Treatise on Ammunition, from 1926 retitled Text Book of Ammunition, is a series of manuals detailing all British Empire military and naval service ammunition and associated equipment in use at the date of publication. It was published by the War Office at approximate 5 year intervals. As the guns are listed for which the ammunition can be used, the Treatise also constitutes a list of guns in service at the publication date.
Its predecessor was Ammunition: A Descriptive Treatise on the Different Projectiles, Charges, Fuzes, Rockets, &c., at Present in Use for Land and Sea Service, and on Other War Stores Manufactured in the Royal Laboratory of 1867.
The editions contain diagrams, measurements, storage and transportation instructions useful to officers involved in storage, transport and firing of ammunition. It is an important primary source of information for military historians researching the types and capabilities of ammunition available to the British military at the time of various conflicts, and for collectors wishing to identify artifacts. However, the individual editions lack historical context, in that they omit dates and rationales for particular types and Marks of ammunition being added to or removed from the inventory.
The editions are notable for the many pages of colour lithographs of cartridges, shells and fuzes by Harrison & Sons and later by Malby & Sons.
From the 1926 edition onwards it was renamed Text Book of Ammunition.
The best known editions are the 10th, accurate as at August 1, 1914 and published in 1915 which constitutes a definitive description of the ammunition with which Britain began World War I, and the 1936 edition which lists the ammunition with which Britain entered World War II. These and other editions are available as modern facsimile reprints.
Editions
1st, published 1873. Lithographs by Harrison & Sons.
2nd, 1877 edition. Corrected up to December 1877. Published 1878
3rd, as at November 1881.
4th, published 1887. Lithographs by Dangerfield, Covent Garden
5th, published 1894. Lithographs by Wyman & Sons Ltd.
6th, published 1897
7th, published 1902. Lithographs by Weller & Graham Ltd.
8th, dated 1 September 1905. Published 1906. Lithographs by Weller & Graham Ltd.
9th, published 1911
10th, dated 1 August 1914. Published 1915. Lithographs by Malby & Sons.
11th, published 1922. Lithographs by Malby & Sons.
Shrapnel shells were anti-personnel artillery munitions which carried many individual bullets close to the target and then ejected them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually. They relied almost entirely on the shell's velocity for their lethality. The munition has been obsolete since the end of World War I for anti-personnel use, when it was superseded by high-explosive shells for that role. The functioning and principles behind Shrapnel shells are fundamentally different from high-explosive shell fragmentation. Shrapnel is named after Major-General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), a British artillery officer, whose experiments, initially conducted on his own time and at his own expense, culminated in the design and development of a new type of artillery shell.
A shell is a payload-carrying projectile that, as opposed to a solid round shot, contains an explosive, incendiary or other chemical fillings, though modern usage sometimes includes large solid kinetic projectiles properly termed shot. Solid shot may contain a pyrotechnic compound if a tracer or spotting charge is used. Originally it was called a bombshell, but "shell" has come to be unambiguous in a military context.
The Ordnance QF 18-pounder, or simply 18-pounder gun, was the standard British Empire field gun of the First World War-era. It formed the backbone of the Royal Field Artillery during the war, and was produced in large numbers. It was used by British Forces in all the main theatres, and by British troops in Russia in 1919. Its calibre (84 mm) and shell weight were greater than those of the equivalent field guns in French (75 mm) and German (77 mm) service. It was generally horse drawn until mechanisation in the 1930s.
Palliser shot is an early British armour-piercing artillery projectile, intended to pierce the armour protection of warships being developed in the second half of the 19th century, It was invented by Sir William Palliser, after whom it is named.
This article explains terms used for the British Armed Forces' ordnance and also ammunition. The terms may have slightly different meanings in the military of other countries.
The Ordnance BL 6 inch 30cwt howitzer was a British medium howitzer used in the Second Boer War and early in World War I. The qualifier "30cwt" refers to the weight of the barrel and breech together which weighed 30 hundredweight (cwt) : 30 × 112 lb = 3,360 lb. It can be identified by the slightly flared shape of the muzzle and large recuperator springs below the barrel.
The BL 6-inch gun Mark VII was a British naval gun dating from 1899, which was mounted on a heavy traveling carriage in 1915 for British Army service to become one of the main heavy field guns in the First World War, and also served as one of the main coast defence guns throughout the British Empire until the 1950s.
The Ordnance BL 5-inch howitzer was initially introduced to provide the Royal Field Artillery with continuing explosive shell capability following the decision to concentrate on shrapnel for field guns in the 1890s.
The Ordnance QF 15-pounder gun, commonly referred to as the Ehrhardt, was a modern German field gun purchased by Britain in 1900 as a stopgap measure to upgrade its field artillery to modern QF standards, while it developed its own alternative. This was precipitated by the experience of the British Army in South Africa during the Boer War, where its standard field gun, the BL 15-pounder, was out-performed by modern French and German field guns deployed by the Boers. It bore no relation to the BL 15-pounder or BLC 15-pounder, two other guns in British service at the time, other than a common shell.
The Ordnance BL 12-pounder 6 cwt was a lighter version of the British 12-pounder 7 cwt gun, used by the Royal Horse Artillery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Armstrong Breech Loading 12 pounder 8 cwt, later known as RBL 12 pounder 8 cwt, was an early modern 3-inch rifled breech-loading field gun of 1859.
The QF 6 pounder Nordenfelt was a light 57 mm naval gun and coast defence gun of the late 19th century used by many countries.
The BL 12-inch Mark VIII naval gun was one of the first large British rifled breech-loading naval guns designed for the higher pressures generated by the new cordite propellant of the 1890s, and Britain's first large wire-wound gun. It represented a major advance compared to previous British guns.
The BL 9.2-inch Mk I–VII guns were a family of early British heavy breechloading naval and coast defence guns in service from 1881 to the end of World War I. They were originally designed to use the old gunpowder propellants.
The RML 10-inch guns Mk I – Mk II were large rifled muzzle-loading guns designed for British battleships and monitors in the 1860s to 1880s. They were also fitted to the Bouncer and Ant-class flat-iron gunboats. They were also used for fixed coastal defences around the United Kingdom and around the British Empire until the early years of the 20th Century.
The RML 9-inch guns Mark I – Mark VI were large rifled muzzle-loading guns of the 1860s used as primary armament on smaller British ironclad battleships and secondary armament on larger battleships, and also ashore for coast defence.
RML 12-inch 35-ton guns were large rifled muzzle-loading guns used as primary armament on British battleships of the 1870s. They were the longer and more powerful of the two 12-inch British RML guns, the other being the 25-ton gun.
RML 11-inch 25-ton guns were large rifled muzzle-loading guns used as primary armament on British battleships and for coastal defence. They were effectively the same gun as the RML 12-inch 25-ton gun, bored to 11 inches instead of 12.
The 4.7-inch gun M1906 was designed and issued by the US Army Ordnance Department beginning in 1906, with the first units receiving the weapon in 1911. It was of the field gun type. It was one of very few pre-war US artillery designs selected for wartime production in World War I, although few of these weapons were delivered to France and used in action. A combination of a limited pre-war munitions industry, the short (19-month) US participation in the war, technical problems with large-scale production, and the ready availability of munitions overseas led to this.
The RML 16-pounder 12 cwt gun was a British Rifled, Muzzle Loading (RML) field artillery gun manufactured in England in the 19th century, which fired a projectile weighing approximately 16 pounds (7.3 kg). "12 cwt" refers to the weight of the gun.
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