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Battleof arausio1/6/2024 ![]() ![]() While the "Lions led by Donkey's" mythos to it is somewhat exaggerated & untrue, the real story is in how differences in ordnance technology shaped this battle, yet for whatever reason it remains to this day sorely overlooked. The first wave got caught up in these obstructions, could not make it to the German line, and were then blown to pieces wholesale by German HE shells, fired from such a long range that the guns responsible for it could neither be seen nor shot back at! To this day the Somme has gone down in history as one of the biggest disasters in the entire history of the British military. they found that all of the obstructions the shrapnel shells had intended to destroy had survived. Then when the guns finally stopped & the dust settled and the first wave left their trenches. This was & to this day remains one of the longest artillery barrages in human history. The offensive was prefaced with a week's long artillery barrage. One noteworthy example of this is the Battle of Somme where the British attempted to clear the field of obstructions using shrapnal shells. Time was of the essence though, because the longer they went without it the more avoidable deaths their front line soldiers would experience. The longer the war went on, the more desperately the British & French needed heavy, long-range, HE-ordnance which spurred on many secret R&D projects to come up with a solution. So there you have it: Two different examples from history where putting a more volatile explosive type in a shell, without changing the shell's design to coupe with the new payload choice, resulted in disaster. The shock from firing the shells would jar the fulminate of mercury too much, causing it to instantly detonate before leaving the barrels! This is the same problem that the Japanese Navy had experienced in 1904, when they had decided to switch the payload of their British-designed Armor-Piercing Shells to a more volatile explosive type which, as history documents quite clearly, immediately blew up most of the Japanese 12-inch guns. Why? Not because the shells were being manufactured poorly, but because the design was not one that could handle such an extra volatile payload type. So they acquired the fulminate of mercury, started using it in their existing HE shell-design, only for it to blow up over a thousand of their guns. So they bought it from the Canadians & Americans. The switch to fulminate of mercury was not something they had expected to do, and it presented a new problem: where to get that extremely volatile explosive? France did not have a domestic manufacturing system for it, nor a large supply of it stashed away. ![]() And it was their attempts to fix that fatal flaw with a more volatile explosive that resulted in the destruction of 1/4 of the 75s in existence. The HE shells they did possess, were a single design which was inherently defective due to the type of explosive they had selected to use in them. They had precious few HE-shells, because they had no expectation of needing them up until when they saw what the Germans were able to do with theirs. Indeed, that's because it was most of what the British & French forces possessed. Most of the shells used by smaller caliber field guns were shrapnel shells. ![]() Instructions and advice on how to best do an AMA. Want to do an AMA or know someone who does? Message the mods! Comments should be on-topic and contribute.ĭiscussions are limited to events over 20 years ago.If a post breaks one of our rules or guidelines you will be informed about it. So it is perfectly normally for your post to not show up in the new listing. Feel free to submit interesting articles, tell us about this cool book you just read, or start a discussion about who everyone's favorite figure of minor French nobility is!Īll posts will be reviewed by a human moderator first before they become visible to all subscribers on the subreddit. r/History is a place for discussions about history. Join the r/history Discord server to chat with other history enthusiast! ![]()
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