Bombardment

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Bombardment, the act of throwing bombs or shells into a town or fortress for incendiary purposes. A bombardment is either desultory, when ships, field batteries, or a proportionally small number of siege batteries, throw shells into a place in order to intimidate the inhabitants and garrison into a hasty surrender, or for some other purpose; or it is regular, and then forms one of the methods of conducting the attack of a fortified place. The attack by regular bombardment was first introduced by the Prussians in their sieges in 1815, after Waterloo, of the fortresses in the north of France. The army and the Bonapartist party being then much dispirited, and the remainder of the inhabitants anxiously wishing for peace, it was thought that the formalities of the old methodical attack in this case might be dispensed with, and a short and heavy bombardment substituted, which would create fires and explosions of magazines, prevent every soul in the place from getting a night’s rest, and thus in a short time compel a surrender, either by the moral pressure of the inhabitants on the commander, or by the actual amount of devastation caused, and by out-fatiguing the garrison. The regular attack by direct fire against the defences, though proceeded with, became secondary to vertical fire and shelling from heavy howitzers. In some cases a desultory bombardment was sufficient, in others a regular bombardment had to be resorted to; but in every instance the plan was successful; and it is now a maxim in the theory of sieges, that to destroy the resources, and to render unsafe the interior of a fortress by vertical fire, is as important (if not more so) as the destruction of its outer defences by direct and ricochet firing. A bombardment will be most effective against a fortress of middling size, with numerous non-military inhabitants, the moral effect upon them being one of the means applied to force the commander into surrender. For the bombardment of a large fortress, an immense materiel is required. The best example of this is the siege of Sebastopol, in which quantities of shells formerly unheard of were used. The same war furnishes the most important example of a desultory bombardment, in the attack upon Sweaborg by the Anglo-French mortar boats, in which above 5,000 shells and the same number of solid shot were thrown into the place.