wizer":2gdb7vqk said:
For someone who is so clearly lacking in Historic education, please can we have an explanation of what a fuze is? I'm guessing something to do with bombs? Simply what we know as the fuse? Or the detonator?
The fuze is the small bangy bit that makes the big bangy bit go bang.
Several different types - time, altitude, contact, grazing etc.
Time fuzes used on big bangy-bangies (heavy artillery, where the shell will be in the air for a number of seconds), altitude fuzes for shrapnel (which are small musket balls, not splinters of shell casing which are called shell splinters) which go bang at a certain height on their way down, contact and grazing fuzes which go off when they hit something.
It was the failure of grazing fuzes which caused (or played a big part in) the losses on the first day of the Somme. Instead of acting when they hit the barbed wire they penetrated the earth before exploding, meaning that the wire was blown upwards, but not cut, and landed in a worse tangle than before. Usually shrapnel shells were used to try to cut wire, but later in the war more sensitive and faster-acting grazing fuzes were able to do the job much more effectively.
When shells were referred to as 'dud' it usually meant that the fuze was faulty in some way, which when you take one apart and look at it isn't surprising, given the stresses involved. How to make a sensitive enough fuze to explode on first contact with mud which doesn't go off due to g-forces when fired out of a cannon? Tricky...
