Artillery is not in vain called the god of war, but this capacious definition still had to be earned. Before becoming the decisive argument of the warring parties, artillery has come a long way of development. In this case, we are talking not only about the development of the artillery systems themselves, but also about the development of the used artillery ammunition.
A big step forward in increasing the combat capabilities of artillery was the invention of the British officer Henry Shrapnel. He created a new ammunition, the main purpose of which was to fight the enemy's manpower. It is curious that the inventor himself did not witness the triumph of his brainchild, but he found the beginning of the use of new ammunition in combat conditions.
Henry Shrapnel became the creator of the projectile that brought artillery to a new level of power. Thanks to shrapnel, artillery was able to effectively fight infantry and cavalry located in open areas and at a considerable distance from the guns. Shrapnel became death of steel over the battlefield, striking troops in marching columns, at the moments of rebuilding and preparing for an attack, at halts. At the same time, one of the main advantages was the range of use of ammunition, which buckshot could not provide.
Henry Shrapnel
Henry Shrapnel, whom descendants began to call "the killer of infantry and cavalry", began to create a new artillery ammunition at the end of the 19th century. The idea of an officer in the British army was to combine in a new weapon - two types of already known shells - a bomb and a buckshot. The first ammunition was a hollow core filled with gunpowder and equipped with an ignition tube. The second one was a set of metal striking elements that were placed in a bag, or at the later stages of development in a cardboard, cylindrical metal package. Shrapnel's idea was to combine the lethality of these two ammunition, from the bomb he wanted to borrow the radius of destruction and the power of the explosion, and from the buckshot the lethal effect of defeating openly located enemy infantry and cavalry.
The birthplace of shrapnel can be called Gibraltar, where the lieutenant of the British Royal Artillery, Henry Shrapnel, was appointed in 1787. Here the inventor not only served, but also seriously studied the experience of the Great Siege of Gibraltar (1779-1783), mainly the use of artillery by the opposing sides. Six months after arriving at the fortress, the lieutenant showed his brainchild to the commander of the British garrison. The date of the first experiment using shrapnel is December 21, 1787. As a weapon, an 8-inch mortar was used, which was loaded with a hollow core, inside which was placed about 200 musket bullets and the gunpowder necessary for an explosion. They were shooting from the fortress towards the sea from a hill about 180 meters above the water level. The experiment was considered successful, the new ammunition exploded about half a second before meeting the water surface, the water literally boiled from being hit by hundreds of bullets. The officers present, including Major General O'Hara, were well impressed by the tests, but the Gibraltar garrison commander did not dare to take the implementation of the project under his personal patronage.
Shrapnel's card grenade
As a result, in 1795, Henry Shrapnel returned to the British Isles with ideas, the results of tests, but without the ammunition itself and the prospects for its production. Already in the rank of captain, he did not abandon his idea and took up the "favorite business of inventors" - active correspondence with all kinds of officials. Continuing to improve the new ammunition, Henry Shrapnel prepared several reports to the Artillery Council Commission. Here his papers lay motionless for several years, after which the inventor received a refusal to support the work. However, Shrapnel was not going to surrender and literally bombarded the commission with his messages and proposals, after all, the artillery officer knew a lot about conducting a good artillery preparation. As a result, in June 1803, the bureaucratic British monster fell under the attacks of a persistent officer, and a positive response was received on his messages. Despite the fact that at that time the problem with the premature detonation of the ammunition was not fully resolved, the results of the tests carried out in England were recognized as successful and encouraging. The new artillery shell was included in the approved list of ammunition for the British field forces, and Henry Shrapnel himself advanced in service on November 1, 1803, receiving the rank of major of artillery.
The grape-grenade proposed by officer Henry Shrapnel was made in the form of a solid hollow sphere, inside which was a charge of gunpowder, as well as a bullet. The main feature of the grenade proposed by the inventor was a hole in the body, into which the ignition tube was placed. The ignition tube was made of wood and contained a certain amount of gunpowder. This tube served as both a moderator and a fuse. When fired from a gun, while still in the bore, gunpowder ignited in the ignition tube. Gradually, while the projectile flew to its target, the gunpowder burned out, as soon as it burned out all, the fire approached the powder charge, which was located in the hollow body of the grenade itself, which led to the explosion of the projectile. The effect of such an explosion is easy to imagine, it led to the destruction of the body of the grenade, which in the form of fragments, together with bullets, flew to the sides, hitting the enemy's infantry and cavalry. A feature of the new projectile was that the length of the ignition tube could be adjusted by the gunners themselves even before the shot. Thanks to this solution, it was possible, with an acceptable level of accuracy at that time, to achieve a grenade explosion at the desired time and in the desired place.
Attack of a brigade of light cavalry under fire of Russian artillery
The brainchild of Henry Shrapnel was first tested in real combat conditions on April 30, 1804. The debut of the new shell fell on the attack on Fort New Amsterdam, located on the territory of Dutch Guiana (Suriname). Major William Wilson, who led the British artillery in that battle, later wrote that the effect of the new shrapnel shells was amazing. The garrison of New Amsterdam decided to surrender after the second volley, the Dutch were amazed that they were suffering losses from being hit by musket bullets at such a great distance from the enemy. It should be noted here that smooth-bore guns of that era could effectively shoot buckshot at a range of 300-400 meters, while the nuclei flew at a distance of up to 1200 meters, the same was true for smooth-bore guns, the firing range of which was limited to 300 meters. In the same 1804, Shrapnel was promoted to lieutenant colonel, later this artillery officer and inventor successfully rose to the rank of general and even received a salary from the British government in the amount of 1,200 pounds per year (a very serious amount of money at that time), which also testifies on the recognition of his merits. And shrapnel became more widespread. In January 1806, new ammunition brought death and horror to the opponents of the British in southern Africa, where the empire, over which the sun never set, regained control over the Cape Colony, after a new shell was used in India, and in July 1806 in the battle of Maida … The new artillery ammunition quickly took its place in the sun and every year it was increasingly used in battles around the world.
A primordially British invention over time became widespread in the armies of all countries. One of the examples of the successful use of shrapnel is the famous "light cavalry attack" during the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Best of all, a witness to the battle, General of the French army Pierre Bosquet, described it in his time: "This is great, but this is not war: this is madness." One can only agree with the French general, the attack of the English brigade of light cavalry, commanded by Lord Cardigan, went down in history. Poems, paintings, and then films were dedicated to this event. The attack itself near Balaklava, under fire from Russian artillery, which used shrapnel, and riflemen located on the heights dominating the terrain, cost the British the loss of about half of the brigade's personnel and even more horses.
Diaphragm Shrapnel Projectile
It is worth noting that it was the Russian artillerymen who made their significant contribution to the improvement of the ammunition. The Russian Empire found its own Henry Shrapnel, his place was taken by the Russian scientist-artilleryman Vladimir Nikolaevich Shklarevich. After rifled guns had just begun to appear in the armies of the world, Vladimir Shklarevich introduced a new type of projectile - diaphragm shrapnel with a central tube and bottom chamber, this happened in 1871. The presented ammunition looked like a cylindrical body, with a diaphragm (cardboard partition), it was divided into two compartments. An explosive charge was placed in the bottom compartment of Shklarevich's projectile. In another compartment, ball-shaped bullets were placed. A central tube ran along the axis of the projectile, which was filled with a pyrotechnic composition. A head with a capsule was placed on the front of the projectile. After a shot from the gun, the capsule exploded and the slowly burning pyrotechnic composition in the longitudinal tube ignited. In flight, the fire passed through the tube and reached the powder charge in the bottom compartment, which led to the explosion of the projectile. The resulting explosion pushed the diaphragm forward in the course of the projectile's flight, as well as the bullets behind it, which flew out of the projectile. The new scheme, proposed by a Russian engineer, made it possible to use ammunition in modern rifled artillery. The new shell had its own significant plus. Now, when a projectile was detonated, the bullets did not scatter evenly in all directions, as originally happened when a spherical grenade of the Shrapnel design was detonated, but directed along the axis of flight of an artillery projectile with a deviation to the side from it. This solution increased the combat effectiveness of artillery fire when firing shrapnel.
The presented design also had a significant disadvantage, but it was quickly eliminated. The first projectile of Shklarevich provided for firing only at a predetermined distance. The deficiency was eliminated already in 1873, when a tube for remote detonation of a new ammunition with a rotary ring was created. The main difference was that now, from the capsule to the explosive charge, the fire followed a path consisting of three parts. One part, as before, was the central tube, and the two remaining sections were channels with the same pyrotechnic composition, but located in the rotating rings. By turning these rings, the gunners could change the amount of pyrotechnic composition, ensuring the detonation of shrapnel at the distance required during the battle. At the same time, two terms appeared in the colloquial speech of artillery crews: the projectile was placed "on shrapnel" if it was necessary for it to explode at a great distance from the gun and "on buckshot" if the remote tube was adjusted for the minimum burning time. The third option for the use of such projectiles was the "on impact" position, when the path from the capsule to the explosive charge was completely blocked. In this position, the projectile exploded only at the moment of meeting an obstacle.
The use of shrapnel shells reached its peak by the beginning of the First World War. According to experts, for field and mountain artillery of 76 mm caliber, such shells constituted the vast majority of ammunition. At the same time, shrapnel was quite actively used by large-caliber artillery systems. For example, a 76-mm projectile contained about 260 bullets, and a 107-mm one already had about 600. In the event of a successful rupture, such a lethal swarm of lead could cover an area of 20-30 meters wide and up to 150-200 meters deep - almost a third hectare. With a successful break, only one shrapnel could cover a section of a large road along which a company of 150-200 people was moving in a convoy along with its machine-gun gigs.
One of the most effective episodes of the use of shrapnel shells occurred at the beginning of the First World War. On August 7, 1914, Captain Lombal, the commander of the 6th battery of the 42nd regiment of the French army, during the battle that began, in time managed to find German troops at a distance of five kilometers from the location of their guns, which had emerged from the forest. At the concentration of troops, fire was opened with shrapnel shells from 75-mm guns, 4 guns of his battery fired a total of 16 shots. The result of the shelling, which caught the enemy at the time of perestroika from marching to battle formations, was disastrous for the Germans. As a result of the artillery strike, the 21st Prussian Dragoon Regiment lost only about 700 people killed and about the same number of trained horses, after such a blow the regiment ceased to be a combat unit.
Fight during the First World War
But by the middle of the First World War, when the sides switched to positional actions and the massive use of artillery, and the quality of the officers of the belligerent sides fell, the disadvantages of shrapnel began to appear. Among the main disadvantages were:
- a small lethal effect of spherical shrapnel bullets (usually low-grade enough), they could be stopped by any obstacle;
- powerlessness against targets hiding in trenches, trenches (with a flat trajectory of firing), dugouts and caponiers (for any trajectory);
- low effectiveness of long-range firing when using poorly trained officers, especially reservists;
- a small destructive effect against the material part of the enemy, even openly located.
- the great complexity and high cost of such ammunition.
For these reasons, even during the First World War, shrapnel was gradually replaced by a fragmentation grenade with an instant fuse, which did not have the listed disadvantages and, moreover, had a great psychological effect on enemy soldiers. Gradually, the number of shrapnel in the troops decreased, but even during the Second World War, such ammunition was used quite massively, as the search engines working on the battlefield can tell you about. And the very use of shrapnel shells has found its reflection in fiction, for example, the famous story "Volokolamsk Highway". In the second half of the 20th century, the shrapnel shell, which was a real thunderstorm for the infantry for more than a century, practically ceased to be used, but the very ideas on which this weapon was based, albeit in a modified version, continue to be used today at a new level of development of science and technology.
