American Rifle - Alexander Rose [123]
The implications of guncotton for the conduct of warfare and for rifle design were startling. Needing only half the amount of powder as before, soldiers could not only carry more cartridges but would not tax the army’s limited transportation capabilities. The commanders’ oft-expressed fear that their men would run out of ammunition if permitted to fire freely would no longer cause nightmares. And since guncotton was cheap to produce compared with prime-grade gunpowder, military accountants would also sleep better. Better news was still to come. In Britain a wad of guncotton was experimentally submerged in water for sixty hours, extracted, and dried out; it was then found “to possess all its original inflammability and strength.”9 The stuff was basically impervious to water, and if kept moist it could be safely transported with virtually no risk of a stray spark setting it off.10
For the generals, a waterproof propellant meant an end to the tyranny of the weather. For the first time since firearms had replaced bladed metal weapons during the Renaissance, armies could fight in the rain, or at least in damp conditions, thus extending each campaigning season from the traditional summer into the fall and spring.
Once the initial celebrations subsided, however, ordnance experts and military writers began to notice guncotton’s drawbacks. Experiments were showing that in fact guncotton was not, in Mordecai’s words, “well adapted to use in firearms.”11 The problem lay mostly in its enormous explosive force: no shoulder arm in existence could handle more than a dozen successive loads without bursting. Guncotton may have burned at a much lower temperature than gunpowder, Ordnance discovered, but it burned far faster. As a result, immense pressure accumulated within the firearm before the projectile exited the muzzle, rupturing the breech and barrel and shearing off the rifle grooving. Until the rate of combustion could be controlled, Ordnance recommended postponing its adoption by the military.
Other voices, too, were urging caution. The longer campaigns permitted by smokeless powder might have the adverse effect of greatly increasing the cost of war, since extended periods in the field required larger armies and therefore higher expenses for pay, supply, and maintenance of weapons—and all that was before factoring in rising casualty lists and pension registers. To a budget-minded military complex, such concerns were painfully relevant.
Tactically speaking, guncotton’s smokelessness meant that a man could loose a shot and then, no longer blinded by the traditional fog of the battlefield, immediately fire again. For progressives, the advent of smokeless powder “set a premium upon marksmanship” because soldiers “will have no excuse for wild firing at clouds of smoke” and “each shot will be directed at the men of the enemy.”12 Then again, smokelessness also meant that the enemy marksmen would be more likely to hit one’s own troops. In the future, for precisely that reason, armies that were once garishly and gorgeously uniformed (so that friendly soldiers could see each other in the smoke storms darkening the battlefield) began outfitting their troops in muted colors to camouflage them.13 By the turn of the century the once-red coated British Army, for instance, was kitted in khaki.14 From 1902 the U.S. Army relegated its Revolutionary War–era dark blue to formal use only and switched to khaki in the summer and olive drab in the