History
Disappearing guns as a functioning concept were invented in the 1860s by Captain (later Sir) Alexander Moncrieff, who built on his observations in the Crimean War to improve on existing designs for a gun carriage capable of rising over a parapet before being reloaded from behind cover. His key innovation was a counterweight system that raised the gun as well as controlled the recoil. Moncrieff promoted his system as an inexpensive and quickly constructed alternative to a more traditional gun emplacement.
Buffington and Crozier further refined the concept in the late 1880s by incorporating hydro-pneumatic recoil control to assist the counterweight action. The Buffington–Crozier Disappearing Carriage (1893) represented the zenith of disappearing gun carriages, and guns of up to 16-inch size were eventually mounted on such carriages. Disappearing guns were highly popular for a while in the British Empire, the United States and other countries.
However, in the 1890s, a series of Royal Navy/New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy trials carried out in New Zealand (where numerous disappearing guns had been bought and installed during the Russian Scares), revealed the virtual impossibility of a small shore installation being hit by a warship, except by chance. Others dispute that the advantages were so limited, and point to the efficiency of such artillery in for example, the Battle of Port Arthur. In any case, with their protective benefits thus cast into doubt, no further production of the expensive gun carriages was undertaken in New Zealand.
Though effective against ships, the guns turned out to be vulnerable to aerial attack. After World War I batteries of disappearing guns were usually casemated for protection or covered with camouflage for concealment. By 1912, the guns were declared obsolete in the British Army, with only some other countries, particularly the United States, still producing them up to World War I and keeping them active through to the end of World War II.
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