""grazing" (video)" Topic

On this short video (11 min.)
YouTube link
American reenactors of the Civil War 1861-65 fire a cannon called Napoleon. They fire one canister after another.

My question is about the shot fired at 4:55.
Is this the so-called "grazing" ?

We have 4-5 people on this forum who are very knowledgeable on artillery matters. I hope I hear from them :-)

Not really. 'Grazing' was making solid shot 'skip' over the ground to produce the bouncing ball that could cause so much damage. This was as opposed to aiming the round directly at the target so that that would be the first thing hit.

What is also interesting is the recoil which is slower (no jumping back) and not as far as is sometimes imagined.

I thought one of the posters here was part of that shoot… ScottWashburn?

IIRC, the question was to try to reverse-engineer artillery positions based on where the canister balls ended up.

A "Graze" is when the projectile hits the ground. Cannon were fired with the barrel almost parallel to the ground(well the outside parallel- the bore was 1-2 degrees upwards). The ball would travel below head height and at some point hit the ground (first graze) bounce up and then hit the ground again (2nd graze). ….. When firing at long range, the barrel would be elevated a few degrees and the ball would be above head height for part of its flight before the first graze. ……Gunners had tables of elevation versus first graze distance that were used for firing at range. The best effect was to have the ball hit at the feet of the target, so you knew it would go thu the enemy and not bounce over their heads.

I was wondering, why did they not chock the wheels, and fit a spade on the gun trail, to manage recoil?

Wouldn't it be better to let it recoil rather than damage the barrel mountings?

As Marc has said, the state of technology and thus the structure of guns was served better by allowing the gun to absorb its recoil naturally by running back. The constant use of chocks or sandbags would eventually put an extra strain on wheels and axles not to mention them being an extra complication in the field. A spade would put an extra strain on the trail which it would eventually pay back with a structural failure.

Having said that, fortress artillery did sometimes make use on an inclined slope to help absorb the recoil and aid running up.

Interesting thought – wear and tear in a wooden world.

How long does a wooden gun-carriage wheel last in peacetime? What is the rate of consumption of gun wheels during war?

If you fit an iron axle then it appears to make a stronger carriage – but – then rest of the carriage shakes to pieces faster (as opposed to all wooden parts shaking to pieces at a similar rate).

Saw this video sometime ago and the thing that struck me most is that, as far as you can tell, the "cone" or spread of shot was far less than I ever imagined from period tests and accounts.

Thanks gentlemen. An obvious objection once pointed out. Indeed, some of the lightest guns of this period, the 1-2 pdr amusetten used by Danish forces, which had a split trail with two slender shafts that allowed the gun to be hitched directly to a horse in so-called 'galloper' mode, had a tendency to shake themselves to bits.

At Antietam, Gibbon [an artillerist] told gunners to aim the canister shot at the enemy's feet to achieve the grazing fire. So, while that is not what is done in the video, grazing fire, or ricochet fire was done with canister.