Ww1 Shrapnel Shells And How They Worked - Part One: Artillery Ammunition Before Shrapnel
To the untutored eye, this mysterious half-inch metal ball (see figure 1 linked to at foot of this page), found in a field in France, looks innocuous.It could be part of some item of farm machinery – a large ball bearing maybe.In fact it is a relic of the First World War, a shrapnel ball from an artillery shell.
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So what exactly is a shrapnel ball?
The term ‘shrapnel’ is commonly used for the fragments of any sort of artillery shell, the shards of steel that fly about once a shell has exploded and which can cause horrific injuries, but originally the term was coined for a particular type of shell designed to kill and maim troops in the open.By the start of the First World War it had become the most common type of shell for the light artillery of all armies and in fact the only type of shell for the most common field gun in the British Army – the 18-pounder.Millions of shrapnel shells were fired during the First World War and so shrapnel balls are still being ploughed up in the fields that were fought over during 1914-18.
But to understand the shrapnel shell properly, it is necessary to step back in time even further.
Over a century before the First World War, during the wars against Napoleon, artillery (cannons) fired three main types of ammunition: round shot, canister and common shell (see figure 2 linked to at the foot of this page).
Round shot was simply a solid cannon ball – a sphere of iron several inches across.It didn’t explode – it killed by simply crushing anything and anyone in its path, but with the dense and deep formations of massed infantry on the battlefield of that era a single cannon ball could easily plough through several men, killing them all.
Round shot was effective at up to 1000 to 1500 yards range (depending on the size of the cannon).At closer range, cannon changed over to using a different type of ammunition called case shot or canister.This was basically a large tin filled with metal balls and it burst apart when leaving the cannon barrel, turning the cannon effectively into a giant shotgun! As you can imagine, this was very effective against soldiers in the open, but only at up to a few hundred yards since the cloud of balls spread apart as they flew further, many ploughing into the ground or sailing over the heads of the enemy.
The third type, common shell, was mainly used against troops dug into field defences or behind fortifications.It was a round hollow ball filled with gunpowder and with a short length of fuse poking out.In fact it looked remarkably like the round black bombs in children’s cartoons! When the cannon fired, the explosion inside the barrel lit the end of the fuse, which burned down as the shell flew through the air towards the enemy.When the fuse burned all the way down it ignited the main charge of gunpowder inside the shell and it exploded, bursting, throwing fragments of shell case around to injure or kill nearby enemy soldiers.
Because common shell could be fired over the earth barricades of field defences before exploding behind them, it was the most effective ammunition type during the Napoleonic Wars against dug in troops.But it suffered from two problems which prevented it becoming a universal ammunition for all targets.Firstly the primitive time fuses were very hard to set effectively.They were tubes (sometimes hollow quills were used) containing gunpowder and the gunner simply snipped them to the length that he judged would burn down in the time it would take the shell to fly to the enemy.If the fuse burned down too quickly, the shell would explode harmlessly in the air only part way to the enemy.If it burned down too slowly then it would still be fizzing down after it landed and a quick-witted enemy soldier could stamp on it and put it out.The second problem was that the shell case tended to burst into only a few large pieces when it exploded, limiting the number of men that could be killed by the fragments.
But then in the 1780s an officer in the Royal Artillery of the British Army had an idea that would overcome the latter problem and start the rise of the shrapnel shell (which I'll cover next).
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Figure 1: photograph of First World War shrapnel ball found in France
Figure 2: diagram showing different artillery ammunition types of 18th and early 19th centuries
Next part (part two) of this mini-series
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