Lead shirt grenade

Prussian 8 cm or 9 cm lead shirt grenade. The illustration shows the cast iron grenade body before it was cast around with lead.

Rear part of the cast iron body of a Prussian lead shell grenade. The front part was sawed off during dismantling.

The French grenade based on the La Hitte system was the counterpart to the Prussian lead shirt grenade . It had zinc guide warts and a burner.

As lead shirt shells are shells referred whose garnet sleeve partially with lead is sheathed.

In the middle of the 19th century, various nations (e.g. France and Prussia ) made attempts to increase the range and accuracy of the artillery by giving the projectile a twist when it was fired (so-called twist stabilization ). Long bullets were fired from rifled cannon barrels for this purpose. To improve the transfer of twist to the projectile, it was surrounded with a lead shirt . The lead Shirt served to the progress of the trains to transfer the gun barrel during firing of the grenade, so to put it in rotation. In addition, the lead shirt was used to seal off the powder gases produced during firing and thus to improve the power transmission to the projectile.

The first Prussian gun intended for the use of lead shirt grenades was the Krupp'sche C / 61 . Grenades of this type were first used in the wars of 1864 , 1866 and 1870–71 . In 1870–71 in particular, the Prussian grenades with an impact fuse proved to be more effective than the French ones with a fire fuse.

See also

• Leader tape

literature

• Wilhelm Witte: The rifled field guns according to their setup, equipment, etc., along with some rules for handling the material. C / 61, C / 64 and C / 64/67 . Olms, Krefeld 1971 (reprint of the Berlin 1867 edition).
• Hermann von Müller: The development of the field artillery in relation to material, organization and tactics, Vol. 1: From 1815 to 1870 . 2nd edition, Mittler Verlag, Berlin 1893.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.wehrtechnikmuseum.de/Exponate/Bleihemdgranaten/bleihemdgranaten.html