The era of Golden Gate’s big guns and coastal artillery
From the days of the Spanish-American War until the end of World War II, the Golden Gate was protected from potential invaders by a mighty ring of artillery. Old gun emplacements can be found in various places around the entrance to the bay, crumbling reminders of that vanished era.
As related in the last Portals, in the late 19th century, Army brass ordered a complete upgrading of America’s aging coastal defenses. San Francisco was the top priority after New York. Work began almost simultaneously in 1891 at Fort Scott in the Presidio and Fort Baker in Marin. The first batteries were installed in the Marin headlands. The gun emplacements at Fort Scott, armed with 5-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch guns and 12-inch mortars, can still be seen today on the cliffs south of Fort Point.
After these installations were completed around 1900, the Army worked west, installing batteries on the bluffs and dunes all the way to Baker
Beach. One of those emplacements, Battery Chamberlain, built in 1904, is located just north of Baker Beach. A 6-inch “disappearing” gun (so called because its recoil caused it to return to a hidden position behind the parapet), received from the Smithsonian in 1977, can be seen at emplacement number 4. Engineers also installed batteries around Fort Miley and Fort Barry.
This ring of batteries served as the Golden Gate’s main line of defense during World War I. But as Brian Chin writes in “Artillery at the Golden Gate: The Harbor Defenses of San Francisco in World War II,” by 1915, several new foreign battleships were equipped with turrets with high firing angles, giving them a greater range than the Army’s most powerful coastal artillery. Worried that enemy warships could take up positions outside the range of the guns at Fort Miley and shell the city with impunity, the top brass recommended that 16-inch guns be installed at a new military reservation, Fort Funston, as well as in the Marin Headlands.
No action was taken for years, but in 1935, with the threat of war with Japan looming, Congress finally funded those batteries.
In 1936, ground work for Battery Davis at Fort Funston began. The next year, two enormous 16inch guns arrived. Engineers mounted the guns on their carriages and built concrete casemates 8½ feet thick around them, which were then covered with 20 feet of earth and camouflaged so that they could not be seen from the air.
Soon thereafter, the Army constructed Fort Cronkhite on the Marin Headlands. High on 800foot Wolf Ridge, the Army built Battery Townsley, mounting two 16inch guns there. Battery Davis and Battery Townsley were the first 16-inch gun emplacements in the country.
In the summer of 1940, the army decided to test the big guns, which had
not been fired since they were placed in 1937. The 16-inch guns were rarely fired because their 2,100 pound projectiles were so expensive and because the massive internal pressure generated by firing them caused their barrels to wear out after 250 rounds.
Battery Townsley was chosen for the test firing. The guns had a range of 53,000 yards, meaning the shells would hit the water 30 miles away, 5 miles beyond the Farallon Islands. To be sure that the splashes would be visible, officers had to wait for a clear day. On July 1, 1940, it was finally clear enough, and the gun crew went into action.
The roar of the 16-inch gun “was like thunder,” one observer recalled. The projectile shot up to 30,000-40,000 feet in the
air before descending. The shells went further than expected, and their splashes were never seen. But the guns and casements had performed well. The only critics were some San Franciscans whose windows were broken by the concussive force of the firing.
For gun crews, carrying out target practice sometimes presented unexpected challenges. One day, the 155mm guns at Fort Funston were about to begin target practice when the San Francisco crab fleet suddenly appeared in their field of fire. The Coast Guard tried to chase the crabbers away, but they kept coming back. Finally, the exasperated safety officer in charge turned to the lieutenant in command of the battery and said, “Go ahead and shoot.” The lieutenant
gave the order to commence firing. “When the first rounds went out,” he recalled, “all the crabbers picked up and headed for the Golden Gate.”
Another time, the Army hired a civilian tugboat with an Italian skipper to tow a target for Battery Townsley’s 16inch guns. When the shell landed, it sent up a geyser of water 200 feet high and cut the 400-foot tow cable between the tug and the target. That was too close for the tugboat captain. He began speaking excitedly in Italian, “turned that little tugboat around, and that was it,” an observer recalled. “He wasn’t going to be towing any more targets.”
After Pearl Harbor, the soldiers manning the coastal defenses went on high alert. But although a Japanese submarine came close to shelling
San Francisco on Christmas Eve in 1941, the city was never threatened by invasion, and none of the coastal defense guns were ever fired in anger. After the war, most of the batteries were dismantled. The 16-inch guns were cut into 5-foot, 23ton pieces and melted down for salvage. The almost two-century era when big guns stood guard at the Golden Gate was over.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco.” His most recent book is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle. com/portals.