Bomb gun

Artillery bomb

Although by the beginning of the 19th century, artillery had long played a decisive role in naval battles, its ability to effectively disable enemy ships was still in question. Large wooden battleships and frigates, with their very thick (from half a meter to a meter or more) wooden sides, were insensitive to the spherical nuclei of smooth-bore artillery. Nuclei stuck in thick boards; to break through them and inflict significant damage to the inside of the people and guns of the time the guns of that time could only from small distances. The waterline holes that threatened the ship with flooding were small due to the small caliber of the cores and were easily sealed either internally with plugs or externally with a patch. In order to disable a sailing battleship, it required a huge number of hits, which usually could be achieved only by concentrating the fire of several ships against one target. Naval battles were protracted and often indecisive.

Explosive artillery bombs - hollow cast iron shells filled with black powder and equipped with a remote fuse - could have been much more effective ammunition for a long time, but had been used exclusively for firing from howitzers and mortars. The high-explosive impact of bombs on wooden structures could be extremely destructive, but the howitzers used to fire them on a mounted trajectory had very low accuracy, so it was almost impossible to achieve confident hits on a moving ship. As a result, they were used mainly for shelling coastal facilities.

80 pound. 22 cm cannon Peksana. 1842 year

Shooting from ordinary cannons of that time with explosive shells was also ineffective: because of their relatively small caliber, they had a small explosive charge, and very weak - black powder, and did not cause significant damage to the explosion outside the shell. To ensure a high-explosive effect, it was necessary that the bomb penetrated into the thickness of the wooden side before the explosion or penetrate it and explode inside the hull itself. However, small-caliber bombs - much lighter than solid-core cores of the same caliber - did not have enough kinetic energy to break through thick boards, and, as a rule, simply bounced off the side or burst on the skin surface. It was not possible at that time to increase the kinetic energy and thereby the penetration ability of bombs by increasing their initial speed: the thin-walled shells of the bombs could not withstand overloads during firing, and the probability of a bomb burst directly in the gun barrel dangerously increased.

Thus, the only way out was to increase the caliber and, accordingly, the mass of the bomb, which required specific solutions in the design of the gun itself.

In 1822, the French General Peksan suggested that to increase the effectiveness of naval artillery “large short- caliber cannons are required, firing explosive shells with a large explosive charge at large distances from a wooden fleet” . For such firing, Peksan developed the so-called bomb cannons , in which the breech was thickened to give greater strength, the shape of the chamber to accommodate a reduced charge was changed, the muzzle was thickened, and for the convenience of loading, the channel was expanded at the very muzzle - the collapse.

The first experiments were conducted in France in 1822, following which a 22-cm bomb gun and an 80-pound (36 kg) bomb were adopted. Later for small ships they adopted a lightweight cannon with a 30-pound (13.5 kg) explosive grenade (heavy explosive shells were called bombs, light explosives were called grenades) ^[1] .

Due to the large caliber with a relatively short barrel, the Peksan gun fired very heavy bombs (80 pounds, while the main caliber of the French fleet in those years was 30 pounds) with a relatively low initial velocity. The kinetic energy necessary for breaking a wooden board was achieved due to the large weight of the bomb; the overload during the shot was relatively small, and the risk of detonation of a bomb in the barrel is acceptably small (although such cases were still not uncommon as far back as 1850-1870). Getting on board the enemy ship, the bomb with its mass broke through the board and stuck on board. The subsequent explosion led to severe destruction of wooden structures, the emergence of many foci of ignition and the expansion of wooden fragments and fragments of the shell of the bomb itself, mortally dangerous to the crew.

Although the ballistics of short bombing cannons were worse than those of conventional, firing ammunition, due to the striking ability of explosive ordnance, the effective range of fire from them increased many times. A bomb burst of a heavy bomb gun on board a wooden ship made a gap of more than a square meter, so at a distance of 500-1000 meters a wooden ship could be sunk by 20-25 shots of bombing cannons. For comparison: even heavy guns fired with solid cores pierced a thick wooden board only from a distance of about 100-150 meters, that is, comparable to the length of the ships themselves, without causing substantial damage to the hull itself - an artillery duel could last for hours until it was completely destroyed enemy crew.

Sometimes bombing guns are incorrectly referred to as Peksan howitzers . In fact, the idea of ​​installing howitzers on a sea ship and mounted bombing from them was not new by the 1820s. The novelty of Peksan’s idea consisted precisely in the creation of a special heavy weapon capable of firing bombs, but along a fixed rather than a hinged trajectory, which made it possible to significantly increase the accuracy of shooting and thereby make bombing weapons such an effective and formidable means of waging war at sea. This misunderstanding is due to the fact that in the original Peksan’s guns were called fr. Canon-obusier , that is, literally, "gun-howitzers." But in fact, this name meant a cannon firing artillery bombs, formerly exclusively howitzer ammunition.

The bombs themselves were hollow cast-iron shells filled with black powder. They had a remote fuse in the form of a wooden, and later - copper, with a special fire-resistant insert, a fuse. The bombs were kept empty and equipped before the battle. Before the shot, a fuse was inserted, which was shortened to a certain length corresponding to the estimated range of the shot, while checking with a special table. However, this “tuning” was very crude and was done “with a margin”: as already indicated, usually bombs pierced the side of the ship and exploded either in the thickness of the tree, which reached one meter in battleships, or — through penetration — inside the hull itself. Subsequently, they began to use ignition tubes of several standards, which differed in length and, accordingly, in setting the time of the explosion - for example, in the Russian fleet there were tubes of three different lengths. They tried to make bombs with a contact fuse, but for some reason they did not receive distribution; they were probably afraid of their accidental actuation before or during the shot, or could not provide an explosion of the explosive charge with a slight slowdown. Bombs were made only of relatively large calibers - from about 24 pounds, and one of the main ones was 68 pounds.

In England, a similar gun was adopted in 1825 under the designation 8 inch shell gun , with a 50-pound (barrel length of 6 feet), and subsequently a 54-pound bomb (barrel length of 8 feet). It was later deemed too weak to arm large ships, which led to the adoption in 1838 of a gun of the same caliber, but with a longer barrel (9 feet) and a 65-pound bomb. All these guns could not shoot solid cores, since they had a very lightweight design (for example, a 65-pound bomb gun weighed 3302 kg - 32% less than the same caliber 95-pound, designed for firing nuclei, which weighed 4826 kg) .

In Russia in 1833, 3-pound (50 kg; caliber 273 mm) bomb guns for coastal fortresses and 2-pound (33 kg, 248 mm) for the fleet were adopted.

In 1834, a large destructive force of bombs was confirmed by experimental shelling of wooden hull structures; as a result, over the next decade, bombing weapons were adopted in almost all fleets.

Subsequently, instead of specialized purely bomb guns (shell guns) , universal large-caliber guns appeared, such as the English 68-pound Dandas system (1846) or the American Dahlgren and Rodman systems - capable of firing with both heavy nuclei (which was soon useful against armadillos) and lighter but with powerful explosive charge bombs - combining a large caliber with high initial speed and good ballistics.

Explosive shells were also used for smaller caliber guns - artillery grenades (this name was used in the Russian fleet for high-explosive shells even during the Russo-Japanese War ), but their effectiveness was low and they were used mainly against crews and small vessels. Along with the bombs, other types of incendiary shells were also used, for example, the Martin shell filled with molten iron, which was considered an extremely destructive weapon against wooden cases - however, they were less reliable and inconvenient to use compared to bombs.

Bomb guns were first used during the Danish-Prussian War in 1849: at the Battle of Eckenfjord on April 5, 1849, Prussian coastal batteries, with a small number of such guns, shot and burned the 84-gun battleship Christian VIII attacking them. In naval combat, the bombing guns were first widely used in the Sinop battle in 1853, and with great effect, although their share in the total number of shells fired by the Russian fleet was small. They were massively used in the subsequent course of the Crimean War , and for the destruction of unarmored ships and coastal fortifications - until the appearance of high-explosive fragmentation shells of a modern type in the 1880s.

Bomb guns were very heavy: even on a battleship, they could only be installed on the lower deck without risk for stability. This largely balanced the firepower of single-deck frigates and multi-deck battleships, setting the stage for replacing the latter with frigates protected by armor - the first type of armadillo .

It is worth noting that, under the impression of the first use of these weapons in the midst of military sailors, there was a clearly exaggerated impression of the combat effectiveness of artillery bombs against wooden ships. Subsequently, this was no more than a personal opinion passed on to military historians and is often repeated up to the present. In fact, large wooden ships quite successfully survived bombardment - for example, at the battle of Liss, the Austrian wooden battleship SMS Kaiser withstood very intense bombardment from extremely short distances, while not only was not sunk, but although it suffered huge losses in the carriage and completely lost the mast , after the battle on its own it reached the place of basing (and was subsequently rebuilt into an armored battleship ).

There were also field bombing guns that fired a wide variety of ammunition - cores stuffed with grenade powder or shrapnel , both along a flat trajectory and a canopy. Due to such universality, in the French army the only type of such a gun replaced almost all previous models of field artillery and light military howitzers.

• Bomb gun
• Carronada

• Bomb guns // Military Encyclopedia : [in 18 vol.] / Ed. V.F. Novitsky [et al.]. - SPb. ; [ M. ]: Type. t-va I. D. Sytin , 1911-1915.

• Ships and battles S. Smirnov
• Apostles and bombing guns
• Fleet offshore