50 Weapons That Changed Warfare by William Weir

Author:William Weir
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: The Career Press, Inc
Published: 2005-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

Block that Kick!: Quick-Firing Field Pieces

National Archives from Army

Howitzer shelling Germans in 1944 recoils after firing a shot.

It really wasn’t like the movies. In films about the American Revolution or the American Civil War, for example, the muzzle-loading cannons fire, throwing out some smoke, and the gunners, who have been standing beside them and behind them, immediately reload and fire again. Actually, the guns of those days threw out a lot more smoke, because the film-makers don’t use full charges of black powder. And the real gunners didn’t stand behind the cannons and reload as soon as they fired. The recoil of the shot blew the gun back quite a few feet, and standing behind a heavy cannon when it fired was a good way to keep from growing old. The movie cannons don’t recoil, because they really don’t fire shot or shell. Property-owners in the vicinity would take a dim view of cannonballs holing their roofs or shells exploding in their gardens.

Before the cannon could be fired again, it had to be swabbed out with a wet “sponge” (actually a wad of wool on the end of a ramrod) to kill any sparks that might be in the gun. Otherwise, the powder charge might ignite and drive the ramrod through the gunner before he had a chance to load the shell or cannonball. Swabbing took some time. Even more time-consuming was the need to realign the gun. The gun crew had to manhandle the cannon back to its original position and aim it again. Even a comparatively light gun such as the 12-pounder “Napoleon” of the Civil War weighed more than a ton, and aiming the gun usually involved lifting the trail of the heavy carriage to swing the gun around.

By the Civil War, another problem had appeared. Rifles had become so accurate at long range that using artillery at traditional ranges had become almost suicidal. Artillery could no longer be used in the front line with the infantry. The gunners stood in the open, and there was nothing to give them protection from enemy rifle fire. Recoil made it impossible to hide behind the gun.

The latter part of the 19th century was a period of tremendous progress in artillery design. One prime objective was to increase the effective range of cannons. Another was to increase their speed of fire. Achieving both of these objectives meant overcoming recoil.

One way to increase the range was to fire guns at a higher elevation. Most of the cannons until this time were what artillerymen technically call guns — comparatively heavy, long-barreled weapons that have a higher muzzle velocity than the shorter barreled howitzers and mortars and fire their projectiles on a flatter trajectory. If a gun could be elevated to fire on a higher trajectory, its projectiles would go farther. But more of the recoil would be directed down at the carriage. That proved to be too much strain on the old wooden carriages. Gun makers switched to metal carriages, particularly steel carriages.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.