Shells and Shooting |
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Modern Age, New York; 1942 223 pages; many diagrams |
April 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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An engaging history of artillery
The development of artillery, broadly conceived, cannot be separated from the evolution of firearms in general, but particularly of gunpowder, related difficulties of casting or assembling sufficiently strong gun-barrels, the principle of range-finding, understanding high-angle fire versus flat-trajectory fire, and so on. In all these, the many clear drawings and diagrams, most by Willy Ley himself, are greatly helpful. Shells and Shooting is definitely not an Army manual. It is more like a warlike cousin of Ley's wonderful natural histories of extinct and mythical beasts and plants. Here's an example. Among grenades, the German "potato-masher" is classified as an offensive weapon, and the American "pineapple" as defensive. This is one of the topics where Willy Ley, German-born, adds personal observation to history and analysis:
And in case you thought discus practice might not be that helpful: For some time the Germans employed a flat "discus grenade," thrown precisely like the classical discus. ... From grenades, Ley goes on to the development of various kinds of trench artillery, in which he includes mine throwers, trench mortars, and flame-throwers. Among other specialized functions, the author discusses anti-aircraft guns with their features and tactics, airplane-mounted guns, recoilless artillery, as well as battle rockets — which latter is the seed of Ley's Rockets and evolving into his famous Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel. The "extreme guns" material here deals with the search for Big Ordnance, or Great Bombards, present almost from the beginnings: The first monster cannon was the Dulle Griete, built in 1380 and used in 1411. It was simply a gigantic firing tube, sixteen feet long and weighing thirteen tons, with an inside diameter of twenty-five inches. It fired a stone ball weighing roughly 700 pounds, and that ball, if and when it hit, naturally disposed of what was then considered a solid fortification. The cream of the crop, though, is the German Army's Paris Gun of World War I — after the war often confused with the "Big Bertha" super-howitzers. This long-range gun could fire eighty miles, a spectacular technical feat although not helpful militarily. Its history is most interesting — for instance, its combat air patrol of forty planes to prevent surveillance — and draws together a number of the technologies and tactics Ley has shown us in other cannon and other conflicts. The Paris Gun's tactical secrecy and logistical misadventures are related neatly beside its success at blasting random Parisian streets. What I find particularly fascinating in Ley's account of the Paris Gun is its stratospheric arc and his comparison of air resistance with the abstract or Platonic ideal of vacuum range: the performance of a bullet or shell without having to push air out of its way. I trace my curiosity about shooting in vacuum to my first reading of Robert A. Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo with its use of firearms on the Moon. I also recall, with more tolerance after reading Ley's account, the almost-prophetical Baltimore Gun Club in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. From grenade tactics to giant howitzers, there's a lot here. How can one not be bemused by an exploding discus, or a gun for which an ordinary truck can carry only one round, like a single giant log on an Oregon logging truck? While you will find the delights of Willy Ley's Shells and Shooting mostly more measured than explosive, this is a very good history.
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© 2009 Robert Wilfred Franson |
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