Artillery Through the Ages
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Albert Manucy >> Artillery Through the Ages
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8 ARTILLERY
THROUGH THE AGES
A Short Illustrated History of Cannon,
Emphasizing Types Used in America
UNITED STATES
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
Fred A. Seaton, _Secretary_
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
Conrad L. Wirth, _Director_
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents
U. S. Government Printing Office
Washington 25, D. C. -- Price 35 cents
(_Cover_) FRENCH 12-POUNDER FIELD GUN (1700-1750)
ARTILLERY
THROUGH THE AGES
A Short Illustrated History of Cannon,
Emphasizing Types Used in America
_by_
_ALBERT MANUCY_
_Historian
Southeastern National Monuments_
Drawings by Author
Technical Review by Harold L. Peterson
_National Park Service Interpretive Series
History No. 3_
UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
_WASHINGTON: 1949_
(Reprint 1956)
Many of the types of cannon described in this booklet may be seen in
areas of the National Park System throughout the country. Some parks
with especially fine collections are:
CASTILLO DE SAN MARCOS NATIONAL MONUMENT, seventeenth and eighteenth
century field and garrison guns.
CHICKAMAUGA AND CHATTANOOGA NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, Civil War field
and siege guns.
COLONIAL NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK, seventeenth and eighteenth century
field and siege guns, eighteenth century naval guns.
FORT MCHENRY NATIONAL MONUMENT AND HISTORIC SHRINE, early nineteenth
century field guns and Civil War garrison guns.
FORT PULASKI NATIONAL MONUMENT, Civil War garrison guns.
GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, Civil War field guns.
PETERSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, Civil War field and siege guns.
SHILOH NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, Civil War field guns.
VICKSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK, Civil War field and siege guns.
The National Park System is dedicated to conserving the scenic,
scientific, and historic heritage of the United States for the
benefit and enjoyment of its people.
CONTENTS
THE ERA OF ARTILLERY
The Ancient Engines of War
Gunpowder Comes to Europe
The Bombards
Sixteenth Century Cannon
The Seventeenth Century and Gustavus Adolphus
The Eighteenth Century
United States Guns of the Early 1800's
Rifling
The War Between the States
The Change into Modern Artillery
GUNPOWDER
Primers
Modern Use of Black Powder
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF CANNON
The Early Smoothbore Cannon
Smoothbores of the Later Period
Garrison and Ship Guns
Siege Cannon
Field Cannon
Howitzers
Mortars
Petards
PROJECTILES
Solid Shot
Explosive Shells
Fuzes
Scatter Projectiles
Incendiaries and Chemical Projectiles
Fixed Ammunition
Rockets
TOOLS
THE PRACTICE OF GUNNERY
GLOSSARY
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Illustration: "PIERRIERS VULGARLY CALLED PATTEREROS,"
from Francis Grose, Military Antiquities, 1796.]
THE ERA OF ARTILLERY
_Looking at an old-time cannon, most people are sure of just one
thing: the shot came out of the front end. For that reason these
pages are written; people are curious about the fascinating
weapon that so prodigiously and powerfully lengthened the
warrior's arm. And theirs is a justifiable curiosity, because the
gunner and his "art" played a significant role in our history._
THE ANCIENT ENGINES OF WAR
To compare a Roman catapult with a modern trench mortar seems absurd.
Yet the only basic difference is the kind of energy that sends the
projectile on its way.
In the dawn of history, war engines were performing the function of
artillery (which may be loosely defined as a means of hurling missiles
too heavy to be thrown by hand), and with these crude weapons the
basic principles of artillery were laid down. The Scriptures record
the use of ingenious machines on the walls of Jerusalem eight
centuries B.C.--machines that were probably predecessors of the
catapult and ballista, getting power from twisted ropes made of hair,
hide or sinew. The ballista had horizontal arms like a bow. The arms
were set in rope; a cord, fastened to the arms like a bowstring, fired
arrows, darts, and stones. Like a modern field gun, the ballista shot
low and directly toward the enemy.
The catapult was the howitzer, or mortar, of its day and could throw
a hundred-pound stone 600 yards in a high arc to strike the enemy
behind his wall or batter down his defenses. "In the middle of the
ropes a wooden arm rises like a chariot pole," wrote the historian
Marcellinus. "At the top of the arm hangs a sling. When battle is
commenced, a round stone is set in the sling. Four soldiers on each
side of the engine wind the arm down until it is almost level with the
ground. When the arm is set free, it springs up and hurls the stone
forth from its sling." In early times the weapon was called a
"scorpion," for like this dreaded insect it bore its "sting" erect.
[Illustration: Figure 1--BALLISTA. Caesar covered his landing in
Britain with fire from catapults and ballistas.]
The trebuchet was another war machine used extensively during the
Middle Ages. Essentially, it was a seesaw. Weights on the short arm
swung the long throwing arm.
[Illustration: Figure 2--CATAPULT.]
[Illustration: Figure 3--TREBUCHET. A heavy trebuchet could throw a
300-pound stone 300 yards.]
These weapons could be used with telling effect, as the Romans learned
from Archimedes in the siege of Syracuse (214-212 B.C.). As Plutarch
relates, "Archimedes soon began to play his engines upon the Romans
and their ships, and shot stones of such an enormous size and with so
incredible a noise and velocity that nothing could stand before them.
At length the Romans were so terrified that, if they saw but a rope
or a beam projecting over the walls of Syracuse, they cried out that
Archimedes was leveling some machine at them, and turned their backs
and fled."
Long after the introduction of gunpowder, the old engines of war
continued in use. Often they were side by side with cannon.
GUNPOWDER COMES TO EUROPE
Chinese "thunder of the earth" (an effect produced by filling a large
bombshell with a gunpowder mixture) sounded faint reverberations
amongst the philosophers of the western world as early as A.D. 300.
Though the Chinese were first instructed in the scientific casting of
cannon by missionaries during the 1600's, crude cannon seem to have
existed in China during the twelfth century and even earlier.
In Europe, a ninth century Latin manuscript contains a formula for
gunpowder. But the first show of firearms in western Europe may have
been by the Moors, at Saragossa, in A.D. 1118. In later years the
Spaniards turned the new weapon against their Moorish enemies at the
siege of Cordova (1280) and the capture of Gibraltar (1306).
It therefore follows that the Arabian _madfaa_, which in turn had
doubtless descended from an eastern predecessor, was the original
cannon brought to western civilization. This strange weapon seems to
have been a small, mortar-like instrument of wood. Like an egg in an
egg cup, the ball rested on the muzzle end until firing of the charge
tossed it in the general direction of the enemy. Another primitive
cannon, with narrow neck and flared mouth, fired an iron dart. The
shaft of the dart was wrapped with leather to fit tightly into the
neck of the piece. A red-hot bar thrust through a vent ignited the
charge. The range was about 700 yards. The bottle shape of the weapon
perhaps suggested the name _pot de fer_ (iron jug) given early cannon,
and in the course of evolution the narrow neck probably enlarged until
the bottle became a straight tube.
During the Hundred Years' War (1339-1453) cannon came into general
use. Those early pieces were very small, made of iron or cast bronze,
and fired lead or iron balls. They were laid directly on the ground,
with muzzles elevated by mounding up the earth. Being cumbrous and
inefficient, they played little part in battle, but were quite useful
in a siege.
THE BOMBARDS
By the middle 1400's the little popguns that tossed one-or two-pound
pellets had grown into enormous bombards. Dulle Griete, the giant
bombard of Ghent, had a 25-inch caliber and fired a 700-pound granite
ball. It was built in 1382. Edinburgh Castle's famous Mons Meg threw a
19-1/2-inch iron ball some 1,400 yards (a mile is 1,760 yards), or a
stone ball twice that far.
The Scottish kings used Meg between 1455 and 1513 to reduce the
castles of rebellious nobles. A baron's castle was easily knocked to
pieces by the prince who owned, or could borrow, a few pieces of heavy
ordnance. The towering walls of the old-time strongholds slowly gave
way to the earthwork-protected Renaissance fortification, which is
typified in the United States by Castillo de San Marcos, in Castillo
de San Marcos National Monument, St. Augustine, Fla.
Some of the most formidable bombards were those of the Turks, who used
exceptionally large cast-bronze guns at the siege of Constantinople in
1453. One of these monsters weighed 19 tons and hurled a 600-pound
stone seven times a day. It took some 60 oxen and 200 men to move this
piece, and the difficulty of transporting such heavy ordnance greatly
reduced its usefulness. The largest caliber gun on record is the Great
Mortar of Moscow. Built about 1525, it had a bore of 36 inches, was 18
feet long, and fired a stone projectile weighing a ton. But by this
time the big guns were obsolete, although some of the old Turkish
ordnance survived the centuries to defend Constantinople against a
British squadron in 1807. In that defense a great stone cut the
mainmast of the British flagship, and another crushed through the
English ranks to kill or wound 60 men.
[Illustration: Figure 4--EARLY SMALL BOMBARD (1330). It was made of
wrought-iron bars, bound with hoops.]
The ponderosity of the large bombards held them to level land, where
they were laid on rugged mounts of the heaviest wood, anchored by
stakes driven into the ground. A gunner would try to put his bombard
100 yards from the wall he wanted to batter down. One would surmise
that the gunner, being so close to a castle wall manned by expert
Genoese cross-bowmen, was in a precarious position. He was; but
earthworks or a massive wooden shield arranged like a seesaw over his
gun gave him fair protection. Lowering the front end of the shield
made a barricade behind which he could charge his muzzle loader (see
fig. 49).
In those days, and for many decades thereafter, neither gun crews nor
transport were permanent. They had to be hired as they were needed.
Master gunners were usually civilian "artists," not professional
soldiers, and many of them had cannon built for rental to customers.
Artillerists obtained the right to captured metals such as tools and
town bells, and this loot would be cast into guns or ransomed for
cash. The making of guns and gunpowder, the loading of bombs, and
even the serving of cannon were jealously guarded trade secrets.
Gunnery was a closed corporation, and the gunner himself a guildsman.
The public looked upon him as something of a sorcerer in league with
the devil, and a captured artilleryman was apt to be tortured and
mutilated. At one time the Pope saw fit to excommunicate all gunners.
Also since these specialists kept to themselves and did not drink or
plunder, their behavior was ample proof to the good soldier of the old
days that artillerists were hardly human.
SIXTEENTH CENTURY CANNON
After 1470 the art of casting greatly improved in Europe. Lighter
cannon began to replace the bombards. Throughout the 1500's
improvement was mainly toward lightening the enormous weights of guns
and projectiles, as well as finding better ways to move the artillery.
Thus, by 1556 Emperor Ferdinand was able to march against the Turks
with 57 heavy and 127 light pieces of ordnance.
At the beginning of the 1400's cast-iron balls had made an appearance.
The greater efficiency of the iron ball, together with an improvement
in gunpowder, further encouraged the building of smaller and stronger
guns. Before 1500 the siege gun had been the predominant piece. Now
forged-iron cannon for field, garrison, and naval service--and later,
cast-iron pieces--were steadily developed along with cast-bronze guns,
some of which were beautifully ornamented with Renaissance
workmanship. The casting of trunnions on the gun made elevation and
transportation easier, and the cumbrous beds of the early days gave
way to crude artillery carriages with trails and wheels. The French
invented the limber and about 1550 took a sizable forward step by
standardizing the calibers of their artillery.
Meanwhile, the first cannon had come to the New World with Columbus.
As the _Pinta's_ lookout sighted land on the early morn of October 12,
1492, the firing of a lombard carried the news over the moonlit waters
to the flagship _Santa Maria_. Within the next century, not only the
galleons, but numerous fortifications on the Spanish Main were armed
with guns, thundering at the freebooters who disputed Spain's
ownership of American treasure. Sometimes the adventurers seized
cannon as prizes, as did Drake in 1586 when he made off with 14 bronze
guns from St. Augustine's little wooden fort of San Juan de Pinos.
Drake's loot no doubt included the ordnance of a 1578 list, which
gives a fair idea of the armament for an important frontier
fortification: three reinforced cannon, three demiculverins, two
sakers (one broken), a demisaker and a falcon, all properly mounted on
elevated platforms in the fort to cover every approach. Most of them
were highly ornamented pieces founded between 1546 and 1555. The
reinforced cannon, for instance, which seem to have been cast from the
same mold, each bore the figure of a savage hefting a club in one hand
and grasping a coin in the other. On a demiculverin, a bronze mermaid
held a turtle, and the other guns were decorated with arms,
escutcheons, the founder's name, and so on.
In the English colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, lighter pieces seem to have been the more prevalent; there
is no record of any "cannon." (In those days, "cannon" were a special
class.) Culverins are mentioned occasionally and demiculverins rather
frequently, but most common were the falconets, falcons, minions, and
sakers. At Fort Raleigh, Jamestown, Plymouth, and some other
settlements the breech-loading half-pounder perrier or "Patterero"
mounted on a swivel was also in use. (See frontispiece.)
It was during the sixteenth century that the science of ballistics had
its beginning. In 1537, Niccolo Tartaglia published the first
scientific treatise on gunnery. Principles of construction were tried
and sometimes abandoned, only to reappear for successful application
in later centuries. Breech-loading guns, for instance, had already
been invented. They were unsatisfactory because the breech could not
be sealed against escape of the powder gases, and the crude, chambered
breechblocks, jammed against the bore with a wedge, often cracked
under the shock of firing. Neither is spiral rifling new. It appeared
in a few guns during the 1500's.
Mobile artillery came on the field with the cart guns of John Zizka
during the Hussite Wars of Bohemia (1419-24). Using light guns, hauled
by the best of horses instead of the usual oxen, the French further
improved field artillery, and maneuverable French guns proved to be an
excellent means for breaking up heavy masses of pikemen in the Italian
campaigns of the early 1500's. The Germans under Maximilian I,
however, took the armament leadership away from the French with guns
that ranged 1,500 yards and with men who had earned the reputation of
being the best gunners in Europe.
Then about 1525 the famous Spanish Square of heavily armed pikemen and
musketeers began to dominate the battlefield. In the face of musketry,
field artillery declined. Although artillery had achieved some
mobility, carriages were still cumbrous. To move a heavy English
cannon, even over good ground, it took 23 horses; a culverin needed
nine beasts. Ammunition--mainly cast-iron round shot, the bomb (an
iron shell filled with gunpowder), canister (a can filled with small
projectiles), and grape shot (a cluster of iron balls)--was carried
the primitive way, in wheelbarrows and carts or on a man's back. The
gunner's pace was the measure of field artillery's speed: the gunner
_walked_ beside his gun! Furthermore, some of these experts were
getting along in years. During Elizabeth's reign several of the
gunners at the Tower of London were over 90 years old.
Lacking mobility, guns were captured and recaptured with every
changing sweep of the battle; so for the artillerist generally, this
was a difficult period. The actual commander of artillery was usually
a soldier; but transport and drivers were still hired, and the drivers
naturally had a layman's attitude toward battle. Even the gunners,
those civilian artists who owed no special duty to the prince, were
concerned mainly over the safety of their pieces--and their hides,
since artillerists who stuck with their guns were apt to be picked off
by an enemy musketeer. Fusilier companies were organized as artillery
guards, but their job was as much to keep the gun crew from running
away as to protect them from the enemy.
[Illustration: Figure 5--FIFTEENTH-CENTURY BREECHLOADER.]
So, during 400 years, cannon had changed from the little vases,
valuable chiefly for making noise, into the largest caliber weapons
ever built, and then from the bombards into smaller, more powerful
cannon. The gun of 1600 could throw a shot almost as far as the gun of
1850; not in fire power, but in mobility, organization, and tactics
was artillery undeveloped. Because artillery lacked these things, the
pike and musket were supreme on the battlefield.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS
Under the Swedish warrior Gustavus Adolphus, artillery began to take
its true position on the field of battle. Gustavus saw the need for
mobility, so he divorced anything heavier than a 12-pounder from his
field artillery. His famous "leatheren" gun was so light that it could
be drawn and served by two men. This gun was a wrought-copper tube
screwed into a chambered brass breech, bound with four iron hoops. The
copper tube was covered with layers of mastic, wrapped firmly with
cords, then coated with an equalizing layer of plaster. A cover of
leather, boiled and varnished, completed the gun. Naturally, the piece
could withstand only a small charge, but it was highly mobile.
Gustavus abandoned the leather gun, however, in favor of a cast-iron
4-pounder and a 9-pounder demiculverin produced by his bright young
artillery chief, Lennart Torstensson. The demiculverin was classed as
the "feildpeece" _par excellence_, while the 4-pounder was so light
(about 500 pounds) that two horses could pull it in the field.
These pieces could be served by three men. Combining the powder charge
and projectile into a single cartridge did away with the old method
of ladling the powder into the gun and increased the rapidity of
fire. Whereas in the past one cannon for each thousand infantrymen had
been standard, Gustavus brought the ratio up to six cannon, and
attached a pair of light pieces to each regiment as "battalion guns."
At the same time he knew the value of fire concentration, and he
frequently massed guns in strong batteries. His plans called for
smashing hostile infantry formations with artillery fire, while
neutralizing the ponderous, immobile enemy guns with a whirlwind
cavalry charge. The ideas were sound. Gustavus smashed the Spanish
Squares at Breitenfeld in 1631.
[Illustration: Figure 6--LIGHT ARTILLERY OF GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS (1630).]
Following the Swedish lead, all nations modified their artillery.
Leadership fell alternately to the Germans, the French, and the
Austrians. The mystery of artillery began to disappear, and gunners
became professional soldiers. Bronze came to be the favorite gunmetal.
Louis XIV of France seems to have been the first to give permanent
organization to the artillery. He raised a regiment of artillerymen in
1671 and established schools of instruction. The "standing army"
principle that began about 1500 was by now in general use, and small
armies of highly trained professional soldiers formed a class distinct
from the rest of the population. As artillery became an organized arm
of the military, expensive personnel and equipment had to be
maintained even in peacetime. Still, some necessary changes were slow
in coming. French artillery officers did not receive military rank
until 1732, and in some countries drivers were still civilians in the
1790's. In 1716, Britain had organized artillery into two permanent
companies, comprising the Royal Regiment of Artillery. Yet as late as
the American Revolution there was a dispute about whether a general
officer whose service had been in the Royal Artillery was entitled to
command troops of all arms. There was no such question in England of
the previous century: the artillery general was a personage having
"alwayes a part of the charge, and when the chief generall is absent,
he is to command all the army."
[Illustration: Figure 7--FRENCH GARRISON GUN (1650-1700). The gun is
on a sloping wooden platform at the embrasure. Note the heavy bed on
which the cheeks of the carriage rest and the built-in skid under the
center of the rear axletree.]
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
During the early 1700's cannon were used to protect an army's
deployment and to prepare for the advance of the troops by firing upon
enemy formations. There was a tendency to regard heavy batteries,
properly protected by field works or permanent fortifications, as the
natural role for artillery. But if artillery was seldom decisive in
battle, it nevertheless waxed more important through improved
organization, training, and discipline. In the previous century,
calibers had been reduced in number and more or less standardized;
now, there were notable scientific and technical improvements. The
English scientist Benjamin Robins wedded theory to practice; his _New
Principles of Gunnery_ (1742) did much to bring about a more
scientific attitude toward ballistics. One result of Robins' research
was the introduction, in 1779, of carronades, those short, light
pieces so useful in the confines of a ship's gun deck. Carronades
usually ranged in caliber from 6- to 68-pounders.
In North America, cannon were generally too cumbrous for Indian
fighting. But from the time (1565) the French, in Florida, loosed the
first bolt at the rival fleet of the Spaniard Menendez, cannon were
used on land and sea during intercolonial strife, or against corsairs.
Over the vast distances of early America, transport of heavy guns was
necessarily by water. Without ships, the guns were inexorably walled
in by the forest. So it was when the Carolinian Moore besieged St.
Augustine in 1702. When his ships burned, Moore had to leave his guns
to the Spaniards.
One of the first appearances of organized American field artillery on
the battlefield was in the Northeast, where France's Louisburg fell to
British and Colonial forces in 1745. Serving with the British Royal
Artillery was the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston,
which had originated in 1637. English field artillery of the day had
"brigades" of four to six cannon, and each piece was supplied with 100
rounds of solid shot and 30 rounds of grape. John Mueller's _Treatise
on Artillery_, the standard English authority, was republished in
Philadelphia (1779), and British artillery was naturally a model for
the arm in America.
[Illustration: Figure 8--AMERICAN 6-POUNDER FIELDPIECE (c. 1775).]
At the outbreak of the War of Independence, American artillery was an
accumulation of guns, mortars, and howitzers of every sort and some 13
different calibers. Since the source of importation was cut off, the
undeveloped casting industries of the Colonies undertook cannon
founding, and by 1775 the foundries of Philadelphia were casting both
bronze and iron guns. A number of bronze French guns were brought in
later. The mobile guns of Washington's army ranged from 3- to
24-pounders, with 5-1/2- and 8-inch howitzers. They were usually
bronze. A few iron siege guns of 18-, 24-, and 32-pounder caliber were
on hand. The guns used round shot, grape, and case shot; mortars and
howitzers fired bombs and carcasses. "Side boxes" on each side of the
carriage held 21 rounds of ammunition and were taken off when the
piece was brought into battery. Horses or oxen, with hired civilian
drivers, formed the transport. On the battlefield the cannoneers
manned drag ropes to maneuver the guns into position.
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