Artillery
Artillery.Artillery has played a critical role in providing close support to the infantry, bombarding fortifications, defending coasts, and, in the twentieth century, attacking tanks and aircraft. Beginning with the initial settlements, English colonists in North America, like Europeans, employed smoothbore, muzzle‐loading, black powder, cast‐bronze cannons and howitzers. Cannons, also called guns by the nineteenth century, had powerful, flat trajectories to batter down fortification walls or to shatter troop formations, while howitzers had curved trajectories for lobbing projectiles over fortification walls or into troop formations. Colonial artillery fired several types of projectiles, among them: solid shot, an exploding shell that was detonated by a fuse; canister, which was a can filled with musket balls; and grapeshot, a cluster of iron balls grouped around a wooden spindle and covered by a heavy cloth...
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