GDG- Arty Anti-personnel Effectiveness

[Batrinque at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/29/06 1:09:20 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
ccj at infionline.net writes:

> Please note: There was little real difference between the 
> artillery materiel of the Franco-Prussian War and that of the Civil War. 
> The famous French "75" to which you refer was introduced for service in 
> 1898.  It had the long-recoil cylinder that made it the first modern 
> quick-firing field gun.  The German 77mm C 96 n/A followed soon after and 
> was in service in World War I.
> 

I think that we must keep in mind that due to the nature of the munitions, 
the lethality of CW artillery was much different at close (canister) range than 
at long (exploding shell and exploding case) range.  I suspect we are 
unconsciously influenced by 20th Century experience where artillery rounds filled with 
high explosives were far, far more lethal at long range than their 
counterparts of the century before.  CW explosive shells were thick-walled and contained 
a rather small powder charge sufficient to burst the casing and not much 
more.  Doctrine called for employing canister at ranges up to 200 or 300 yards, 
then solid shot for the next few hundred yards (yes, a solid 12-pound ball or 
10-pound bolt could do nasty things to the human body, but their overall 
lethality was dwarfed by the spray of shot from canister at shorter ranges).  And 
beyond that, exploding shells/case were called for, ideally exploding over the 
heads of enemy troops, showering them with shell fragments (and balls from 
exploding case).  But to do this took considerable skill (and some luck) with the 
types of fuses in use.  Certainly, sometimes an individual exploding shell 
might inflict a number of casualties, but can we realistically compare  it with 
what canister did at much shorter ranges?

Once again, I point to the low power of explosives used in shells.  Early 
high explosives -- including dynamite -- were too unstable to be fired from 
cannons by conventional means -- the shell would detonate while being fired.  This 
led to a curious development late in the 19th century: the "dynamite gun", 
"dynamite referring to the projectile, not the projecting charge.  Such 
"dynamite" projectiles were propelled by compressed air to avoid too great a shock 
during discharge.  Both US Army and Navy versions were employed to a limited 
extent during the Spanish-American War.  But these low-velocity, short-range 
weapons proved a technological dead end when more stable high explosives, capable of 
withstanding the shock of firing from a gun, were developed, leading to the 
truly lethal artillery of WW1 and after.  (And, of course, the employment of 
rapid-firing breech-loading cannon added to that lethality.)

If data exists that distinguishes between casualties inflicted by canister 
versus those from other artillery rounds, a comparison would be very 
interesting.  From everything I have seen, the number of such casualties drastically drop 
after a few hundred yards.
]

Bruce Trinque
Amston, CT