HIGH VELOCITY
HOLY GRAIL OR FALSE GOD?
London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 set many things in motion. Although it cannot be proven definitively, one of these may have been the Great Quest for Velocity that continues to this day. Although James Purdey is credited with the original “express” rifles, which fired lighter bullets at higher velocities, he may have gleaned the idea from Lt. Col. David Davidson, who had an exhibit displaying his early telescopic sights and rifles specially engineered to fire smaller, lighter projectiles at higher velocities.
Lt. Col. Davidson was an officer of Scottish birth who served in the Bombay Army in India through the 1830s and ’40s. While there, he pursued his ideas about velocity and long-range shooting. By the time of the Great Exhibition, he was retired and back living in Scotland, where he devoted his life to the development of rifles and telescopic sights.
The essence of the express rifle, as made by James Purdey, was not so much smaller calibers as it was lighter bullets and heavier powder charges. A bullet was reduced in weight by hollowing out the nose. This not only made it lighter, affording higher velocity, but also made the bullet prone to expand on impact, increasing its shocking power. Depending on the resistance it encountered, this expansion slowed the bullet’s passage through the animal and reduced penetration, but it also produced some spectacular kills.
From the 1850s to the 1890s, a controversy raged in the sporting press over these occasional spectacular kills with express rifles, versus the equally frequent surface wounds, failure to strike a vital part, and animals escaping to die lingering deaths. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the controversy has continued to this very day, throughout the development of self-contained cartridges, smokeless powder, and jacketed bullets. The debate has ebbed and flowed, but the same pattern seems to repeat itself with disquieting regularity, and always taking the same tone: someone will rise up and claim supernatural results for high velocity in and of itself, as if surpassing a certain velocity would somehow impart magical killing power to a bullet out of all reasonable proportion, ignoring dreary mathematical realities.
One such person was Major Sir Gerald Burrard, Bt., DSO, RFA (Ret’d), who was possibly the greatest authority on English shotguns of modern times as well as an expert on forensic ballistics. He wrote the definitive three-volume work The Modern Shotgun (1931), and was a pioneer in the field of forensic ballistics. The Identification of Firearms and Forensic Ballistics (1934) is recognized as a ground-breaking work. Sir Gerald was also an artillery officer and big-game hunter, so he came by his interest and knowledge of ballistics from several angles. In Notes on Sporting Rifles, which he wrote after 1918 when he was in hospital recovering from wounds sustained in the Great War, he states, “The shock given to an animal when hit by a bullet traveling with an initial velocity of about 3,000 ft. per second is enormous, and seems to have a paralyzing effect. I do not think the reasons for this are quite understood. I believe there is something in it more than mere bullet energy. When a velocity of 2,500 f.s. is exceeded the blow of the impact seems to have a different effect on the tissues struck to the effect obtained with a bullet traveling at a lower speed. It is this peculiar property of shock which makes the magnum small bore such a splendid killing weapon . . .”
Much of the material included in Notes on Sporting Rifles had already appeared in The Field, in feature-article form, so Sir Gerald (or Maj. Burrard, as he then was) carried a considerable reputation among the most respected of English sporting ballisticians. His favorite rifle for stalking was a .280 Ross, chambered in a Charles Lancaster double rifle, and he could not praise it highly enough—provided, he wrote, “It is not abused by being employed against very heavy dangerous game at close quarters.” When he wrote that, he was undoubtedly thinking of the fate of George Grey, in Kenya in 1911, killed by a lion while armed with a Ross rifle. Maj. Burrard was assisted in compiling much of the ballistic data, trajectory tables, velocities, and so on, by F. W. Jones, a man of impeccable credentials both as a ballistician and a competition rifle shooter. We shall meet Mr. Jones again in the next chapter, wherein we study the checkered career of the .280 Ross. For his part, Maj. Burrard credited the .280 Ross with ushering in the modern era of high velocity.
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In recent years, we have seen similar claims made for the .220 Swift, for the smaller Weatherby cartridges, and even for the tiny bullets of the .17 HMR. An article in the 1951 Gun Digest, by Roy Weatherby, was the most egregious example I have seen, wherein Weatherby claimed that his .257 and .270, on an extended African safari, had proven to be better killers on any animal (my italics) than either the .375 H&H or .470 Nitro Express. Furthermore, he said, with ultra-velocity, an animal did not need to be hit in any vital area to die as if struck by lightning. It could be hit in the paunch, in the leg, anywhere—all that was necessary was a kiss from a bullet at high velocity, and that was the shuddering end. By comparison with this, Maj. Burrard was the soul of moderation and sober observation.
In retrospect, the astonishing thing to me is that Gun Digest’s editor, John T. Amber, would print such hogwash, but that is somewhat balanced by the fact that Weatherby’s contribution was only one half of a two-part article, with the opposing view written by Elmer Keith. Keith, predictably, came down in favor of heavy bullets at reasonable velocities, and his contribution is by far the more plausible.
The major Weatherby high-velocity performers were, from left, the .257 Weatherby, .270 Weatherby, 7mm Weatherby, and .300 Weatherby. All are excellent long-range hunting cartridges, but they do not possess supernatural powers.
During the black-powder era, technology limited maximum possible velocity in a number of ways. One was the fact that bullets were made of pure lead, and when they were driven above 2,000 fps, lead fouling would gum up a barrel within a few shots. Another was simply the amount of powder that could be packed in, and this became even more of an issue after muzzleloaders gave way to self-contained cartridges. The arrival of smokeless powder, followed by jacketed bullets, changed all that. Suddenly, more velocity was possible with considerably less powder, and the original cupro-nickel jackets did not foul barrels to the same noticeable extent as lead. In later years, it was discovered that super-high velocities resulted in considerable cuprous fouling, but that was a separate issue.
Early military rifles that employed smokeless powder fired bullets that today we consider heavy for those calibers. The 7x57 bullet was 175 grains; the .30-40 Krag was 220; the .303 British was 215; and the 8x57 J was 226. Velocities were all in the 2,100–2,400 fps range. In 1905, the Germans switched to a 154-grain bullet with a spitzer tip, and a muzzle velocity of 2,880 fps (the 8x57 JS). This load, with its flatter trajectory and greater point-blank range, changed the game for everyone. The US responded by redesigning its .30-03, modifying the new Springfield rifle, and arriving at the .30-06 with its 150-grain bullet at 2,740 fps; the British abandoned their 215-grain bullet in favor of 174 grains, at 2,440 fps (the famous Mk. VII load). Comparing the 8x57 JS with the .30-06, the Germans were able to coax more velocity, from a smaller case and with a heavier bullet, because they had the finest smokeless powders in the world at that time.
This Montana elk was taken with a .270 Weatherby, firing a 150-grain Nosler Partition. The bull was hit squarely in the lungs at about 250 yards and died quickly, but he did not drop “as if pole-axed,” as the literature would have it. High velocity is not a magic elixir.
The British had learned a hard lesson about long-range shooting and ballistics during the South African War (1899–1902). It was not that their Lee-Enfields were terribly outclassed by the Boers using Mausers, because the ballistic differences were not that great. However, the English press used the perceived shortcomings of the Lee-Enfield as a bludgeon to use on the War Office and the Conservative government in power, and this caused a great scramble to improve upon, or even replace, the Lee-Enfield and the .303 British cartridge. More than that, it sparked an interest in rifle shooting, rifle clubs, and target shooting among all classes in England that bordered on frenzy. Suddenly, gunmakers were called upon to produce small-caliber, high-velocity rifles with elaborate long-range sights, for shooting at targets from 100 yards all the way out to 1,200.
This passion for rifle shooting lasted until 1914, with a tremendous number of significant developments. A key figure was a wealthy Scottish baronet, Sir Charles Ross, one of the most controversial and intriguing figures in rifle history. His work in rifle, cartridge, and bullet design, and the study of ballistics, was to have far-reaching consequences, on both sides of the Atlantic, that stretched into the 1930s. We will get to Sir Charles in the next chapter. However, one footnote is required to this short history of the pursuit of velocity.
Accounts of the development of the German 8x57 cartridge in its various guises, including reloading handbooks, the many editions of Cartridges of the World, and histories of the Mauser rifles themselves, describe the original 8x57 J, with its .318-inch, 226-grain bullet, and the switch in 1905 to the 8x57 JS, with its .323-inch, 154-grain bullet at higher velocity. Rarely is mention made of the fact that beginning around 1917 and extending into the 1930s, the Germans replaced the 154-grain JS load with a heavier bullet, of superior ballistic configuration, but (of necessity) at a lower velocity. This was for standard infantry use.
This load used a 198-grain bullet at a velocity of around 2,700 fps, although some references claim up to 2,850 fps. The bullet was an elongated spitzer with a boattail base, and it originated in 1917 as a cartridge for use in machine guns. The standard “S” load, with its flat-base, 154-grain bullet, did not give sufficient range and penetration for machine gun purposes. The heavier load (designated “sS,” for Schwerespitz) gave the desired penetration, according to some accounts, all the way out to 4,200 yards.
American forces, which began arriving on the Western Front in early 1918, found that their standard .30-06 load gave the same problems in their machine guns as the Germans had experienced, and they requested development of a load comparable to the new German ammunition. This set off a long quest in America to solve the problem of mass-producing boattailed bullets.
When Germany began rearming in the mid-1930s, and resumed production of 8x57 JS ammunition (prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles), the load adopted by the army was the 198-grain boattail.
One vital fact that proponents of ultra-velocity tend to leave out when praising their babies is that a lighter bullet may start out faster, and get out to 300 yards more quickly (with a resulting flatter trajectory to that range), but around that point a heavier, slower bullet catches up, eventually passes the light bullet, and continues to lengthen its lead until both fall to earth, exhausted. The key to exploiting this ballistic fact is a heavy-for-caliber bullet, of superior ballistic form and coefficient. This concept originated with Sir Charles Ross around 1906. Whether it was Ross’s own idea or not, he was the man who made it famous on the pre-1914 target ranges, and inspired a host of rifle developments, in America and Germany as well as in the United Kingdom.
The Germans put this to use in 1917 with their 198-grain sS, followed by the Americans with refinements to the .30-06 in the 1920s. In the modern era, these bullets, sporting names like “ultra-low-drag” and “extended ogive,” have been used in specialized sniper rifles and for long-range target shooting, all to great effect. We should remember, however, that it’s a concept that is now at least 110 years old. All the developments we have seen since the Gulf War in 1991, remarkable though they are, only build on the work of Sir Charles Ross and his associates, in the years before 1914.
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Ross M-1910, chambered for the .280 Ross.
