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Old 08-12-15, 08:43 PM   #8
JHS
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The Naval Staff report is in an appendix in Dudley Pope's book on the Plate battle. It specifically states that own ship's helm changes threw off gunnery solutions, and abhored unnecessary maneuvering (Langsdorff was constantly evading). The WWII USN made a cult out of straight course shooting in order to get optimum solutions. This inadvertently played into the hands of Japanese torpedomen in the Guadalcanal surface battle because USN cruisers followed a steady course in battle---and ran right into torpedo spreads. Of course, the late-war USN gunnery radars were so accurate they sometimes gave very good results on the fall of shot. But there was still time-of-flight which could be up to a minute at long range. Nothing could be done to correct the fall of a shell once it left the muzzle.
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