Did cannonballs explode?
In movies showing battles from the
Civil War and earlier conflicts, cannon-fired projectiles inevitably
send up dirt and smoke and flailing stuntmen upon impact. It makes
a nice visual and is probably easier to stage than an iron ball
bouncing murderously through a division.
In reality, an array of both exploding
and solid projectiles were used in the Civil War and for centuries
before, but solid shot predominated until around the1850s.
The earliest cannons, developed
in 1300s, fired nothing but solid objects -- stone balls. The
following century weapons makers did develop hollow iron balls
filled with gunpowder and fitted with a fuse that had to be lit
just before firing. But the difficulty in handling these primitive
time bombs and in getting them to explode at the target made them
both dangerous and unreliable. To minimize the danger of their
blowing up in the cannon's barrel, these lit-fuse balls were used
mainly in quick-loading, wide-bore, stubby-barreled cannons called
howitzers or with drop-and-fire "mortars," which looked like the
World War II-era weapon of the same name only much larger.
Over the centuries, weapons makers
devised a great variety of solid-shot combinations and techniques.
The one-two punch of stone and iron balls spelled doom for castle
walls. At close range, cannons were often used like sawed-off
shotguns to fire bunches of smaller balls, devastating to troops
massed on level ground. At sea, ships often fired iron bars, chains
and small balls to take down masts and rigging. Another trick
was to heat a cannonball red hot in hopes of igniting a fire on
deck or, better yet, landing one in the enemy ship's magazine.
Blasting a hole through the hull of the enemy ship by firing into
the water normally didn't work, however. The ball would skip off
the surface.
Elongated solid projectiles called
bolts were developed for use with rifled cannons, which had a
spiral groove cut on the inside of the barrel to start the projectile
spinning and improve accuracy. But round balls were the most common
solid shot used in the Civil War, and those are what you see today
welded into a pyramid shape and set next to a cannon in a town
square.
Sources: Daniel A. Lindley and Keir Lieber, both Notre Dame assistant
professors of government/political science;
Dennis Showalter, professor of history, Colorado College;
various reference works
