April Corrected July North Carolinians and the Great War. Rumerman, Judy. Centennial of Flight Commission. Department of Cultural Resources. Learn NC.
NC Department of Cultural Resources. Used in France. Accession no. Model NC Museum of History. Accession No. What were the benefits of using a riffle over any other handheld gun in WW1? Was the production easier or was it the quality of the firearms that caused mass manufacturing? Please let us know what you are looking for and we will try to help you.
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If you prefer not to leave an email address, check back at your NCpedia comment for a reply. Please allow one business day for replies from NCpedia. Skip to main content. Is anything in this article factually incorrect? Please submit a comment. WWI: Technology and the weapons of war by A. Additional resources: "World War I in Photos. Image credits: "Gas Mask. World War I McLean, A. Since World War I, chemical weapons have caused more than one million casualties globally. As a result of public outrage, the Geneva Protocol , which prohibited the use of chemical weapons in warfare, was signed in While a welcome step, the Protocol had a number of significant shortcomings, including the fact that it did not prohibit the development, production or stockpiling of chemical weapons.
Also problematic was the fact that many States that ratified the Protocol reserved the right to use prohibited weapons against States that were not party to the Protocol or as retaliation in kind if chemical weapons were used against them. Poison gasses were used during World War II in Nazi concentration camps and in Asia, although chemical weapons were not used on European battlefields.
The Cold War period saw significant development, manufacture and stockpiling of chemical weapons. By the s and 80s, an estimated 25 States were developing chemical weapons capabilities.
The military value of contemporary armaments is primarily adjudged by their effectiveness in producing physical trauma. Whether through intimidation or physical damage, the military usefulness of weapons must ultimately be judged in terms of their contribution to this objective. While the extent to which military effectiveness correlates with the potential for generating fear is a concept not well understood, history suggests that its role can occasionally be pivotal.
For example, whistles were added to some aerial bombs during World War II specifically for psychologic effect. When diving on its target, a wind driven siren attached to its wing was activated. Likewise, some of the appeal of chemical weapons lies in their presumed psychologic effects as well. Except for chemical agents, however, the design of pre-nuclear weapons was not significantly influenced by psychologic considerations.
The character of modem weapons is ever changing, however, and considerable advances have been made in broadening and increasing their effectiveness. Furthermore, the principles of their use have been expanded. Given the often unique constitution of each tactical situation, these improvements, together, may provide an increasingly greater variety of options for operational commanders.
Effective antipersonnel weapons cause not only multiple casualties in a population of troops, but may also inflict multiple wounds in each of their affected targets. From the perspective of weapons designers, exploding missiles carry a far greater probability of hits than solid projectiles of the same size.
From a medical standpoint, a weapon producing multiple random wounds is more likely to injure a critical organ than a single injury caused by an aimed missile such as a rifle bullet. Furthermore, by creating greater numbers of casualties among opposing forces, many with multiple wounds, the enemy force will not only be weakened, but the logistic needs of their medical services will be increased.
This may often evolve at the expense of the combat arms, since more enemy logistical resources and personnel will need to be withdrawn from offensive operations to care for the injured and facilitate their evacuation. As a tactical situation changes, differing degrees of injury intensity may vary in their military impact. In one situation, where enemy capabilities for replacement are not great, as in the attack on an isolated strong point, weapons capable of only transient impairment of efficiency, although affecting a substantial part of the enemy force, may be of greater tactical value than weapons causing more permanent wounds to a much smaller number.
Altematively, in another situation, a premium may be placed on lethal or permanently disabling effects. Stated otherwise, are 10 casualties, losing 10 days each, equivalent to losing one day each? The dilemma may be re-defined as weighing immediate tactical advantage against a long term effect upon manpower. The expenditure of ammunition by various military forces has been reasonably well recorded.
It has thus far proven impractical, however, to relate a given expenditure of munitions to a given number of enemy casualties, much less relate them to a particular type of weapon. Wounds from explosive fragmentary munitions have accounted for between 44 and 92 percent of all surgical cases.
Under circumstances where fragments predominate, and weapons cannot be aimed at particular body regions, missiles tend to be randomly distributed in space, and hits are a function of the frequency and extent to which the various regions of the body are exposed. Today, even terrorists may utilise explosive fragmentation devices that are as sophisticated as those used in modem warfare. Under certain warfare conditions the ratio of fragment to bullet injuries may reverse.
During combat at close quarters, where ambush and sniping are frequent, directed fire may increase, and hits upon vital areas may be more frequent. These differences in bullet versus fragment distributions are important to recognise, since bullets are more likely to kill their victims than fragments from explosive munitions such as artillery shells or grenades 33 versus 10 to 20 per cent.
As a result of the ongoing perfection of a class of anti-personnel munitions known as fuel-air explosives FAE , future wars will probably have even higher proportions of casualties with primary blast injury as.
In addition, if larger numbers of troops serve in armoured fighting vehicles, the proportion of bums in land warfare will also increase. Due to e::o.
Armour casualties may experience more than bum injuries, however. They are also prone to the combined impact of blast injury, toxic gas inhalation, and tissue wounds from both the penetrators of anti-armour munitions and the shrapnel fragments emanating from the defeated armour. The nature of war wounds is always prone to continuing change with the development and use of new weapons systems.
Innovations such as futuristic laser-charged particle beams and high powered microwaves, for example, are now just beginning to demonstrate their impact as well. The prototype of the exploding munition is the shell. Originally composed of a hollow metal casing, explosive powder was packed within, along with a fuse for ignition. Depending upon the shell design, various kinds of fragments, projectiles, chemicals, or other agents were dispersed upon explosion. In older designs, fragments of the shell casing created most of the damage.
Subsequendy, artillery forces incorporated shrapnel to increase the antipersonnel effectiveness of explosive munitions. A shrapnel ball contained explosive as well as many small lead spheres the shrapnel packed in resin.
Blasted out of the shell at detonation, the lead spheres gready increased the number of projectiles from the explosive munition. Subsequendy, more specialised modem exploding munitions evolved, such as hand grenades, rockets, bombs and mines. Depending upon the size and design of the explosive munition, several thousand metal fragments may be produced upon detonation.
Fragments radiating from the detonation site may retain their wounding potential for up to several hundred metres. Such munitions can also injure through blast and burning effects. A casualty close to the point of detonation of an explosive weapon, although extensively injured by the mutilating effects of a high concentration of fragments, may also sustain blast and bum injuries.
Most of these casualties die immediately from multiple high energy transfer wounds, while some die from traumatic amputations caused by the dynamic blast over-pressure. The majority of the surviving wounded, however, these generally located distant from the explosion site, will have multiple, relatively low energy-transfer wounds caused by fragments of variable size with low impact velocities. An average of nine low energy transfer wounds were inflicted per patient!
The older fragment family is the product of detonation of artillery shells and large caliber mortar bombs. Natural fragmentation of the projectile casing results in fragments varying in size from dust particles to metal pieces weighing more than 1 grams.
Initial fragment velocities may be very high as much as 1 to 1 metres per second , but decline rapidly because of the poor aerodynamic characteristics of their irregular shape.
Some fragments have a Limited effective range and poor tissue penetrating power. Others, as a consequence of heavy mass and high kinetic energy, may penetrate deeply and cause massive damage. Because of their irregular shape and ragged edges, fragments produced by random fragmentation munitions often cause wounds with Jagged shape due to the drag of the projectiles within soft tissues.
On future conventional batdefi. In reality, the size of a fragment that will cause a casualty is surprisingly small — several hundred milligrams only. Modem improved fragmentation munitions, such as contemporary hand grenades small mortars and antipersonnel mines, contain either multiple uniformly constructed metallic spheres, or aerodynamically fashioned dart-like arrow shaped projectiles flechettes , all of which have been designed for great penetration.
Weapons designers have expended considerable effort in producing a consistent fragment size, which offers an optimum compromise between range, velocity, probability of hit, and target wounding effectiveness.
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