Gunboat

The CWS in 1942 experimented with mortars mounted on landing craft, including the LCI s and the LCT s. It took the view that mortars 

Oschner, History of German Chemical Warfare in World War II, p. 33. 

Technicians rigged an oblong wooden frame, filled with a mixture of sand and sawdust, on the floor of the craft. A thick slab of wood, grooved to take the bottom of the baseplate, sat on top of the sand-sawdust filling. This served as an artificial land emplacement for the mortar. The Amphibious Training Command, Carrabelle, Fla., to which the CWS sent the firing platform, saw the utility of the device and asked the service to design a standard model. 

See Paul W. Pritchard, Brooks E. Kleber, and Dale Birdsell, The Chemical Warfare Service Chemicals in Combat, a volume in preparation for the series, UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II. 

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RGb river gunboat Romite Ital cheddite type expl... 

The opiates are perhaps the oldest drugs known to man. The use of opium was recorded in China over two thousand years ago and was known in Mesopotamia before that. Over the centuries the crude extract derived from poppies has been widely used as a sedative. A tincture of opium called laudanum was introduced to England and was considered indispensable to medicine. It is ironic that a compound renowned for its sedative effects should have led to at least one war. In the nineteenth century, the Chinese authorities became so alarmed about the addictive properties of opium that they tried to ban all production of it. This was contrary to the interests of the British traders dealing in opium and as a result the British sent in the gunboats to reverse the... 

Revisionists were more concerned with the interplay between this superiority complex and the hundred years of ignominy that China had suffered under unequal treaties imposed by Western powers after the Opium War of 1842. The China specialists at the Senate hearings presented an image of China derived from three main historical observations. First, it was historically a very big, ancient, isolated, unified, and self-sufficient empire, and because of this, an intensely ethnocentric great power. Second, because of its humiliation under the Western gunboat diplomacy of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were ultra-nationalistic and had a... 

Eads proposed a fleet of armour-plated, steam-propelled gunboats and constructed seven of these 600 tons vessels. Widiin two weeks, over four thousand men were engaged and in forty-five days, St. Louis, the first of the seven boats, was launched. In the course of the Civil War, Eads constructed another foiuteen gunboats incorporating several new ordnance inventions. Following this heroic undertaking, his health became seriously impaired, yet he was fit again in 1865. 

Schenectady Raihoad. He then worked for Croton Aqueduct and had an engineering job on the Erie Canal. At age 22, he was appointed first assistant engineer of the Navy. During the Mexican-American War, he served on a steam warship and a gunboat. 

Since court diplomacy had not worked, the British notched up the pressure to gunboat diplomacy. Admiral Robert Stopford (1768 - 1847) was ordered to make the Mediterranean fleet ready for war in Mareh and was ofifieially ordered into action on April The Sulfur War was beeoming a pan-European affair ... 

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