Did cannonballs used in the American Civil War explode?
Yep. Saw a bunch of them at Fort Sumpter. I think most of them had a ‘timed’ fuse that would be lit by the gun powder that propelled the projectile.
Civil war cannons fired a wide variety of stuff.
They could fire a solid round cannonball, which did not explode. There are some pretty big holes in buildings in and around Gettysburg from these.
They could fire explosive shells. Smooth bore cannons often fired round “shells” where rifled cannons would fire more modern artillery shell shaped shells. Spherical shells used timed fuses, which were often an issue. These fuses were fairly crude by modern standards, and if you set the fuse time too long, the shell would bury itself into the ground from the impact before exploding, and the resulting underground explosion was much less effective against the enemy (most of the energy would be wasted throwing dirt up into the air). The more modern shell shaped things sometimes had timed fuses, and sometimes had percussion detonators on the front of them. Round shells tumbled in the air, and therefore could not use the percussion detonators since you had no way of knowing which part of the shell would hit first.
Cannons could fire shrapnel rounds, which like shells were designed to explode, but were also specifically designed to explode into much smaller pieces so that they were much more effective against troop formations (but less effective against fortifications).
They could also fire grapeshot, which is basically what you get if you take a shotgun and scale it up to cannon sized things. And they were used kinda like large shotguns, being blasted at enemy troop formations at relatively close range. Later on in the war, they began to pack the grapeshot into layers, held together by a flimsy container packed with sawdust. These were called “canister” rounds. When fired, the sawdust and the container would be blasted apart and the shot would spread out, so it was quicker to load but still had that deadly jumbo shotgun kind of effect.
Wouldn’t this be a non-issue in some cases? For example, say you’re attacking a fort. If you aim such that the shell clears the outer wall, it will fall inside, and either detonate on impact or after the shell bounces or rolls a bit. It might not tear a hole in the outer wall but it could damage structures or kill defenders inside the fort.
For that nice little treatise. I always wondered, because all I ever see is round, smooth cannonballs. Those could not have been very effective against personnel, you’d need a direct hit, or maybe a few good bounces.
Solid shot was VERY effective against infantry. Apart from hitting a guy directly, it caused a great deal of secondary damage from sending pieces of dirt, rock and tree splinters, and other victims throughout the formation. When a cannonball hits a guy and sends his canteen flying at cannonball speeds, it is just as deadly as a piece of shrapnel.
In a perfect world, yes that’s what you do. The world of field artillery was a whole lot less than perfect in the mid-Nineteenth Century. The fuses were pretty crude and depended on the length of time it took a powder train to burn through to the bursting charge. With a projectile moving at from 800 to 1000 feet per second it doesn’t take much of an error to set off the charge where it will not do all that much damage – a miss-estimate of range, a slight mistake in cutting the fuse, a minor fault in the fuse itself would render the whole thing ineffective and a waste of powder. Look at Gettysburg where the Confederate artillery was cutting its fuses a bit too long and most of the damage done by the great bombardment on the third day was expended in the rear of the Union front along Cemetery Ridge.
There were contact fuses in use, notably by the battery on top of Little Round Top, Haslet’s Battery which became Rittenhausen’s Battery by the Third Day. It was a Parrot Rifle battery which fired a shell that was pointed, elongated and primed with a percussion cap at the point. The shell went off when the point hit something solid no matter how long or short a time it was on the fly. Armed with reliable shells and manned by skilled gunners the battery beat up on the right flank of Pickett’s Division at extreme long range.
Of course, with a restricted shell size and a black powder bursting charge to send hunks of the cast ion shell casing flying around, the detonation wasn’t as powerful or as destructive as one might hope..
I have read about “Chain Shot” where 2 balls are connected together by chain.
This Wiki link has some more.
Biggest thing about canon fire was the demoralizing effect. A cannon ball bouncing along the battle field would take a leg off one and the head off another and so on until it’s max range or it burrowed into the ground, tree, building.
The red hot cannon balls from the wiki link sound terrible! :eek:
Chain shot was generally used in naval battles to take down your opponent’s rigging.
As I’ve understood it, the difference between grape and canister is mainly academic, depending on if you were in the army or navy. Grape was rarely free-loaded, but packed in a canvas cylinder. The main difference between the two is that naval grape was usually of a larger caliber in order to be able to smash through hulls.
As a gun owner, I occasionally fire in a range.
Have any of you fired a cannon (in a range, of course)?
It seems like firing grapeshot at a target might be interesting.
Probably would be way expensive per round.
Round ball were pretty nasty against personnel - they threw clumps of dirt around wherever they landed and then either bounced at about chest height or skidded along the ground, taking legs with them as they went. Since back then war was still waged in tight regiments, shoulder to shoulder and 5 or 6 ranks deep, a well aimed cannonball could plow a bloody furrow through a formation. Whoever wasn’t maimed outright was shoved out of the way or thrown about spreading confusion, chaos and panic. If you were a good general, or had fast horse-drawn artillery, you could even set your pieces in some place where they’d get to fire not at the front of a given unit, but along the whole length of the Line… that must have been endless fun for the poor bastards.
So, yeah. Round ball may not have been as effective at this purpose as proper shells (the exploding, shrapnel-flinging variety of cannon & howitzer ammunition) or the aforementioned canister shot, but they were still plenty scary.