Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
33 March/April 2012
countered in this particular case, it illustrates the need to foster better understanding and more accurate use of professional terminology.
According to Brasseys Encyclopedia of Land Forces and Warfare, The
term shrapnel has been widely misused
by nonartillerymen since the closing
months of World War I. The origin of
this misuse seems to have been reports
by British surgeons on their treatment of
wounds. Apparently aware that shrapnel
had been the principal artillery ammunition against personnel, the surgeons
began to refer to shell fragments (quite
incorrectly) as shrapnel and to wounds
inflicted by such fragments as shrapnel
wounds.
Sydney Kerksis and Thomas Dicky
gave a similar account in their book Field
Artillery Projectiles of the Civil War:
While case shot was the most generally used term the projectile was also, in
contemporary accounts, referred to as:
Spherical Case, Bullet Shell, Shrapnel
Shell, etc. It is the later name by which
it was known in WWI, and by extension
and ignorance, today means any shell
fragment.
Maj. Gen. H.W. Blakelys article,
Shrapnel, Semantics and Such, sheds additional light on the matter. Blakely was an
artilleryman and World War II Divisional
Commander. He writes, My first experience with the use of the word shrapnel
to mean shell fragments was in Normandy about D plus 2. The 4th Infantry Division had landed on Utah Beach on D-day
with surprisingly light opposition, but
as we turned north toward Cherbourg
we ran into rough going that was to cost
the division over 5,000 battle casualties
in the next three weeks. A surgeon mentioned to me that one of our regiments,
the 22d Infantry, was having particularly
high losses from shrapnel wounds. As
division artillery commander, I was very
much interested. Were the Germans using what we regarded as an obsolescent
type of ammunition? Or did they have an
improved variant of it? I visited the regiment and asked questions everywhere.
No one knew of anyone wounded by
shrapnel. When I hunted up the surgeon
who had first mentioned shrapnel, and
told him that practically all the casualties
in the 22nd were from shell fragments, he
said, Thats what I told you. Since then
I have frequently noticed the misuse of
shrapnel by newspaper men, radio commentators and historians...
Basically the shrapnel shell as invented by Henry Shrapnel is a means to project the shotgun like anti-personnel effects of canister, the army term, or grape
shot, the naval term, at a much greater
range. Having only black powder available as an explosive, there was no way to
effectively fragment a shell casing into a
pattern of lethal shards as we can do today with high explosives. Henry Shrapnel
packed canister shot into an artillery projectile with a burning time-delay fuse and
a small black powder bursting charge.
This was fired down range, igniting the
37 March/April 2012
leagues who ask what to call the ball bearings packed into this weapon. According
to U.S. Army Field Manual 23-23, Antipersonnel Mine M18A1 (Claymore),
Section II, 4., Casualty Effects, When
detonated, the M18A1 mine will deliver
spherical steel fragments over a 60 fan
shaped pattern that is 2 meters high and
50 meters wide at a range of 50 meters.
As the field manual indicates, the modern military term (the correct term) for
these types of explosive-driven missiles is
fragments.
Therefore, if one is to be precise, the
historical definition of shrapnel is an antipersonnel pellet projected from an artillery shell that primarily uses the speed of
flight of its carrier shell for its own velocity. Therefore, for a missile or shard from
a shell or bomb casing, the more appropriate term is simply fragmentation. At
the very least, the members of the profes-
sional bomb disposal and bomb scene investigation community, should strive for
improved accuracy and understanding in
the use of collective terminology. Especially for those that give expert witness
testimony in court, where accuracy goes
directly to the credibility of the opinion
offered.
Brennan Phillips is an
ATF Explosives Enforcement Officer based in
Seattle, Wash.. Brennan also serves as
a Lieutenant Colonel
in the Army National
Guard and commanded
a Joint EOD Battalion in
Afghanistan as part of
JTF Paladin in 2009.
He is a Graduate of U.S. Naval School EOD
(1991), the Irish Defense Force IEDD Course
(1998) and Hazardous Device School
(2002).