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Field artillery in the American Civil War refers to the artillery weapons, equipment, and practices used by the artillery branch to support infantry and cavalry forces in the field. It does not include siege artillery , use of artillery in fixed fortifications, coastal or naval artillery .
Round shot or solid shot or a cannonball or simply ball A solid spherical projectile made, in early times, from dressed stone but, by the 17th century, from iron. The most accurate projectile that could be fired by a smooth-bore cannon, used to batter the wooden hulls of opposing ships, forts, or fixed emplacements, and as a long-range anti ...
The cast iron cannonball was introduced by French artillery engineers after 1450; it had the capacity to reduce traditional English castle wall fortifications to rubble. [1] French armories would cast a tubular cannon body in a single piece, and cannonballs took the shape of a sphere initially made from stone material.
In the period before the Civil War, a U.S. Army light artillery battery was organized with four M1841 6-pounder field guns and two M1841 12-pounder howitzers. [1] The field gun fired solid iron cannon balls in a flat trajectory to smash its targets [2] while the howitzer was designed to lob hollow shells into massed formations or fortifications. [3]
Artillery shot-canister for a 12-pounder cannon from the US Civil War era. From the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society. Note the uniform, regularly shaped projectiles, unlike langrage. Canister shot is a kind of anti-personnel artillery ammunition. It has been used since the advent of gunpowder-firing artillery in Western armies ...
The M1841 12-pounder field howitzer was a bronze smoothbore muzzle-loading artillery piece that was adopted by the United States Army in 1841 and employed during the Mexican–American War and the American Civil War.
The M1841 6-pounder field gun was a bronze smoothbore muzzleloading cannon that was adopted by the United States Army in 1841 and used from the Mexican–American War to the American Civil War. It fired a 6.1 lb (2.8 kg) round shot up to a distance of 1,523 yd (1,393 m) at 5° elevation.
In the American Civil War, the siege train was always transported to the area of the siege by water. The siege trains of the Civil War consisted almost exclusively of guns and mortars . Guns fired projectiles on horizontal trajectory and could batter heavy construction with solid shot or shell at long or short range, destroy fort parapets , and ...