And Teach Us How to Foil the Hun

DESCRIPTION: "And teach us how to foil the Hun With paravane and six inch gun."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1983 (Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood)
KEYWORDS: fight ship
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 129, "And teach us how to foil the Hun" (1 fragment)
Roud #25533
NOTES [296 words]: There is something a little odd about Alice Kane's text of this, although with only two lines of text, it's hard to be sure what. Kane is patently right to date it to World War I, since the paravane did not first see action until that year (Uden/Cooper, p. 360).
The problem is that the paravane isn't even a weapon; it's an anti-mine device. A paravane consisted of (usually) two strong wires attached to the bow of a ship, one extending to port, one to starboard, with the other end of each attached to an "otter board" (a small float), the purpose being to keep the remote end afloat, When the ship got underway, the two floats would fall back to port and starboard, stretching the wire; the result was a sort of an arrowhead of wire on each side of the ship, like an upside-down V or a Greek lambda Λ. The idea was to snag mines, ideally cutting their cables, so that they would float to the surface, where the could be exploded by gunfire at a distance without harming a ship.
But paravanes would not normally be used on combat ships -- a ship at speed would just pull them back against the sides of the ship. They were for relatively slow-sailing minesweepers which swept an area in a pattern.
So here is the problem: Minesweepers were armed, but not heavily armed. Jane's-WWI, pp. 86-89, lists a few World War I minesweepers with 4.7 inch guns, but even these heaviest minesweepers were often fitted with four inch guns instead, and most were fitted with guns in the three inch range. Even in World War II, no British minesweeper carried a gun heavier than 4.7 inches -- indeed, only one oddity had a gun heavier than four inches (see list on pp. 120-123 of Worth). A six inch gun was a light cruiser gun. So paravanes and six inch guns didn't really go together. - RBW
Bibliography

Jane's-WWI: Jane's Fighting Ships of World War I (1919; I use the 1990 Studio Editions reprint with modern foreword by Captain John Moore, RN)
Uden/Cooper: Grant Uden and Richard Cooper, A Dictionary of British Ships and Seamen, 1980 (I use the 1981 St. Martin's Press edition)
Worth: Richard Worth, Fleets of World War II, Da Capo, 2001

Last updated in version 6.5
File: KSUC129D

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