50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  There were some drawbacks to these “plug bayonets.” If someone put a plug bayonet in the muzzle of a loaded musket and then fired it, the gun might blow up. This sort of accident seems to have been much more 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

  Two grenades. At top is a German”potato masher” hand grenade used in both World Wars. Below it is a rifle grenade fitted to a U.S. M 1 carbine.

  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 menti
on 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 arms, and they had to be able to lug sacks of grenades, which weighed between a 1 1/2-3 punds each. These “grenadiers” were most impressive-looking on parade, which some rulers such as Frederick William of Prussia seemed to think was an army’s most important function. Grenadiers wore high, brimless hats so the brims wouldn’t interfere with their throwing arms and to make them look even taller. The big, strong grenadiers were essential to the rapid storm tactics the Duke of Marlborough devised. They threw grenades to demoralize the enemy, then finished him off with musket and bayonet. Occasionally, though, they couldn’t use their grenades. In 1710, Marlborough sent his grenadiers through neck-deep water to attack a position outside Bouchain. After that immersion, the grenade in the grenadiers’ bags were as useful as so many sacks of stone. The water not only soaked the powder in the grenades, it extinguished the slow match every grenadier carried in a perforated metal case.

  That slow match was one of the reasons the grenade was almost abandoned shortly before the Revolution. It made the grenadiers’ job as dangerous as that of the matchlock musketeer. If a spark fell on a grenade fuse, the grenadier would become a human bomb, wiping out himself and anybody near him. Sometimes a sharp jar would set off a grenade. In addition to that, the weight of a sack of grenades detracted from mobility. So the grenade was largely abandoned. But the grenadiers were not. They looked too good. They became an elite corps, just as paratroopers have in modern times (even though the parachute is obsolescent and mass parachute jumps like those on D-Day in World War II will probably never happen again). Even countries with hardly any airplanes have parachute troops.

  What brought the hand grenade back was trench warfare. The Western Front in World War I was a massive siege — the longest siege line in the history of the world with the most besiegers and defenders (each side had both). In the kind of close-quarters fighting that characterized struggles in the zigzag trenches and dugouts of the Western Front, the hand grenade was sometimes the only weapon that would work. The front-line infantrymen adopted the grenade before the military authorities. They filled old cans with TNT or gun cotton, sometimes with nails taped to them, sometimes with scraps of metal in the can with the explosive. To get more range when throwing the explosive, some soldiers taped their home-made bombs to wooden handles. Later, the German government issued its famous “potato masher” grenade with a wooden handle. Through World War I and later World War II, all nations continued to develop types of grenades.

  There were incendiary grenades and gas grenades, smoke grenades and antitank grenades, offensive grenades and defensive grenades. Defensive grenades were designed to be used from cover: They sprayed the area with metal fragments, covering distance farther than most men could throw. Offensive grenades relied on concussion: they would kill only at a short distance, although at a somewhat longer distance they might temporarily disable an enemy. An attacker in the open could safely throw them. Antitank grenades had some sort of tail — fabric fins, bundles of hemp, or cloth streamers to make them fly point-first.

  They had to strike point-first because they had armor-piercing shaped charges in the nose. One Soviet antitank hand grenade was the RPG 43. “RPG,” obviously, did not stand for “rocket propelled grenade” on this arm-propelled bomb any more than it does on the well-known RPG 7, a Soviet antitank weapon, which uses a recoilless gun to launch a rocket-assisted shell and has become every guerrilla’s favorite hardware. Some incendiary grenades used thermite to create an intensely hot fire. Thermite could burn anything and could not be extinguished by water. Pushed down the barrel of a cannon, the thermite fire would weld the breechblock to the barrel and render the gun useless. Another type of incendiary grenade used white phosphorous, known to World War II and Korean War veterans as Willy Peter. White phosphorous ignites when exposed to air. When the grenade bursts, fragments of burning phosphorous filled the air. Willy Peter could inflict horrible burns on anyone it touched, but its primary purpose was to create a smoke screen.

  The hand grenade was a favorite weapon of Orde Wingate, the maverick British general who invented new tactics in Palestine, Ethiopia, and Burma.

  Wingate favored the grenade for night fighting, when a rifle could not be aimed, because there was no way an enemy could tell from where the weapon had come. In World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, grenades were widely used as the basis for booby traps, as well as for attacking pill boxes and bunkers.

  Some “military experts” have expressed doubt that hand grenades are worth their weight in modern warfare (such as Ray Bonds, author of Advanced Technology Warfare). One wonders if such experts have ever studied war from the vantage point of a front-line infantryman.

  In World War I and later wars, there were frequently situations in which soldiers wished they could throw the grenade a little farther. That led to the rifle grenade. There were several ways of throwing a grenade with a rifle. One way was to place the grenade in a cup on the muzzle of the rifle and fire a blank cartridge. The gas blast armed the grenade and threw it toward the enemy.

  Another way used a long rod attached to the grenade. This was pushed down the barrel of the rifle, then propelled with a blank cartridge. Grenades especially designed to be fire from rifles were then issued. These usually had a hollow tail with fins that fitted over a device called a “grenade launcher,” which was attached to the muzzle of the rifle. Again, a blank cartridge was the propelling force. After World War II, some grenades were made that could be launched with a regular cartridge. These had a steel block in the base of the grenade that stopped the bullet.

  Presently, the United States and other forces use “grenade launchers” that are really separate guns. These use a 40 mm cartridge that has a small grenade instead of a bullet. The earliest models of this type of gun looked like a short, fat single-barrel shotgun, but now the U.S. grenade launchers are minimal guns that fit below the barrel of the standard rifle. NATO and Warsaw Pact countries also had automatic grenade launchers that looked like machine guns on steroids and fired a more powerful 40 mm grenade cartridge.

  Chapter 19

  “Bombs Bursting in Air”: Explosive Shells

  One cannonball and a variety of explosive shells.

  When Francis Scott Key located the flag by “the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air,” he was watching the effects of two weapons which had been developing for centuries and would turn into devices no one in the early 19th century could have imagined. Of the two — the rocket and the artillery shell — the rocket was far older. The Chinese had been using rockets in war before anybody had guns. And as we know, rockets would not only put men on the moon, they would develop into intercontinental engines of destruction.

  The artillery shell, in contrast, was not quite three centuries old. The first recorded use was by the Turks at the siege of Rhodes in 1522. The Turkish bombards hurled huge shells over the walls of the fortress. The shells made a tremendous flash and noise when they exploded, but they weren’t much good for knocking down walls. They could knock down flimsy houses and they could kill by concussion anyone unlucky enough to be near them wh
en they went off. But mostly, they were useful only to terrify the defenders. In the case of Rhodes, though, the defenders were the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist of Jerusalem (the Crusading Knight Hospitalers), a military unit that was among the least susceptible to terror in all history. The Turks eventually took Rhodes after expending rivers of blood, but the explosive shells weren’t much help. There was no indication in those days that the explosive shell would some-day be the most deadly device in land warfare and the supreme weapon at sea.

  The explosive shell developed from the hand grenade. The first shells were hollow metal spheres filled with gunpowder. There was a hole in the ball, and it was covered with a fireproof sack filled with a flammable compound. A hole in the sack, on the other side of the sphere, faced the gun’s powder charge. When the gun went off, it ignited the compound in the sack, which burned around to the hole in the shell, and the shell exploded. Later, artillerymen used wooden or metal tubes filled with a priming compound. They hammered these into the hole in the shell. At first, they loaded the shell with the tube facing the gun’s powder charge. Too often, though, the propelling charge did not merely ignite the shell’s fuse. It drove the fuse into the shell, which then went off inside the gun, destroying the gun and gunners.