GDG- Arty Anti-personnel Effectiveness

[Batrinque at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/26/06 10:09:06 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
rkadas at sbcglobal.net writes:

> A little research has located tests conducted by a man whose last name was 
> Muller

Was this Wiliam Mueller?  I have never seen his 1811 "The Elements of the 
Science ofd War" but some of his indings are summarized in B.P. Huhes's 
"FDirepower: Weapons Effectivness On the Battlefield, 1630-1850".  And I know that a 
John Muller published a treatise on artillery some decades earlier.

 and by British Army Oednance on Napoleonic war smoothbore cannon. If 
assumptions 
> that the propellant strength,  and consistency had remained constant then 
> ther might be little variance between ACW Napoleons firing cannister and  
> Wellington Army 12 pounder field arty. firing similar rounds. My other key 
> assumptions are that a cannister round is a thin walled metal container of a 
> diameter consistint with the bore of the weapon firing it, mounted on a sabot., It 
> is filled with a relatively consistent number of identical spherical lead or 
> iton submunitions that are packed in an orderly manner in a sawdust matrix. 
> Furthermore a cannister round is passive in that it does not contain any 
> bursting charge. The firing of the cannon shreds the cannister container so that 
> on exiting the cannon's mouth the submunitions, cannister container remains, 
> and sabot emerge. My analogue is a modern shot gun. From
> data I've collected a cannister round's effective range lies between 300 and 
> 600 yards dependent upon the upward angle of the cannon muzzle. Cannister 
> was either fired directly or reflectively by aiming it to hit the ground some 
> distance in front of its infantry target and have it skip upward ijnto them 
> like a stone skipped across a pond.
> 

I find that confusion sometimes arises from the terminology of the erandred . 
 Even as late as the ACW the term "case" was used synonymously with "canister"
, but "spherical case" was a form of exploding shell, filled with small balls 
as projectiles.  Case/canister seems to have been the ammunition of choice 
out to a few hundred yards, then solid shot out to several hundred yards, but 
spherical case/shrapnel when the target was massed troops) beyond that.

 I like you have questions about dispersion of the shot. Do you think that 
battery fronts 
> were scientifically derived by U.S. Army ordnance to give interlocking 
> field of fire for a battery firing cannister. It is well known that arty 
> batteries frequently had all their horses killed or wounded by opposing infantry. 
> However, given the general absence of infantry target practice or training in 
> marksmanship one might assume that this occurred more frequently in mixed 
> terrain where trees and rocks were available to give infantry cover. In an open 
> area Arty. firing cannister might have the advantage over untrained infantry 
> firing a rifled musket at ranges of 200 -300 yards. If this logic is sound then 
> over 50% of the casualties in the PPT assault may to have come from arty.
> 

Perhaps some of our artillery enthusiasts can correct me, but as far as I 
know, the US Army of the mid-Nineteenth century did not draw distinctions in 
deploying artillery batteries between those with rifled guns and those with 
smoothbores, nor was bore size a consideration.  From this, I don't see any 
scientific derivation of interlocking fields of fire.

Bruce Trinque
Amston, CT