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Gary (no login)
Posted Jul 9, 2007 11:22 PM
The following article is copied here from "The CDSG Newsletter" May 2003 Pg 6 & 7. Not included are the four photos and one map which appeared in the article and I could not reproduce here. The photos of the two 6-inch guns are somewhat similar to those appearing earlier on this thread.
Falkland Islands’ Surviving Coast Defense Guns
by Philip Sims
For ease of production, logistics, and training, the British Empire enforced considerable standardization on its coast de¬fenses throughout the world. However, every large operation has it exceptions, and the press of war combined with remoteness made the Falklands Islands one. The three coast defense guns still there today were mounted on ex-naval mounts, and two of them received what appear to be home-built shields that they still retain. A WWI destroyer 4-inch gun is mounted at the “Penguin Sanctu¬ary”; its breech marks are “ORDNANCE MARK IA, VICKERS
It overlooks Port William Sound, where it necks down to the entrance to Stanley Harbour, plus Yorke Bay, where the Argentine troops landed in 1981, although the gun was long out of service by then. The white ship in the first picture is the Royal Princess, the means of reaching the island on Christmas Day 1999.
The two 6-inch guns are located near the present-day airport on a low rise called Canopus Hill, named for a fire control sta¬tion located here that supported the fire of the battleship HMS Canopus during the battle of the Falklands. The breech of the ¬right-hand gun is marked “B.L. 6 IN WIRE VII EOS 1900 No 1230,” while the left-hand gun is “B.L. 6 IN WIRE VII EOS 1902 No 1735.” The locals claim the guns were removed from the secondary armament of the Canopus. Launched in 1898, by WWI Canopus was desperately slow and obsolescent at best, although she had pioneered British use of Krupp cemented armor. She had been briefly moored (some reports say beached) in Stanley Harbour as a static harbor defense, and opened the battle of the Falklands with indirect 12-inch fire from out of sight, to the considerable surprise of the Germans. After serving in the Dardanelles expedition, she was sold for scrap in 1920.
The box-like shields for the 6-inch guns do not resemble other shields elsewhere in the empire. Possibly they were made on site. Two spare barrels are on the grounds of the Falkland Island Museum. The pits of the supporting magazines and fire control emplacements still exist but the structures have been destroyed.
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