Military bullets

[enfieldspares]

I had to study "International Law: Disputes and War" back in the late 1970s. It is correct that it is the 1899 Hague Regulations that also, went further than earlier "rules" (St. Petersburg 1868) banned explosive ammunition of under I think four hundred grams or about one pound in weight.

https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/st-petersburg-decl-1868

This was because light (well light for back at that time) cannon firing such ammunition were being developed.

The Avalon Project - Laws of War : Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague II); July 29, 1899

in which under various outlawed practices listed under Article 23 is this:

To employ arms, projectiles, or material of a nature to cause superfluous injury

Quite then how things went from that to the 20mm automatic cannon shell that weighs four ounces and Gunner Deane blown apart in his turret by a cannon shell as mentioned elsewhere on SD is just how things then get categorised as "anti materiel" rather than "anti personnel" or as "smoke creation for concealment or target marking" - white phosphorous - so as to thus not be then unlawful!

 

[Foxyboy43]

So then the military moved to bullets designed to tumble on impact and cause optimum damage without necessarily killing - then It takes four soldiers out of the action as they are busy carrying off the said damaged casualty….

 

[Rory]

Agh... so many myths arise again. All aerodynamically optimised bullets will eventually 'tumble', it is not some devious design, just physics. The larger mass at the rear will eventually rotate 180deg. How quickly it occurs depends on material and velocity.
If you dropped a bullet pointy end down from high enough, it will eventually rotate 180deg so that the heavier end hits the ground first.

Go to 03:50

 

[User00056]

Agh... so many myths arise again. All aerodynamically optimised bullets will eventually 'tumble', it is not some devious design, just physics.

Well, yes. That's exactly why ballistic tables exist

 

[enfieldspares]

So then the military moved to bullets designed to tumble on impact and cause optimum damage without necessarily killing - then It takes four soldiers out of the action as they are busy carrying off the said damaged casualty….

The Germans did in fact design such the spoon point bullet of the 1970s. See below:

4.6×36mm - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The .303 Mk VII had an aluminium tip filler to give a better ballistic coefficient.

There is a passage in (from memory) Keith Simpson's book "Forty Years of Murder" where in WWII he visited a bullet factory and they were using fibre paper as a tip filler instead of aluminium. He remarked that this was a very good idea as fibre paper cost must of course be cheaper than aluminium regardless of the fact that it also saved aluminium for more pressing uses. And that maybe other bullet making factories could adopt the idea?

He was rebutted that the terms of the Hague Regulations on "poison" meant that a very costly process had to be in place to sterilise and keep sterile the fibre paper. That said process was in cost far more expensive and time demanding than the cost and time of the aluminium it replaced.

But indeed in WWI the Germans protested that the Mk VII was an illegal design as it did tumble on impact. As a kid you on the links at Skegness where I guess they did rifle shooting in WWII you could find spent .303 Mk VII bullets that had either bent in two or the jacket had fractured such that all that could be found was the jacket and still in place aluminium tip and a third or so jacket.