War Diaries Talk

Ammunition Use

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    I thought I'd start a bit of a discussion on the use of ammunition. It would be great if people could contribute to this using examples they've found, either relating to the firing or the supply of rifle and machine gun ammunition.

    I was inspired to start this after reading this report from 3 Battalion the Machine Gun Corps who during a Divisional operation lasting less than 24 hours fired over 200,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition. I've had some minor experience at moving boxes of ammunition and it seems to me that this is a significant amount to have to get up to the front line for an operation. The same Unit was firing 10 - 20,000 rounds a day at enemy aircraft and on so-called "night harassing fire"

    And apparently a box containing a 250 round belt of ammunition weighed 22 lbs or 10 kg. I make that 8 tonnes of ammunition for that one 18 hour operation. This is for the Vickers Machine Gun of course.

    Anyone got any other ammunition facts to share?

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    The ammunition belt for the Vickers was constructed from cloth and was 20 feet (6.1 metres) long.

    So when the Unit I am tagging fired 200,000 rounds in less than 24 hours, they used 800 belts, which took 16,000 feet or just over 3 miles of cloth! In a country where resources were becoming scarce, I was wondering how they sustained this kind of use. I have seen entries relating to the salvage of materials from the battlefield and wonder if they also salvaged and sent back the used cloth belts and the wooden ammunition boxes.

    Anyone tagging a supply regiment got anything about the supply of ammunition?

    Posted

  • brecon_beacons by brecon_beacons

    Heather -

    I noticed in the Life Guards account of their participation in the Second Battle of Ypres (May 1915) that they were recording the length of time that they were under enemy bombardment (at one point, for 16 consecutive hours). Would this be to gain some rough estimation of how much 'firepower' the enemy was getting through?

    Their own shortages of ammunition were not detailed in the War diary - but they did have shortages. On Image AWD00003xt I provided a link to the (private) diary of Captain Geoffrey Coddington of the Leicestershire Yeomanry - who were fighting alongside the Life Guards. On May 12th 1915 he recorded they were about to go into the front line trenches when:

    "the Brigadier[4] asked if we had got everything. The 1st Life Guards said they had no Very pistol ammunition and a staff officer of the 27th Division (I think) said that that would be provided on arrival. The Brigadier told him that he would not march off till he had some and when put in that way some ammunition was forthcoming in a car in no time! This was served out and off we went. "

    The brigadier was General A.A. Kennedy.

    My reading of this is that: on the brink of being sent into very heavy fighting, the Officers (with pistols) didn't have ammunition - and were still advised to get into the front line, until the Brigadier intervened.

    Posted

  • David_Underdown by David_Underdown moderator

    I'm fairly sure the belts were resuable. I believe there were machines for loading them up with cartridges (though occasionally they had to resort to filling them by hand which was a rather tedious occupation as you can imagine).

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    It seems there were two types of belt for the Vickers, one which was all cloth and a second type which had a brass divider placed every third round to show how far the rounds should be inserted into the belt when reloading. I can imagine the ones with the brass dividers were probably quite expensive to produce and they would certainly have wanted them to be re-used. I shall now start looking for mentions of salvage in the diaries!

    Posted

  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    I've now moved on to tag a Divisional Ammunition Column and it seems commonplace for them to hand out 150,000 rounds of small arms ammunition (SAA) daily.

    So far the types of ammunition they are supplying include: SAA, 8 pounder shells, Lyddite shells, shrapnel shells and HE Shells.

    Posted