Military History Photo Friday: Elaborate Renaissance Arms and Armor

Here are a couple of fine pieces from The Wallace Collection, one of the best private collections of art in London. They have an especially good arms and armor gallery. It's well worth checking out if you're in London.

On the top we have, according to the signage, "a mace of the morning star type, damascened in gold with arabesques and emblematical figures within cartouches of silver piqué." Well that clears that up. It's from Milan c.1560.

Below are some fine parade helmets from the same century, also made in Italy and of the type known as "antique armor", which imitated the styles of parade armor from ancient Rome.

Military History Photo Friday: A German Halberd Pistol

On my recent trip to Vienna I got to see some great museums. One of my favorites was the collection of Hapsburg arms and armor at the Neue Berg. I'm working on an article about this place, which has one of the greatest collections of medieval arms and armor anywhere.

Here's one interesting item: a combination halberd and double-barreled rifle made in Germany c.1580. You can see it at the top of a case of other early firearms.

Here's a closeup. As you can see it has two wheellocks, firing mechanisms that are wound up and then released by the pull of a trigger. Given the ornamentation on the halberd, I'm thinking this was intended more for show as a curio than as an actual weapon. A lot of these combination weapons have survived from the Middle Ages and Renaissance but I've never read an account of one actually being used. They all tend to be similarly ornamental, which may explain why so many have survived.

Military History Photo Friday: The Chakram, India's deadly frisbee

No, these aren't toys, but they did inspire those Aerobees that we played with as kids. These are Chakram, an Indian weapon. They're razor sharp on the outside, generally about 5-10 inches in diameter, and are thrown (carefully) like a Frisbee or twirled on the forefinger and then released. Accounts say Indian warriors could throw these long distances with great accuracy. Medieval Indians understood aerodynamics and made the bottoms flat and the tops curved like with the wings of an airplane.

It's unclear when the Chakram was first invented although it's certain they're very ancient. They were mainly used in northwest India, especially by the Sikhs, who continued using them into the 19th century. One account mentions street criminals using small chakram in Calcutta as late as the 1940s.

While the chakram were long-lived as a weapon, I'm not surprised they didn't spread to a wider area. Like many unusual weapons, the chakram was trying to replicate something that could be more easily accomplished in another form. A bow is easier to use and deadlier, which is why you can find bows in pretty much every culture. These are neat, though! Anyone want to practice with one and get back to me?


Top photo copyright Sean McLachlan. Taken at the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. Bottom photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Military History Photo Friday: Medieval Handgonnes in Slovenia

When I started researching my book Medieval Handgonnes: The First Black Powder Infantry Weapons, I discovered the Balkans were early adopters of the earliest handheld firearm technology. Many of the photos for the book, for example, come from Croatia.

Just north of Croatia is Slovenia, the subject of my current travel series for Gadling. While in the National History Museum in the capital Ljubljana I came across two examples of early firearms.

This top one of from the early 15th century. It's of the earliest of the three main types I outlined in my book. It's only a little more than a foot long with a touch hole at one end. The hook at the bottom was for hooking over a wall or shield in order to steady it. The handgonne may have been fixed to a wooden shaft but I couldn't see any evidence for that.

This is from the late 15th century and as you can see it's a much more advanced model. Well, hopefully you can see. It's really hard to take good photos through glass! Anyway, it's about three feet long and has the familiar hook. It also has a pair of gunsights and a pan for the gunpowder that was originally fitted with a swiveling top in order to secure the loose powder.

Here's a closeup of the back end, showing the pan, maker's mark, and rear sight.

As you can see, there's no trigger on either of these pieces. Triggers of the matchlock type only came into use slowly near the end of the 15th century.

You might also want to check out a guest post I did about the accuracy of medieval handgonnes.

Flintlocks in the American Civil War

This is a sketch of a flintlock musket, the height of weapons technology in the late 18th century. When the trigger was pulled, the lock snapped down, bringing a piece of flint against a plate of steel. This made sparks fly into a pan filled with gunpowder. A hole between the pan and the inside of the barrel set off a larger charge of powder that shot the bullet out the barrel.

By 1861, the flintlock was old tech. All modern armies used the percussion cap, an explosive cap struck by a hammer that replaced the unwieldy and often unreliable flint and pan. The problem was, many people hadn't caught up. Underfunded local militias, who hadn't heard a shot fired in anger in a generation, often still carried flintlocks. Many rural farmers also had flintlocks as family heirlooms. Modern guns were pricey and the flintlock was still good enough for hunting.

But not good enough for the modern battlefield. Armies on both sides scrambled to supply enough percussion lock rifles for their troops. The industrial North soon had this sorted out, and government contractors got rich selling modern weapons or refitting flintlocks into percussion locks.

The South, however, lagged behind. Many regiments required individuals to bring their own guns and were thus a motley collection of flintlocks, shotguns, and percussion rifles scrounged from dead Yankees.

An account of the 1861 Battle of Lexington, Missouri tells how one old farmer approached the Union fortification every morning with a flintlock and a lunch his wife had packed him. He'd sit behind a tree and take potshots at the Union troops all morning, take a break for lunch, then fire at them all afternoon before going home to his wife. He doesn't appear to have hit anyone!

Even more primitive weapons appeared on the battlefield. Check out my post on Medieval weapons in the Civil War.

Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Civil War Photo Friday: Civil War hand grenades

Here are two interesting shots of hand grenades from the Civil War. They already have captions so I won't say much. One thing to point out, though, is that grenades were nothing new in the 1860s. I've already blogged about medieval hand grenades, and they became popular in the 17th century when "grenadiers" used them.

They eventually fell out of favor because their slow-match fuses were unreliable in wet weather, could be pulled out by quick-thinking opponents, and could be dangerous to the thrower. Grenades saw a revival in the Civil War because the percussion cap made for a more reliable way to ignite the charge. As you can see, both of these examples had to hit head on or they wouldn't go off. This proved a problem and many soldiers didn't like hand grenades, thinking them unreliable.

Civil War Photo Friday: Confederate Cavalryman or Bushwhacker?

I came across this curious photo in the Library of Congress online archive. The caption says this guy is an "unidentified cavalry soldier in Confederate uniform with slant breech Sharps carbine, two knives, and two revolvers."

This is not, however, a regulation uniform. The shirt looks about right except for the decoration on the front and breast pocket. The hat is also nonregulation. In addition, few Confederate cavalry were armed with the Sharps carbine, with only about 5,000 being produced in the South.

So is this really a Confederate cavalryman? As I've mentioned frequently on this blog, rebel uniforms often varied quite a bit because of shortages and the men supplying their own clothes. So this odd-looking fellow could indeed be a cavalryman.

There's another possibility. He may be a bushwhacker. These guerrilla warriors often went heavily armed with multiple weapons. They also liked wearing decorated "guerrilla shirts", a subject I'll delve into further in a post next week.

Whoever he is, I'm glad I didn't have to face him in battle!

The three traits you need to win a gunfight

In my last post I reviewed Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier by Bat Masterson, who was a gunfighter himself. While I found the book flawed on a couple of levels, it did have some useful information about life (and death) in those days. One interesting passage is about how to survive a Western-style gunfight.

Masterson says every gunfighter needs three traits. The first is courage, which should be obvious. You should also have skill, which is also obvious. But both of these traits are useless without an all-important third trait--a cool head.

Masterson states, "I have known men in the West whose courage could not be questioned and whose expertness with the pistol was simply marvelous, who fell easy victims before men who added deliberation to the other two qualities."

He goes on to give a few examples. Here's one:

"Thirty-five years ago Charlie Harrison was one of the best-known sporting men west of the Missouri River. His home was in St. Louis but he traveled extensively throughout the West and was well-known through the Rocky Mountain region. He was of an impetuous temperament, quick of action, of unquestioned courage and the most expert man I ever saw with a pistol. He could shoot faster and straighter when shooting at a target than any man I ever knew; then add to that the fact that no man possessed more courage than he did, the natural conclusion would be that he would be a most formidable foe to encounter in a pistol duel.

The LeMat Combination Revolver/Shotgun

Here's a strange gun that saw a fair amount of use in the Confederate army.

Called the LeMat pistol, it was patented in 1856 by Jean Alexandre LeMat of New Orleans. It featured a nine-shot cylinder, rifled barrel, and a smoothbore shotgun underneath. This was fired by a pivoting striker on the hammer that could be rotated so that it struck a percussion cap on the lower barrel, thus firing the buckshot.

The advantages of this pistol over regular six-shooters is obvious. Reloading black powder weapons is a slow business and not at all fun in the middle of a battle. Many bushwhackers compensated by carrying more than one pistol, or extra loaded cylinders that could be snapped into place. Extra guns or cylinders weren't always available, however, especially to regular army units, so having more shots in the same gun came in handy.

One disadvantage of the gun was that revolver part originally fired .35, .40, or .42 bullets, all nonstandard sizes. Quartermasters had to stock special bullets or the troops were forced to cast their own. Later versions were made to fire .36 or .44 caliber bullets, the standard for both Union and Confederate armies.

New Orleans was captured early in the war and LeMat fled to France, where he had his special guns produced by French, Belgian, and English manufacturers. About 3,000 slipped through the Union blockade to make it into the hands of rebel troops.

I have found no record of these weapons seeing service west of the Mississippi so they won't be featuring in my next Missouri Civil War novel. I do have plans to write some Westerns some day and I probably won't be able to resist the urge to outfit at least one character with a LeMat!

Here's a look at the business end of this fearsome weapon. I took both photos at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. For more on this interesting gun check out this website by some Florida Reenactors.

July 4, 1862: The Union Navy captures Confederate "aircraft carrier"

On this day 150 years ago the United States was celebrating a grim Fourth of July. The nation was torn apart by a Civil War that was getting progressively bloodier with no end in sight. Union General McClellan's attempt to take the Confederate capital at Richmond had just failed. It wasn't yet clear if he'd be able to extract his army before it would get wiped out. The excellent blog Civil War Daily Gazette is covering this in detail.

There was one little Union victory on this date, however. The Confederate gunboat CSS Teaser was captured by the USS Maratanza. This photo, courtesy Library of Congress, shows the damage to the deck caused by a 100-pound rifled shell that made a direct hit. You can also see a nice photo of its bow gun here.

The CSS Teaser was a screw tug of 64 tons with a length of 80', a beam of 18', a depth of hold of 7'. She was armed with one 32-pounder rifle and one 12-pounder rifle. According to the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships,

"CSS Teaser had been the aging Georgetown, D.C., tug York River built at Philadelphia. Purchased at Richmond by the State of Virginia in 1861, she was assigned to the naval forces in the James River with Lt. J. H. Rochelle, Virginia State Navy, in command. Upon the secession of that state Teaser became a part of the Confederate Navy and continued to operate in Virginia waters. With Lt. W. A. Webb, CSN, in command, she took an active part in the battle of Hampton Roads, Va., on 8-9 March 1862, acting as tender to CSS Virginia. She received the thanks of the Congress of the Confederate States for this action

"Teaser was a pioneer "aircraft carrier" (balloon ship); she also became a pioneer minelayer when ordered 17 June to assist Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Under Lt. H. Davidson, CSN, she was used by the Confederate Naval Submarine Battery Service to plant and service "torpedoes" (mines) in the James River. While engaging Maratanza at Haxall's on the James 4 July 1862, a Union shell blew up Teaser's boiler and forced her crew to abandon ship. When seized by Maratanza, Teaser was carrying on board a balloon for aerial reconnaissance of Union positions at City Point and Harrison's Landing. Teaser was taken into the Federal Navy, and sold at Washington, D.C. on 24 June 1865."

Civil War Video Friday: Loading and firing a Springfield rifled musket

Here's a video showing how to load and fire the 1861 Springfield rifled musket. This was the standard issue weapon for Union infantry. A large number of Confederate troops also used the Springfield. It was a single-shot muzzleloader.

For dramatic effect he pulls off several shots at the end instead of just one. In reality he'd have to reload for every shot but they edited that out.

One realistic aspect of this is the fellow playing the Union soldier. So many reenactors are paunchy middle-aged guys, when in fact most Civil War soldiers were skinny kids like this guy. He looks a bit too clean, though. Maybe he just bathed in the creek.

You also might be interested in a video on how to load and shoot a Colt Navy revolver.

How to load and shoot a Colt 1851 Navy Revolver

I've talked a lot on this blog about the Missouri bushwhackers and their use of the Colt Navy revolver. They often carried several of these and would close with the enemy as quickly as possible, absorbing the one volley of the Union troops single-shot rifles and then opening up a murderous fire at close range. This tactic worked time and again. In my Civil War novel, Union militia captain Richard Addison begs his general for pistols to fight back against the bushwhackers. When they aren't forthcoming, he decides to raise the money in other ways. . .

The revolvers weren't perfect, however. They were extremely slow to reload, as this annotated video shows. This is why the guerrillas carried more than one, and often had preloaded cylinders in the deep pockets of their guerrilla shirt. Also note how much smoke these things create. I've talked about the fog of war before. Now imagine fifty bushwhackers blazing away as quickly as they could. Things would get pretty hazy.

Getting "slightly" wounded in the Civil War

"Buck" from a "buck and ball", Wikipedia

I’ve been thinking about the term “slightly wounded” that's so often seen in battle reports. I doubt if the large lead balls of the era were capable of giving a light wound unless they barely grazed a man. From what I’ve heard, a body or head shot was always grievous and often fatal, and a shot to the limb often shattered the bone and led to the loss of that limb. So how did these "slight" wounds come about?

If my personal library can't help me, my first stop with Civil War questions is the Missouri in the Civil War Message Board. I asked if these wounds could come from the common use of “buck and ball”, in which three (or sometimes more) pellets of buckshot were wrapped in the cartridge paper along with the ball.

Consider for a moment that your position takes a volley from a hundred of the enemy. One hundred bullets are now singing through the air at you. Not a pleasant thought. Also there are 300 buckshot pellets coming at you, so you are three times as likely to get hit by a bit of buckshot as you are by a ball.

Assuming you only get hit by one pellet, you'll probably only be wounded, and probably only “slightly” wounded. Now add to this that many soldiers, especially Confederates and some Union militia, only had shotguns or squirrel rifles and were firing at an unsuitably long range for those weapons, and you can see why there were so many “slight” wounds.

You can even be slightly wounded by a cannonball. I read of one incident of a shell bursting right next to a soldier. The force threw him into the air and his trajectory was stopped by the trunk of a nearby tree. He was knocked out cold, but when he came to he was unscathed except for some nasty bruises.

Someone pointed out that buck and ball was only used in smoothbores, not the Enfield or Springfield rifled muskets with their deadly Minié balls. Smoothbores were only used early in the war. That had slipped my mind. I’m sure some smoothbores still saw action in later years with the Union militia and Confederate forces. Even as late as Price’s invasion in 1864 there were many unarmed rebels in the ranks. I would think they’d grab anything available. But in essence the poster was right. The answer must lie elsewhere.

Civil War author Bruce Nichols replied, "I read in Connelley's 1910 Quantrill and the Border Wars, pages 318-9 and in Castel's 1962 William Clarke Quantrill: His Life and Times, page 113 that the west-central Missouri guerrillas developed the wartime practice of reducing the amount of gunpowder in their revolver loads both to save precious powder and to reduce pistol recoil to improve accuracy, especially from horseback. I think this was especially helpful with repeated or continued shots. Guerrillas from this region were influential in passing along such techniques and tactics to other Missouri guerrillas they encountered, so this practice may have spread."

I'm thinking this may have been common practice with regulars in the Confederate army too, since they were often short of powder.

Another researcher pointed out that slight wounds may have been caused by "spray" from whatever those bullets hit. If soldiers were hiding behind rocks or fences, and bullets hit those barriers, all sorts of stuff would be flying around. There might also be "shavings", bits of the bullets sheared off while coming out of the barrel, creating an unintended "buck" along with the "ball".

Ask a question on this forum, and you always get a wealth of answers! I'm thinking that all of these explanations contributed to the high number of slight wounds in the Civil War. Not that these wounds always stayed slight. One poster mentioned his great-great uncle received a "slight" wound in the side at Hartville in January 1864. He was listed as dead the next month.

Lancers in the American Civil War

I recently did a guest post over at Genre Author about Medieval Weapons in the American Civil War. Space limitations didn't allow me to include all examples of "primitive" weapons used in the war, so here are some more.

Some Texas cavalry units had lances. These weren't the huge lances of the medieval jousting era, rather the slim lances used in the Napoleonic era. The Texans' lance blades were 3 inches wide and 12 long, mounted on a 9 foot shaft. Each sported a red guidon with a white star to "drink the blood" of the Yankees.

At the Battle of Valverde, New Mexico Territory,  on 21 February 1862, Texas lancers under Capt. W.L. Lang, Fifth Texas Regiment, formed three columns and charged the Union left flank. Facing them were the Second Colorado Volunteer Infantry. The infantry waited until the horsemen were only 20 yards away and then gave them a volley. At that range it was hard to miss. At least 20 fell and the Coloradans quickly reloaded and gave them some more of the same.

Some Texans managed to close with the infantry. The Colorado troops didn't break, instead fighting back effectively with their bayonets. At this point the Texans should have been able to destroy the infantry. They had longer reach, after all. That a lancer should be beaten by a bayonet hints that the Texans hadn't trained with their weapons much. A fellow history buff over at the RenWars Yahoo group told me the Texans, disgusted at their performance in battle, ended up using their lances as firewood!

Another RenWars user pointed out an interesting article on pikes used by soldiers in Georgia. None actually saw combat, which was probably a good thing as far as the Georgians were concerned.

I couldn't find a public domain image of the Texan lancers. There's a good modern painting of them here. 

Book review: A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in All Countries and in All Times

A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in All Countries and in All Times by George Cameron Stone

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A flawed but classic study.
My high school library had a copy of this book and I spent many hours poring over the descriptions of odd weapons and staring at the hundreds of photographs. When I grew up and started researching and writing military history, I consulted it again. What a disappointment! This book is filled with mistakes. Stone was an expert on Asian arms and armor but makes countless errors when he writes outside his area of expertise. He should have had a coauthor!

That said, you can still learn a lot about Asian militaria from this book, and the photos are a goldmine of information no matter what region you study. I suggest buying The Complete Encyclopaedia of Arms and Weapons, edited by Tarassuk and Blair, instead of Stone's work. If you have deep pockets, buy both.

NOTE: This review is of the original 1961 edition. I haven't seen the later facsimile edition. Another reviewer said the photos are poor quality in the facsimile. They weren't too good in the original, although they were clear enough. I suppose they may have lost some quality in the reprint.

View all my reviews