Santiago de Cuba was besieged. The coastal artillery in the Spanish forts was the only risk.

At night, Vesuvius would sneak beneath the Spanish guns and fire a few rounds into the city.

Since Vesuvius’s air guns made little noise and produced no muzzle flash, the Spanish were baffled. Things blew up, but as you can imagine, you couldn’t really talk about accuracy in discussing this exciting new technology.

After the war, admirals said nice things to justify the effort and expense, but Vesuvius went to the shipyards where the pneumatic guns were removed. The ship had a second career testing another emerging technology: the torpedo.

The Army invariably makes for better movies than the Navy. There’s drama in people fighting people.

Navies fight with machines. Machines change, and the only way to tell whether a technology that offers great theoretical promise is practical is to build a prototype and try it. It’s expensive. Sometimes, it’s barmy.

I’m prejudiced, of course, but I think any democracy would be well advised to keep a strong navy. I wish ours were better at communicating with the average citizens that support it. I think we’d have a better democracy if the average citizen understood something of the difficulties — and the zaniness — of trying to provide the common defense.