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 cannon were highly important to military affairs and generally represented the areas of high tech and capital cost among materiel. The advent of 20th-century technologies, especially military aviation, naval aviation, jet aircraft, and missile guidance , 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 Sea denial the use of .
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.
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 , , , or , the first three types often with detached gun batteries called "water batteries".
Coastal artillery could be part of the Navy (as in countries, war-time Germany, and the Soviet Union), or part of the Army (as in the Anglosphere alignment for significant english-speaking countries). 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 battery. 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 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 (CAC) The CAC was disbanded as a separate branch in 1950.See "Coast Artillery Organization: A Brief Overview, Bolling W. Smith and William C. Gaines, in a 2008 update to "American Seacoast Defenses," Mark Berhow, Ed., CDSG Press, McLean, VA, 2004. An online version of this article can be found here.
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.
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 in six separate attacks on the sole remaining Russian battleship. After 3 weeks, the Sevastopol was still afloat, having survived 124 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.
On September 3, an artillery duel took place between the Polish coastal batteries, ORP Gryf and ORP Wicher, and the German Destroyer Leberecht Maass and Wolfgang Zenker. After a 15-minute exchange of fire, Leberecht Maass was hit in the gun mask, with several wounded sailors (this fact was reported by both the commander of the Laskowski battery, Captain Zbigniew Przybyszewski, and the German Rear Admiral Lütjens). 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 (6 ships), 1st Minesweeper Flotilla (5 ships).
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.
Fire from the smaller guns (57 mm to 150 mm) 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.
It is a commonly repeated misconception that Singapore's large-calibre coastal guns were ineffective against the Japanese because they were designed to face south to defend the harbour against naval attack and could not be turned round to face north. In fact, most of the guns could be turned, and were indeed fired at the invaders. However, the guns were supplied mostly with armour-piercing (AP) shells and few high explosive (HE) shells. AP shells were designed to penetrate the hulls of heavily armoured warships and were mostly ineffective against infantry targets. Military analysts later estimated that if the guns had been well supplied with HE shells the Japanese attackers would have suffered heavy casualties, but the invasion would not have been prevented by this means alone. The guns of Singapore achieved their purpose in deterring a Japanese naval attack as the possibility of an expensive capital ship being sunk made it inadvisable for the Japanese to attack Singapore via the sea. The fact that the Japanese army chose to advance down from Thailand through Malaya to take Singapore was a testament for the respect the Japanese had for the coastal artillery at Singapore. However, the lack of HE shells rendered Singapore vulnerable to a land based attack from Malaya via the Johore straits.
The Harbor Defenses of Manila and Subic Bays denied Manila harbor to the invading Japanese until Corregidor fell to amphibious assault on 6 May 1942, nearly a month after the fall of Bataan. Beyond tying up besieging Japanese forces (who suffered severe supply shortages due to the inability to use Manila as a port), the forts allowed Station CAST later decisive at Midway.
The Japanese defended the island of Betio in the Tarawa atoll with numerous 203 mm (8-inch) coastal guns. In 1943, these were knocked out early in the battle with a combined USN naval and aerial bombardment.
The old battleships HMS Ramillies and Warspite with the monitor HMS Roberts were used to suppress shore batteries east of the Orne; cruisers targeted shore batteries at Ver-sur-Mer and Moulineaux; while eleven destroyers provided local fire support. The (equally old) battleship Texas was used to suppress the battery at Pointe du Hoc, but the guns there had been moved to an inland position, unbeknownst to the Allies. In addition, there were modified landing craft: eight "Landing Craft Gun", each with two 4.7-inch guns; four "Landing Craft Support" with automatic cannon; eight Landing Craft Tank (Rocket), each with a single salvo of 1,100 5-inch rockets; eight Landing Craft Assault (Hedgerow), each with twenty-four bombs intended to detonate beach mines prematurely. Twenty-four Landing Craft Tank carried Priest self-propelled 105mm which also fired while they were on the run-in to the beach. Similar arrangements existed at other beaches.
On June 25, 1944, the American battleship Texas engaged German shore batteries on the Cotentin Peninsula around Cherbourg. Battery Hamburg straddled the ship with a salvo of 240 mm shells, eventually hitting Texas twice; one shell damaging the conning tower and navigation bridge, with the other penetrating below decks but failing to explode. Return fire from Texas knocked out the German battery.
Allied efforts to take the port of Toulon in August 1944 ran into "Big Willie", a battery consisting of two prewar French turrets, equipped with the guns taken from the French battleship Provence, each mounting a pair of 340 mm naval guns. The range and power of these guns was such that the Allies dedicated a battleship or heavy cruiser to shelling the fort every day, with the battleship Nevada eventually silencing the guns on August 23, 1944.
The Scandinavian countries, with their long coastlines and relatively weak navies, continued in the development and installation of modern coastal artillery systems, usually hidden in well-camouflaged armored turrets (for example Swedish 12 cm automatic turret gun). In these countries the coastal artillery was part of the naval forces and used naval targeting systems. Both mobile and stationary (e.g. 100 56 TK) systems were used.
In countries where coastal artillery has not been disbanded, these forces have acquired amphibious or anti-ship missile capabilities. In constricted waters, mobile coastal artillery armed with surface-to-surface missiles still can be used to deny the use of sea lanes. The Type 88 surface-to-ship missile is an example of modern mobile coastal artillery. Poland also retains a coastal missile division armed with the Naval Strike Missile.
During the Croatian War of Independence in 1991, coastal artillery operated by Croatian forces played an important role in defending Croatian Adriatic coast from Yugoslav naval and air strikes, especially around Zadar, Šibenik and Split, defeating the Yugoslav Navy in the Battle of the Dalmatian Channels.
In practice, there is a distinction between artillery sited to bombard a coastal region and coastal artillery, which has naval-compatible targeting systems and communications that are integrated with the navy rather than the army.
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