Calibrating Gorgon’s guns on German batteries

Gorgon worked up for five weeks after reaching Dover because the Royal Navy expected a major 1918 coastal campaign rather than an imminent peace. On 26 July she fired eight rounds at a German battery from about 33,000 yards to calibrate her guns under combat conditions. The firing provoked a response from a German 15-inch battery, but Gorgon continued the shoot. Three days later she accompanied the monitor Marshal Soult in a bombardment of the Tirpitz battery. The ship then spent the following weeks patrolling the English Channel and preparing for the September offensive. The sequence shows how urgently the Dover Patrol was turning a recently completed foreign design into an operational fire-support asset.