In the TV series Napoleaon, there is a scene where during the Battle of Austerlitz the French capture a Russian or Austrian battery (can’t tell) and one of the French officers seems to hammer a nail into one of the cannons. WHat is he doing? I presume he is disabling it in someway.
Maybe reaming the vent of debris after firing to prepare for a new fuse?
ETA: Blocking the vent would certainly make the cannon impossoble to fire.
Dunno the scene.
Captured guns that couldn’t be carried away for the victor’s own use or surrendered guns were often disabled by ‘spiking’. Spiking was accomplished by driving a nail or spike into the touch hole of the cannon so it couldn’t fired until repaired.
Here is the scene in question, its at around 7:50.
I believe it was also done in cases where a force had to retreat and could not take their guns with them. It would prevent the advancing enemy from using what was left behind.
I’ve seen movies where troops would drop a grenade into a mortar tube to destroy it if they could not take it with them as they retreated. I guess it’s the modern version. with larger guns I’ve read that they’d take the breech block and bury or destroy it.
The cavalryman is spiking the gun, driving an iron nail into the touchhole so that the cannon cannot be fired. In reality he would not have disabled a captured gun unless there was a good chance that it would be recaptured. Anglo-Dutch cannon were overrun any number of times during the great cavalry attacks at Waterloo but were just as frequently retaken and opened fire again because no one thought to disable the guns – maybe because cavalry was not provided with the necessary spikes and hammers and maybe because no one was willing to dismount to do it.
The general practice was to spike a gun you were going to lose so that you enemy could not turn it on you. To that end artillery units had spikes and hammers in their equipment. Of course a cannon could be temporarily disable by carrying away the rammer and sponge, linstock or friction primers necessary to load and fire it. That is just what the Anglo-Dutch gunners did at Waterloo.
Modern artillery units are provided with a high heat grenades to put in the breech of a gun that is going to be abandon. When set off the heat fuses the pieces of the breech mechanism and renders the gun a pile of scrap iron. You don’t do that unless you have a very good reason.
Maybe he was using the Russians own hammer and nails. They seem to have been killed.
It could be that the cavalry were raiding the artillery rather than trying to capture the position outright. They could run in, drive off the enemy gunners, spike the guns and then retreat. Thus, destroying the guns and removing the danger they created.
Unless the intent was to remove the guns as a threat to an imminent attack not much point. Spiking a cannon in that era disabled them rather than destroying them outright (generally speaking). Depending upon how competently the spiking was done, the cannon’s could be back in action anywhere from hours to days (if the touch holes needed to be completely redrilled)
The frog was ‘spiking’ the gun. It was done in order to ensure that the cannon would be unusable by the enemy should the position overtaken be retaken by the enemy, or (in other circumstances) that the guns couldn’t be used by the attackers against the defenders as they retreated. One of the reasons that the Charge of the Light Brigade was such a useless waste of life was that they didn’t stick long enough to spike all of the guns the Russians had presented against them.
It’s a Russian gun. One can tell from the gunner’s shako (Austrian gunners wore helmets and bicorns during that period) and green uniform (Austrian artillery was brown).
Would it be possible to repair the damage caused by “spiking” on the battlefield. Or would it need to be taken to the rear?
Pull the nail out or redrill it with the appropriate sized hole. It would be a very temporary disabling of the gun to avoid getting fired in a retreat or from behind if advancing without the gun.
I know it’s GQ and all that , but I can’t help mentioning that this serie is real bad, IMO.
Most of it is devoted to romantic intrigues instead of historical events, which are poorly covered, acting is bad even though many actors are normally quite excellent, battles scenes are unimpressive (as can be seen in the video linked too). Basically no redeeming quality in my opinion (except one actor, who probably didn’t realize that nobody was taking this thing seriously, and impressed me, but unfortunately I can’t remember which one).
Malkovich as Talleyrand was the only redeeming feature.
Yes. 
Indeed he was the actor I was referring to.
Would it be a repair that could be done in the field?