Artillery of the Napoleonic Wars: A Concise Dictionary, 1792–1815: A Concise Dictionary, 1792-1815 by Kevin F. Kiley (PDF)

Description

A comprehensive military history reference book exploring all aspects of the artillery used during the Napoleonic Wars.Napoleon began his military career as an artillery cadet and artillery played a fundamental part in all his great battles. Until the Napoleonic Wars artillery had been seen merely as a supporting arm to the infantry, but Napoleon changed everything. He massed his guns in huge batteries to blast holes in his opponent’s line. He even used the artillery to charge the enemy, the gunners galloping up to the enemy to open fire at pointblank range.Napoleon’s opponents did not all follow suit, choosing other tactical deployments. As a result, the Napoleonic era, more than any that preceded or followed it, was one of fascinating artillery maneuvers and critical actions that changed the course of many of the key battles. As the Prussian Field Marshal Blucher once observed, “Against Napoleon you needed guns – and lots of them!”The Napoleonic Wars was also a time of innovation, with the introduction of shrapnel shells and military rockets. This book will examine the artillery arms of all sides from ‘muzzle to butt plate’. As well as the significant artillerymen of the period, the scientists, and innovators, military and civilian—individuals such as Robins, Belidor, Gribeauval and his colleagues, Maritz, Liechtenstein and his collaborators, as well as the du Teil brothers – will all be examined, as will the important battles and sieges, significant memoirs and documents, and artillery terms that soon became part of the military lexicon.Written by the renowned historian Kevin F. Kiley, this will be the definitive book on the subject and will cover all aspects of artillery in the Napoleonic Wars.“This is a wonderfully complete induction into the details of Napoleonic Artillery. As well as defining some of the archaic terms associated with the art of gunnery (note; point blank is not what we mostly believe it to be) it provides background to the careers of the key characters in the science. The book contains many excellent technical drawings to explain, sketches and images to inform and data tables in the appendix to which to refer. Overall, it is an indispensable aid to understanding the artillery of the period.” —Michael McCarthy, battlefield guide

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The Siege, Fortress and Naval Artillery is presented as very well and in as great a depth as Kevin Kiley did in earlier in his first volume covering the Field Artillery of the Napoleonic Wars. The period drawings drawings are very detailed many of which I personally have never seen before. These two books by far some of the best reference material on the market today.

⭐Definitely one for the connoisseur, very deep with what appears to be very little left out. if you want to know something about the Napoleonic Wars artillery, this would be the one.

⭐Great book full of useful information

⭐It is surely an interesting topic and the book contains some information about it. However the book has many issues and the quality is poor compared to many other historical books that I’ve read:- Lots of repetition! The same information appears several times, sometimes even sentences sound very similar a couple of pages later.- Unstructured descriptions with much jumping in time (forward and backward in the same chapter) and many sentences were not clear about the period (e.g. 17th century or napoleonic era) being described.- Pictures often don’t support the description of the text. For sure, some nice original pictures, but the text doesn’t mention them to explain better some concepts. I really have the impression, many pictures were added simply to make the book thicker (the same impression I have with several tables)- Even if the title says “Napoleonic” the book contains information from 17th century to the napoleonic era. This could have an advantage (a way introduction), but often I had the impression that the author used more time describing the period before the napoleonic wars and the specific information was sometimes thin.- Bad editing or lack of it. Probably some of the issues above would have been avoided by a better edition.Some of this issues are also used to describe another book of this author (unfortunately I saw the review after reading this book), so I assume this is an issue with the books of this author.Probably the best descriptions are contained in the appendix of the book … what is funny is that most chapters in this appendix where directly copied from an contemporary artillery manual (i.e. not from this author).

⭐Very detailed on all aspects of siege warfare in this period. Has numerous tables on different artillery pieces and their performance as well as maps and graphs of siege works. Also explores the logistics around a siege and various considerations that need to be addressed to make an success.

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