Do they use shrapnel shells, or does the percussion of the shell impacting alone cause physical trauma?
Is grapeshot (I think that is what they called it in Napoleon’s days) still a thing?
Shrapnel is/was the idea of sending all the shot inside a single shell, then bursting the shell just before impact, so that the shot spread out, still traveling at the spead of the original shell, and killed anybody it hit.
Because the shot traveled inside the shell, it didn’t slow down and spread out like it would if fired from a shotgun.
The bursting charge was just enough to break the shell and spread out the shot: if you stand a little bit back from one of these shells and detonate it, you are unlikely to get hurt.
A disatvantage is that you have to time the shell to burst at the correct height, otherwise the shot either slows down/spread out, or just spreads out on the ground.
Shrapnel was replaced with Fragmentation shells in WWI, but still existed at the start of WWII. Fragmentation shells are/were sometimes still called shrapnel.
Shot fired directly out of a shotgun still exists as an anti-personal weapon, but it’s short range. It was used by artillery (grapeshot) when artillery was short range, ie up to the start of the Boer War. Neglecting the lessons of the Boer War, England deployed artillary up on the front lines at the start of WWI, but soon learned better.
And Henry Shrapnel was an English Army Officer.
Grapeshot was a bunch of round lead balls, roughly the size of small grapes (hence, the name), typically bunched together in a canvas bag. Cannister shot (aka case shot) was basically the same thing except that it was placed inside of some sort of can or case, often metal but sometimes wood. There were a lot of variations on the theme that all went by the same basic names.
As Melbourne said, these were replaced by shrapnel rounds and fragmentation rounds. We tend to refer to anything that explodes and throws off chunks of stuff as shrapnel rounds these days, even though originally a shrapnel round had the “shrapnel” inside of it, which is different from the modern style round which often fragments the case itself to produce the “shrapnel”.
Another type of anti-personnel round in modern use is the flechette round or the “beehive” round. This type of shell contains a bunch of metal darts, called flechettes which is French for “little arrow”. Flechette rounds were used a lot in Vietnam and they earned the nickname “beehive” round due to the buzzing sound that the flechettes make as they whiz through the air. Flechette rounds and fragmentation rounds are both still in use today. Fragmentation rounds are more common.
Anti-personnel cluster bombs are sometimes used today in applications where anti-personnel artillery would have been used in the past.
A 105mm gun has to have at least one flechette round. It’s intended to be used when the enemy somehow comes within sight of the battery. The gunner simply levels and traverses the gun, peers through the bore and spots the center of mass of the attacking force. Load and then fire.
I think there are two general types of shell intended for antipersonnel use - canister or flechette shells for direct fire (that is, you point the howitzer straight at a mass of troops) and high-explosive fragmentation shells (which I believe are generally used for indirect fire).
The former still exist - as an example there’s a 120mm canister round for the M1 Abrams tank which turns the main gun into a giant shotgun, the round contains something like 1000 tungsten balls.
Effective out to 500m per that link.
Here’s a high-speed video: Shotgun Tank Round - XM1028 120mm Canister Tank Cartridge - YouTube
However your general purpose artillery round is going to be something like this, the M795 high explosive fragmentation round for 155mm howitzers.
Contains over 20 pounds of high explosives and the body of the shell fragments at detonation which will damage everything nearby, including vehicles and people. I think that the casualty-causing radius is in the tens of meters and the shell can be fired 20+km.
If you’ve got waves of mounted infantry coming at you from 10 miles off you’ll be lobbing HE shells at them. If 20 guys with RPGs decide to charge your tank from 400m, that’s probably where you fire a canister round at them.
It’s not just physical trauma. There is a psychological trauma that artillery inflicts. Remember all of those Iraqi soldiers that surrendered during the Gulf war? Those guys had been pounded for days with MLRS rockets. Though they were physically OK, they had had enough.
Historically, cannons fired either solid shot or canister shot, with solid shot being exactly what it sounds like- an iron cannonball. Canister shot was a bunch of smaller balls contained in a light sheet metal canister. Solid shot was fired at range, and generally the goal was to fire down a line of infantry, as you could kill or maim several infantrymen with one round. Canister was used in close essentially like a large shotgun.
At some point, Shrapnel shells came into vogue. They were basically a round containing a bunch of small balls that was fired, and that would fly some distance, and then detonate, firing the balls down toward the enemy- kind of like a shotgun shell that would fly and then detonate. Eventually these were found to be relatively ineffective and were withdrawn from service.
Generally speaking all the above types were replaced by HE shells, where the casing would fragment into small fragments propelled by the explosion. They’re still the main round for AP use. The fuses can be set for impact or airbursts.
More modern rounds have cluster munitions- DPICM, for example, that allow shells to cover a wider area.