After watching a superb video about Napoleon, I find myself still wondering about something I have never quite understood. How, specifically, did cannons kill lots of people at once? As I understand it, the powder in the barrel of the cannon is ignited and the resultant explosion simply propels the cannonball outward with great force. Now, I certainly understand that if you were among the first few people in its path, you would have been something between pulverized and knocked into tiny bits. But how did it kill a large group of people at once? The video made it seem that Napoleon lit the fuse, shot the ball into a huge mass of troops, and took out hundreds if not thousands of people at a stroke. (Other historical videos do the same.) The ball itself was not explosive, just heavy and coming with force. Why wouldn’t it just knock down (in a fatal way) the unlucky ones who were in the front and directly in its path, and then be rendered relatively harmless, having had its forward momentum stopped?
The plural of Cannon is Cannon. Or so I’ve heard.
Stuffing Cannon with all sorts of stuff “Langrage” was/is common- tacks, nails, broken glass, chain links, bits of this and that, provides a nasty weapon. Lots of collateral damage, as body parts flying cause even more deaths and casualties. Ugh.
While tricky, it was also a technique to have two cannon balls linked together with a good length of chain. Ugh.
they could have been firing cannister, which is like grapeshot and would have mowed down the enemy line. However, it is also possible that the director realized that an explosion was far more dramatic than solid shot. There may have been bombs, but I think the most common and easiest to use projectile would have been solid shot.
There were a number of types of shot available besides the simple cannonball.
–Grape or cannister shot was a container of many small shot (about 1" in diameter). When it struck the ground, it would shatter and the shot would scatter.
–Exploding shot. Similar to above, in that it would cover the impact area with shrapnel. A fuse in the ball would be ignited during the firing of the cannon. That fuse would detonate and shatter the cannonball, turning the ball into shrapnel. There was also a deadly effect from the explosion.
–Chain shot. Two balls attached by a long chain would be fired out of a cannon. The balls would spin around the chain, kind of like a bolo. You could take out whole battallions with this one.
I’m sure the resident milliaty experts here can fill in the details I’ve glossed over, but I think this is a fair summary.
What Tedster said.
Also, some Cannon(s) were laoded with grapeshot, turning them into large shotguns. Explosive shells were fired sometimes.
Even a regular old cannonball could take out dozens of people if they were close together. Think bowling ball travelling several hundred mph. The brilliant military strategy of lining all your soldiers up didn’t help much either.
Like the military is more humane in killing people these days, Ted.
I don’t know about you, but the canon balls tied together with a chain technique actually seem pretty ingenious, if you ask me.
Here’s a thread about the explosive cannonballs Guy mentioned.
If I’m not mistaken, there’s a subtle difference between canister and grape shot – the size, possibly.
I was under the impression that chain shot was used mainly in naval engagements , where it was used very effectively to chop up your opponent’s masts and rigging. I never heard of it being used against infantry.
You could all sorts of nasty things in your cannon to cut up troops, but I suspect that was limited to the early days of the cannon, and in desperate circumstances when you didn’t have anything else to toss in. A cannon was supposed to be a precision piece of equipment, and random rocks and nails would mess up the bore.
I was always under the impression that cannon balls did their damage by smashing in a straight line through men, horses, and equipment, with some secondary damage from the initially hit objects falling into others. Even secondary and tertiary damage could be pretty daunting – read C.S. Forester’s novel The Gun about the devastating result of a cannonball hitting stony ground and transferring its kinetic energy to the pebbles. During the Revolutionary War inexperienced Colonials built redoubt walls incorporating rocks and bottles and found out this wasn’t a good idea – British cannonballs hitting the outside would transfer momentum to the stuff making up the walls, which would then fly into the fort and ricochet around (see Bruce Bliven’s The Battle for Manhattan).
I am not a military expert or historian, but I’ve read a lot of history and historical novels, and done a fair amount of simulation gaming.
also even if you didn’t go for the more advanced cannon ammo (grape shot, chains) the force of a solid cannonball hitting a structure that the enemy in holding up in would cause some of that structure to become shrapnel. Also just hitting the ground would cause a simular effect.
Cannons don’t kill people.
People kill people.
[sub]Sorry, couldn’t resist. :)[/sub]
Grappe shot was (I beleive) primarily Naval ammunition, for boarding parties.
Cannister was longer ranged & for shore use.
But I don’t believe cannister was available for use during the Napoleonic wars. US Civl war as first use?
Mostly, cannons (either use is acceptable) just had scrap crammed down the barrel. Don’t know that there was a specific name for it.
In naval engagements, the splinters shot out from the cannonballs hitting the wooden ships did as much or more damage than the cannonballs themselves. (Ask Scylla how it feels to have a chunk o’ wood sticking out of your arm.)
Cannonballs were particularly effective because of the formations forced by the use of muskets. In order to get concentrated firepower, you had to have a formation several soldiers deep, so that the solders in each rank could alternate firing. This made a pretty good target for artillery. I think you also pretty much had to be standing to load the weapon, which meant the obvious military tactic of getting down and staying down when the cannons started firing wasn’t an option.
Apparently the French liked to advance in columns beating the drums – this was apparently extremely impressive, but against disciplined (British) troops, not very smart, because it lessened their firepower and made them great targets for artillery.
I’m pretty sure that there were cannonballs (named after Shrapnel) designed to fragment nastily when they hit.
Can’t pass up this opportunity to flaunt my ignorance:
I understand the value of grapeshot, etc. Believe it was very useful when your cannon occupied high ground, and were attempting to dissuade folks from ascending.
But in many films about 18th-19th century wars, you see cannon loaded with what appear to be solid balls. When the shot lands, a group of folk in the vicinity go flying. Is this entirely a fictional depiction? Or was the shrapnel and/or the concussion of the cannonball landing enough to send people through the air?
My son was recently obsessed with Gettysburg. He directed me to a section of a book that talked about the numbers of soldiers actually taken out by artillery. I’ll try to dig it up at home. I seem to recall that a single shot that took out soldiers numbering either in the teens or low twenties was considered exceptionally successful.
If grape/etc. were primarily used against personnel, were cannonballs primarily used to damage enemy structures and large equipment? Gotta figure solid shot would have a far greater range than the alternatives.
Final thought, that cannonball sure took that guy’s head off in a hurry in The Patriot.
Hmmm… ISTR reading that this was tried experimentally but not used in combat much, if at all. But maybe I’ve been misinformed. I don’t suppose anyone has cite?
Obviously the rifled cannon shooting a standard ball had the best range, and so was used most frequently–it’s hard to load, aim, and fire a cannon when you’re being shot at. The best strategy was to get your batteries on high ground (for better range and lines of sight) and on the flanks (so the balls would rip across the entire width of a formation).
Cannister was litterally that: A thin-walled (tin, leather, or heavy canvas) container filled with musketballs. Firing it would rupture the cannister, converting the cannon into an enourmous shot gun. Its primart purpose was anti-personell, but could be used for stripping the rigging off of ships in a naval application. Usually, naval engagments used grapeshot because cannister is a very short-ranged round. It has been around almost as long as cannon have been around.
Grapeshot was larger, with balls running around several aounces up to a pound each, depending on the size of the cannon. Grapeshot was usually secured to a sabot or supporting spindle. Think of the spindle as something closely resembling a free-standing papertowel holder: A disk-shaped base the same size as the cannon’s bore, with a dowel stuck in the middle of it. The grapeshot was secured to this by means wrapping a cloth around the grapeshot and lacing it down. This produced a bundle that resembled a bunch of grapes, hence the name. Grapshot was useful for anti-personnel (although less devestaing than cannister, it had longer range), especially in naval applications, where the individual balls had to penetrate heavier obstructions. It was also used for stripping the rigging of ships.
Langrange is nothing more than a bag stuffed with whatever nasty objects came to hand: Nails, musketballs, rocks, broken glass, etc. Very nasty, but a poor second choice to cannister. Used almost exclusively against personnel, usually when the chips were down, and all the cannister and grapeshot was gone. This was the precursor to cannister.
Roundshot was used for general purpose work: Counter battery fire, skipping off the ground like an amuck bowling ball, hulling ships, knocking down fortifications, etc. When used in an anti-personnel manner, the idea was to graze the ground, so the ball didn’t bury itself, but instead went skipping through the enemy formations, bouncing through legs, bodies, and heads. There is one good shot of this in the climatic battle in the movie “The Patriot”.
Chainshot was mostly a naval weapon, used for stripping the rigging off and dismasting of naval vessels. It had limited anti-personnel use, but really wasn’t the best choice. Barshot (looked like a dumbell), and sliding barshot (similar to barshot, but with an expanding center bar) were other choices for anti-rigging fire.
Shells were exploding shot, but in Napoleonic times was unreliable enough to be mostly relegated to siege warfare. It was principly used for starting fires and injuring personnel behind fortifcation walls. Red-hot roundshot could also be used for starting fires.
Carcass was a shot made out of a basket of iron straps that contained a ball of pitch and other flamible materials. It was purely incindiary, but relatively inefficient. Purely for siege warfare. Being able to make a carcass was one of the hallmarks of a well-trained artilleryman, and often one or two carcass would be fired during a siege for tradition’s sake.
maybe this thread will help you out a bit…
or this thread . . .
I saw part of a Horatio Hornblower movie where the shore battery was firing cannonballs heated up red hot. They used the hot balls to set attacking ships on fire. Is this for real?
I knew I could get an answer here if anywhere. I’m not sure why I didn’t find Scarlett67’s referenced thread when I searched for “cannon”, but I can see why I didn’t get evnglion’s, since, while I had thought of stuffing psuedo-shrapnel into a cannon, I had not considered a goat. 
Makes sense that the cannonballs would create lots of useful projectiles when striking walls, ships, etc; I had only been thinking of them plowing into one of those tidy and convenient columns of soldiers without considering their use on structures. I was particularly interested in the two-balls-on-a-chain and the exploding/fused balls, which I had not seen before. All I’ve seen were the ones as described by CrafterMan in the other thread (big-old-iron-bowling-ball type).
Thanks for all the insightful info, and the laughs as well.
I wrote a paper on this once. Want some of the gory details?
Solid cannon shot was a favorite against massed infantry in the era of the line of bayonetted muskets (c.1700-1865). It significantly outranged the smoothbore musket (by hundreds of yards). When a solid round hit massed infantry, it worked in a very similar way to how solid shot worked against ship personnel, by creating secondary projectiles which also injured. The difference was that the secondary projectiles generated in massed infantry formations were the soldiers’ accoutrements and… body parts.
A cannonball would do one of at least three things when it hit a soldier; fragment the skull and send pieces into other troops; sever a limb, sending it along a projectile path along with the cannonball; or hitting the torso and imparting its energy into it and the limbs and equipment that might get torn from it. Virtually everyone who witnessed a Napoleonic battlefield and lived to write about it described files of troops being knocked down like bowling pins, with severed limbs flying. While not necessarily fatal, the effect was horrifying.
A secondary effect of such gunplay on exposed troops was it seriously endangered unit integrity. On the battlefields of the 16th to the 19th centuries, infantry had to remain in massed formation because if the infantry units lost their integrity they became vulnerable to cavalry attack. Thus, infantry formations had no choice but to take it. At Waterloo, with French cavalry ranging the field, the 27th Foot (Inniskillings) had no choice but to remain in square, exposed to solid shot virtually all day. They pulled their dead and injured into the center of the square until virutally none remained standing.
This was pure Napoleonic (Bonaparte was an artillerist) doctrine: “soften up” the infantry formations with solid shot, then send in infantry and cavalry to deal with the disarrayed formations. One type of medium weight, mobile, horsedrawn gun used for these sorts of tactics eventually became known as Napoleons.
Cannister, case, grape, and its more primitive associates have been around almost as long as the cannonball. It probably originated from desperation, when cannons were under infantry assault and out of ammunition, or from the observed effects of early stone cannonballs occasionally splintering when fired. Gun crews would load the powder, then fill the barrel with anything they could stuff into it, especially rocks, glass and scrap metal. The concept quickly turned into its own munition. The effect of cannister was unbelievably effective, and became even more effective (although much shorter ranged) when double- or even treble-shotted. Because of the volume of projectiles sent out, accuracy was not a consideration.
Two Union cannon–Napoleons, triple-shotted–were primarily responsible for blunting Stonewall Jackson’s counterattack along the Hagerstown Pike at the battle of Antietam Creek. Jackson probably wasn’t suprised–he was an artillerist, too. Also present at Anteitam were a number of Parrot guns, firing conical, fused shells from rifled barrels. They were the direct ancestors of today’s artillery.
To sum up, you used round shot against massed troops, cannister to defend. Both tactics were extremely effective, and eventually led to artillery being the most feared battlefield weapon. By the Great War, artillery accounted for an estimated 80% of all battlefield casualties.