3pdr With the little 3pdr, the 6pdr was normally one of the battalion guns in the 18th century. It fought at Dettingen, Fontenoy and Minden, and one was hauled up to the top of the Heights of Abraham during the attack on Quebec in 1759. It was widely used in the Peninsula, arming all the Horse Artillery Troops. It was the equipment, together with the light 5 1/2-inch howitzer, with which Norman Ramsay, cut off and surrounded by French cavalry during the battle of Fuentez d'Onoro, took his whole Troop, men, horses, guns and all, at a full gallop straight through the enemy cavalry to safety. French Shells at Waterloo Captain Mercer, who commanded a Troop of British Horse Artillery at Waterloo, described how the French shells remained on the ground with the fuse spluttering before exploding around his gun position, and, while not giving them credit for very serious execution, admitted that they were harassing and inconvenient. Vulnerability The most vulnerable part of the weapon was its vent and, if blocked, it was impossible to fire the piece. During an attack guns were 'spiked' by driving a metal spike down the vent so that it would be temporary useless even if recaptured. Assaulting troops carried supplies of spikes for this purpose and sometimes parties of gunners followed up the attacking infantry to carry out a more professional job on the captured enemy guns. The normal method of unspiking a gun was to place a small charge in the bore and run a quick match down the bore' from muzzle to charge--The muzzle was then blocked with shot and clods of earth then the charge fired in the hope of blowing out the spike. If this did not work then the very laborious task of drilling a new vent had to be undertaken. British Artillery atthe Alma 1854 At the Alma the British Field Battery hurried forward into a position which dominated the Russian gun areas and then had to be brought into action by the mounted officers and the staff of the Artille Commander because its panting detachments were quite unable to keep up with the guns. (1854) ACW 3-mile Range Captain Robert A.Hardaway of Alabama took careful aim through the sights of his favourite Whitworth fieldpiece. It was late fall of 1862; the gun's long muzzle pointed menacingly from Ashby' Gap, high up in the mountains that separated Virginia proper from the Shenandoah. A small group of blue horsemen were visible far below. Hardaway, a burly, unsmiling man, grunted. The gunner at the trail spike stopped his movements and stood clear. The captain checked the angle of elevation, made a small adjustment with the elevating screw so the cavalrymen were precisely in the middle of his lin of sight, and stood clear too. "Fire!" A gunner jerked the lanyard attached to the friction primer in the heavy, cheese-shaped breech. The gun roared, and then ran back a dozen yards on the rocky road. White smoke enveloped the crew but was blown clear by a slight breeze. They all peered intently down into the valley. Ten, twelve, fifteen seconds they waited. This was really long range. Had the "Old Man" so miscalculated the effect of the difference in elevation of gun and target that the Northerners wouldn't know they were being shot at? Suddenly, the whole tiny knot of men and horses below seemed to grow larger. Horses reared and shied violently at the weird screech that suddenly stopped with a dull triple thud. One man, and another's horse, had been hit; a spurt of earth marked the spot where the solid Whitworth bolt buried itself deep in the soft Virginia soil. The man killed was Union General George D. Bayard; the range was over three miles. The shot was lucky, yet Hardaway repeated it with tolerable frequency throughout the war. He used his Whitworth field gun almost like a sharpshooter's rifle, but at much greater range. From near the Yerby house above Fredericksburg his astonishingly accurate counter battery fire kept a dozen Union batteries silent for days at a time. Guns vs. Maoris When the sun rose, the guns, including the big one hundred and ten-pounder, opened fire, sending their shells roaring through the air. Over the pah a red flag waved on a tall mast, from the battery it seemed to be in the centre of the pah and most of the gunners took it for their mark in laying the pieces; it was later discovered that the flagstaff stood further off just behind the rearward stockad so that for the first two hours many of the shells passed harmlessly over the Maori position. In an effort to make a breach in the parapet, the guns were directed on the left angle of the fort. Every now and then a brave Maori would creep up to the crumbling mound and shovel a few spadefuls of earth into the gap and slip back again; once a native actually succeeded in hanging a blanket across the breach to conceal the movements of those bringing up repairing materials. The place was completely surrounded with thirteen guns and mortars blazing away at it; the big Armstrong gun fired no less than a hundred 110 lb shells before it ceased firing at three o'clock for want of ammunition. It was late discovered that the Maoris, crouching in their hollowed-out shelters in the trenches suffered very few casualties, being greatly, encouraged by the realisation that even though the shells made a terrible noise they killed or wounded very few men. (Maori Wars, New Zealand 1864). Breech vs. Muzzle Loaders In the late 19th century, heated arguments on the merits of breech and muzzle-loading guns were frequent as soldiers and experts "aired their views". Sir Andrew Noble, an advocate of rifled guns, was trying on one occasion to convince a senior artillery officer that the rifled guns were more accurate than the smooth-bores and, to support his case, he drew a diagram showing that shot from a rifled gun fell into a much smaller area that those of the smooth-bore. The eminent gunner was not shaken: "That only proves what I have always maintained that our smooth-bore is the best in the world. With your new-fangled gun firing at me I've only to keep outside that small area and I shan't be touched but with the smooth-bore firing at me I'm not safe anywhere!" Writing at the same time, C.E. Callwell said: "The new-fangled ideas that had gained approval in the regiment with regard to rifled guns were frown upon by some members of its ranks. Older members looking on them with suspicion. One very disAtinguished veteran who had performed good and gallant service in the Kaffir and Crimean Wars and had played a prominent role in the Mutiny used to grumble:- "First of all they insisted on having a lot of grooves in the bore of the gun, now they are only going to have three grooves in the bore of the gun. Please goodness that they will next have no grooves at all and we shall get back to the good old smoothbore which was all that was necessary to beat the Russians and smash the Mutiny." Afghan Charge 1880 In April 1880, at Ahmed Kheyl, Stewart's force of 7,000 were so rapidly attacked by Afghans that the artillery, after opening fire at 1,200 yards had to reduce range to 400 yards and then, with tribesmen on top of them, the guns were loaded with shrapnel, heads towards the charge so that they exploded at the muzzle. The ground before the guns were covered with heaps of torn and mutilated dead and dying. Ali Musjid in Afghanistan 1878 The attack on Ali Musjid began with an advance by the 81st Regiment and the 14th Sikhs throwing forward a line of skirmishers to clear the villages and cover the mountain spur; a battery of 9-pdrs got into position a mile and three quarters from Ali Musjid. Mule-batteries came thundering and clattering along the stony bed of the Khyber River and up to the open ground whilst the heavy 40-pdr guns were dragged forward like toys by a train of elephants. The booming of the guns and the crash of exploding shells woke the echoes of the hills on every hand while spurts of white smoke from the line of skirmishers darted incessantly forward. Before long the guns of the fort were completely silenced and the troops began their advance to the deep hoarse booming of the 40-pdrs reverberating from hill to hill. Roberts laboriously dragged four 40-pdrs on his epic march from Kabul to Kandahar and earlier, at Peiwar Kotal, came up against Afghans well armed with artillery. Eighteen-pounder cannon, waggons, ammunition boxes and piles of shells and round-shot lay in all directions. However, their gunners had much to learn in the proper adjustment of time-fuses; at least fifty per cent of their shells exploded in the air. (Afghanistan 1878). Lyddite HE In 1898 a new high explosive "Lyddite" was introduced to replace gunpowder as a shell filling. It was adopted for the bursting charge of common shell for all natures of breach-loading guns and howitzers of over 4.7 inches calibre. It was fired for the first time in war at Omdurman in 1898. Here the artillery included some 5 inch howitzers, little stubby guns painted pea-soup colour, that bombarded Omdurman with 50 lb shells at a range of 3,000 yards, tearing great holes in the dome of the Mahdi's tomb, bringing down the cupola and enveloping the whole structure in a cloud of yellow fumes and dust. The effect of lyddite was awe inspiring.  Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 167 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1976 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com