50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  That led to double-firing — the gunner placed the shell in the gun with fuse facing the muzzle. He then lit the fuse and, immediately after, applied fire to the gun’s touch-hole. This could only be done with short-barreled guns. 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

  Four Minie rifles, all with percussion locks, and a smoothbore flintlock.

  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 Minié 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 h
ad 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 Minié did was invent a bullet that was considerably smaller than the bore, so there was no trouble loading it, but that when the charge was fired, expanded into the rifling grooves and spun as it left the muzzle. Minié’s first bullet had an iron cup inserted into the hollow base of the conical lead bullet. When the powder charge exploded, it drove the cup into the bullet, which forced the sides of the bullet into the grooves. Later ordnance experts discovered that the iron cup was not necessary: the explosion alone was enough to expand the base of the bullet. Because the Minié bullet was longer than a round ball, it was also heavier. That meant it had greater “sectional density,” which resisted retardation by the atmosphere and gave it greater penetration.

  The close fit of bullet to the bore greatly increased accuracy. The bullet of a smoothbore, being smaller than the bore, literally bounced around inside the barrel as it traveled through the gun. And, of course, the spin imparted gyroscopic stability and prevented unequal air resistance on the front of the bullet.

  A British officer in the Revolutionary War, Major George Hanger, said, “A soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him.” Hanger also said that only if a musket were perfectly bored, as few of them were, would a soldier be likely to be hit at 80 yards.

  The rifled musket would hit man-sized targets at 800 yards.

  The American Civil War was a good — and gory — example of how generals fight the previous war and what happens when they do. Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg would have seemed quite familiar to his fellow Virginian, George Washington.

  Pickett’s troops lined up, dressed ranks, shouldered their rifles, and marched up to the enemy. But where soldiers in the 18th century might wait to see the whites of the enemies’ eyes, the Yankees began picking off Pickett’s men almost as soon as they began to march.

  In the 1860 census, the population of the United States was 31,443,321. In the Civil War, there were 364,512 Union deaths and 133,821 Confederate deaths — although Confedrate figures are almost certainly incomplete. Even with the grossly inadequate Confederate figures, that 498,333 death toll amounts to 1.6 percent of the entire population. In World War II, U.S. forces suffered 407, 316 deaths; the U.S. population was 132,164,569 in the 1940 census. The American Civil War remains in both proportionate and absolute term the bloodiest war in our history.

  That was the result of the universal use of rifled weapons and smoothbore tactics.

  Besides the slaughter of infantry, the Minié bullet — “minnie ball” to the troops — also meant the end of the traditional cavalry charge. A man on horseback makes a big target, and he can seldom lie down or take advantage of cover provided by the terrain. After a few bloody lessons, the generals adapted cavalry tactics to the new conditions more quickly than they changed infantry tactics. Most of the cavalry fighting in the Civil War was done by dismounted troopers. Cavalry were used mostly as mounted infantry and some mounted infantry outfits, like Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade,” were used as cavalry.

  Towards the end of the Civil War, American infantry occasionally modified the traditional charge by increasing the use of skirmishers and advancing by rushes. On the defensive, they used trenches and other field fortifications to an extent unseen until World War I. It took a long time for the lessons to really sink in, though, especially in Europe. In South Africa, the British had to relearn the lessons in 1881 and in 1899 when faced with improved rifles (see Chapter 24). And in World War I, there were still cavalry units on the Western Front preparing to exploit the breakthroughs that never came.

  Chapter 21

  Sailing Into the Wind: The Steam Powered Warships

  National Archives

  U.S. steam frigate Pensacola in 1861.

  For thousands of years, most mariners had dreamed of being able to take a large cargo anywhere they wanted without worrying about wind and currents.

  High-ranking British naval officers in the 19th century were the exception. We’ll come to that in a moment.

  Ships propelled by oars could, of course, proceed into the wind (although progress was a lot slower than if there were no wind), but the large number of rowers precluded carrying much cargo and ensured that such ships as the Greek triremes (a galley with three banks of rowers) could not go far from land. Primitive sails like those of the classical galleys or the Arab dhows could take a vessel a long distance if the wind were favorable, but not if it were in the wrong direction. That’s why a dhow plying the Indian Ocean trade took a year to make a round trip. Half of the year the winds blew to the West; the other half, to the East. Scandinavian seamen learned to manipulate a square sail to allow some progress against the wind, as did Arab sailors using the lateen sail. But even after Europeans developed the full-rigged ship, progress could be slow unless the weather cooperated. If there was no wind, progress was nil.

  The steam engine changed sailing radically, and that transformed warfare at sea. But the steam engine would not have been possible without a previous advance in the art of war. In the 18th century, a Swiss gunfounder named Jean Maritz, improved the rough, sometimes-crooked bores of cannons by inventing a machine for boring out the barrel after the gun was cast solid, instead of incorporating the bore in the casting. A few years later, in 1774, a British engineer named John Wilkinson improved the machine. Wilkinson’s device created an extremely smooth and precise hole. With a machine like that, the pioneers of steam power were able to build cylinders with tight-fitting, efficient pistons.

  Such cylinder and piston arrangements are essential to early steam engines as well as modern internal combustion engines.

  The first steam engines worked by filling a cylinder with steam, then con-densing it to water. The vacuum created drew the piston into the cylinder. These “atmospheric” engines were useful for pumping out mines and other tasks where their weight was not important. They were far too heavy and bulky to use aboard ships, however. James Watts’s improved steam engine drove the piston in the opposite direction — expanding steam, rather than atmospheric pressure on a vacuum was the driving force. Such engines could be made small enough to power a ship. Their earliest use was to turn a pair of huge side wheels.

  Steam gave navies a great strategic advantage. Steam warships no longer depended on weather and could cross the oceans much faster than sailing ships.

  “Seizing the weather gauge” (maneuvering into the best location to take advantage of the wind) had long been a favorite tactic of British seamen. It no longer gave any advantage. For that reason, Britain, although it was the home of the first steam engines and it utterly depended on its navy for its primacy in world affairs, tried to retard the development of steam-powered ships. British naval personnel were the most skilled in the world; British shipyards devoted to building sailing men-of-war were the biggest in the world; British technology in preserv-ing food for long journeys, manufacturing the heavy, short-range cannons, called carronades, and everything else needed for wooden, sail-driven warships, led the world. If the world’s navies went to steam, all of that would be worthless.

  In 1828, the British admiralty expressed their views on steam-powered warships:r />
  Their lordships feel it is their bounden duty to discourage to the utmost of their ability the employment of steam vessels, as they consider that the introduction of steam is calculated to strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire.

  In spite of the size of the British Navy, this policy bore more than a little resemblance to the actions of an earlier British authority figure: King Canute, who tried to tell the tide to reverse itself. The American, Robert Fulton, had built a working steam ship as early as 1807. In 1837, the paddle wheel steamer Sirius crossed the Atlantic in 18 days — breathtaking speed in an era when Atlantic crossings were measured in months.

  Although the new method of propulsion had manifest advantages, the world’s navies did not immediately board the steamship. The French started building steam warships in the 1840s, but they did so on a small scale. There were a number of reasons for this slow progress. There was the natural conservatism of sailors and military men, and that the British, owners of the world’s most powerful navy, professed to see little value in the new technology. And, most important, there was the fact that the early steamships could not survive a battle with sailing warships of comparable size. The huge paddle wheels on each side of the vessel were vulnerable to gunfire, and they made it impossible for the ship to carry enough cannons along the side to match the broadsides of a sailing ship. Another drawback was that steamships could not stay at sea nearly indefinitely, as the sailing ships could. They had to be near a supply of coal.

  The paddle wheel was the first drawback eliminated. In its place, ship builders used the screw propeller. The new device had to rotate much faster than a paddle wheel, which meant both major changes in gearing and much more efficient engines. John Ericsson, a Swedish engineer, invented both a screw propeller that worked and an engine to drive it. He sold the designs to the U.S.