I recently read a news story about a cruiser of the California Highway Patrol that, while driving on the highway that passes through Camp Pendleton, had been hit by ‘shrapnel’ from prematurely exploded ordnance fired by nearby Marines. This report reminded me that the men who fought in the First World War used that word to mean something other than ‘any flying fragment created by an explosion’. Indeed, a number of words that, in the present day, serve generic purposes provided soldiers of the Great War with specific terms of art.
In 1914, artillery pieces light enough to take the field fired projectiles of two basic types. A ‘common shell’ contained a charge that accounted for twenty percent or so of its weight. Thus, when it exploded at the end of its flight, it inflicted intense, but highly local, damage to its target. A ‘shrapnel shell’ carried several hundred lead balls, each weighing somewhere between ten and thirteen grams. (This equaled, in rough terms, a third or so of an ounce.) When employed with skill, it burst in the air over its victims, subjecting them to the heavy metal analog of a hail storm.1
While fully capable of firing both kinds of shells, the most common type of artillery piece employed in the First World War, the light field gun, specialized in the delivery of shrapnel. To this end, it were fitted with a long and narrow barrel that permitted the projectiles that it fired to travel at especially high speeds, and, as a result, increased the destructive effects of the bullets they released.
Shrapnel shells fired by the paragon of this class of weapon, the 75mm field gun adopted by the French Army in 1897, enjoyed an initial velocity of 525 meters (1,720 feet) per second. (Also known as ‘muzzle velocity’, V0 , and - my personal favorite - Anfangsgeschwindigkeit, ‘initial velocity’ describes the speed of a projectile at the point at which it leaves the business end of an artillery piece.)
Light field guns could also fire common shells. However, the combination of thick shell bodies (needed to survive the high velocities) and narrow barrels reduced the amount of explosive material such projectiles could carry. The high velocities imparted by field guns, moreover, did little to enhance the ruin wrought by such charges at the end of their journeys through the air.
Because of this, most armies complemented their fleets of light field guns with light field howitzers of comparable weight. These pieces made use of barrels that were much shorter than those of their running mates. They also used smaller propellant charges to deliver, at much lower speeds, much larger shells.
Compare, if you will, two artillery pieces offered for sale by the Bethlehem Steel Company in 1916. Both weighed 3,000 pounds (1,360 kilos) or so and rolled on wheels with a diameter of 56 inches (142 centimeters). However, while the first member of the set - a light field gun - used a large charge to send a small shell through a long barrel at high speed, the second - a light field howitzer - employed less propellent to push a much larger shell through a much shorter barrel at a slower speed. As a result, the projectile fired from the light field gun could travel much further than the mine tossed by the howitzer.
Speaking of mines …
During the century leading up to the Great War, the terms ‘mine’ and ‘torpedo’ might describe any device that combined a relatively large explosive charge with a relatively thin casing. Thus, the large, thin-walled shells fired by short-barreled artillery pieces might be described as ‘mines’, ‘mine shells’ or ‘aerial torpedos’.
In much the same way, ‘grenade’ could be applied to exploding projectiles of many different kinds. German-speaking soldiers, for example, referred to large mortars as ‘mine throwers’ (Minenwerfer) and smaller weapons of that class as ‘grenade throwers’ (Granatwerfer).
During the First World War, the words ‘mine’, ‘torpedo’, and ‘grenade’ traded their generic significations for the narrower connotations they enjoy today. Thus, they came to mean, respectively ‘a weapon that waits’, ‘self-propelled underwater weapon’, and ‘small projectile that is either thrown by hand or fired from a hand-held launcher’.
‘Gun’, ‘howitzer’, and ‘shrapnel’, however, moved in the opposite direction.
In the course of the First World War, arms makers produced howitzers with longer barrels. They also mounted guns on carriages originally designed for howitzers. As a result of these two trends, the difference between artillery pieces of the two categories diminished, leading to the creation of hybrid weapons known as ‘gun-howitzers’. (The term was borrowed from Napoleon 12-pounder of the previous century.)
Over the years, American artillerists shortened ‘gun-howitzer’ to ‘howitzer’. At the same time, their British counterparts replaced the hyphenated term of art with the monosyllabic ‘gun’. (This parting of ways explains why the US Army refers to the British L118 ‘light gun’ that it adopted in the 1980s as the M119 ‘light howitzer’.)
‘Shrapnel’ lost its specific meaning when, at the end of the First World War, gunners decided that, thanks to improvements in explosives, fuzes, and shell bodies, an explosive shell could achieve many of the effects that shrapnel shells had previously produced.
The disappearance of shrapnel shells also led to an increase in the number of things covered by the term ‘barrage’. Borrowed from the French word for ‘dam’, ‘barrage’ originally referred to a curtain of shrapnel shells laid down to prevent movement through a particular area. When, however, gunners replaced such barriers with concentrations of explosive shells, ‘barrage’ came to mean ‘bombardment of any sort.’
Source for the Diagram
Bethlehem Steel Company Mobile Artillery Material (South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Bethlehem Steel, 1916) (Combined Arms Research Library)
For Further Reading
Readers interested in the particulars of the payloads carried by artillery projectiles of the First World War can find them in such contemporary reference books as the Treatise on Ammunition (Internet Archive) and Matériels en Service (Gallica)
Good points, but another issue is that many people, including almost all journalists, have so little understanding of military equipment and operations that they often make amazingly silly mistakes (when is a tank, not a tank? When it is an up armored HMMWV).