And for those who doubt the power of cap-and-ball, blackpowder pistols.
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| Three hundred thousand killed with blackpowder muzzleloaders and two-hundred-seventy thousand wounded Source |
On a more serious note, blackpowder killed and wounded over a half-million soldiers in the US Civil War. By modern standards, the loads used in the Civil War were pretty wimpy, usually 60 grains of blackpowder behind 510 grain, 0.58" diameter miniball. That produced a very pedestrian 975 feet-per-second.
If bone was hit square on, that slow lead ball would remove a section of it. No way to fix that, yielding the huge amount of amputations. Also, the spit patch and old lard patch wasn't very clean, so sepsis was common too. Volley fire and massed formations were behind the times for the weapon improvements that had been made.
ReplyDelete"...massed formations...", you mean like Antifa?
DeleteMedicine, especially field medicine was abysmal at that point.
ReplyDeleteMany wounds that killed in that era are very survivable in 2025.
However, improvements in accuracy, bullet performance, and
kinetic energy delivered make today's weapons much more lethal.
The velocity wasn't much, true enough, but the size of that bullet combined with the quality of medical care saw to the death of many. The accuracy of the .58 caliber musket should not be underestimated either as a trained marksman was supposed to be able to hit a man sized target at five hundred yards and the English Whitworth rifle to do the same at one thousand. In modern times original Whitworths and the reproductions built from the original dies and tooling have shown that level of accuracy.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the wounded during The War Of Northern Aggression would have survived if they had access to medical care we have available today.
ReplyDeleteAntiseptic surgery (Joseph Lister) started to become common practice about ten years after the end of CWI. It wasn't universally accepted until about 1900.
DeleteA very large number of the wounded who eventually succumbed to their wounds would have had a much better chance with 1900 level understanding of sanitation.
WWI had the issue of being fought in the highly manured and septic fields of France.
Commercial quantities of moderately effective antibiotics arrived just in time for WWII.
Canister shot and shrapnel shot killed and wounded many of them. It was still musket balls. Just the delivery was different.
ReplyDelete