|
Coastal artillery is the branch of 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 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 cannon, 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 still can 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. == History == One of the first registered 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 which mounted defensive artillery, in this case muzzle-loading cannon. During the 19th century China also built hundreds of coastal fortresses in an attempt to counter Western naval threats. Coastal artillery could be part of the Navy (as in Scandinavian countries, war-time Germany, and the Soviet Union), or part of the Army (as in Anglophone countries). In the United Kingdom, in the later 19th and earlier 20th Centuries, coastal artillery was 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. Then, following the Spanish–American War and the report of the Endicott Board, U.S. harbor defenses were greatly strengthened and provided with new, rifled artillery and minefield defenses. Shortly thereafter, in 1907, Congress split the field artillery and coast artillery into two separate branches, and created a separate Coast Artillery Corps (CAC).〔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. A PDF of this article can be found (here ).〕 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 bases, and its close ties to the Navy allowed it to man coast artillery around these bases. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Coastal artillery」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|