Artillery : a history / John Norris.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Norris, John, 1954 April 10-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Artillery--History.

Artillery.

History.

Physical Description:

xi, 212 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stroud : Sutton, 2000.

Summary:

By the time the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918, vast tracts of the European landscape had been so utterly devastated by artillery fire that they were virtually unrecognisable. Of all the many weapons invented by man for the purpose of waging war, artillery must rank among the most destructive of all.

Through detailed research, John Norris has traced the development of artillery through the ages and up to the dawn of the twenty-first century, to provide a fascinating study of this principal weapon of warfare. From its earliest recorded use in battle almost a millennium ago, up to the recent Gulf War and Balkan conflicts, artillery has often been the deciding factor in a battle. And yet its origins are somewhat vague.

The Chinese had been working with gunpowder since the tenth century, yet it was another 200 years before the compound was used to propel a projectile from a long-barrelled bamboo piece of apparatus. Not long after this, the use of artillery quickly spread to Europe and gunpowder weapons soon appeared in all the major conflicts of the world -- the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the American Wars of Independence, the Napoleonic, American Civil, Crimean and Boer Wars. Artillery played a pivotal role in conflict throughout the twentieth century, in particular the two world wars, followed by Korea, Vietnam and many other conflicts up to the present day.

Over the centuries artillery has been dramatically improved and developed to deal with changes in battle tactics, and particularly to combat the introduction of new weaponry like the tank and the aeroplane. As armies enter the twenty-first century it is unlikely that conventional tubed artillery as we know it will disappear -- a fact borne out by its continued use in combat zones around the world.

Contents:

1. Whence Came the Guns? The Origins of Artillery, 1200-1400 1

2. Artillery Takes Shape, 1400-1500 22

3. Into a New Era, 1500-1600 45

4. The Gun Takes the Field, 1600-1700 72

5. The Rise of the Great Gunners, 1700-1800 97

6. New Developments and the Gunner's Art, 1800-1900 127

7. Artillery Comes of Age, 1900-2000 164.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0750921854

OCLC:

42834496