Ammunition - Supply of Ammunition in The Field

Supply of Ammunition in The Field

With every successive improvement in military arms there has necessarily been a corresponding modification in the method of supplying ammunition and in the quantity required to be supplied. When hand-to-hand weapons were the principal implements of battle, there was no such need. But in the Middle Ages, the archers and crossbowmen had to replenish the shafts and bolts expended in action, and during a siege, stone bullets of great size, as well as heavy arrows, were freely used. The missiles of those days were however interchangeable, and at the Battle of Towton (1461), part of the Wars of the Roses, the commander of the Yorkist archers induced the enemy to loose arrows in order to obtain them for future use, similarly to a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (孔明借箭). This interchangeability of war material was even possible for many centuries after the invention of firearms. At the Battle of Liegnitz (1760) a general officer was specially commissioned by Frederick II of Prussia to pack up and send away, for Prussian use, all the muskets and ammunition left on the field of battle by the defeated Austrians.

In earlier periods of warfare, captured material was often utilized. In the First Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese went so far as to prepare beforehand spare parts for the Chinese guns they expected to capture. By the end of the 19th century, it was rare to find a modern army trusting to captures for arms and ammunition; almost the only instance of the practice from that time was that of the Chilean Civil War (1891) in which the army of one belligerent was almost totally dependent upon this means of replenishing stores of arms and cartridges. What was possible with weapons of comparatively rough make is no longer to be thought of in the case of modern arms.

After World War II, the widespread availability of mass-produced small arms have resulted in many conflicts in which both sides use the same weapons (e.g. the AK-47) and ammunition types, making captured ammunition once again a potentially important consideration.