Battle Of Yorktown Essay

Words: 1686
Pages: 7

The Battle of Yorktown (1781), which took place during the Revolutionary War, is momentous in the history of the field artillery. With approximately 1,700 cannon balls and bombs fired per day, or is about 1.2 rounds per minute, making this a predominantly artillery-based battle consisting of four types of British, French and American artillery pieces with comparatively few direct troop skirmishes. This paper analyzes the battlefield methodologies used at the decisive victory at Yorktown, precisely the two main types of weaponry deployed by American troops supplied by the French and seized from the British: the field cannon and the mortar
The primary piece of artillery used in the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, was the Field Cannon. The Field
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There were only two different kinds of mortars used at The Battle of Yorktown, the Coehorn mortar and the Dictator. Each mortar had a barrel-shaped tube that would sit on a flat wooden baseplate, unlike the Cannon and the Howitzer. Most mortars were equipped with large brass handles that made it easier to move them onto its base quickly. The mortar used "a fixed trajectory (around 45 degrees)" (11th Pennsylvania Regiment. n.d.), and the distance the round traveled was adjusted by changing the amount of the powder charge that the Americans and British would pack into the breech. The propellant that the mortars used would explode in midair sending shrapnel in different areas. These propellants had a variety of weights. The Coehorn mortar used the smaller round which weighed 90 pounds, and was made from rocks and steel and had a range of roughly 1,700 yards. The Dictator mortar, the biggest one out of the two has the heaviest round. This round was made from concrete and steel weighing in at roughly 200 pounds with a range of approximately 4,600 yards. This round took two soldiers to load into the tube. Using this type of propellant was good to use against their nemesis while in their