Anti-personnel Weapons

Sipri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367623784
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000261844
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book, first published in 1978, analyses the development, uses and effects of conventional anti-personnel weapons such as rifles and machine guns, grenades, bombs, shells and mines. It provides the historical, military, technical and clinical background to the international legal discussions as part of the ongoing efforts to prohibit or restrict the uses of some of the more inhumane and indiscriminate of these weapons, the most successful being the 1997 Ottawa Treaty that banned the use of anti-personnel mines.

1. The rise of anti-personnel weapons, from antiquity to 1900

Superior numerals, thus⁵, refer to notes on page 16.

I. Early anti-personnel weapons

It is a sad fact that man's use of tools to kill or injure his fellow man is one of his most abiding characteristics and distinguishes him from nearly all of the animal kingdom. Even today, enormous amounts of time and energy are devoted to improving means of slaughter.

Most modern weapons, like primitive weapons, are designed to transfer a quantity of energy to the enemy's body in order to crush, penetrate or burn it. It takes no more energy now to incapacitate a man than it did in the Stone Age.

Man is a peculiar mammal in that he is little adapted to meet the hazards that surround him; he is not equipped with effective camouflage or long limbs, or with teeth, claws or horns to serve as weapons. At an early stage, man turned to the use of simple hand-held weapons, and projectiles made of wood and stone. Perhaps he lacked the innate inhibitions about attacking members of his own species which are found in other predatory animals (Lorenz, 1966; Hinde, 1966; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1975). Simple tools and hunting weapons became potential instruments of war.

The first aggressive weapons were 'anti-personnel' in that they were made to injure or kill other men. Only later as people built protective walls around themselves were more powerful weapons needed to breach these defences. Sticks and clubs for use in hand-to-hand fighting evolved into maces and axes with stone, bronze or iron heads. Some of the Egyptian Pharaohs are depicted with a mace, which appears to have been preferred to the sword. Before discovering metal, some primitive peoples had war clubs with edges of shark's teeth, ray's tails, or other sharp objects, such as obsidian (Turney-High, 1971). Axes were designed for cutting, for use against an unprotected foe, for piercing, or for use against an enemy wearing armour. When the easily wielded iron sword came, the club and the axe became obsolete (Oakeshott, 1960).

Swords of copper or bronze were short because of the weakness of the metal, and it was not until the Iron Age that the gradual transition to the sword as a major weapon took place. The Greeks, for instance, did not make use of iron swords until the Doric invasions of about 1100 BC.

The production of steel from iron, which was achieved during the first millennium BC, resulted in blades that could be honed to a fine edge (Derry & Williams, 1960). Sabres (swords primarily designed for slashing) remained a feature of warfare until the first decades of the twentieth century. They were used mainly in cavalry charges.

The spear also developed from the dagger of the Bronze Age, and later the pike gave the wielder a longer outreach. Javelins were spears designed to be thrown; a quiver of javelins was a common fixture on Greek and Roman chariots. Some Roman javelins were designed to break in two or bend at the tip to prevent their reuse by the enemy. A later development was the lance, designed to utilize the force exerted by a charging horse and rider.

The earliest projectiles were stones thrown by hand and later by sling (cf. Krause, 1905). Since the sling required considerable skill, some armies relied on mercenary slingers such as those from the Balearic Islands. In their hands, shot of stones or lead slugs had considerable accuracy and a range of about 200 m (Kormann, 1973).

The bow marked the earliest use of mechanical energy to project a missile. It also is of prehistoric origin and was apparently used originally for hunting. Its development as a weapon of war is attributed to the Akkadians in their conquest of the Sumerians. It became the main weapon of war by about 1500 BC. The Greeks and the Romans did not favour the bow and for a time it went out of fashion. The most powerful bows had an effective range of 300-400 m, and a maximum range of twice that, which is similar to the ranges for which modern military rifles are designed. A trained man with a longbow could shoot about five arrows a minute. These arrows were often tipped with about 2 cm of steel and could penetrate chain-mail. In one recorded instance in 1182, such an arrow penetrated oak doors 10 cm thick (Oakeshott, 1960). In 1346, the Battle of Crecy demonstrated the effectiveness of the bow against soldiers wearing armour. The bow remained in service in European armies until about the end of the sixteenth century.

The crossbow, which uses a hand-crank to set the bow, probably entered Europe from China, and was inherited by the Romans from the Greeks and Carthaginians. The steel military crossbow of the fifteenth century had a range of some 380 m and a point-blank range of about 65 m (Hogg, 1970). Crossbows may have greater range and accuracy than conventional bows, but they are more complex and cumbersome and have a slower rate of fire. In the same way the heavier weapons which gave rise to early forms of artillery were slow. Examples of these are the catapult and the ballista. Some of these were designed to project small or large stones while others released arrows or iron-tipped darts weighing about 3 kg.

II. Early firearms

It was only many years after their appearance in the fourteenth century that the significance of firearms and explosives was appreciated. Firearms as we know them have their origins in the development of metallurgy and chemistry about AD 1200-1300 (Derry & Williams, 1960). The techniques of bell-founding appeared about AD 800, and by 1250 the Moors used cast-iron buckets to project stones using a powder charge. Gunpowder came into more general use about 1300 (Partington, 1960) and cannon by 1350 (Hogg, 1970).

The first firearms were developed while the crossbow and the ballista were still in use, and used similar projectiles, such as bolts or darts, usually made of iron. They had iron fins or feathers for stabilization and weighed about 200 g (about three times the weight of the normal crossbow bolt). The bolts were wrapped in leather so that they fitted tightly in the barrel of the gun. Later they gave way to small balls of about the same weight cast in lead. Stone, iron and bronze shot were used in heavier guns.

Early firearms were laboriously loaded at the muzzle and this restricted their rate of fire. Hand-guns were mainly used for sport, where time was not so vital. Rifled gun barrels were known as early as 1525 but they were not used in combat until the Thirty Years' War (1618-48); they permitted more accurate fire at longer ranges than smooth-bore guns.

The usefulness of the hand-held firearms improved considerably with the step-by-step evolution of the firing mechanism from match to matchlock to wheel-lock (originating in Italy between 1494 and 1559) and then to flintlock (originating in France about 1630). The flintlock was adopted by the French Army in 1660 and by the British in 1688 and it remained in use until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The addition of the bayonet in the 1600s led eventually to the obsolescence of the pike. The curved stock mitigated recoil and thereby improved the accuracy of fire.

Until the Napoleonic period, tactics were largely dictated by the effective range of the flintlock musket - about 200 m. The infantryman could carry about 60 rounds of ammunition and fire them at a rate of two per minute. The cavalry could cover 200 m in about 30 seconds. Once the musketeer had shot at the cavalryman, he had a good chance of being cut down by the cavalryman's sabre before being able to fire a second shot.

For many years artillery was used primarily to breach fortifications. Specialist gunners, sometimes hired for the occasion, operated the heavy pieces. Sometimes artillery was used for defence against besieging forces. About 1630 the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, effectively introduced the use of concentrated fire from light artillery on to the battlefield to break up the 'Spanish square' of opposing infantry. By the time of Napoleon, the French Inspector General of Artillery, de Gribeauval, introduced new tactics and materiel which enabled the artillery to charge up close to the enemy and decimate the front lines (Manucy, 1949).

A great many kinds of shell and shot were developed to be fired by artillery. A shell¹ is a projectile containing an explosive or other chemical substance and is designed to detonate or disperse the active material on or over the target. Shot refers to solid projectiles designed to penetrate the target by means of kinetic energy; the 'cannon-ball', or round shot, was for many years the most common type.

Additional kinds of shot included:

1. bar shot, shaped like a dumb-bell and intended to tumble in flight, so creating more injuries amongst a concentration of troops;
2. chain shot, consisting of two balls linked by a chain and intended to destroy the masts and rigging of sailing-ships. It carried incendiary candles to set fire to the sails;
3. knife-blade shot, which had hinged blades designed to open as the projectile left the muzzle; and
4. incandescent or hot shot, which was simply iron shot heated until it was red-hot shortly before being loaded into the gun.

These projectiles were in the main intended for use against materiel targets, such as ships. Other kinds of ammunition were developed which were primarily anti-personnel. They included a quantity of small projectiles, such as pieces of iron, nails, stones or flints, which were loaded directly into the gun. Later, such missiles were enclosed in a container and became case or canister shot. Case shot is said to have been first used at the Siege of Constantinople in 1453 (Hogg, 1970), and a later version, filled with small iron balls, was known as hail shot. In 1573 a German gunner, Zimmerman, invented a shell with a powder charge which burst the lead jacket and dispersed the enclosed hail shot.

In 1784, following the siege of Gibraltar, a British lieutenant, Henry Shrapnel, proposed his spherical case shot. On 11 June 1852, ten years after Shrapnel's death, the British Government, which had by then adopted the shell into service, ordained that shells of this kind should be called shrapnel shell. In case shot, the shell opened at the muzzle, but the shrapnel shell could be fired to any distance up to about 1 200 m, before it opened to release the lead shot.

Another weapon which depended on the effects of gunpowder - though not as a propellant - was the hand-grenade. This consisted of a hollow iron sphere, about 5 cm in diameter, filled with powder. Although it was introduced during the seventeenth century, it was not widely used until the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, which foreshadowed the trench warfare of World War I.

III. The rifle

During the nineteenth century, percussion cartridges were invented which simplified the loading and firing of rifles. Conical bullets, such as the French Minié bullet (designed to fit the grooves in the barrel), improved the efficiency of the rifle. These innovations permitted the development of the breech-loading gun and the repeating rifle. The Minié bullet was widely used, not only by the French but also by the British, who paid the inventor the sum of £20 000 and modified it for use in the Crimean War (1853-56).

An account of wounds inflicted by the weapons of the time is given in the British official medical history of the Crimean War (Matthew, 1858). While sword and lance wounds were 'generally not of a grave nature', patients were categorized according to their most severe wound, which was 'almost invariably found to be that inflicted by the bullet' (ibid., p. 262).

The conical bullets used so extensively in this campaign inflict a much more severe and dangerous wound than the old round. . . . The worst and most dangerous wounds appeared to be inflicted by the British oldfashioned Minié bullet with the iron cup. This sometimes had the effect of splaying out the ball on encountering an obstacle. (Matthew, 1858, p. 263)

The heaviest Russian conical ball (54 g) and the British Enfield bullet (37.5 g) caused more severe wounds, such as compound fractures of bones, than the older round balls, though these resulted in a more regular wound channel.

The Enfield version of the Minié bullet² was introduced into the British armies³ in India by 1857. The paper cartridges were heavily lubricated with animal fat, and the ends were supposed to be bitten off by the user before loading the gun. However, since the cow is sacred to Hindus and the pig unclean to Muslims, the Indian troops refused to do this and were imprisoned by their British officers. This helped to precipitate a mutiny which developed into a major uprising against British rule.

According to Smith (1969), the Minié bullet also played a role in the history of the United States:

It was the ball generally used in all the muzzle loaders used by both the North and the South during our Civil War; it was responsible in very large measure for the catastrophic loss of life in that terrible conflict. (Smith, 1969, p. 33)

Diffenbaugh (1965), summarizing the surgical history of the US Civil War, records that the Minié bullet 'produced marked destruction, shattering bone rather than piercing it, frequently emerging from the body in a transverse axis, producing horrible wounds' (p. 490).

Inspired by several earlier designs, a British Major Fosbery (1869) described how his own invention, an exploding bullet for use in the standard British rifle of the time, was first introduced in the summer of 1863 as an aid to judging the range of fire. The British were at the time engaged in 'pacification' operations in the North-West Frontier district of India. The steep mountains made it difficult to judge the distance to the enemy, and firing trial artillery rounds would remove any chance of surprise. The explosive bullets (the impact of which could be seen and heard) provided an effective alternative, enabling the artillery to be accordingly targeted.

It was not long before Fosbery's bullets were used 'on the enemy generally' when it became desirable to have a 'strong moral effect'. In this respect the exploding bullet seemed to be successful, for Fosbery records that the tribesmen 'were at pains of sending us a deputation, under a flag of truce, praying that their use might be discontinued' (Fosbery, 1869, p. 23).

Developments in small arms ammunition opened the way to breech-loading rifles of the modern type. By the 1860s the Spencer and Henry repeating rifles, and breech-loaders of many other types were in service in the United States. The Prussians used the Dreyse needle-gun in the Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864 and in the Seven Weeks' War of 1866 with Austria. The Austrians, who still used muzzle-loaders, suffered many more casualties. This impressed upon other European powers the advantages of breech-loading weapons. The breech-loa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations, Acronyms and Conventions
• Contents
• Introduction and summary
• Chapter 1. The rise of anti-personnel weapons, from antiquity to 1900
• Chapter 2. The rise of anti-personnel weapons, from World War I to the Viet Nam War
• Chapter 3. Projectile wounds and wound ballistics
• Chapter 4. Small arms and ammunition
• Chapter 5. Fragmentation weapons
• Chapter 6. Blast and blast weapons
• Chapter 7. Delayed-action weapons
• Chapter 8. Electric, acoustic and electromagnetic-wave weapons
• Chapter 9. The development of the laws of war on anti-personnel weapons
• Bibliography and references
• Index