GDG- Arty Anti-personnel Effectiveness

[James Cameron]

<< Recognizing that statistics is a study of averages makes your argument 
even stronger. Can we agree that arty casualties ranged between 0 and 40 
percent with the higher end of the range occurrung on fields like Malvern 
Hill, GB, and Antietam where the open nature of the terrain favored the big 
guns. >>

That's the problem.  Certainly the low end is higher than 10 percent, but we 
really don't know about the high end.

<< It was my understabding that standars U.S. cannister rounds were loaded 
with spherical iron or lead submunitions averaging 1.5 inches in diameter. 
This gives them about three times the cross sectional area of a rifled 
musket slug. Don't you think this might cause a bit more wound damage and be 
pretty obvious to a combat surgeon that it was not caused by a rifle slug? 
 >>

Other members have already responded that some ran smaller than that.  But 
there are still a lot of factors in play.  An iron ball won'd expand on 
impact, a soft lead minie ball will.  A smoothbore musket ball at close 
range will hit with more velocity than a cannister ball at long range, or, 
even one from a case shot, where the velocity depends on how fast the shell 
itself is going when the bursting charge goes off.  That isn't to say that 
in many cases, an experienced surgeon might not be able to make a correct 
determination, but I'm not sure how reliable many of the determinations 
would be.  And nobody was going to bother figuring our what killed who in 
the case of men dead on the field.

<< Guess that I'm still a little leary of the claimed effectiveness of the 
rifled musket in the hands of generally untrained marksmen. >>

It did take a lot of rounds fire to inflict a casualty.  But there were lots 
of men shooting.  As Joseph Stalin is supposed to have said, "Quantity has a 
quality all its own."

<< The analogy I use is that I hunted deer effectively in the Ozarks from 
age ten using a .44 calibre Marlin magnum saddle carbine. It was a great gun 
for hunting in heavy brush. Its
 round went to ground in under 200 yasrds so I didn't have to worry about 
killing someone in the next county if I happened to miss.  I was far more 
effective when I used the piece hunting deer than when I hunted woodchucks. 
At 100 yards a chuck is a mighty small target using iron sights. IMHO 
hitting a chuck at 100 yards with a standard commercial .44 magnum round is 
equivalent to hitting a man at 200 yards using an 1861 model .58 caliber 
Springfield rifled musket. >>

Well, I'm not sure about that analogy, but then, I've never hunted 
woodchucks.  But what if it's you and 1,000 of your friends, shooting at 
1,000 woodchucks.  Unlike when it's just you and that one woodchuck, nobody 
cares which specific woodchuck gets shot, as long as there are some dead one 
out there when you get done shooting.  And there probably will be.

Jim Cameron