“Part of the country’s edge in its history of conflicts has been superior technology by land, sea, and air.”

By Douglas Brown

THE UNITED KINGDOM has seen its share of armed conflicts. In fact, few countries can match the sheer volume of foreign wars, domestic rebellions and international emergencies, crises and interventions in which Great Britain has found itself embroiled over the centuries.

From 1066 to 1707, England fought in an estimated 60 different conflicts. Following its establishment by the Treaty of Union, Great Britain participated in another 165 conflicts.

Indeed, one 2012 book estimates that Great Britain has used its military against or in aid of 82 percent of the countries in the world – no small feat for a tiny island nation that’s smaller than the state of California. Incredibly, England and later Britain won the vast majority of its wars, losing only one of its eight worldwide conflicts. Part of the country’s edge in its history of conflicts has been superior technology by land, sea, and air. Here are nine weapons that Britain’s armed forces put to effective use.

Putting the “seax” in Saxon

The first Anglo-Saxons came to the Roman province of Britannia as raiders when the Western Empire was in its death throes. In response, sometime in the first half of the 5^th century AD, the Romano-British ruler Vortigern invited three ships of Germanic mercenaries under the brothers Hengest and Horsa to settle in Britannia and protect it from foreign raiders, be they Saxon or otherwise. The two succeeded, but soon made excessive demands on Vortigern, leading to conflict.

The Romano-British drove the brothers and their followers back to the Isle of Thanet, but the barbarians had a secret weapon: the seax. This weapon, which gave its name to the Saxons, was a single-edged cross between a short sword and a dagger ranging anywhere from eight to 76 centimetres long, but usually 24 centimetres. Seaxes were pattern-welded, meaning they used a Dark Age technique of twisting iron rods and forge-welding them together, resulting in a strong, flexible blade.

Asking for negotiations, Hengest instructed his followers to stash their seaxes in their shoes. When the Romano-British arrived, Hengest’s men set upon them in the original Night of the Long Knives and slaughtered 300 of Vortigern’s “seniors.” More barbarians began settling in Britannia, and over the course of the following three centuries, these Anglo-Saxons carved out a new kingdom in the British Isles: England.

Britain’s great equalizer: the longbow

At Hastings on October 14, 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, destroyed the Anglo-Saxon army with effective combined-use of his knights and archers using an ancient weapon, the longbow. Centuries later in the Hundred Years War, the English, Anglo-Normans and Welsh turned this devastating weapon on the French. Made of yew or elm from one piece of wood and producing a draw weight of up to 140 pounds, this war bow had a range of 320 to 350 yards but was most effective at 100 yards. English armies might take with them one to two million 30-inch arrows on campaign.

With its combination of range, shooting rate and armour-piercing capabilities, the longbow made England’s common foot soldiers the equal of France’s vaunted knights. At Sluys in 1340, Edward III used bowmen to crush the French fleet and ensure the war would be fought on French soil. Then, at Crécy in 1346, the longbows outshot the Genoese mercenaries using crossbows and devastated the French cavalry charge. At Agincourt in 1415, when their supply of arrows ran out, the nimble, lightly armed longbowmen proved a match for the French knights in full panoplies. The archers’ rain of arrows forced the armoured warriors to dismount and attack on foot through churned-up mud to avoid a repeat of the disastrous Crécy cavalry charges. The men-at-arms quickly bogged down and were easily overwhelmed by the English.

“An outspoken, flinty-lipped, brazen-faced jade¹”: Brown Bess

The 18^th and early 19^th centuries saw Britain rise to the greatest empire on the globe in a series of worldwide wars. The secret of her red-coated warriors’ success was their strict discipline, rugged tenacity and devastating firepower. The gun that delivered this from the 1730s into the first half of the 1800s was the smoothbore flintlock affectionately known as Brown Bess.

A .75-calibre muzzle-loader with barrels from 46 inches trimmed down to 39 inches for the Napoleonic Wars, it proved sturdier than the French Charleville musket.

To load, a soldier poured a little gunpowder from a cartridge into a small pan beside the bottom of the barrel and closed a steel “hammer” with a plate-like frizzen over it. He then rammed a lead ball on top of a charge of powder down to the bottom of the barrel and cocked the weapon. When the trigger was pulled, a piece of flint would strike the steel frizzen, throwing it forward and sending sparks into the powder in the pan. The subsequent ignition would travel into the barrel by way of a small touch hole setting off the charge tamped down inside. The resulting blast would propel the ball down the barrel and out of the muzzle and towards the enemy.

Notoriously inaccurate, the gun was largely ineffective beyond 100 yards. As such, soldiers trained to fire en masse from tightly packed ranks. A well-trained formation of troops could manage three volleys per minute, which could be devastating when concentrated on a body of enemy infantry.

British musketry was legendary. In 1759 at the Plains of Abraham, James Wolfe’s army dispersed the French with a single, perfectly delivered volley winning Quebec for King George. During the Napoleonic Wars, Bonaparte’s formations rarely stood before a crippling British fusillade delivered at close range followed by three cheers and a bayonet charge, especially if those troops had been hidden from view until the moment of contact by the Duke of Wellington’s trademark “reverse-slope” tactic.

The Royal Navy’s “smashing” Carronades

General Robert Melville invented a new type of naval cannon adopted by the Royal Navy in 1779. Named the carronade after its manufacturer, Glasgow’s Carron Iron Founding and Shipping Company, this gun was shorter and lighter than the typical naval “long gun” and was usually mounted on a slide carriage. It could fire balls of up to 68 pounds, more than twice the mass of 32-pound shot of a heavy long gun, and it used less powder. Its lesser recoil helped in re-siting the gun after firing, it took a smaller crew to handle it and it could be rotated instead of firing from a conventional truck carriage.

The carronade also fired its ball along a flatter trajectory and at a lower velocity, which caused the ball to shatter when it hit the enemy hull, resulting in more splinters and earning the gun the nickname “the smasher.” When loaded with grape shot — bags of small lead balls — it acted like an enormous shotgun subjecting crews on an enemy ship’s deck to horrendous destruction. So why weren’t British ships predominately armed with carronades instead of with long guns? The weapon’s range was too short to compete effectively with the long gun for predominance. But at close range it packed a crippling punch.

Henry Shrapnel’s “rain of death”

During the Napoleonic Wars, artillery fired a series of projectile types. Solid shot simply bounced and skipped along the ground tearing holes through enemy formations. Gunpowder-filled iron shells, on the other hand, were designed to explode among concentrations of troops. Canister, which used clusters of small iron balls, could shred ranks and files of infantry at close range. In 1784, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery invented a projectile that combined the range of shells with the dispersal of canister. Dubbed shrapnel after its inventor, this thin-casing shell was crammed full of musket balls and would explode over a cluster of troops. Skillful artillerists would trim the projectiles’ fuses so they would burst at the exact moment the round was above a target, showering those unfortunate enough to be standing below with shell casing and musket balls.

The French had learned in their previous campaigns to deploy from column into line out of range of canister, but shrapnel was a devastating and thoroughly unpleasant surprise when they first encountered it at the Battle of Vimeiro in 1808. The British fielded artillery in smaller numbers than most other Great Powers at the time, but shrapnel helped even the odds. The French called it “black rain” and never effectively countered it. Neither could they create their own since they couldn’t master the fuses.

Ezekiel Baker’s practical rifle

Britain experimented with rifles during the American Revolution. Featuring spiral grooves that put a stabilizing spin on a round, rifles promised a level of accuracy unheard of in a smooth-bore musket. British armories could produce rifles, but not ones that were sturdy enough, reliable or easy to use in combat. American rifles were similarly slow to reload in combat and standard bayonets wouldn’t fit onto their specialized barrels. Effective rifles continued to elude the British army into the Napoleonic Wars. Then in 1800, the Board of Ordnance turned to Ezekiel Baker, who perfected the German short rifle. It was 45.75 inches long, weighed nine lbs., and was .625 caliber. The rifle fired with a flintlock mechanism like the smoothbore Brown Bess, but its seven grooves inside the barrel produced a one quarter-turn inside its 30-inch length.

Rugged, faster to load than American rifles, and accurate up to 150 yards, the Baker rifle was used by a new breed of soldier: riflemen. Uniformed in dark green, as opposed to the brilliant red tunics of conventional infantry, these sharpshooters trained to work in pairs using their own initiative, intensive training and resourcefulness. The result was an elite corps of crack shots capable of decimating the French officers at long range, just as Tom Plunket did at Cacabelos in 1809. Lying on his back, he killed General Auguste de Colbert at 300 yards and threw the French attack into disarray. Baker rifles continued to be used by British soldiers until 1841, four years after production ceased. By the 1850s, most ordinary British infantry were outfitted with rifled muskets.

The Royal Navy “dreads nought but God”

The Industrial Revolution led to advances in technology often faster than admirals and generals knew what to do with them.

In 1906, Admiral Sir John Fisher put the naval pieces all together with HMS Dreadnought, in one stroke making every other battleship in the world obsolete. Before, ships had been fitted with some 12-inch guns and a variety of other, smaller calibers. Dreadnought went all-in with big guns, mounting 10 12-inchers offering improved range, firepower and fire control. To power a ship with such an arsenal, not to mention even heavier armor, Fisher took a chance and powered his game-changing warship with experimental steam turbines. The result was world’s fastest battleship, capable of reaching speeds of 21 knots.

The drawback of the Dreadnought was that, in making all other ships obsolete, it made all of the Royal Navy’s other vessels obsolete too. Britain and its naval rival Imperial Germany immediately embarked on a naval arms race. They spent the eight years leading up to 1914 building more numerous, more powerful Dreadnoughts, leading to ever-rising tensions. When war broke out, both navies avoided a decisive showdown as long as possible. Jutland in 1916 would be the powerful battle-fleets’ only encounter, one with controversy still ringing as to who actually was the victor. Ultimately, though, the British dreadnoughts clearly won the naval war, keeping the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet bottled up and unable either to invade Britain or lift the blockade as the Royal Navy slowly starved Germany into submission.

Radar: Britain’s death-ray

When Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg on Western Europe in 1940, he found his opponents woefully unprepared. The Führer’s war machine astonished the world with how quickly it could overrun Poland and then France. When the Third Reich finally directed its military against Great Britain, it opened its onslaught with an air campaign aimed at destroying the Royal Air Force. What the Luftwaffe found, however, were the best-prepared air defences in the world. The First World War had demonstrated Britain’s vulnerability to Zeppelin and bomber raids. In 1934, the Air Ministry approached Robert Watson-Watt to see if his radio research could help prevent air attacks in a future conflict. It was most interested in directing energy beams at incoming aircraft. Watt was unable to develop a “death ray,” but he could provide something else: radio detection and ranging or “radar.”

The British set up 20 Type 1 radar stations in a network along the eastern and southern shores of Britain dubbed Chain Home and 30 AMES Type 2 stations in another network known as Chain Home Low. Using 22.7-29.7 MHz frequencies powered at 750 kW, Chain Home used intersecting range arcs to detect enemy aircraft at ranges of up to 100 miles. AMES 2, using 200 MHz, provided more accurate but shorter-ranged detection.

By 1940, these radar stations were detecting incoming Luftwaffe formations, allowing air controllers to scramble RAF fighters to intercept raiders, rather than keeping the limited number of planes continuously in the air on patrol. Radar delivered a decisive edge in the Battle of Britain, saving the United Kingdom from invasion.

Britain’s fierce-tempered saviour: Spitfire

Early warning of German aircraft meant nothing if Britain didn’t have the fighters to counter them. Fortunately, by the Battle of Britain, the RAF had the Vickers Supermarine Spitfire.

Designed by Sir Reginald Mitchell in 1936, it used elliptical wings for maneuverability and a Rolls Royce Merlin engine. It took considerable time to manufacture, but the end result was an airplane of lethal beauty. At 355 mph at 19,000 feet, it could fly slightly faster than Germany’s prize-fighter, the Bf 109E.

Although the Messerschmitt may have been a marginally better fighter, the Spitfire’s capabilities gave Britain a fighting chance that combined with the nation’s pluck and manufacturing capacity to outlast the Luftwaffe’s battle of attrition.

On Sept. 6, the Luftwaffe’s commander, Hermann Göring, harangued his fighter pilots for not protecting his bombers better. When he asked what he could do to fix the problem, Adolf Galland, one of Germany’s top aces, requested a squadron of Spitfires.

The Luftwaffe fighters generally had a favourable kill ratio through August 1940 against the Spitfire, but Germany’s attempted knockout blow on Sept. 15 backfired. The RAF, using improved “Big Wing” tactics, inflicted equal casualties, including 15 per cent of the precious German bombers. Hitler had to postpone his invasion indefinitely.

The Spitfire would continue to be improved and upgraded through the war, with 24 distinct models. In all, more than 20,000 would be manufactured by 1945.

Douglas Brown is a Texas-based writer who specializes in military history and historical fiction. His novel The Honorable Spy was released by Cheetah Publishing in July of 2022. Buy it on Amazon HERE. Follow him on Twitter @DougBrownAuthor or Instagram at douglasbrownauthor, or like his Facebook page, “Douglas Brown – Author.”

 

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[1] An epithet from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Brown Bess”