50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  Uluch Ali, the commander of the Turkish left, had been trying unsuccessfully to flank Andrea Doria. He suddenly changed course and darted through the gap between the Christian center and right. He managed to get behind Don Juan’s formation, but the Spanish admiral cut loose the prizes he had been towing and turned toward Uluch Ali’s unit. Caught between Don Juan and the Christian reserve, Uluch Ali fled to the nearest Turkish harbor. Some of his ships made it.

  Lepanto was the greatest defeat the Turks had ever suffered in the Mediterranean. Selim the Sot built a new fleet, but his ships were built of green wood and manned by greener sailors. From then on the Turkish Navy studiously sought to avoid battle. The Turks would still threaten Christendom, but after Lepanto, they were a greatly diminishing threat. That’s one reason Lepanto is a notable battle.

  The other reason is that it was the last great battle between galleys. Don Juan’s four-gun galleys were not the wave of the future; his big, clumsy, heavily gunned galleasses were. That had been demonstrated more than 60 years earlier when a handful of Portuguese sailing ships wiped out 200 Turkish and Egyptian galleys off the Indian port of Diu. (See Chapter 13, The Sailing Man of War.) After Lepanto, the galley would never again play an important part in naval warfare, but it had had a long and honorable career.

  As did the spear and the bow, the origins of the galley are lost in the mists of prehistory. The first boats were probably dugout canoes, propelled by paddles.

  They were followed by lighter boats with a covering of leather or bark stretched over a framework of wood. Someone discovered that rowing provided more powerful propulsion than paddling, and, probably about the same time, someone learned that fixing a sail to the boat made rowing unnecessary if the wind was right. From there, developing the galley was merely a matter of making a bigger row-or-sail boat with wooden sides.

  One of the earliest accounts of a galley and its crew is the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, who sailed from Greece to Colchis on the Black Sea in search of the Golden Fleece. According to the legend, the expedition took place a generation before the Trojan War. To see if Jason’s voyage was even possible, Tim Severin, the adventurer who crossed the North Atlantic in a skin boat to retrace the legendary voyage of St. Brendan, the Irish monk who supposedly reached America in the Dark Ages, built a replica of Jason’s galley, Argo. Severin consulted experts on ancient Greek shipping and had a galley built according to the ship-building methods of Jason’s time. The craft was 52 feet long and seated 20 rowers. It took Severin and his crew from Greece to the site of ancient Colchis. The crew was even able to row against a head wind added to the ferocious currents of the Bosporus that have defeated many modern boats. All the modern Argonauts agreed, however, that sailing on that sort of ancient galley was no holiday.

  As time went on, ancient ship builders improved their designs. The boat had to be light, so it could be rowed swiftly, but it had to be strong enough to be seaworthy. It had to be fairly low so the rowers could use their oars at the optimum angle. Before long, ship builders were using mathematical formulae.

  Within reason, the longer the ship, the faster it would be, but the ship should not be longer than 10 times its beam or it would be too fragile to take to sea. In his Greek and Roman Naval Warfare, Admiral W.L. Rodgers explains the many calculations the ancient ship builders had to make. Ships got bigger and got two or three rows of oars. They got still bigger and had two or three men on each oar, sometimes as many as five men on each oar. According to Rodgers, a small Greek trireme of the Peloponnesian War period would carry about 18 soldiers for boarding, about 162 rowers, and 20 more as officers, row masters, and seamen. All the rowers were free men (not slaves, as they were during renaissance times), and all had weapons and took part in any melee when their ship was boarded. The galley would be 105 feet long, displace 69 tons, and be capable of 7.8 knots (almost 9 mph) at top speed.

  Galleys were extremely maneuverable. With the rowers on one side pulling normally and those on the other side backing water, the galley could almost swivel on the spot. Oars were arranged so the rowers could step over them and back up instantly. Rapid maneuvering was essential, because a galley captain aimed to ram the side of an enemy vessel while avoiding being rammed himself.

  Another favorite tactic in galley fighting was to brush close to an enemy’s side, pulling your oars out of the way at the last minute. The intention was to catch the enemy’s oars still in rowing position and break them off. Galley crews threw fire pots on enemy ships to burn them, tossed jars of soft soap to make enemy decks slippery, and sometimes threw jars of poisonous snakes to distract enemy crews.

  In Hellenistic and Roman times, galleys, which had grown quite large, were often equipped with catapults to hurl such missiles. And in the 7th century, the Eastern Romans came up with the ultimate weapon in galley warfare: Greek fire. That’s worth a separate chapter (see Chapter 8).

  Chapter 5

  To Foil All Weapons: Body Armor

  Frankish warrior of the 10th century.

  According to George Cameron Stone in his classic A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in All Countries and at All Times, “Armor has been worn by all nations with any pretensions to civilization… ” It has also been worn by many nations with few pretensions to civilization. Armor has been made of many materials besides metal. Among the types illustrated in Stone’s book are Aleut armor composed of Chinese coins sewn on a leather vest; the wood, steel, and leather armor of the Koryak tribe of western Siberia; the leather and wood armor of the Chukchi people of eastern Siberia; the armor of the Lolo barbarians of southeastern China; and the armor of the Gilbert Islanders of the South Pacific, consisting of coconut fibers and fish skin. Corselets made of many layers of linen have been worn in many places, including ancient Greece. Leather armor has also been popular. One of the earliest depictions of armor is on the “Royal Standard of Ur,” a box covered with figures carved from shell and limestone, found in the royal cemetery of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur. It shows a phalanx of warriors wearing copper helmets and long leather cloaks covered with metal disks.

  Armor, a defensive weapon, varies with the weapons it is intended to defend against. The thick layers of cord worn by the Gilbert Islanders would not have stopped a steel lance head, but they did deaden the impact of sling stones, one of the islanders’ principle offensive weapons. The Gilbert Islanders specialized in mobile missile warfare. They’d run up to stone-throwing range, fire their sling stones, run away, and attack again. To guard against enemy sling stones when they were retreating, their armor had a tall square piece behind the head, rising well above a fish skin helmet. The ancient Celts invented mail — armor composed of thousands of interlocking rings. Mail was more flexible than most armors, and it protected the wearer very well against sword cuts. It was less protective against thrusts with a sharply pointed sword, but Celtic warriors usually relied on the edge of the sword, rather than the point. Roman soldiers were taught to use the points of their short swords; “duas uncias in puncto mortalis est” (“two inches in the right place is fatal”) was a motto of the legionaries. That was one of the reasons the Romans conquered the Gauls. The barbarian tribes that overran the Roman Empire, however, were slashers, so mail became the uniform of European knights. The knights usually wore their mail over a padded garment called an aketon to soften the impact of blows. A stroke that could not penetrate the mail could still break a bone. During the crusades, Christian soldiers sometimes wore a jacket of felt over their armor. It must have been stifling in sunny Palestine, but its wearers thought its advantages outweighed its discomfort. Beha ed-Din Ibn Shedad, one of Saladin’s officers, wrote: “I have seen soldiers with up to 21 arrows stuck in their bodies marching no less easily for that.”

  Slashing with the sword is a more instinctive action than thrusting, so mail became popular far from its Celtic homeland. The Arabs, Persians, and Indians adopted it early, but some of them also added small metal plates to the mai
l that would stop a sword or spear thrust. Warriors of such West African kingdoms as Bornu, Mali, and Songhai also wore mail. Mail-wearers in such hot places as Africa and Arabia covered their armor with cloth robes to keep the sun off the metal and keep from turning a suit of armor into an oven capable of literally burning flesh. European warriors who went on crusade adopted the surcoat from their enemies and brought it back to Europe. There, European knights found the surcoat ideal for displaying their heraldic arms.

  The ancient Greeks favored bronze armor because bronze could be melted and cast in large pieces. No European furnaces at that time were hot enough to melt iron. Iron was extracted from the ore by a laborious process of heating and beating, and the smith was left with small pieces that had to be welded together to make a piece as large as a sword blade. So for centuries, iron armor was composed of small pieces. Mail, made of rings formed from bits of iron wire, was one example. Scale armor (overlapping bits of metal fastened to fabric or leather and arranged like the scales of a fish) was another. And yet another example was lamellar armor (bits of metal fastened to each other with cords or wires). Japanese armor is probably the type of lamellar armor most familiar to Americans, but the type was also extremely popular in Persia, Central Asia, and India. The Romans used a wide variety of armor, including solid breast plates and back plates of bronze, mail, scale, and a type with overlapping strips of iron called the lorica segmentata. In the later Middle Ages, when the crossbow began to make life dangerous for mail-wearers, European knights began to cover their mail with a “coat of plates.” This was a vest of strong fabric with small, rectangular iron plates riveted to the inside of it. The plates were usually lined with another layer of fabric. A century or two later, a similar garment was used by infantrymen, usually as their sole armor except for the helmet. It was called

  “brigandine.” People at that time, during the Hundred Years War with its rapa-cious mercenary bands, saw little difference between infantrymen and brigands.

  European smiths became more and more skilled in metal working and were able to produce large pieces of mild steel by the 14th century. That was fortunate for the knights, because they were just beginning to face three new missile weapons: the longbow, the crossbow with a steel bow that had a draw weight of more than a 1,000 pounds, and the handgun. Plate armor could be made proof against these weapons. In fact, the word proof comes from the practice of firing a crossbow or a gun at a finished breast plate. If the shot did not penetrate, it proved that the armor was safe. But guns got more powerful. Armor got heavier, but it finally got so heavy it interfered with fighting. It began to disappear. Leg armor was replaced by heavy “jack boots,” thick leather boots that covered the thighs, and by the 17th century much of the upper body armor was replaced by a “buff coat,” a coat of heavy buffalo leather that was worn under a steel corselet. Sometimes it was worn instead of the corselet.

  All of the preceding refers to armor that was worn like clothing. But for most of the same period, the most effective piece of armor was not worn but carried: the shield. At close range, the arrow from a longbow will penetrate a breast plate of the type worn in the 15th century. It may not pass all the way through, but if only half of it got through, half of a 28-inch arrow is more than enough to kill the man wearing the breastplate. If the arrow hits a shield and has the same effect, it might not even reach the body of the shield-holder. Even if it did, after passing through the shield, it wouldn’t have enough power to penetrate any kind of armor.

  The shield was so important in classical Greece that the heavy infantryman, the hoplite, took his name from the word for shield, hoplon. For a hoplite to lose his shield was the ultimate disgrace. European knights carried shields until plate armor was developed so heavy it could resist a lance thrust by itself. The Saxon “shield wall” at Hastings turned back the Norman knights for most of the day. Archers and crossbowmen could not hang shields on their arms for obvious reasons, but they had substitutes. Some crossbowmen carried large shields on their backs. When loading their weapons, they turned their backs to the enemy. That was a less than satisfactory alternative, because a shield on the back was too close to the body. A better substitute was the pavises, a large shield propped up on the ground. Both archers and crossbowmen used pavises.

  Shields were such such effective pieces of equipment that they were the only armor that has been used by many nations. The Highlanders of Scotland, the Zulus of South Africa, and the Plains Indians of North America, as well as hundreds of peoples between them, used no armor but the shield. The Spanish infantry swordsmen of the 16th century had shields that were proof against pistol shots.

  From the late Middle Ages into the early modern period, a type of shield was frequently worn by civilians. In an era when every male with pretensions to manhood wore a sword, the more aggressive types hung small round shields on the hilts of their swords. This type of shield, called a buckler, was held in the left hand of a right-handed swordsman and used to parry an opponent’s sword strokes. People wearing a buckler on their swords were presumed to be looking for a fight and called “swashbucklers.”

  Armor did not entirely disappear with the advent of gunpowder. Some French cavalrymen were still wearing breastplate and metal helmets in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and British horsemen of the same period and later wore mail epaulets. In the American Civil War, many soldiers privately purchased “bullet-proof” steel vests to wear under their uniforms. Some of these actually worked. In the 1880s, Wyatt Earp wore one and it was said to have saved his life on at least one occasion.

  World War I saw a revival of officially issued armor. The most widespread item was the steel helmet, which was designed to protect soldiers in the trenches from overhead shrapnel bursts. The Germans issued special armor to many of their machine gunners and some snipers. It consisted of a steel corselet and a helmet that covered the entire head except the eyes.

  In World War II, the crews of bombers often wore “flak vests” as protection from the fragments of bursting anti-aircraft shells. Infantry were given armor vests made of nylon in the later stages of the Korean War. These vests would stop shell fragments and bullets from a .45 caliber pistol, but not bullets from any service rifle. They continued to be used in the Vietnam War. Body armor has continued to improve. In the Iraq War, combat soldiers have helmets of Kevlar, a synthetic material that is lighter and stronger than steel, and armor vests of the same material. The Kevlar “soft armor” vests have pockets that contain “hard armor” plates of metal, ceramic, or plastic, which can resist penetration by most rifle bullets. The most generally-used forms of the new armor will stop bullets from the 7.62 × 39 caliber Kalashnikov rifles. Some troops, particularly those on riot control, wear Kevlar greaves.

  The modern infantryman is as thoroughly armored as a 17th-century pikeman.

  Chapter 6

  Horses Change the Battlefield: The Chariot

  Assyrian bow, arrow, and quivers. With weapons like this, the charioteers of Assyria conquered most of the ancient Near East.

  An army of enemies was approaching Egypt and they were coming from the northeast, not the south, the only direction from which enemies had come before. Nubians had occasionally marched north, along the Great River, but no large armies had ever come from either the east or the west. The barren, water-less deserts that stretched on either side of the Nile Valley had a way of discouraging invaders. The Pharaoh called up all the men of Lower Egypt to meet the invaders. They appeared with their copper axes, copper-headed spears, stone maces, and simple self-bows.

  Egyptian weaponry was nowhere near as advanced as that of the people of Mesopotamia, where warfare was almost constant. The deserts had protected the Egyptians from all but occasional clashes with the Nubians, the black inhabitants of the much-less-populous kingdom on the Upper Nile. And if the Egyptians’ military equipment and organization was primitive compared to that of the peoples in the valley of the Two Rivers, it was light-years behind what they faced now.


  The enemy, called the Hyksos, which has been variously translated as “Lords of the Uplands” or “Shepherd Kings,” had sharp bronze weapons, including swords, bronze scale armor, and powerful composite bows. (See Chapter 2.) They also had something utterly unknown to the Egyptians: horse-drawn chariots.

  Egyptian tradition says the Hyksos took Lower Egypt without a fight. That doesn’t mean they slowly infiltrated. Archaeological evidence shows that they suddenly took possession of the Delta and all of Lower Egypt after thoroughly sacking it. “Without a fight” means that there was no toe-to-toe infantry slugging match — what the Egyptians meant by “fight.”

  On their light, fast chariots, the Hyksos literally rode circles around their enemies and shot them down. There were two men to a chariot: a driver and an archer. The Hyksos powerful composite bow easily outranged the bows of the Egyptians. The mobile Hyksos could concentrate on any part of the Egyptian line they chose and shoot down the unarmored Egyptian infantry with impu-nity. When at last the Egyptians broke and fled, the Hyksos charioteers rode them down, shooting arrows and slashing with their curved bronze swords. They stayed in the Delta and Lower Egypt for a century. They didn’t try to conquer Upper Egypt, where the valley is narrow — not ideal chariot country — and most transportation was by boat.

  Staying proved to be a mistake. The southern Egyptians learned to make composite bows and bronze weapons and armor. Most important, they learned to make and use chariots. They drove the Hyksos out of Egypt and ended Egypt’s centuries-old isolation. The Egyptians became conquerors and pursued the Hyksos into their homeland.

  The Hyksos homeland is believed to be the Arabian Desert, south and east of the cities of Syria. Not much is known about the Hyksos. Some of their rulers had Semitic names like Jacob-her; others had names that cannot be identified ethnically. Their invasion, in about 1750 B.C., was at the southwestern end of a human avalanche that began on the steppes of what is now southern Russia and was sparked by the invention of the light, horse-drawn chariot.