Posted on 01/03/2017 12:27:14 PM PST by w1n1
It all started with the Baker Rifle and the British 95th Rifle Regiment
The defining moment for rifles in the western world was when Rifleman Thomas Plunkett serving with the British 95th Rifle regiment took a shot with his Baker rifle towards the end of the Battle of Cacabelos in 1809.
Rifleman Plunket laid flat on his back in the snow took a shot at the French General Auguste-Marie-François Colbert.
While he lay on the ground, Plunket inserted his foot into the sling of his Baker .705-caliber rifle to stabilize the weapon, the butt of his rifle flushed into his shoulder and took aim using only his marksmanship skills and iron sights.
Plunkett squeezed the trigger, and a moment later the general fell dead at 600 yards away. Then Plunkett reloaded and ran back to cover and took another shot that killed a second French officer who rode to Colbert’s aid.
This feat catapulted the capability of the basic firearm used by a soldier, led by the Baker rifle. The Baker rifle was not the first rifle invented, as there were other muskets used in the previous century with less accuracy. The Americans and Germans learned ways to use it with deadly effectiveness. Read the rest of the story here.
ping
In Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin used to simply look for the big red star on the front of the headgear. Officer. Boom.
It is quite the word, especially when one knows the meaning of the root word; that is, bugger.
American manufactured smooth bores were .69 cal. American manufactured rifled muskets such as the 1855 or 1861 pattern Springfield rifled muskets were .58 cal. Brit manufactured Enfield rifles were .577 cal. but would handle American ammunition for the .58 rifles.
Read the books. The tv show was fun, but it was a Godawful bastardization. The books are loaded with mostly accurate description of historical characters and events, not just battles. They’re necessarily modified to put Richard Sharpe in them, but they’re based on prime sources as much as possible and accepted biographic and historical books whenever needed.
Both smooth bore and rifled muskets had their place. Despite popular beliefs, most battles were fought in the line up in rows and shoot at each other, European method of warfare. 4 shots a minute at a lined up block of soldiers was superior to 2 shots. If you needed to off an officer, 1 or two good men with rifles were superior.
A smooth bore 69. cal. weapon had an effective range of about 50-75 yards. The .58 rifle musket had and effective range over 300 yards. Casy’s and Hardees manuals for infantry called for a soldier to be able to load and fire the weapon at 3 rounds a minute. The soldier didn’t actually aim, in the term we understand, they brought the rifle to aim about shoulder height and fired when ordered to do so. After the first company or regimental volley, the powder smoke pretty much clouded up any vision down range.
Obviously the author is ignorant of similar feats of sniper marksmanship 50 years before during the American Revolution. It was getting so out of hand for the British that they complained about our snipers were shooting their officers.
Is that a guy who works for Terminix!? :-)
Thank you for expanding my vocabulary in a most colorful way!
Screen adaptations always are. Master and Commander is a prime example set in the same time period.
Major Ferguson, inventor of the breechloading rifle bearing his name, once drew a bead on Gen. George Washington and spared his life for that very reason, that gentlemen do not kill each other from ambush.
Ferguson was later killed at King’s Mountain by an American rifleman who didn’t care for such niceties.
I like Master And Commander: The Far Side of the World and I’m reading the O’Brian series. Next up are The Surgeon’s Mate and The Ionian Mission. Although Weir combined elements from five or six of the novels to make that film, I think he did it well. A film can only spend a little time to explore the lesser of two weevils, then the joke gets stale.
I appreciate ITV’s desire to do something with the Sharpe series, but it was beyond their ability. A tv show can’t depict Talavera. Sharpe’s Rifles could be depicted properly on film because most of it centered on small groups, the climactic battle only needs a couple of hundred extras, and most of the sets would be outside on a dirt road. ITV had to gut the stories to fit the budget. I’ll watch them again (they come and go on YouTube) but they’re pretty lackluster compared to the books. Cornwell’s running commentary on the politics and intrigues of the era were always fun, but that doesn’t translate to film.
I also found it amusing that Cornwell retconned Sean Bean’s Yorkshire accent into the series but they didn’t make him dye his hair. :)
Well, until the Minie bullet was developed from its first French form by the US Harpers Ferry Armory team before the Civil War, you comment WAS exactly right: The rifled muskets and pure Kentucky-Pennsylvanian rifles were much, much too slow to make a difference in massed fire by lines of standing troops. The strategy and tactics used in the Revolutionary War-Napoleon Wars-French-and-Indian War .. (and all other conflicts going back to the Germanic wars of the early 1600’s ) were true. (Minie invented the concept, but his didn’t work very well. Were very slow to manufactor, hard to use, wore out the rifling in the barrel.
Rifled weapons were too slow, go ahead and march forward and then rush and charge.
But, when the rifled Minie ball was perfected by Harpers Ferry, THEN it became possible to shoot 3-4 times a minutes accurate to 600 yards. And that lesson was not realized until half-way through the US Civil War. Then promptly forgot again until WWI.
CS Forester's “Rifleman Dodd” was a single book, about a British rifleman in the Spanish-Portuguese theater against the French.
L8r
bttt
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