The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-08-14

distance was gradually decreased, but the average range was about l6,0oO yards, which is far in excess Of any thing we have report of from abroad.
 In response to an inquiry of member of the committee, Admiral Fletcher said: "I am greatly pleased with the results of the last target practice. It shows a high efficiency"
 Admiral Mayo, the present com mander in chief of the Atlantic fleet, who was the vice admiral in command of the battleship squadron when Ad- miral Fletcher was commander in chief, in. an official letter under date of July g, 1916, referring to the ele- mentary target practice in the fall of practice it was apparent that very great improvement had been made over the records of the similar prac- tice of the preceding year, this in-i crease averaging about 40 per cent. for all battleships that had fired" and, further, "It is believed that the dissemination of gunnery knowledge during the last year has been greater than during any similar years, and that there now exists in the fleet an excellent gunnery spirit and thor ough interest in the attainment of bat tie efficiency, which cannot fail to bring about a further improvement in the hitting ability of the fleet-"
 Captain Sims, speaking of Captain Plunkett, director of gunnery exer- cises and engineering performances, said: '.He is the best equipped man in the navy to handle 1t.
 Captain Plunkett, in speaking of the practice of the turret guns, said: "The records of the fall of 1915 in dicate that we are advancing by leaps and bounds" /. < Attention is called to Captain Sims's statement before the House commit tee, in which he said:
 .s"As far as have been able to make out for the last year or so, there seems to have been an effort to try to convict the Democratic party of al- lowing the navy to go down in target practice The target practice in the navy, from the time we took it up on Scott's system until about 1909, was very satisfactory, indeed, as far as our information went The English man is said to be much more conserv- ative than the American. When I got the information concerning his new methods from Captain (now Vice Ad- miraD Scott in China and brought 1t home, and President Roosevelt was pushing it along, we went ahead of the British navy in shooting, because the British Admiralty was not willing to accept Admiral Scott's ideas at that time Up until 1909 we were at least equal to them. Then came the slump immediately after that, and the fault was with the naval officers. They made a fundamental mistake. That mistake can be perfectly, readily un- derstood by simple Illustration. If you had a company of 100 men that you were to teach to shoot with rifles so that they could fire volleys that would 70 accurately to the mark, nec- esarily you would take each of the men individually out to target and say, Now, there, fire away and you would drill him until he could hit the mark. In other words, that man would know that he might as well get busy, because he would be found out if he did not learn to aim accurately. Having done that until each man could aim and hit the mark, you could stand them up in a company in line and you could say, Aim, fire,' and d hit at least in the neighborhood of the enemy.
 Now. if somebody else took a com pany and said, T do not want to waste all this ammunition by having these men shoot separately at the target. I will just stand them all up in line and let them shoot together And I want to tell you that under those con- SrAA a should worry. They cannot tell whether hit the target or not The competition would be, gone out of it; there would be no personal interest, and you could not get any good out of it at all.
 Now. exactly what we did up to 1909 was to train the crew of a ship, the gun pointers and gun crews, the same way you would train a company of soldiers-one at time. We let every gun pointer know, and every man who loaded the guns, and every body else know, that we were going to fire the guns individually, one at a time, at a range so short that if they did not aim properly we would find it out and that if they made a good record we would give them a reward, and if not we would give them a black eye.' Those are the two things that tend strongly toward ef1ciency- rewards and punishments: the 'bu- quet and the black eye,' and they get busy. That is what we used to do, and we made very remarkable shoot ing records under that system.
 Finally about 1909, the people who cannot think, or do not think there is always certain amount of criticism of target practice methods in the navy-conceived the idea that we were wasting many hundreds of thousands of dollars year in firing at short ranges when we ought to be learning to hit the enemy at long range. a->d I will give you my word that they abolished the short range practice. and that happened which will always habpen with ordinary, everyday human nature: namely, that efficiency in shooting began, to go down; and in 1912, when I delivered the opening address before the Naval War College extension in Washington, pointed out exactly what happened, that the target practice-they had just restored the short range, and we then had the first results of twas an utter and absolute wreck
 FIND RUNAWAY HERE,
 Fourteen year old John Benge of New Brunswick, N. J., who was found