1. The USS Constitution, a “super frigate” constructed by the young U.S. Navy especially to combat the smaller British frigates during the War of 1812, was built from live (evergreen) oak and was resistant to the weight of the British cannon-balls. The balls simply bounced off, and this venerable ship (the oldest commissioned warship still afloat) was consequently dubbed “Old Ironsides.”
2. It is reported that an early-nineteenth-century 32-pound cannonball (the gun itself weighed over a ton and a half) could smash through 3 feet of solid oak at close range (100 yards). See, for example, Heath (2005, chap. 12). Many of the injuries to ships’ crews came not from the ball itself but from the high-speed splinters that were sprayed over the decks.
3. There are many books about Age of Sail warfare; see Nicolson (2005) for a particularly vivid account of the Battle of Trafalgar. See, for example, Hall (1997, chap. 4) or Denny (2007, chap. 1) for a description of the military use of archery.
4. To be fair, the Panzerfaust was effective against most tanks, not just Soviet ones, but the majority of tanks that the Axis powers had to combat during these final months of the war were Soviet. Also, the proliferation of Panzerfaust RPGs had more to do with their low cost than their effectiveness. The best antitank weapon of World War II was another tank, but the collapse of German armaments production capability at the end of the war limited Germany’s options.
5. See Beevor (2002) for an authoritative and very readable account of the Battle of Berlin and for the report of mattresses used to defend tanks.
6. For an introduction to tank armor, see Montgomery and Chin (2004). For more on the M1 Abrams, see Green and Stewart (2005). The introduction to Norris and Marchington (2003) provides a useful survey of antitank weapons.
7. The statistical nature of penetration experiments is demonstrated in Zukas et al. (1982).
8. See Lee and Kosko (2005) for this baseball comparison. Patrick (1989) gives an FBI view on the knockdown myth.
9. Tissue damage occurs when energy is transferred from bullet to tissue, tearing it apart. On the other hand, momentum transfer causes tissue to be forced out of the way of a moving bullet. If a bullet passes right through a person and loses half its momentum in doing so, then it will leave behind three-quarters of its kinetic energy.
10. Such a bullet wound may not have caused instantaneous death, but the damage was enough to lead to infection which, in the days before antibiotics, killed more soldiers than did gunfire.
11. This interesting experiment is reported by Dougherty and Eidt (2009).
12. Much of this section comes from Carlucci and Jacobson (2008), Di Maio (1999), and Patrick (1989). Many Web sites discuss ballistic wounds and—a little out of our field—forensic ballistics.
13. Expanding bullets are sometimes known as dumdum rounds, after the nineteenth-century British arsenal in Dum Dum, India, where they were developed.
14. Wadcutters, bullets with a flat nose, look a little like hollow-point bullets, but they are not designed to damage animal tissue. Wadcutters are used in competition against paper targets; the flat nose seems to produce a clean, round hole with a less ragged edge, which helps with judging how close the shot came to the bull’seye, for example.
15. These can be found on YouTube. See, for example, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQBsFoOVAeI. For a bullet passing through a block of ballistic gelatin, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL-liPFY5-I&feature=related. The complexity of high-speed fluid dynamics becomes quite evident in these films; thus, note how the target fluid explodes toward the bullet source as well as away from it.
16. Beehive rounds contain many steel darts (8,000 for 155 mm howitzer ammunition) called flechettes, which spray out when the round is detonated mid-air by a time fuze. Flechettes are typically 1 inch long and break up when they strike a target. Beehive rounds are so called because of the buzzing noise made by the flechettes.
17. War correspondent Anthony Loyd (1999) reported that the casualties in Grozny, Chechnya, resulting from the use of Russian heavy artillery were far worse than any of the horrors he had witnessed a few years earlier in Bosnia.