Dum Dum Bullets

[SiegeGunner]

Any indication how many Germans were actually shot under this Rule 7.92, Tom?

[QSAMIKE]

Thank You Tony......

Mike

[Black Jock]

Any indication how many Germans were actually shot under this Rule 7.92, Tom?

So far I haven't found any entry to show that offenders were shot.

[MikB]

In Sniping in France by Major H. Hesketh-Prichard D.S.O.. M.C. page 30 he says....

" These Germans, who were often

Forest Guards...

... the pointed German

bullet, which was apt to keyhole...

That occasional snipers on the

Hun side reversed their bullets, thus making

them into dum-dums, is incontrovertible, because

we were continually capturing clips of such bullets,

but it must also be remembered that many bullets

keyholed which were not so reversed.

I've noticed this passage a number of times before, and it raises two questions for me:-

(i) Was the 7,92 as prone to topple under sharp deceleration as the 303 Mk.VII, despite the absence of the lightweight forward core?

(ii) May H-P - along with many others - have been mistaken as to the purpose of the reversed bullets? Other threads have pointed to a belief - possibly with or without substance, but be that as it may - that such bullets had a better short-range piercing performance against armoured loopholes or tanks. H-P and the British side had access to heavy game rounds of .333 Jeffrey and upwards for this purpose - whilst in the absence of a large empire well-stocked with large game, these were most uncommon in Germany. So this application for reversed rounds might not've occurred to H-P.

Regards,

MikB

[Joe Sweeney]

I thought I would share this link as it is appropriate in the Dum Dum bullet discussion.

http://forums.gunboards.com/showthread.php?249595-German-propaganda-image-Dum-Dum-bullets!&p=1997201#post1997201

This link shows what happens to a jacketed bullet after nose has been cut off (dum dumized). I would say Dum Dum refers to the guy who would actually load modified ammunition and the intended target wouldn't have anything to worry about.

Joe Sweeney

[Thunderbox]

I've noticed this passage a number of times before, and it raises two questions for me:-

(i) Was the 7,92 as prone to topple under sharp deceleration as the 303 Mk.VII, despite the absence of the lightweight forward core?

(ii) May H-P - along with many others - have been mistaken as to the purpose of the reversed bullets? Other threads have pointed to a belief - possibly with or without substance, but be that as it may - that such bullets had a better short-range piercing performance against armoured loopholes or tanks. H-P and the British side had access to heavy game rounds of .333 Jeffrey and upwards for this purpose - whilst in the absence of a large empire well-stocked with large game, these were most uncommon in Germany. So this application for reversed rounds might not've occurred to H-P.

Regards,

MikB

(i) One aspect of "tumbling" bullets that may have been overlooked in discussion is that bullets will of course "keyhole" anyway if a normal rifle or ammunition is defective.I wonder how many of these accounts were due simply to worn or damaged rifle bores, or poor quality ammunition? British small arms and ammunition seem to have had a reliable quality inspection regime, despite the billions of rounds of .303" made, but I wonder whether German manufacturing was necessarily as consistent - especially given the strain it was under later in the war?

(ii) Despite all the learned discussion about German reversed bullets, I personally feel that these actually had several intended uses - possibly different uses at different stages of the war. Not only were reversed bullets turning up long before the advent of tank warfare or even particularly static trench warfare, but other "batches" turned up in large quantities without any propellant charge.

[MikB]

(i) One aspect of "tumbling" bullets that may have been overlooked in discussion is that bullets will of course "keyhole" anyway if a normal rifle or ammunition is defective.I wonder how many of these accounts were due simply to worn or damaged rifle bores, or poor quality ammunition? British small arms and ammunition seem to have had a reliable quality inspection regime, despite the billions of rounds of .303" made, but I wonder whether German manufacturing was necessarily as consistent - especially given the strain it was under later in the war?

(ii) Despite all the learned discussion about German reversed bullets, I personally feel that these actually had several intended uses - possibly different uses at different stages of the war. Not only were reversed bullets turning up long before the advent of tank warfare or even particularly static trench warfare, but other "batches" turned up in large quantities without any propellant charge.

(i) Defective ammunition and damaged bores can sometimes produce grossly unstable bullets, but these are unlikely to hit what they're aimed at, and the tumbling bullet in at least one H-P story ('Willibald the Hun', possibly a conflation of several actual experiences) was fired by a German sniper with a reputation for accuracy. Even though it later turned out he was working at short range in No Man's Land through clever concealment, he wouldn't have been using a worn out or damaged rifle. Inferior ammunition has not been a general characteristic of German military provisioning.

(ii) I think you could be right about multiple uses for reversed bullets. There was one quite convincing source quoted that suggested they were for ripping up sandbag cover, although it damaged the guns it was fired in. But what were the batches without propellant? I can't imagine this was deliberate as such cartridges would be unlikely to drive the bullets out of the bores, and it seems a grotesque QA faux pas.

Regards,

MikB

[chrislock]

Well I can only use my own observations.

I have seen the results of HV bullet strike/damage on soft tissue with FMJ rounds. Small entrance with similar exit wound.

I have also seen the result of HV bullet strike/damage after hitting bone, body armour or richochet. Not pleasant!

Clean shot FMJ through soft tissue is one thing: Clean FMJ shot through body armour, webbing, branches, bone, in fact anything slightly harder than soft tissue will have a dramatic effect on the FMJ rounds passage through the body. FMJ satisfies the conventions on paper but in reality it is a complete lottery depending on where, at what range and how/which part of the body is hit!

Science and clean ballistics is one thing, reality is another....

[Stoppage Drill]

Well I can only use my own observations.

I have seen the results of HV bullet strike/damage on soft tissue with FMJ rounds. Small entrance with similar exit wound.

I have also seen the result of HV bullet strike/damage after hitting bone, body armour or richochet. Not pleasant!

Clean shot FMJ through soft tissue is one thing: Clean FMJ shot through body armour, webbing, branches, bone, in fact anything slightly harder than soft tissue will have a dramatic effect on the FMJ rounds passage through the body. FMJ satisfies the conventions on paper but in reality it is a complete lottery depending on where, at what range and how/which part of the body is hit!

Science and clean ballistics is one thing, reality is another....

Modern military ball rounds are designed so that they rapidly become unstable when entering a medium denser than air. On entering even soft tissue they rapidly start to yaw and pitch so that the wound tracks are far larger than the diameter of the bullet. The current NATO 5.56 round, firing the SS109 bullet, generally fragments inside the wound at about the point wher it is travelling sideways. The tombac jacket rips away, the lead part of the core extrudes from the base and is deposited along the wound track, and the steel penetrator usually travels deepest. Any sort of screening in front of the target will start the tumbling before the strike on tissue , and that is when entry wounds look gory. The rifling pitch and the construction/weight distribution of the bullet are design characteristics which are intended to cause enhanced tissue damage whilst superficially complying with the Hague Convention.

Military rifles, and ammunition, of the Great War era were not so designed and were indeed likely to cause only comparatively minor injury to soft tissue where the bullet struck at a stable point in its trajectory. Hugh Thomas, a surgeon at BMH Berin in the 1970's built a theory that the man in Spandau was not Rudolf Hess largely on the basis of being unable to discover residual evidence (60 years later) of the WW1 bullet wound in Hess's chest.There was only a small scar, and Thomas felt that there should have been far more observable damage. Mind you, Thomas subsequently had many unconvincing conspiracy theories, if you like those sort of things, which tended to undermine the believability of his book about Hess.

The earlier post in this thread quoting "keyholing" whereby a small entry wound to the head resulted in a huge exit wound is nothing at all to do with the bullet tumbling. A high velocity bullet striking tissue sets up a pressure wave which creates a temporary cavity typically ten times the diameter of the permanent wound track. This usually oscillates and completely collapses within milliseconds, though the stretching effect can cause permanent damage to the tissue, which is why the surgical technique is to debride a large quantity of seemingly healthy tissue along the track. Where a bullet enters a closed structure such as the cranium, this expansion and pressure wave causes an explosive injury, blowing out part of the skull and brain. It's what happened to JFK - watch the Zapruder film and you'll see Jackie reaching over the boot of the car to retrieve part of her husbands head.

[MikB]

The current NATO 5.56 round, firing the SS109 bullet, generally fragments inside the wound at about the point wher it is travelling sideways. The tombac jacket rips away, the lead part of the core extrudes from the base and is deposited along the wound track, and the steel penetrator usually travels deepest.

It looks as if there are now a lot of variants on the SS109 base, and that this behaviour is not consistent.

The very great amount of experimental resource and battlefield data-capture evidently expended on this round was not available to WW1 military authorities, nor would it be to a modern nation that became as heavily engaged as WW1 participants were.

I would think that the wound behaviour you describe - if it is a design feature - was achieved in disregard of the Hague protocol, and more recent designs of this round seem to attempt to retain bullet integrity, for effectiveness reasons apart from any other.

WW1 authorities regarded themselves as bound by Hague requirements, and violations on both sides were unofficial and generally at private soldier or junior NCO level. The 303 Mk.VII's snap turnover in tissue was complained about by the Germans as a violation, but the bullet's internal design could (conveniently for the British) be demonstrated to result from accuracy requirements. It's difficult to compare numbers, but if the differences in wounding characteristics between WW1 belligerents' rifle calibre rounds discussed here previously are genuine, it's reasonable to think that German soldiers had more to gain than others. For the British, modification of rounds was unnecessary and potentially dangerous, for the French with their solid bullet, valueless.

Regards,

MikB

[Radlad]

Dum Dum developed a round, the Mark II Special, in which the cupro-nickel envelope was open at the nose to expose the tip of the lead core. These were claimed to work well and led indirectly to the Mark III, IV and V hollow nosed rounds in British service between 1897 and 1900.

Regards

TonyE

Very interesting discussion. As an aside, does anyone know the current legal position of a collector in the Uk, aquiring bullets such as these? my understanding is that an FAC with expanding variation would be required to possess even deactivated round examples. Is this correct?

The way I see it, even nipping the tips off mk VII for example purposes could land the perpetrator in very hot water.

[TonyE]

Yes, you are quite correct. Expanding ammunition is prohibited under Section 5(1A)f of the Firearms Act and a specific variation of one's FAC is need to hold it. It is the projectile itself that is the subject of prohibition so even an inerted round or a loose bullet is covered by Section 5(1A)g of the Act.

Cutting the tip from a normal ball round makes it ammunition designed to expand and is therefore subject to the Act. Apart from questions of legality it is a very foolish thing to do as a normal ball round has an open base to the envelope (jacket) and the core is liable to be blown through leaving the envelope lodged in the barrel. The next round then bulges the barrel.

This is what happened when the hollow point .303 Mark IV was introduced to service in 1898. To overcome this the core material was changed to a harder alloy od lead antimony and the fold-over at the base increased.

I have posted this before but here is an example of what happens.

Regards

TonyE