prevalent among civilians who, unlike soldiers, did not load and fire on command. It was so prevalent that in 1660, Louis XIV had to issue a proclamation forbidding the placing of daggers in the muzzles of hunting guns. The trouble with plug bayonets in military guns was that, when the bayonet was in place, the gun could not be loaded or fired, although there were situations when it would be most helpful to be able to do either with the bayonet in place.
The first attempt to remedy this condition was to fit the handle of the bayonet with a pair of rings that could be slipped over the barrel of the musket. The blade hung below the barrel so there was nothing to stop bullet from either entering or leaving the muzzle. The person who first invented the ring bayonet is uncertain. Hugh Mackay, a Scot in the service of William of Orange who campaigned for the Netherlands-born English king in Scotland in the late 1680s and early 1690s, wrote that his men had no time to place or remove their plug bayonets when the Highland clansmen charged them firing their pistols and brandishing their swords. He had rings put on the bayonets so his men could fire while their bayonets were in place.
The ring bayonet was a major improvement, but it could easily fall off a musket barrel — or be pulled off by an enemy. That led to the invention of the socket bayonet, a type that was universally used from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century and was revived in the late 20th century by the British Army.
Basically, the socket bayonet is a blade set at an angle to a tube that fits over the barrel of a gun. Its advantage over the ring bayonet is that the socket includes a way to lock it on to the gun.
The socket bayonet was an extremely efficient weapon when mounted on a musket or rifle. It was much less satisfactory when used without the gun, as the socket was awkward to hold. As time went on, the bayonet became increasingly less important as a weapon. The universal use of rifles in the late 19th century, as in the American Civil War, made it unlikely that enemy soldiers would get close enough to use bayonets. In World War I, repeating rifles and machine guns made bayonets almost useless. American authorities in that war estimated that no more than.024 percent of their casualties were caused by bayonets.
But although the rifle was seldom used as a spear, bayonets were far from useless. Every infantryman has a need for a good knife. The old socket bayonet was not a very good knife, but it began to be replaced by the bayonet that was.
This type was a knife or a short sword that typically had a catch in the pommel that attached to a stud on the gunstock and had a ring in the guard that slipped over the muzzle of the rifle. The German bayonet of the two world wars did away with the muzzle ring and attached the handle of the bayonet to a long bar below the rifle barrel. At first, most of these bayonets were quite long, one early British type had a blade more than 30 inches long. The idea was to make a bayonet long enough to keep cavalry at a safe distance when attached to a rifle. When it dawned on military authorities that cavalry was no longer a major combat arm, the bayonet started to shrink. Still, the M1917 bayonet the United States used in World War I had a blade 17 inches long. That made a handy short sword, but swords were even less likely to be used as serious weapons than bayonets. What the soldier needed was a knife — something that could open cans and other types of packaging, cut rope, carve wood or meat, cut the throat of an enemy sentry, or be used in very close quarters combat. In World War II, the bayonet for the M1
Garand rifle at first had a blade 10 inches long. In a later version, the blade was only 6.7 inches long, the same length as the bayonet for the M1 carbine.
When armies dropped the socket bayonet, they began issuing bayonets that could double for other types of tools. Both the British and the Germans once issued bayonets with saw teeth on the back. This was not, as some charged, to make a more frightful wound, but so that the bayonet could also be used as a saw. The United States issued a number of these specialized bayonets. One was trowel bayonet, which was designed to be either a weapon or an entrenching tool but was good for neither use. Another was a Bowie bayonet, a very peculiar device that bore little but superficial resemblance to the traditional Bowie knife.
There was also the bolo bayonet, an excellent bush knife for use in the Philippine jungles but that, when mounted on a rifle, seriously unbalanced the weapon.
Today, most bayonets are short knives with a special scabbard that allows them to be used as wire cutters.
In the 17th century, the bayonet changed warfare by making the pike obsolete and making all infantry gunners — in effect, doubling the firepower of the infantry. Since then, its importance as a serious weapon has greatly diminished, although it is still useful for crowd control. And in the Korean War, a bayonet charge by Company E of the Twenty-seventh Infantry Regiment routed the entrenched North Koreans opposed to them.
It should be noted, though, that this charge by a single infantry company was later hailed as “the greatest American bayonet charge since the battle of Cold Harbor” in the Civil War.
Chapter 18
Little Bombs With Big Results: Hand Grenades
The crowd lining the streets of Sarajevo was in a festive mood. Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the throne), was visiting, and the weather was perfect on July 28, 1914. The mayor of Sarajevo, proud as a peacock, rode by in the first car. The next car was the archduke’s. He sat in the back seat, next to his beloved Sophie, the woman he married against the wishes of the emperor himself. As the royal car approached, a young man named Nedjelko Cabrinovic took what looked like a whiskey flask from a pocket, unscrewed the top, and struck it against a lamp post. Spectators heard a pop, then they saw Cabrinovic hurl the flask at the Archduke. Franz Ferdinand saw out of the corner of his eye what looked like a rock flying toward Sophie. He threw up his arm and blocked the missile. It fell on the street and exploded with a loud bang. People screamed. Several bystanders were wounded. Franz Ferdinand ordered the car to stop. He got out to make sure the injured spectators would get medical treat- ment, then got back in the car and proceeded to the city hall.
In a sense, the first shot of World War I had been fired. It was fired with a hand grenade.
Later, after a reception at the city hall, the archduke insisted on going to the hospital to visit people wounded in the attack. On the way to the hospital the chauffeur suddenly learned that he was going the wrong way. He stopped so he could turn around. He stopped right in front of another young man named Gavrilo Princip, who was, as Cabrinovic was, a member of the assassination conspiracy. Princip pulled out a pistol and shot and killed the archduke and his wife.
Princip used a Browning automatic pistol, a weapon so popular that “brown-ing” became a synonym for automatic pistol in several European languages. But Cabrinovic’s weapon was a Serbian army hand grenade. A description of the Serbian grenade shows how these little bombs had declined from being a major weapon of war from the 15th through 18th centuries to being mainly an assassination weapon in 1914. The Serbian grenade was flat, not as convenient a shape for throwing as later grenades, but a shape that let it fit in a pocket without causing suspicious bulges. Under the screw top of the “flask” was a percussion cap. Striking that on a hard surface ignited a short fuse. In short, the Serbian grenade was a weapon for clandestine use, not the battlefield.
The hand grenade had seen some battlefield use in the Russo-Japanese War and somewhat less by defenders of forts in the America Civil War and the American Revolution, but most military authorities saw little use for it before World War I. That’s somewhat surprising, because the hand grenade was probably the earliest of all gunpowder weapons. The Chinese were using bamboo joints filled with gunpowder before anybody had guns. European records mention the use of grenades in the 15th century, when the principal missile weapons were the longbow and the crossbow. The grenade at that time was an iron sphere filled with gunpowder with a fuse projecting from a hole. A picture in La Pyrotechnie, a book published in 1620, shows a grenade filled with gunpowder and pistol balls. The bullets were packed like seeds in a pomegranate, and is why it was called a “grenade,” which is Middle French for pomegranate.
Those early grenades weighed about 3 pounds. Both garrisons of fortresses and besiegers tossed grenades over walls at their enemies. Because few men could throw a 3-pound ball far enough to be out of range of those lead “seeds,” grenade throwers liked to have a wall between themselves and their target. In the 17th century, when all European war revolved around capturing enemy strong points and supply depots, the grenade became a most important weapon. To use it, European armies picked tall, strong men. They had to have strong throwing
