Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 174, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 July 1915 — HOW SHRAPNEL IS MADE AND USED [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HOW SHRAPNEL IS MADE AND USED

4 LITTLE more than one than one hundred and thir-ty-four years ago there was born near London the great English artillerist, Henry A A Shrapnel, the officer who at the age of eighteen years sMm conceived the idea of a bul-let-showering projectile—r the missile which, in all

countries, is known by the name of shrapnel, and which remains to this day one of the most effective man-kill-ing projectiles yet devised. In all armies the field artillery units today use shrapnel. One has only to read the war news that is cabled or wirelessed across the Atlantic to realize the all-important part shrapnel shells are playing in the conflict now raging. The shrapnel projectile consists of a hollow cylindrical body with an ogival or conoidal head; in the interior, near the base, there is an explosive charge, and immediately above the charge there is an iron disk, and between this disk and the head the body of the projectile is filled with spherical bullets. The fuse is fixed in the point of the projectile, and communicates with the powder or bursting charge through a central pipe, and is timed so as to explode the shell during its flight, at a point about sixty or eighty yards short of the target The bursting charge is only strong enough to blow oft the head of the projectile, which is lightly attached, and thus release the bullets, which fly forward in a cone-shaped shower, covering a large front. The bullets depend for their force ppon the speed at which the projectile is traveling when they are released. For effect they should have a momentum of not less than four hundred feet per second. Consequently, as the ballistics, or the force and velocity, of the projectiles increase, the striking effect of Shrapnel becomes more formidable. In all the history of warfare there are few more interesting stories than that which tells of the evolution of the terrible weapon invented by General Shrapnel In the latter part of the eighteenth century. Likewise it is a story little known outside military circles. On July 9, 1779, a commission as a second lieutenant in the Royal artillery was issued to Henry Shrapnel. Shrapnel was then eighteen years years of age. It was a period in the world’s history when great wars, which were to culminate in the overthrow of Napoleon, were being fought, an era when an officer of the Inventive genius of Shrapnel was sorely needed In practically every army in Europe. As soon as he was commissioned Lieutenant Shrapnel was ordered to Gibraltar to take part in the defense of the great rock, then besieged by the Spaniards. The siege lasted intermittently from 1779 until 1783. From the very first day of his service Shrapnel was a student Arriving at Gibraltar, he viewed the situation from a scientific rather than a military standpoint, and history states that the young officer was most impressed, or rather depressed, because of the poor effect of the British gunnery. Shrapnel noted that on one occasion when more than two thousand twenty-four pounders were fired from the rock at a body of Spanish troops, that out of the entire command only twenty-six men were put out of action. Another officer who was impressed as a result of the poor results obtained was a Captain Mercier, perhaps an ancestor of the great Belgian cardinal of the present day. Mercier recommended that an experiment, namely, the firing of mortar shells, with short fuses so that they should burst In the air at close proximity to the target, be tried. On the first trial the shells did terrible execution. Shrapnel ' witnessed the experiment and then and there was born the Idea out of which has been perfected the dreadful bullet-stuffed pro-

jectile. An English artillery officer has written; “Shrapnel realized that the effect of round shot (cannon balls), impact bombs, case or grape Bhot against troops in the field was trivial. His idea was to increase thd ranges of the most effective missiles, namely, case anil grape shot, by producing a collective fire at long distances. Shrapnel therefore suggested a hollow spherical projectile filled with carbine balls and containing, a small quantity of gunpowder, just sufficient to burst the shell, the explosion to be timed at a short distance previous to its execution, by which means the fire would be equally severe at all ranges.” In 1787 the records of the British army state that Shrapnel in that year described to General O’Hara, then commanding at Gibraltar, “a new method of extending the use of grape or case shot to the utmost range of ordnance.” In 1802 Shrapnel’s idea may be said to have taken, for the first time, definite shape. In that year there was issued at Woolwich, England, a book which embodied “a table of practice with Lieutenant Shrapnel’s proposed new method of firing case Bhot,” and in that same year it is recorded that Shrapnel “exhibited the new shells on Woolwich common, In the presence of his majesty the king and a great number of general officers, add that all foreigners were excluded.” Among the general officers was Wellington, who was greatly impressed, but who in later years changed to a certain extent his opinion as to the effectiveness of shrapnel in war. In 1803, and following the royal inspection of the new shells at Woolwich, Shrapnel was ordered to Elswick, there to superintend the manufacture of “his spherical case shot for immediate issue to the army.” In the following year shrapnel were for the first time employed by the British. The occasion was the bombardment of the Batavian settlement of Surinam in the Dutch East Indies. The time was the latter part of April and the year was 1804. A Major Wilson commanded the British artillery, and it waß under his directions that the shrapnel shell was used for the first time in history.. After the bombardment Major Wilson reported that “shrapnel had so excellent an effect as to cause the garrison of Fort Amsterdam to surrender after receiving the second shell.” Major Wilson’s report continued: “The enemy was so astonished at these shells as not to be able to explain how they apparently suffered from musketry at so great distance as 2,000 yards.” Two years passed before shrapnel was again mentioned in official records. It was at Calabria in 1806, when a force of 4,000 British troops defeated a force of 8,000 French, Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, commanding the British naval force off Calabria, witnessed the engagement. He subsequently wrote: “It was evident that the shells of Coloflel Shrapnel’s Invention, when burst in their flight and short of their objects, as they ought to be, did great execution.” So impressed was the admiral that he asked the admiralty to issue shrapnel to the navy, but his request was refused, whereupon Sir Sidney managed to get some of the shells by paying for them out of his own pocketIn February, 1807, he successfully used the shells in the landing of a division in the Dardanelles. The victory of Vimeiro, in the peninsula war, was largely due to shrapnel, when at the critical moment of that battle the British artillery opened a shrapnel fire, using their nine-pound-ers, and routed the French infantry. The French could not understand where the little balls came from, and the soldiers swore that “devils were in the British shells.”

After Vimeiro little is recorded of the use of shrapnel until the battle of Waterloo, following which historic engagement Wellington said to Shrapnel, then a colonel of artillery, that the shell that bore his name had played a most important part in the battle. Napoleon, after the battle of Vimeiro, issued orders that all unexploded British shells found on the field should be carefully examined, but in some way, never fully explained, the order was apparently not carried out, and Napoleon lost a secret that might have prolonged his power for years. The secret of the shell was absolutely unsolvable by the French. In the Crimean war British artillery declined to, use shrapnel, despite the fact that it had turned the day at Waterloo. The French made a sparing use of it, while the Russians, who had never then heard of it, naturally trusted to the effectiveness of the oldtime missiles. In the Civil war both the Union and Confederate armies used shrapnfel, but it was not until 1866 that the development of the missile to its present deadly effectiveness may be said to have got definitely under way. It was the Prussians who started it, and they continued to improve the missile until by the time the FrancoPrussian war began it was one of the Prussian army’s most effective weapons. The Prussian shrapnel did tremendous execution against the French, especially at Sedan. In the Russo-Japanese war both of the contending armies used shrapnel with great effect, and again in the Balkan wars of 1912, the striking successes of the Serbians, Bulgarians and Greeks were largely due to their splendid French shrapnel-firing field pieces. There are several types of shrapnel shells, among them the “percussion shrapnel,” used for defense at short range and in fire for adjustment Its effect depends upon the range and the nature of the ground. It is effective against troops lodged in tall timber. Masks, branches of trees, etc., frequently cause the premature bursting of these projectiles. On striking, the projectile cuts a furrow in the ground and bursts two or three meters beyond. Percussion shrapnel ‘to be effective must burst immediately In front of the target. Its most effective employment is against standing targets. They are also more effective at long range than is the time-shrapnel. Soft ground newly plowed fields, terrain covered with snow or underbrush, or a rising slope diminish the fire effect. When the angle of fall is ten degrees or more, half of the bullets penetrate the ground, and the remainder ricochet and pass on at a greatly reduced velocity. On the other hand, time-shrapnel Is fairly independent of the terrain. The bullets in this type are Imbedded in a smoke-producing substance, making it comparatively easy to observe the burst for purposes of adjustment. The extreme range at which this projectile can be employed is fixed by the facility of observing the fire and by the remaining velocity of the shrapnel bullets, both of which diminish as the range increases. Shrapnel is most effective against prone skirmishers at ranges from 1,000 to 3,000 meters, when burst 28 to 22 meters short of the target, and against standing skirmishers at the safiie ranges when burst 56 to 45 meters short of the target Black also points out that a single shrapnel from a light field howitzer produces a greater number of hits when the point of burst is favorably situated than one fired from a field gun. Shrapnel is also playing a most important part in aerial warfare, and of these antiaircraft shrapnel, all of which embody the same general essentials, there is perhaps none more effective than that known as “Ehrhardt antiaircraft shrapneL”