Original subtitles

(tense music)

Weapons have existed as long as human kind.

For millennia, they have determined the

destiny of generations.

Weapons bring suffering and death, they show

what humans can inflict upon other humans.

But they're also intended to keep the peace

and pave new ways for technology.

Ranged weapons.

We will show how they have made history

and shaped whole eras.

Astonishing experiments will uncover the secret

of their deadly efficiency.

The mini ball, with it's precision and penetrating power

is a real game changer in the 19th Century.

It actually quite scared me.

The longbow even frightens medieval noblemen.

That's a piece of wood that transports

arrows incredibly far.

And the Roman javelin,

incapacitate enemies with a simple trick.

I mean if I was holding that,

it would've reached the man behind.

Our first weapon, the pilum.

The Roman javelin.

According to Ancient sources, it was the decisive weapon

for the Imperial Legions.

The history of the pilum dates back to the dawn of mankind.

Humans have used spears for hunting for more than

400,000 years.

It is the only way for them to kill dangerous,

large animals like bison, which were an

essential part of the Neanderthal's diet.

More than 40,000 years ago, a new species enters

the territory of the neanderthals.

Homo sapiens, the modern man.

The intruders carry wooden throwing spears,

that they use with great efficiency.

About 10,000 years later, the homo sapien species

has successfully outlived neanderthals,

probably thanks to a better hunting and combat technique.

It's a fact that a perfect hunting weapon like a

good throwing spear for example, makes sure that the

human brain, an organ that needs a considerable

amount of protein, gets enough nutrients.

A good hunting weapon is, of course,

conducive to keeping the brain going.

A sensational finding in Germany from the 1990s

in Schoningen, Lower Saxony,

archeologists discover eight wooden javelins.

They estimate they are at least 300,000 years old.

About 10,000 years ago, groups of people started

waging war against each other.

Making use of the weapons that had proven

successful in hunting.

Ancient men developed means of hunting using spears

and throwing weapons and eventually bows

and as soon as they started fighting over territory,

they use all of these weapons against other humans.

And the weapons are not designed purely

for use against other people,

they're designed for use against animals.

They're hunting tools and they then become divergently

specialized as military or hunting weapons.

Ancient peoples further developed

weaponry with great effort.

Mike Loades is a weapon historian,

he finds spears particularly fascinating.

Spears come in all shapes and sizes, heavy ones

and very light ones like this.

A normal throwing spear

carries a decisive risk in battle.

If it misses the target, it falls into the hands

of the enemy, who can then throw it back at the attacker.

From the Sixth Century BCE on,

the rise of the Roman Empire marks

the beginning of a new chapter

in the history of javelins.

The most ingenious, the cleverest,

the most designed spear ever made was the Roman pilum.

Roman soldiers used their spears in battles

for more than a thousand years.

Like in the year 52 BCE the Gauls desperately

opposed their integration into the Roman Empire.

They do everything in their power to defend Lutetia,

which will later become Paris.

Four Roman legions are attacking the Gauls,

difficult territory and the enemy's resistance

are giving them a hard time.

But in the end, Caesar's legionaries triumph.

How did they use their miracle weapon the pilum?

The way the Romans fight is very mechanical.

They fight as a formation, they don't fight individually.

Whereas almost all the people they fight against

fight as individuals.

And the pilum is jus one more way

of making sure that these enthusiastic warriors

coming towards you don't have shields.

The basic equipment of the Roman legionaries

back then consisted of protective mail,

a short sword and two pila.

The length of a typical pilum, two meters.

The weight, about two kilograms.

The pilum looks strikingly different than

other ancient spears.

It has long shaft with a broad, square head.

What is it for?

What's its secret?

Jens Christiansen is a blacksmith and passionate

about historical techniques.

He will try and manufacture a pilum the way the

Romans did 2000 years ago.

First step, forge the head and the shaft from a blank.

That needs to be at 1000 degrees Celsius for the

blacksmith to hammer it into the characteristic form.

Yeah and as you can see, it really

something you have to power... That's hard work.

Yeah.

I mean I wasn't counting but that was

several hundred heavy power blows.

Yeah.

And what, just a third?

But now, it's just grunt work.

Yeah, yeah.

We could use the power hammer.

Yeah, sure.

Let's do that.

Lets finish it off with that.

But even with a modern power hammer,

at 250 blows per minute,

turning a blank into a pilum head takes several minutes.

The elaborate manufacturing of one single pilum

shows how highly advanced the techniques

of ancient blacksmiths were.

The Romans produced weapons on an industrial scale.

The industrial complex of the Roman arms industry

was phenomenal.

The average legion ins 4,800,

so round figures, 5,000 people in a legion.

Roman legionary carried two of these over the shoulder,

so that's 10,000 to supply a legion.

Some battles had 20 legions.

200,000 of these.

I mean what an extraordinary achievement.

(dramatic music)

The Romans have standardized

their manufacturing methods.

This is how they are able to produce

millions of pila throughout the centuries.

The iron shaft of the pilum is fixed

with two bolts on a heavy wooden stick.

In the Battle of Lutetia, the pilum gives the Roman troops

under Titus Labienus' command, a decisive edge.

(dramatic music)

Although the Gauls are armed with heavy shields,

they cannot protect themselves from

the penetration power of the Roman javelin.

Caesar tells us these front ranks

were transfixed by our javelins, by our pila.

In just a couple of salvos of pila,

Labienus had managed to holt that

storm of Gauls coming towards his men.

Not only did he stop that charge,

but by building a wall of dead and dying

in front of his lines, he slowed any further charges.

So that main tactic of the Gauls was now

thwarted for the rest of the battle.

Denmark, a historical village museum.

Mike Loades and his team are preparing an experiment

that will help them find out how the pilum actually performs

when an attacker approaches at high speed.

What we've set up here is to imitate

the charge of a barbarian against a Roman shield wall.

So this is the barbarian shield, Caston is the barbarian.

So he is gonna pull this sled as fast as you can,

charging at me, and then see if it will penetrate

this very sturdy piece of wood.

And I think we've got quite a challenge on there.

But let's give it a go.

(dramatic music)

According to Caesar's book on the Gallic War,

the pilum was able to punch through

several of their adversary shields.

But can this actually be true?

Or is Caesar wildly exaggerating?

Look at that, it's just punched straight through.

It was just effortless almost.

It was using his momentum against him.

This broad conical head has punched through,

and then this narrow fore shaft,

because it's narrower than that,

there was virtually no friction against it,

so it just came straight through.

This also explains why the Romans

put so much work into forging the head of the pilum

and the long iron shaft.

This is what allows a spear to penetrate

the enemy's shield effortlessly.

But could the adversary have pulled the pilum out

and thrown it back at them?

I mean if I was holding that,

it would have reached the man behind.

But even if it had only gone through that far,

then it would have done this.

You can see how the weight of this is pulling down.

If I try to charge forward, now look what happens.

My shield gets stuck.

I can't pull it out.

So all I do is abandon the shield.

Now I have to continue my attack defenseless.

The Battle of Lutetia will be a blood bath.

But the Romans score a pivotal victory.

It's another step on their way to conquer Gaul.

Like many times in the history of war,

discipline and technological supremacy are decisive.

The idea of the pilum, that it's a one shot weapon,

that you can only throw it once,

once it's hit the target it's bent, you can't use it again.

Of course that means you can't throw it back at the Romans.

But after the battle the Romans will have won,

they'll pick up all the pilum,

they'll take them to the armorer,

they'll mend them, and they'll be ready to use another day.

So this is a very neat weapon.

The pilum is much more potent

than ordinary javelin.

Effortlessly it transfixes the shields of enemies,

and at the same time becomes useless for them.

A master stroke by Roman weapon designers.

After the fall of Rome, the pilum fades into oblivion.

In order to successfully use this ranged weapon

you need a veritable arms industry.

No early medieval kingdom has such capacities.

Our next ranged weapon, the longbow.

In the middle ages it becomes the fear of all knights.

What is it's secret?

And why were the English longbow archers

dreaded by so many on the battlefield?

(dramatic music)

26th of August 1346,

Crecy, a small town near the Norman coast.

The forces of England's King Edward III

are facing those of his French antagonist, Philip VI.

It is the first big battle of the

Hundred Years' War between England and France.

They fight over French mainland territory

and the rule of France.

England even claims the French throne.

(dramatic music)

On paper, Philip's troops are clearly superior.

30,000 French warriors are ready to take down

only 14,000 Englishmen.

The French however, have overestimated

their chances of an easy victory.

Thousands of English arrows rain down on them.

Historians estimate that the English

shot up to 35,000 arrows a minute.

(dramatic music)

People have used bow and arrow for at least 10,000 years,

but why does this ancient weapon become

so crucial again in the Middle Ages?

Bowyer Anton Weninger knows their mysteries.

This here is an English longbow, a yew bow.

It stands out for it's length and penetrating power.

This weapon is enormously effective

even at longer distances.

What fascinates me the most is that this is a piece

of wood that is able to transport arrows incredibly far.

The dreaded Hungarian riders a few

centuries earlier used shorter bows, these consist of

several layers, a lengthy manufacturing process.

Such composite bows are hardly weather resistant

but they are handy for rapid deployment.

However, the penetrating power of Hungarian

composite bows is limited.

In 955, the attackers lose against the armed forces

of German King Otto.

The English longbow is special because it consists

of one single piece of wood, one trunk.

Anton Weninger explores the historical techniques that

our ancestors employed to make this weapon.

When you look at this yew, you can see the

sapwood very well.

That's the pale colored layer, and this is the heartwood.

The heart of the yew is very tough and durable,

while the sapwood is very flexible and elastic.

In yew bows, the belly, the part that faces the archer,

is made of core wood and the sap

is used for the front side of the bow.

There is a lot of tension when shooting

so this part needs to be bendy.

Yew wood grows extremely slowly.

Which makes it perfect for bowyery.

This resistant wood is hard to get nowadays.

One trunk costs about 200 euros.

In the Middle Ages, the English bowyery industry

almost wipes out the entire European yew population with

it's insatiable demand for the wood and raw material.

The timber for English longbows often comes from

Southern Germany.

In the middle of the 16th Century, there is hardly

any yew left in the woods of Bavaria.

The clear cutting has left a lasting mark.

In Germany, yew is an endangered species.

Throughout history, men have treated nature quite

carelessly when it comes to procuring resources

for the production of weapons.

Just look at Mitterbach in Central Austria.

In the Bronze Age, people mined copper ore in this region.

The area around some of the mine tailings

is still completely dead today.

Raw materials have always

been essential for manufacturing weapons.

The Romans needed 30 tons of iron to equip

one single Legion for battle.

Since antiquity, mining and smelting for the

weapons industry have contaminated European rivers.

Air pollution even presented a problem in Ancient Rome.

Hundreds of furnaces produced toxic emissions

generated during the smelting of copper, iron or lead ore.

Raw materials that were largely used to produce weapons.

You always work with what you've got.

If you can pick it up it's better than having to pay for it.

And if you have control and the King of England,

for example, has ownership of everything under the ground,

so anything you mine belongs to the King of England.

So, if you need iron, when it's dug up,

the King owns it and he'll pay you a fee

for digging it out rather than paying you

to actually own the physical property.

So, medieval and modern states have found ways of

concentrating their resources to maximize their

ability to manufacture weapons.

Back to the longbow.

In his studio in Austria, Weninger is working on

the fine tuning of the bow,

which has taken it's characteristic round form by now.

The grooves at the end will hold the string that

Weninger will manufacture next.

The string is a decisive detail for the performance

of the longbow.

The more robust it is, the further and

more precisely the bow will shoot.

Traditionally, you use nettles or flax strings

but they don't grow as well as they used to anymore.

Back in the Middle Ages, nettles could grow

as high as one and a half meters.

For safety reasons, we use a nylon string.

This also protects the bow from the vibrations

and we can be sure that the string won't break.

Medieval bow strings made of natural materials,

easily lose their tension when they get wet

and have to be replaced more frequently.

The last step of the procedure is the most difficult one.

Anton Weninger scrapes off razor thin layers to

influence the draw weight of the bow.

The more he scrapes off, the lighter it will be.

The medieval longbow made of yew wood,

almost two meters long.

Draw weight, about 140 pounds.

Today's competitive target shooters,

work with 30 to 50 pounds.

The continued training with these massive weapons

comes at a high price for the English longbow shooters.

This archer has a really large and oversized bow

and most of the archers suffered from skeletal lesions.

On the left, that is the bow hand,

they had underdeveloped shoulders.

And, on the right, where the draw hand is,

the shoulder was overdeveloped.

This is something archeologists found in skeletons.

You know immediately if someone was an archer or not.

On the battle field, a well trained

medieval archer has one main tactical task,

to break through the closed ranks of the enemy

with targeted, long range shots.

But how well does this work with the historical yew bow?

The first shooting test, at 50 meters,

a normal distance in competitions today.

Different factors affect the trajectory of the arrows.

The cross wind and the vibrations when the arrow is shot.

You always create tension in a bow

by pulling back the string.

Energy is stored in it due to this tension.

And once I release the string,

this potential energy becomes kinetic energy.

But the moment I release the string it starts to vibrate,

just think of it like a guitar string.

And this vibration expands to the bow.

And, if I don't pay close attention

and hold on tight to the front part

I will get a little shock and I might miss my target.

Weninger is an experienced archer.

He has to keep all these factors in mind

and intuitively anticipate the trajectory.

Five out of ten arrows hit the target from

a 50 meter range, I'm actually quite satisfied.

Medieval archers were not only known for

their precision, but also for their high fire rate.

How many arrows a minute are possible?

Sticking the arrows in the ground in front of the

archer is one technique that facilitates fast shooting.

For this experiment, Anton Weninger puts on a gambeson,

a historical piece of padded armor that

the archers at Crecy wore as well.

Ready, steady, go.

I can't believe it.

An unusual situation.

The medieval armor seems to greatly restrict

Weninger's movements.

And what was my time?

59:35.

(laughing)

Okay, almost.

But it's really not easy with this thing on.

It's really heavy, very stiff.

I could only draw the first one downwards.

I just could not lift my arm.

The arrows are all over the place,

that's bad, and incredibly hard.

Some modern archers train intensely

for fast shooting.

They can fire an arrow every one or two seconds.

Ancient sources also mention special techniques

like holding several arrows in one hand.

The longbow is a significant part of

England's medieval culture.

King Edward III issued a decree in 1369

that obliged Londoners to regularly practice archery.

Even six year old children were drilled to learn

how to shoot a bow.

Most of the archers didn't get any older than 25

so that was their expiration date if you will.

Young people were almost abused in this

desire to produce good archers.

The well trained archers also

represent a threat to the feudal order.

This is a terrifying weapon for two reasons.

One, it'll kill you but, more importantly,

it means that peasants can kill noblemen.

It's changed the natural order of things.

Noblemen in armor should be able to knock over

all the peasants.

Now one peasant with a longbow can kill the nobleman.

So this terrifies an aristocratic order that

believes it has superiority,

because of birth, because of privilege and

because it has the money for a horse and some armor.

So it's a leveling weapon, it takes away the advantage

of privilege and it restores it to the advantage

of skill and practice.

This also explains why archers

are surrounded by myths.

The most popular among them lives in the forest,

Robin Hood.

In the first medieval ballads, he's described

as a highwayman.

An ordinary criminal.

But later, in 16th Century literature, he becomes

an almost altruistic robber leader who takes from

the rich and gives to the poor.

He went down in history as a highly skilled

longbow archer.

His story remains fascinating to this day.

Countless movies celebrate the heroic Robin Hood.

It's a most unlikely story, villains don't give

money to the poor, they just take it from the rich.

But he's a folk hero who's invented at a time when

the king is oppressing the peasants and taxing them heavily

so the idea that some mythic figure would arise

and take the money back that the king has stolen

and give it to the people, who it belongs to.

It's the myth of all myths because every country

has a figure like this.

In England, he's Robin Hood, he dresses in green

to hide in the forest and he uses a longbow

against the king's men, who wear armor and carry swords.

So he's leveling the playing field.

He's a working class hero.

English longbow archers pose

a threat to noblemen in real life too.

With arrow salves shot from far away.

How does such a long range shot work?

Anton Weninger will now test is yew bow

on a distance of 100 meters.

He has to shoot high.

I have to aim far above the target, up in the forest.

That is where my target is now and this is where

I want to get up to.

The distance is okay but the wind is giving me

a hard time today.

Now I calculated with the wind,

the direction should be perfect.

At this distance,

an archer faces many problems.

Weninger needs to inch towards the target.

We're not far off.

All his arrows fall near the target,

where they dig deep into the ground.

Such long range shots in a high curve, develop

an enormous force and would have penetrated

the armor of fast approaching knights.

The English longbows were even stronger than this bow

you know.

This one's at 50 pounds, back in the days,

they were at 100 to 120 pounds.

Their trajectory is lower, they did not have to

aim as high as I just did and the arrows were heavier.

That means there was less drift in the wind.

We want to find out how bad the injuries

caused by an arrow are.

Weninger is setting up a torso made of ballistic gelatine.

For the targeted shot, he gets assistance from

trick shot artist Pietre Schrecker.

The arrow, shot from a 30 meter distance,

enters deep into the ballistic gelatine.

The material closely simulates

the characteristics of human tissue

and shows how fatally longbows could injure a man.

10 centimeters, that's very deep.

Lets see how deep that is.

Right in the heart.

This also explains the outcome of

the Battle of Crecy.

Several thousands dead in the French ranks.

While the English only lost a couple of hundred men.

This defeat will weaken the Kingdom of France

for decades.

Once again, sophisticated technology

has given the decisive edge.

The longbow is not a precision instrument,

it's not designed to hit a single man at long range.

It's designed to engage a large body of men and,

almost certain, horses as well,

moving towards the longbowmen.

And they will fire volleys of arrows at

the great mass of the enemy.

So it's about a very large amount of fire.

So it's quite modern.

The longbow a decisive weapon

in late medieval battles.

After years of training, the English archers

can defeat the French knights.

Other European rulers would like to have troops

with such penetration power but only the English king

invests enough money and time to build

an efficient army of archers.

But as time goes by, the longbow quickly loses impact.

At the end of the Middle Ages, new weapons arise,

bringing noise and smoke.

And a more efficient form of ranged warfare.

Fire weapons fundamentally changed military

technology around the globe.

One of the deadliest inventions of the 19th Century,

the Minie ball.

It decides on life and death on the battlefield

and also sparks significant progress

in medical care for soldiers.

What's so special about this new kind of ammunition?

Before the Minie ball, until the middle

of the 19th Century, combat tactics were simple.

The soldiers moved in closed ranks towards one another

and then shot at their enemies with muskets.

These weapons were quite powerful,

they did a lot of damage if they hit a human body,

but they were not accurate beyond about 50 paces,

about 40 meters, and they tended to be fired

not at targets but they would be leveled,

as a platoon of soldiers would level

their muskets towards the target and fire them all at once,

hoping that some of the round would hit the target.

Beyond 100 yards, you'd make a lot of noise,

you might hit a few things and you might frighten

the horses but that's about it.

So this is a weapon which lacks range.

The Minie ball will end this

kind of warfare forever.

Summer 1853,

Russian troops invade the Ottoman Empire.

The Crimean War begins, the first media war in history.

Photographer Robert Fenton has a mobile development lab.

His photos document the every day life of the soldiers.

Telegraph lines spread the news everywhere

on the continent within the blink of an eye.

France and England fight side by side

with the Ottoman Empire.

In the Battle of Inkerman, on the 5th November 1854,

they use the new Minie ball against the Russian troops,

and score an important triumph.

On a firing range near Gotha in Central Germany,

we want to uncover the secret behind the Minie ball

and find out how it could make the round lead balls

obsolete so quickly.

The whole different form of this new type of

ammunition immediately catches the eye.

Wolfgang Stabe trades in historical weapons.

He knows how deeply the new ammunition

affected the wars of the 19th Century.

The Minie ball has transformed history

because it was manufactured in a way

that allowed much higher precision.

In 1846, French officer Claude-Etienne Minie

invents the revolutionary ball,

which requires a special barrel.

The Minie ball is not round, which was the norm before.

But it conical at the front.

It's not even 3 centimeters long and only weights 32 grams,

a tiny projectile with dramatic effects.

Minie designed the ball in such a way that it

became the basis for all modern bullets.

But what made Minie's ammunition

that much better than the existing lead balls?

Our shooting experiment begins,

at a distance of 50 meters.

I'll shoot 10 times and see how significant

the dispersion is.

Stabe first puts in the gunpowder

and then the round lead ball wrapped in wadding,

which seals the gas behind the projectile in the barrel.

He uses a Brown Bess for the experiment.

A standard musket of the British Army in the 18th Century.

You can hit the target but there is

some significant dispersion.

The Brown Bess has a flintlock mechanism,

which creates a spark that ignites the gunpowder,

which then, in turn, ignites the main charge in the barrel.

Two ignitions in a row.

But the technology is prone to malfunction.

That's typical for flintlock weapons,

the ignition often fails.

The gunpowder makes everything messy and the flint,

that's here, stops emitting sparks at some point

and you have to replace it.

They often malfunction.

The firing experiment continues with

a new flint and new ignition charge.

And the musket causes more problems.

I can barely touch it.

It's getting hotter and hotter.

It's getting harder to charge because the

barrel is increasingly blocked.

It needs to be cleaner thoroughly.

Alright let's try and fire the last shot.

Stabe's last shot also misses the target.

I think it's astonishing that you can hit

this target at all.

Eight shots hit it, two missed.

But you can already see how much dispersion there is.

That's why the musket has no fixed sight.

From a military point of view, it was like a scattershot.

They pass the firing line, said fire,

hoping that someone would hit the target.

Now the Minie ball.

It needs to be greased before charging,

otherwise it would scratch along inside the barrel

and leave lead traces.

The thick layers of grease in the characteristic grooves

of the projectile prevents this.

To match the ammunition, Stabe uses an Enfeld rifle

that was introduced to the English Army in 1852.

Th Minie ball is easier to charge than the

round ball with the wadding.

And targeting is much easier too,

because other than the musket,

the Enfeld rifle has sights.

They're much closer together.

It's clearly more accurate.

While hitting the target

with a musket is a matter of luck,

Stabe shoots more accurately using the Minie balls.

You can clearly see that the Minie ball is superior.

All these shots would have been deadly.

The evaluation shows, using the new projectile,

Stabe hits the target seven times out of 10,

perfectly or almost perfectly.

He can only score three hits with the lead ball.

The other shots are widely dispersed.

The Minie ball was designed to hit a target from

a distance of several hundred meters.

This is only possible in combination with

another invention.

The Minie ball was not the only innovation.

The barrel is also part of the new design.

The rifle barrel was

invented long before the Minie ball,

presumably in the late 15th Century.

The idea was that the grooves machined into the

walls impart spin to the projectile.

This spinning motion, stabilizes the trajectory.

There are different ways of manufacturing rifle barrels.

Historically, the grooves were cut in

in a complicated process.

Today they're usually formed with a hammer.

It's delicate work requiring

a lot of attention to detail.

these barrels are high precision instruments.

This is how the mechanism works.

The explosion of the gunpowder generates a gas cloud,

which drives the projectile forward.

Minie's ball has a conical hollow in its base,

which expands under the pressure of the explosion

and seals the barrel perfectly.

Due to the spiral grooves the bullet starts spinning.

The stronger the spin, the bigger an external force

must be to diverge the trajectory of the projectile.

This means the spin ensures a stable trajectory.

And if you were to shoot these bullets without spin,

the distribution of the mass would be so imbalanced

that the Minie ball would just tumble and flip over.

Military officers worked meticulously

on the sophistication of ammunition long before Minie.

The objective was always to increase accuracy and range

and, most importantly, the firing rate per minute.

As early as the 16th Century, musketeers started

using specially designed, small, wooden tubes

that were filled with the exact amount

of powder charge they required.

In the 17th Century, the first paper cartridges were

invented that further facilitated the charging process.

In just one case, they contained the gun powder

and the lead projectile.

The next leap forward was the integration of all

components in one metal cartridge.

A couple of French gunsmiths were

successful in this endeavor.

The first being Casimir Lefaucheux

with his pin fire cartridge.

The second, weapon inventor Louis Flobert.

These cartridges almost look like modern ammunition.

The metal cartridge was a crucial advance in the

development of firearms because the cartridge brought

together the four elements in one place.

It contained the bullet, or projectile.

It contained the main charge, which launched the projectile.

It contained the cap, which initiated the main charge.

And finally, the case itself.

100 years ago, John Moses Browning,

an American firearms designer,

developed ammunition with a large cartridge

and a slim pointed projectile.

To this day, the design has barely changed.

But the way ammunition is manufactured

influences its effect.

Some projectiles have such disastrous effects on

the human body that they have internationally outlawed.

What I'd like to know now is how powerful

this Minie ball is, compared to a round ball

and the modern NATO cartridge.

I'll shoot at this ballistic block.

It's a very special gel.

It shows me the realistic impact of a

bullet on a human body.

Each type of ammunition needs the right rifle.

For the lead bullet, Stabe uses the old musket.

The bullet goes straight through the ballistic block

and exits again at the back.

For the NATO cartridge, Stabe uses a semi-automatic rifle.

The cartridge has been an integral part

of the standard equipment of Western armies

for almost 50 years.

Same thing here, a perforating shot.

In the last round Wolfgang Stabe uses a Minie ball

to shoot at the ballistic dummy.

The projectile that dates back more than 150 years

has the biggest impact energy.

Down here was the round ball,

the biggest and heaviest bullet we have.

Incredible impact, that's easy to see.

A large wound channel.

The smallest bullet, the NATO cartridge,

just darted through it, so brutally it would have

perforated anybody.

The Minie ball was actually the most effective,

it's the one which displaced most tissue.

You could see the enormous impact energy.

It actually quite scares me that this

ancient Minie ball had had such an impact.

A direct comparison.

On the left, the lead bullet.

On the right, the NATO cartridge.

In the middle, the Minie ball, with powerful effect.

If you look closely at a bullet would you can

see a large area where the tissue has been destroyed.

This was also true if the bullet hit a bone,

it was simply splintered.

That means the wounds were really, really big,

the bones within were splintered,

and in the past it was extremely difficult

to do anything, to operate for example.

The wounds inflicted by the new bullet

have far reaching consequences.

The Battle of Solferino take place in the

Second Italian War of Independence in 1859.

Austria fights the Italians and the French.

Swiss businessman Henry Dunant witnesses

the terrible wounds the Minie ball causes,

almost 40,000 dead and wounded people

lie on the battleground.

Spontaneously and together with volunteers,

Dunant organizes makeshift first aid for the wounded.

It's the beginning of a movement that will soon

become known as the Red Cross.

From 1864 on, a predecessor of the German Red Cross

is employed for the first time in

the Wars of German Unification.

The 19th Century is marked by discussions

about how to make wars more human.

Focusing on helping the wounded and setting up

binding rules for warfare.

In 1899, the major powers agree on the Hague Convention.

Amongst other things, it prohibits the use of weapons

that cause unnecessary suffering.

A milestone on the way to humanitarian, international law.

It's impact however, remains limited.

The ultimate answer to the Hague Convention was that

everybody broke it in the First World War,

some more than others.

And they broke it because the alternative

was to be defeated.

And rules are rules but, when you're up against it,

the opportunity to cheat a little is quite attractive.

It's a very human thing.

Only after millions have died in

the two World Wars, do people start to rethink.

The societies of the 21st Century are no longer

willing to sacrifice entire generations of

young soldiers.

States have become increasingly interested in ranged

weapons which minimize the danger for their soldiers.

There is a temptation to think we can sanitize

warfare, that we can make it such a one sided process

that it looks remarkably like a video game.

We sit at a long distance, press some buttons

and the bad guys go away.

And that isn't the game the bad guys want to play.

We have to accept that distance is a great advantage,

precision is a great advantage but battles are won,

ultimately, when the enemy is defeated.

And if he won't come out to play,

you will have to go and get him,

and that means getting closer and closer and closer

to the place where he wants you to be.

Nevertheless, much effort and money

is put into the development of new ranged weapons.

Sometimes, they look like they come straight from

a science fiction movie.

(tense music)

For example, the rail gun, but the US Navy

is indeed testing it.

The first phase is stationary but their long term

goal is to operate the weapon from ships or ground vehicles.

The patent for the rail gun was filed in 1918

but it took almost 100 years for this technology

to be ready to use.

In rail guns, propellants become completely

redundant because the acceleration is caused by

a magnetic field not by an explosion.

The principle behind rail guns comes from physics

and functions like this.

I have a conductor, like a piece of wire,

through which electricity is running.

In addition there is an external magnetic field

that effects the wire.

This creates a force that wants to move the conductor.

Now if you take a rail gun, you don't have a wire,

but you send the current right down the projectile,

and if I now have a strong external magnetic field,

there's an accelerating force impact on the

projectile that is so powerful, that it can generate

a velocity seven times the speed of sound.

This novel technology

breaks all limitations of conventional fire weapons.

For physical reasons, they cannot project a projectile

faster than two kilometers per second.

The rail gun on the other hand,

fires almost four times as fast.

Today, it can accurately hit a target that is

185 kilometers away.

It was long way until this futuristic weapon was born.

The first ranged weapons, like the javelin,

were used at close range of a couple of meters.

Over the centuries, the battle distance

has gradually increased.

In a test setting, the rail gun projectile

effortlessly penetrates several steel plates,

but it has a downside.

It uses a lot of power to generate

the enormous projectile velocity.

Whether the rail gun will really

change future wars remains to be seen.