There was no way a gunner could reach deep into a cannon’s bore to ignite the shell.
The early bombards had short barrels for the size of their shells. Later shell-firing guns were the mortar, a very short barreled gun that shot shells only at a high trajectory, and the howitzer, a gun with a slightly longer barrel that could fire shells at a higher velocity and on a flatter trajectory. With any gun, double-firing called for good reflexes and may be one of the reasons artillerymen, unlike most soldiers, were reputed to abstain from drunkenness, lechery, and the use of naughty words. If the gun misfired, the gunner would be standing right next to a bomb that would explode an instant later. Finally, someone discovered that the flash of the propelling charge would ignite the shell’s fuse even if the fuse was facing the muzzle.
Early shells, then, were pretty dangerous gadgets to use. They were not much more dangerous, though, to the enemy. Because shells were hollow, they were useless for battering walls. The shell would either flatten or shatter on striking a stone wall, and an unconfined explosion would have little effect. Used against personnel, a shell would break up into a few large pieces. Gunpowder did not have the shattering effect of high explosive, so the carnage caused by shell fragments was unknown until the very late 19th or early 20th centuries.
That’s another reason first shells were used in mortars: those short-barreled cannons were used to threw their projectiles at a high angle to clear the walls of forts. The timing of shell bursts was none too precise in those early days. Shells frequently did not explode for some time after landing. At other times, they exploded before reaching the target — Keys’s “bombs bursting in air.”
A British artillery officer, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel, saw a way to improve the shell’s performance against personnel. He invented a shell that was much like the early hand grenades — an iron ball filled with lead bullets and enough gunpowder to burst it open.
Before the shrapnel shell, artillerymen had only three missiles to use against infantry. For long range use against infantry, they used cannonballs — “solid shot,” in gunners’ lingo. They fired directly at the lines of marching men. The shot skipped along the ground, ricocheting at flat angles and destroying whatever it hit. Against masses of infantry, like the Swiss or Spanish phalanxes, cannonballs were deadly, indeed. Fired against the flanks of the later “thin line”
formation, they could also kill a number of men with one shot. That, however, took either extremely good marksmanship or a great deal of luck. Infantry could often evade destruction all together by falling flat, so the cannonballs flew over them. When the infantry got close, the artillery became extremely deadly. Grape shot — a number of iron or lead balls packed in a wood-reinforced canvass bag —, spread out like shot from a giant shotgun and took out bunches of infantrymen or cavalrymen before they got to musket range. When the attackers came closer, the gunners switched to case or cannister shot — smaller and more numerous balls packed in tin cans, which was even more deadly. Shrapnel’s invention made it possible to produce the effects of grape or cannister shot at ranges impossible with small shot fired directly from the cannons Shrapnel shells ac-celerated the development of howitzer, shell guns that could fire directly at infantry. The knowledge that a cannon’s muzzle blast would ignite a fuse even when facing away from the powder charge made shrapnel a popular choice for use against infantry or cavalry.
When rifled artillery capable of firing elongated projectiles was introduced, shrapnel shells were adapted to the new guns. These new shrapnel shells have been called “guns fired by guns.” The bursting charge of gunpowder was in the rear of the shell. When ignited by the time fuse, it shot the load of lead balls out of the front of the shell. The shell was a kind of flying shotgun. Shrapnel was used extensively in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was the reason all armies adopted the steel helmet in World War I. Experience in that war, however, showed that shrapnel was no more effective against personnel than ordinary high explosive shells. High explosives shattered shells into thousands of jagged fragments, which killed exposed enemy soldiers quite efficiently, and high explosive could also destroy fortifications, something shrapnel could not do. Although the term is common today, shrapnel has not been used since the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. When newspaper accounts mention “shrapnel” they mean shell or bomb fragments.
High explosives have been around since the late 19th century, but at first they were far too sensitive to use as filling for shells. Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a peculiar weapon called a “dynamite gun” appeared.
It had a long barrel and fired a comparatively small-caliber brass shell filled with dynamite. It did not use a normal propelling charge: The shock of the explosion might well detonate the shell before it left the gun. Instead, a small charge of black powder was fired in a tube beneath the gun barrel. This forced gas through a hole the barrel, giving the dynamite shell a gentle shove. The dynamite gun was used to some extent in the Cuban rebellion and the Spanish-American War that followed. When the shell landed, the blast was most impressive, but the thin-walled shell did not provide much fragmentation, and it exploded as soon as it hit anything more solid than air, which prevented penetration. And it was so dangerous, the gunners who used it were terrified of their weapon. As a result of these problems, the dynamite gun’s career was short, and dynamite has not been used as a shell filling since. Artilleryists switched to more stable explosives like picric acid and TNT.
Shells and cannons have developed steadily. In World War II, a new, high tech fuse was developed to replace the ancient timed fuse based on a burning train of gunpowder and the more modern clockwork fuse. Timing was never precise with the gunpowder fuse, and even the clockwork type left much to be desired. The new “proximity fuse” used a miniature radar to explode the shell when it was a fixed distance from the target. No longer would air bursts be too high to be effective or delayed so long the shell buried itself in the ground before exploding. The new fuse made artillery an even more potent antiaircraft and anti-personnel weapon. In World War II about two thirds of the casualties among soldiers were caused by artillery.
Chapter 20
The Spinning Ball: The Minie Rifle
General Lee’s troops had been fighting here for three days. At around 3 p.m., July 3, 1863, the final stroke was about to begin. The three Confederate brigades of Pickett’s division, joined by six more from Hill’s corps — 15,000 to 17,500 men — dressed ranks in a line 1,000 yards long and marched, rifles on their shoulders, toward the Union positions on Cemetery Ridge about a half-mile away.
Regimental battle flags fluttered in the breeze, as the troops marched in time with their drums. Robert E. Lee watched the steady lines admiringly, confident that his “invincible” troops would pierce the Union center and end this dreadful war.
A few minutes later, the steady lines, most of the regimental colors and all of the drums were gone. In their place was a panicked mob of about 7,000 men.
Pickett’s division, which had led the charge, had lost two thirds of its men.
Histories give much of the credit to the destruction of Pickett’s Charge to the Union artillery, which had held its fire to save ammunition during the artillery duel that preceded the charge. But a much more potent force was the weapon in the hands of the common infantry soldier: the minie rifle. Because of the invention of Captain Charles Claude Etienne Minie of the French Army, rifles could at last be loaded as fast as smoothbores. In all modern armies, the infantry was equipped with rifles, called rifle muskets to show that they were basic military weapons, able to take bayonets, not the specialized rifles of the past, which were basically hunting weapons.
Rifles had been around since the 16th century, but they were so slow to load that the military had ignored them. The lead bullet had to be large enough to force the “lands,” the raised portion of the spiral rifling, to cut into the bullet.
That was necessary to impart a spin to the projectile as it traveled down the barrel. And that meant the slug had to be literally hammered down the barrel.
Later, sportsmen discovered that, if the bullet was wrapped in a greased piece of cloth or leather, the rifling would spin it if the twist were not too rapid. But even using a greased patch, loading was still far slower than loading a smoothbore. Besides, black powder, the only propellant available at the time, left a lot of solid residue in the barrel. After a few shots, this black gunk filled the rifling grooves and made loading practically impossible.
What Captain Minie did was invent a bullet that was considerably smaller than the bore, so there was no
