I’ve never seen photographs of this method of execution, but this painting was made by Russian artist Vasily Vereshagin as anti-British propaganda in the Great Game. Vereshagin died aboard a Russian battleship sunk by the Japanese, who had been greatly aided with intelligence and logistics by the British.
I’ve read that the Enfields themselves were disposed of after the rebellion, by being sold to the Confederacy.
That wasn’t a political jab: it was a direct comparison of the Indian rumours supposed by Really Not All That Bright to be horrification and not meaning any harm to those Tea Partiers emails suggesting bad things as if they were solely for shocking news and not purposed to insult Obama.
Jesus.
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Colibri
General Questions Moderator
While the issue with the cartridges was what set off the events at Meerut, there were quite a few outstanding issues. There had been a reduction in pay and allowances in 1856, which was not something which was popular. The home state of many in the Bengal Army ; Oudh, had been annexed the same year, which as you can imagine led
to great resentment. Finally the Bengal Army and its troops had been more or less continiously at War for 20 years by that point, and this included some of the bloodiest fighting, Afghanistan, Persia, Punjab.
I know this is an older thread, but thought it might be worth mentioning: No-one actually knows where all the Pattern 1853 rifles used in the Indian Mutiny went, but it wasn’t to the Confederacy.
The Pattern 1853 rifles used throughout much of the Indian Mutiny were acquired by the East India Company through what was known as the Gun Trade (ie, bought commercially); they were, in essence, private property (of the EIC).
Most of the rebelling troops kept their smoothbore percussion muskets (basically caplock versions of the Brown Bess), although some of the Pattern 1853s were used by rebelling Sepoys. European soldiers had the Pattern 1853 and the fact they did gave them a large advantage in eventually putting the mutiny down.
The British Government took over the EIC’s Indian operations pretty much as soon as the smoke cleared from the last battle during the Indian Mutiny, but all the guns in the EIC arsenals just seem to have vanished over the years between the Crown taking over and the introduction of cartridge-firing arms a decade or so later. We’re talking a lot of guns too - something in the region of 300,000 or so, I believe.
Quite a few of the smoothbore muskets ended up in Nepal and a few of them are also thought to have been sold off in the South Pacific, but as far as anyone that I’m aware of knows, none of the East India Company Pattern 1853 muskets - or their smoothbore predecessors - ended up in the hands of the Confederacy, as surprising as that may appear.
I’m tempted to make a comment (if I were wittier) about Irish, drunk texting, and lack of spell-check.
Word spell check is only a pale imitation but I don’t have the patience to type this into an iPhone:
As a somewhat related question, what is the origin of the name of the gun? Was it manufactured in Enfield? Was Enfield the name of the designer? The company that made it?
It’s based on a place name.
In the case of the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle-musket, it was named after the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, in North London. That’s where it was designed and originally manufactured, although gunmakers elsewhere in the UK made versions for commercial sale.
The design was also produced in limited quantities in the USA during the Civil War, as well as in India (albeit without rifled barrels) on a large scale and Nepal (of all places) on a small scale after the Indian Mutiny.
Similarly, the Springfield Model 1861 was named after Springfield, Massachusetts, as it was designed and first built in the Springfield Armory.
The 1861 Springfield (and its variants like the Model 1863) was the most widely used infantry weapon of the U.S. Civil War. The 1853 Enfield was the second most widely used weapon of the war.
The Lorenz Rifle from Austria was the third most widely used. Unlike the Springfield and Enfield, the Lorenz was named after a person, its designer, Lieutenant Joseph Lorenz. The Austrian government couldn’t make enough Lorenz Rifles to meet their demand, and so they contracted out the manufacturing to private companies. The Lorenz rifles made by the Austrian government in the Vienna arsenal were excellent rifles, on par with the Springfield and Enfield rifles. The Lorenz rifles made by private contractors were crap.
I chose to purchase an Enfield over the Springfield because the Enfield has better sights. The Springfield has a simple sight with two flip-up leafs. With both leaves down, the sight is set for 100 yards. You can flip up a 300 yard leaf or a 500 yard leaf. The Enfield uses an adjustable ramp sight, graduated in 100 yard increments out to 400 yards. You can then flip the sight up and use it as a ladder sight for ranges beyond 500 yards. On earlier Enfields, the sight topped out at 900 yards. The sights on later Enfields went up to 1200 yards. Realistically, hitting anything beyond 600 yards was mostly a matter of luck. Even so, it’s a pretty darn accurate rifle.
Its accuracy had a huge impact on the Civil War, didn’t it? I understand that one reason for the high casualty rates was that generals were still using musket tactics with weapons that could actually be aimed.
Was your average soldier taught how to aim? I imagine the rural Southerns often hunted, New Englanders too, perhaps.
I’m guessing that even a relatively untrained soldier would be a much better shot with a rifle than he would be with a musket, especially after a few battles.
The effective range of a smoothbore musket was about 100 yards for hitting what you were aiming at more often than not - and that’s in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing with it.
I’m not being flippant, either - the British military ran a whole series of tests around the time the Pattern 1853 was introducted; the accuracy of an average solder went from maybe probably being about to hit a man-size target at 100 yards (2/3 chance, IIRC) to definitely, absolutely being able to hit a man-size target at up to 500 yards.
It’s hard to appreciate how rapidly small arms design changed just in the 19th century. During the Napoleonic Wars British Soldiers were using Brown Bess flintlock muskets. 25 years later they had percussion cap muskets. 25 years after that, rifled caplock muskets. 15 years later, breechloading cartridge arms. 20 years after that, magazine-fed bolt-action repeating rifles or even actual machine-guns, both using cartridges loaded with smokeless powder (or Cordite, but the same thing, basically).
Smooth bore muskets always fire curve balls. The round ball is going to randomly hit the barrel as it travels down, and that’s going to make it spin in some random direction. The ball will go straight for maybe 50 to 75 yards or so. After that, where it goes is anyone’s guess.
Smooth bore flintlocks were the weapon of choice from the 1600s through the 1800s. Other than the addition of the bayonet, they went through very few changes. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, muskets changed from smooth bore flintlocks to rifled percussion locks. The percussion cap allowed the muskets to be much more weatherproof. Firing a flintlock in damp weather is a whole lot of click… “dammit”… click… “dammit”… Percussion caps are a lot more reliable in damp weather. Percussion caps also fire pretty much instantly, where a flintlock has a slight delay as the powder in the pan goes off, which then ignites the main charge.
One of the keys in musket fighting was the bayonet. In the U.S. Revolutionary War and in the Napoleanic Wars, bayonets played a key role on the battlefield. George Washington got his butt kicked up and down the battlefield until he went into Valley Forge. Aside from starving to death, Washington also spent his time at Valley Forge getting his men trained in proper military discipline and proper bayonet fighting. Only after that was he able to go toe to toe with the British troops. Bayonets accounted for roughly a third of all battlefield casualties during those wars.
In the Civil War, the much greater accuracy of the rifle-muskets tended to push back the battle lines, to the point where bayonet fighting became almost obsolete. During the Civil War, bayonets accounted for less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties, a pretty significant change.
The big training for Civil War soldiers wasn’t for accuracy though, it was mostly for speed. While Civil War rifle-muskets are very accurate, their rate of fire is still abysmally slow. Civil War soldiers were expected to be able to fire four shots per minute. That takes a lot of practice.
The changes to muskets as well as changes in tactics made things like Pickett’s Charge suicidal in the Civil War. A charge like that would have overwhelmed the enemy and probably would have been successful in the Revolutionary War. Instead, in the CIvil War, when Pickett was asked to re-form his men, he said “Sir, I have no more men.” Similar charges had also failed spectacularly earlier in the war. The generals were slow to learn the lesson that this sort of charge was no longer effective, and massive casualties were the result.
