Crosley War Production: The Mark 14 Gun Sight

Quite a bit of attention has been focused on Crosley's involvement with the Radio Proxmity Fuze, a device that enabled Naval gunners (and others) to blow enemy aircraft out of the skies with deadly efficiency. Crosley's role was not inventing the device, but manufacturing it and increasing the efficiency of manufacture.

I'll write more about the Proxmity Fuze in a future post. (I was able to hold a couple of these in my hands while traveling recently.) Here I want to focus on another vital Crosley element of the war effort, the manufacture of the Mark 14 (or Mark XIV) gun sight. This gun sight (properly written as two words when it was in use) also increased the accuracy of gunners. A mechanical device, it compensated for gun mount movement, parallax, and other variables to help line the gun up with the target by angle and azimuth. The modern counterpart is the laser sight.

The Mark 14 was used with 20-mm, 1.10-inch, and 40-mm guns. The image above is from the Mark 14 gun sight's Operating Bulletin for gunners and range setters.