Artillery

• 1. Introduction

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  Artillery is one of the oldest instruments of organized violence, and Joseph Stalin put it plainly in a 1944 speech: he called it "the god of war." That phrase captures something real. In the Napoleonic Wars, in World War I, and again in World War II, artillery caused the majority of all combat deaths. In World War I alone, the British Royal Artillery grew to over one million men, larger than the entire Royal Navy. An estimated 75,000 French soldiers died from friendly artillery fire in just four years of that conflict.

  The story begins not with a cannon but with a catapult, in 399 BC in Syracuse, and runs forward through Ottoman siege guns hauled by sixty oxen, Joan of Arc standing against English gunpowder fortifications, a Scottish king killed by his own cannon, and a French engineer who standardized every bolt and screw in an entire army's arsenal. What does it take to turn raw projectile force into a weapon that can decide the fate of empires? And how did the word "artillery" come to mean something so different from what it once described?

• 2. Before Gunpowder

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  The first known catapult was built in Syracuse in 399 BC. For the next seventeen centuries, every engine of war depended on mechanical energy. That constraint imposed strict limits. A Roman catapult from the 1st century BC, launching stones of 6.55 kg, achieved a kinetic energy of 16 kilojoules. That sounds significant until you compare it to a mid-19th-century 12-pounder gun, which fired a 4.1 kg round with 240 kilojoules of energy, or a 20th-century US battleship firing a 1,225 kg shell at energy levels surpassing 350 megajoules.

  The counterweight trebuchet, arguably the most powerful pre-gunpowder siege engine, was invented in the eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century, with the earliest definite written record in 1187. An earlier version, the traction trebuchet, had been in use in China since the 4th century, powered by teams of soldiers pulling ropes. Both types were effective at hurling projectiles at walls, but neither could be moved quickly or used in open-field combat.

  In China, traction trebuchets were deployed as anti-personnel weapons, underscoring that siege artillery and battlefield artillery had very different origins. The Mongol armies adopted Chinese artillery and used it effectively in their conquests, and by the late 14th century, Chinese rebel forces were combining organized artillery with cavalry to drive the Mongols out of power.

• 3. The Cannon Arrives

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  Early Chinese artillery had vase-like shapes, a form visible in the "long range awe inspiring" cannon dated to 1350 and recorded in the 14th-century Ming dynasty treatise Huolongjing. As metallurgy improved, later Chinese designs abandoned that shape. The transition can be seen in the bronze "thousand ball thunder cannon," an early field artillery piece.

  These crude weapons reached Europe in the 13th century. The first drilled bore ordnance on record was operating near Seville in 1247. They fired lead, iron, or stone balls, sometimes arrows, occasionally whatever scrap was at hand. During the Hundred Years' War, the bombard gave way to something more recognizable as a cannon, though all early designs were muzzle-loaders. Attempts at breech-loading existed from early on, but a lack of engineering knowledge made those designs more dangerous to their operators than to any enemy.

  A cannon at Breteuil in 1356 illustrated both the potential and the limits of the new weapon: the besieged English used it to destroy a French assault tower, but the cannon was purely defensive. By the end of the 14th century, cannons could knock in roofs but not penetrate castle walls. Then, between 1420 and 1430, something changed. Gunpowder recipes were improved to make the propellant roughly three times as powerful as before. Cannon barrels were elongated. The traditional defensive advantage in a siege evaporated almost overnight, and the English, French, and Burgundians all adapted rapidly.

  The word "cannon" itself signals a shift. Its appearance in the 15th century marks the introduction of a dedicated field carriage with axle, trail, and animal-drawn limber, producing mobile pieces that could accompany an army rather than sitting fixed in a siege position. A key engineering innovation was the trunnion, a projection cast integrally at the side of the barrel, which allowed the barrel to be mounted to a movable base and raised or lowered with ease.

• 4. Joan, Mehmet, and James

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  Three figures from the mid-15th century illustrate what gunpowder artillery had become by then. Joan of Arc encountered it repeatedly in the campaigns she led for France. At the Battle of Tourelles in 1430, she faced heavy gunpowder fortifications and her troops prevailed. She supported large artillery units in the assaults on Jargeau, Meung, and Beaugency. When she led the assault on Paris, stiff artillery fire from the suburb of St. Denis was a central factor in her defeat. In the same year, fighting the Burgundians, who held the strongest gunpowder arsenal among the European powers at that time, the French under her command still managed to hold their ground.

  Few events show the weapon's decisive potential more starkly than the Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. Mehmet the Conqueror brought sixty-nine guns arranged in fifteen batteries and aimed them at the city walls. The barrage lasted forty days, during which the guns fired an estimated 19,320 times. The most famous single piece, a bombard known as the "Basilic," weighed around 19 tonnes. It could hurl a stone ball of 1,500 lbs more than a mile, though it could only fire seven or eight times a day. Moving it required two hundred men, sixty oxen, and 250 labourers improving the road ahead of it, travelling at barely 3 km per day. The Ottoman answer to these logistical constraints was to cast very large guns in sections that could be screwed together at the site. The historian Sir Charles Oman described the Fall of Constantinople as perhaps "the first event of supreme importance whose result was determined by the use of artillery."

  In 1460, just seven years later, King James II of Scotland was killed at the siege of Roxburgh Castle when one of his own cannons exploded. The cannon had been imported from Flanders. Early cannon were not always reliable, and the men who operated them were as much at risk from their own weapons as from the enemy.

• 5. Portugal, Java, and the Global Spread

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  After the beginning of the 16th century, Portuguese gunners were widely regarded as among the most proficient in Europe. Morocco served as their proving ground. During the reign of King Manuel, from 1495 to 1521, more than 2,000 cannons were sent to Morocco for garrison defense, with over 3,000 estimated to have been needed across that period. A tactical innovation Portugal introduced was the systematic combination of projectile types against massed assaults. Canister shot had existed since the early 15th century, but the Portuguese were the first to use it extensively. Their engineers developed a canister round using a thin lead case filled with iron pellets that broke apart at the muzzle and scattered in a narrow pattern. By 1505, fused-delay shells were common in Portuguese service, and a sixth of all rounds fired in Morocco were of that type.

  The most popular weapon in Portuguese arsenals was the berço, a 5 cm, one-pounder bronze breech-loading cannon that weighed 150 kg with an effective range of 600 meters. Their three main classes of artillery covered anti-personnel guns, bastion guns for battering fortifications, and howitzers that could fire incendiary devices, including a hollow iron ball filled with pitch and fuse, designed to burst on contact.

  When Portuguese and Spanish forces arrived in Southeast Asia, they found the local kingdoms already producing cannon. Duarte Barbosa, writing around 1514, described the inhabitants of Java as great masters in casting artillery. In 1513, a Javanese fleet led by Pati Unus attacked Portuguese Malacca carrying artillery made in Java. By the early 16th century, Javanese foundries were producing guns ranging from 180 to 260-pounders, weighing between 3 and 8 tons and measuring between 3 and 6 meters. Some of these have survived to the present day.

• 6. Standardization and Napoleon

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  Gustavus Adolphus is identified as the general who first made cannon a consistently effective battlefield force, pushing development of lighter weapons and deploying them in far greater numbers than any predecessor. But the structural problem remained: producing cannons was inconsistent, and repairing them was slow. Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval, a French artillery engineer working in the mid-18th century, addressed this by standardizing cannon design across the French army. He developed a 6-inch field howitzer whose barrel, carriage, and ammunition specifications were made uniform, with interchangeable parts down to nuts, bolts, and screws. Mass production and repair became substantially easier.

  During the Seven Years' War, King Frederick II of Prussia used advances in lightness and mobility to deploy horse artillery that could move freely across a battlefield. He also introduced the reversible iron ramrod, more resistant to breaking than older wooden designs and faster to use, since gunners no longer needed to check which end they were holding.

  Napoleon, himself a former artillery officer, perfected the tactic of massing artillery batteries against a single critical point in an enemy's line before committing infantry and cavalry. Each French cannon was named for the weight of its projectile, giving variants such as 4, 8, and 12, indicating pounds. Solid round shot was most effective when fired at shoulder height across flat ground, tearing through ranks or bouncing along the surface to break legs and ankles. Canister rounds acted as massive shotguns at close range, scattering hundreds of projectiles. The 1650 treatise Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima by Kazimierz Siemienowicz remained a standard European artillery manual for over two centuries.

• 7. Armstrong and Modern Artillery

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  After the Crimean War exposed British artillery as barely changed since the Napoleonic era, the government awarded a contract to the industrialist William Armstrong. Production began in 1855 at the Elswick Ordnance Company and the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. The Armstrong Gun had three distinctive features.

  First, it was rifled. Rifling had been tested on small arms since the 15th century, but the machinery to rifle artillery accurately was not available until the mid-19th century. Martin von Wahrendorff and Joseph Whitworth had independently produced rifled cannon in the 1840s, but Armstrong's was the first to see widespread deployment. The shell was cast iron, shaped like a Minié ball, with a thin lead coating slightly larger than the bore that engaged the rifling to impart spin. Spin eliminated windage and extended both range and accuracy beyond what smoothbore muzzle-loaders could achieve.

  Second, it was a breech-loader. Breech-loading had been attempted since the Middle Ages, but no mechanism could withstand the explosive charge until advances in metallurgy and precision engineering during the Industrial Revolution made it viable. Third, the barrel was built up from wrought-iron tubes of successively smaller diameter, each heated to expand over the one before it. When the outer tube cooled, it contracted, applying even inward pressure against the outward forces of firing. Armstrong's system was formally adopted in 1858, beginning with smaller pieces: a 6-pounder mountain gun, a 9-pounder for horse artillery, and a 12-pounder field gun.

  The gun generally credited with containing all modern features is the French 75 of 1897. It used cased ammunition, was breech-loading, had modern sights, a self-contained firing mechanism, and a hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanism that kept the wheels and trail perfectly still during firing. The crew could fire the moment the barrel returned to rest. In typical use it delivered fifteen rounds per minute, with peak rates approaching 30 rounds per minute for short periods with an experienced crew, at ranges up to about 5 miles.

• 8. Indirect Fire and Precision

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  Indirect fire, meaning firing without a direct line of sight to the target, may date as far back as the 16th century. Early battlefield examples include Russian artillery firing over treetops at Paltzig in July 1759 and a battery of the Royal Horse Artillery firing shrapnel indirectly at the Battle of Waterloo. In 1882, Russian Lieutenant Colonel KG Guk published Indirect Fire for Field Artillery, describing the use of aiming points, crest clearance, and observer corrections. A few years later, the German-developed Richtfläche sight gave gunners a practical means of indirect laying in azimuth. By the 1890s, indirect fire had become German army doctrine.

  World War I transformed what indirect fire meant in practice. Delivering effective fire without seeing the target required solving problems that had no precedent: survey to fix gun positions accurately, meteorological data for wind and air temperature, muzzle velocity measurement, propellant temperature corrections, and air photo interpretation for locating targets. In 1914, these methods were rudimentary or absent. British heavy artillery worked systematically from late 1914 onward, and by early 1918 had developed effective predicted fire, meaning accurate fire against a located target without ranging shots. Major General Henry Hugh Tudor pioneered armour and artillery cooperation at the breakthrough Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Germany demonstrated similar capability the following year in Operation Michael.

  By the late 1970s, precision-guided munitions began to appear. The US 155 mm Copperhead and its Soviet 152 mm Krasnopol equivalent used laser designation to home a shell onto an illuminated target. In the early 21st century, GPS made accurate guidance relatively cheap, producing weapons like the US 155 mm Excalibur and the 227 mm GMLRS rocket. These weapons introduced a new logistical requirement: very accurate three-dimensional target coordinates, a process called mensuration. The proximity fuze, first developed by the British and deployed in Europe in late December 1944, had become known informally as the US Artillery's "Christmas present" during the Battle of the Bulge, and the same fuzes proved highly effective against kamikaze aircraft in the Pacific and V-1 flying bombs over Britain.