Dum Dum Bullets
Dum-Dum Bullets
Mike Waldren QPM
The kind of ammunition used by police forces in the United Kingdom occasionally becomes a subject for heated debate, particularly if there is any suggestion that the police have used, are using, or intend to use, ‘Dum-Dum bullets’. Few people, however, have any real idea of what such a bullet actually is. More often than not it is described as being a bullet that has been deliberately doctored in some way so that it will cause unspeakable injuries. That, so legend has it, is why it was ‘outlawed’ by ‘civilised’ states including Great Britain in 1899 at the Hague Convention (although an unspecified Geneva Convention is occasionally substituted) thus ensuring that only ‘humane’ bullets have been used ever since. The reality is very different and fallacies have plagued the subject from the time the bullet was ‘invented’.
Chitral was a small principality in what today is the far North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. When the Mehtar (ruler) of Chitral died in 1892 the first of his seventeen sons, Nizam-ul-Mulk, claimed the throne. He enjoyed friendly relations with the British but in January 1895 he was killed at the instigation of one of his half-brothers, Amir-ul-Mulk, who promptly took over. Amir had no time for the British Raj and a small military detachment under Surgeon-Major George Robertson was sent to deal with the matter. Robertson deposed Amir and installed his more compliant 12-year-old brother, Shujah-ul-Mulk, in his place. Amir appealed to his brother-in-law, Umra Khan, and his uncle, Sher Afzal, for help. They agreed (probably intending to get rid of him as well so that one of them could rule instead) and between 3,000 and 5,000 tribesmen laid siege to Robertson and his men in the small Chitral Fort.
Two attempts at relief failed and with more Chitralis joining Umra Khan and Sher Afzal every day the British government decided on a full scale expedition of 15,000 men. While these marched up from the south and engaged the bulk of the opposition along the way, a small secondary force commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel James Kelly marched from Gilgit in the east. They heroically crossed the 220 miles of mountains, some of which were covered in deep snow, to reach Chitral Fort in twenty-eight days and Umra Khan and Sher Afzal abandoned the siege. The main relief force arrived a few days later. The British suffered less than a hundred casualties and although the losses suffered by Sher Afzal and Umra Khan are unknown, they were reportedly in the thousands. It was the stuff of which glorious Victorian military triumphs were made but it would have been consigned to the pages of history were it not for the actions of some of the British soldiers who took part. It was the military expedition that brought about the Dum-Dum bullet.
British Soldiers During the Chitral Expedition
The late 1800s was a time of great change for all European armies in terms of what firearms they carried and the ammunition they used. In the case of the British, 1866 had seen the introduction of the breech-loading Enfield-Snider rifle which discharged an all-lead .577 calibre bullet at a muzzle velocity of 1,250 ft/s. This was superseded in 1871 by the Martini-Henry which fired a .450/577 calibre all-lead bullet at a similar muzzle velocity. In 1888 the first true repeating rifle in the form of the bolt-action Lee-Metford was introduced. It had a box magazine and the ammunition to accompany it was of .303 calibre. The smaller sized bullet was lighter and this meant that the muzzle velocity increased to 1,830 ft/s thereby increasing the range but there was a problem. Greater speed meant that more heat was generated with the result that some of the lead adhered to the lands and grooves in the barrel causing fouling. To overcome this, a cupro-nickel jacket was added to stop the lead coming into direct contact with the rifle bore. The vast amount of smoke generated by the black powder charge was overcome when cordite (a mixture of nitro-glycerine, nitro-cellulose and mineral jelly) was introduced in 1891 as a ‘smokeless powder’. This also had the effect of increasing the muzzle velocity, this time to 1,970 ft/s. The final development of the cartridge had a round-nose fully-jacketed bullet and was officially known as the ‘Cartridge S.A. Ball, Magazine Rifle Cordite Mark I’, later to become the ‘Mark II’.
Soldiers themselves didn’t like the new bullet for several reasons. Firstly there was the soldiers’ traditional mistrust of anything dreamed up as being ideal for their purposes by someone who, to borrow a military idiom from later years, had never been ‘up to their neck in muck and bullets’. This was exacerbated by their not being able to see a comforting lump of soft lead that would be sent hurtling toward the enemy and because the bullet was smaller they believed that it was not likely to be so effective anyway.
Their worst fears were realised during the opening skirmishes in the Chitral expedition when rumours started to spread of tribesmen who were still able to fight even after they had been hit by several bullets. One story, which no doubt improved with the telling, circulated widely about a tribesman who had been hit by six bullets and yet fully recovered after hospital treatment. Given the average soldier’s talent for improvisation it was not long before one of them discovered that by taking a bullet and rubbing the nose of it against a stone it was possible to wear away the top of the jacket so that the old familiar lead could be seen inside. When this was fired at a charging tribesman it had the desired result.
The need for the British to have an ammunition factory in India had been recognised as early as 1846 and the first to be constructed was at Dum Dum, a small town north-west of Calcutta (renamed as Kolkata in 2001). At the time of the Chitral expedition the superintendent of the factory was a Royal Artillery Captain, Neville Bertie-Clay (sometimes spelt without the hyphen). Bertie-Clay had spent much of his career so far in the Indian Ordnance Department and he was not one to approve of soldiers messing about with his ammunition. He was, however, sympathetic and so he started his own series of trials with the standard military bullet (the Mark II). He found that the benefits of the cupro-nickel jacket which, it will be remembered, was only there to prevent lead fouling in the barrel, were unaffected by the removal of the top one millimetre of it to expose the lead and that the increase in the performance of the bullet in terms of stopping power was significant. His factory therefore started to turn out what today would be called a jacketed soft-point bullet and it is this that was the original ‘Dum-Dum’.
It was just in time because 1897 saw a general outbreak of rebellion against the British. The Risings on the North-West Frontier was compiled in 1898 from the highly detailed reports of special war correspondents and official dispatches, many of which it quoted verbatim. It described the revolt as encompassing: ‘From Waziristan on the left to Bimer on the right a stretch of more than 400 miles of our borderland, inhabited ... by 200,000 first-rate fighting men. ... The tribes which immediately face us on this frontier line, commencing at the top of the semicircle at Dirbund, on the Indus, are, taking them in their order, the Bunerwals, the Swats, the Utman Khels, and the Mohmunds; then come the Khyber Pass and the Afridis, and lastly, on the northern flank of the road from Kohat to Thull, the Orakzai’.
In the early stages this resulted in the formation of a punitive expedition, under the command of Major-General Sir Bindon Blood, which would gain international renown as a result of a narrative by a young lieutenant who accompanied the expedition. His name was Winston Churchill and his book was entitled The Story of the Malakand Field Force. In it, he described how during one action: ‘Determined and vigorous sword charges were now delivered on all sides of the camp. The enemy, who numbered about 4,000, displayed the greatest valour. ... The fire of the British was, however, crushing. Their discipline was admirable, and the terrible weapon with which they were armed, with its more terrible bullet, stopped every rush’.
A Malakand Camp
Churchill also wrote that: ‘The power of the new Lee-Metford rifle with the new Dum-Dum bullet—it is now called, though not officially, the "ek-dum" (Hindustani for "at once.") bullet—is tremendous. The soldiers who have used it have the utmost confidence in their weapon. Up to 500 yards there is no difficulty about judging the range, as it shoots quite straight, or, technically speaking, has a flat trajectory. This is of the greatest value. Of the bullet it may be said, that its stopping power is all that could be desired. The Dum-Dum bullet, though not explosive, is expansive. The original Lee-Metford bullet was a pellet of lead covered by a nickel case with an opening at the base. In the improved bullet this outer case has been drawn backward, making the hole in the base a little smaller and leaving the lead at the tip exposed. The result is a wonderful and from the technical point of view a beautiful machine. On striking a bone this causes the bullet to "set up" or spread out, and it then tears and splinters everything before it, causing wounds which in the body must be generally mortal and in any limb necessitate amputation. Continental critics have asked whether such a bullet is not a violation of the Geneva or St. Petersburg Conventions; but no clause of these international agreements forbids expansive bullets, and the only provision on the subject is that shells less than a certain size shall not be employed. I would observe that bullets are primarily intended to kill, and that these bullets do their duty most effectually, without causing any more pain to those struck by them, than the ordinary lead variety. As the enemy obtained some Lee-Metford rifles and Dum-Dum ammunition during the progress of the fighting, information on this latter point is forthcoming. The sensation is described as similar to that produced by any bullet—a violent numbing blow, followed by a sense of injury and weakness, but little actual pain at the time. Indeed, now-a-days, very few people are so unfortunate as to suffer much pain from wounds, except during the period of recovery. A man is hit. In a quarter of an hour, that is to say, before the shock has passed away and the pain begins, he is usually at the dressing station. Here he is given morphia injections, which reduce all sensations to a uniform dullness. In this state he remains until he is placed under chloroform and operated on’.
By way of contrast, The Risings on the North-West Frontier limited itself to saying just once in its entire 250 pages with a further nine lengthy appendices that ‘the Dum-Dum bullet was most effective’ but Churchill was not the only one to indulge in hyperbole when it came to describing the wounds made by the ‘terrible’ Lee-Metford rifle and its ‘more terrible’ bullet. For Victorian readers this fed directly into their belief in the natural superiority of all things British and they lapped up every bit of it with undisguised relish. Unfortunately it also started a ball rolling that would prove impossible to stop.
The Geneva Convention referred to by Churchill took place in 1864. It related solely to the medical care of the wounded and need not concern us. The Declaration of St. Petersburg in November 1868 on the other hand had ‘fixed the technical limits at which the necessities of war ought to yield to the requirements of humanity’ and decreed: ‘That the only legitimate object which States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy; That for this purpose it is sufficient to disable the greatest possible number of men; That this object would be exceeded by the employment of arms which uselessly aggravate the sufferings of disabled men, or render their death inevitable; That the employment of such arms would, therefore, be contrary to the laws of humanity; The Contracting Parties engage mutually to renounce, in case of war among themselves, the employment by their military or naval troops of any projectile of a weight below 400 grammes, which is either explosive or charged with fulminating or inflammable substances’.
The ‘explosive bullet’ was a Victorian novelty used for a short while by hunters and consisted of a bullet with an internal cavity which was filled with ‘a mixture of chlorate of potash and sulphuret of antimony in equal parts and closed with beeswax’. This was supposed to detonate inside an animal thereby increasing the internal injuries as indeed it did – when it worked. Modern versions are still available and one was used by John Hinckley in his attempt to assassinate President Reagan in 1981. As far as the Dum-Dum was concerned, it was not ‘explosive or charged with fulminating or inflammable substances’ and so Churchill had identified the wrong provision as being applicable. It should have been whether or not the wounds caused by the bullet ‘uselessly’ aggravated the sufferings of disabled men, or rendered their death inevitable. This was wide open to interpretation and the British argued that without modification the standard (Mark II) bullet ‘passed through the limbs or body without causing immediate collapse unless some vital part or important bone was struck. In European warfare this was of comparatively little consequence, as civilised man is much more susceptible to injury than savages. As a rule when a “white man” is wounded he has had enough, and is quite ready to drop out and go to the rear; but a savage, like the tiger, is not so impressionable, and will go on fighting even when desperately wounded’. The effect of the bullet was therefore not ‘useless’; it was considered ‘essential’.
In February 1898 Sir Howard Vincent, who had been the Director of the Criminal Investigation in the Met before entering politics in 1888, asked the India Secretary, Lord George Hamilton, whether it was true that ‘the Queen's enemies in the operations on the North-West Frontier have obtained possession of the latest arms of precision, and particularly of Lee-Metford magazine rifles and Dum-Dum bullets’. Hamilton replied that: ‘The so-called Dum-Dum bullets, which are not explosive bullets, have been used against the troops in the recent Frontier campaigns, and are probably part of a large quantity of ammunition captured from a convoy by the Afridis’.
Afridi Tribesmen
Not everyone supported Churchill’s view that the new bullet was ‘a beautiful machine’ and something about its name had caught the public imagination. Its notoriety was starting to grow and with it came all kinds of stories over its effects. Also in February 1898 in the House of Lords, Lord Stanley of Alderley asked Her Majesty’s Government ‘whether they will lay on the Table any surgical reports on the wounds of Piper Findlater and others caused by Dum-Dum bullets, so that the country may judge whether these are not contrary to the spirit of the Convention against explosive bullets; and to ask whether Her Majesty's Government sanctioned the issue of Dum-Dum bullets for military purposes’. The story of Piper Findlater was being widely reported at the time. On 20 October 1897 during what was known as the Tirah expedition the Gordon Highlanders stormed an Afridi position on Dargai Heights. George Findlater was a junior piper and after being shot in the ankles he was unable to walk but he continued playing to encourage the battalion's advance. He was invalided home, found that he had become a national hero and awarded the Victoria Cross.
Stanley continued: ‘The Afridis say that we have used poisoned bullets. They consider that the bullets are poisoned in consequence of the very few recoveries from wounds that have been observed by them. And besides the injury done by the shreds of nickel, it is said that the lead becomes so [crushed] as to enter into and poison the system. If any of those whose primary duty it is to advance medical and surgical science, have wished for subjects whose position would ensure the greatest attention to their wounds, their desire has been fulfilled in the cases of two of the most popular men wounded in the Frontier War. I refer to the two Gordon pipers. One of these pipers, Milne, was hit by an honest Lee-Metford or spherical bullet, and he has written to the papers to say that he was shot through the chest and through the lungs, but that he would soon be all right. The other piper, Findlater, was shot by a Dum-Dum bullet in both ankles, and it was said that his bones had been reduced to a pulp. It was not certain whether he had not suffered amputation, or might not still be exposed to that calamity’.
In fact, Findlater’s wounds were nothing like as serious as was being claimed. He left the army and used his fame to go on the music-hall stage from which he earned enough money to buy a farm. On the outbreak of World War I he rejoined the colours as a sergeant piper when the 9th Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders was formed in September 1914. He was wounded at Loos and again invalided home. He died in 1942 aged seventy. In any event the Under-Secretary of State for India, the Earl of Onslow, was unmoved and replied that: ‘We have had no reports on the wounds of Piper Findlater and others caused by Dum-Dum bullets. These bullets are not explosive at all, and their use is not contrary to the spirit of any convention or custom of war. No special sanction has been given by Her Majesty's Government for the use of those bullets, as none was asked for or required’.
Nevertheless the level of misinformation that was circulating about the supposed devastating effect of the Dum-Dum bullet was illustrated again when the subject came up for discussion in the House of Commons on 1 March 1898. The India Secretary was asked ‘whether the specific quality of the Dum-Dum bullets supplied to the British troops to be used against the Afridis consists in crushing and pulverising the bone so as to defy all surgical skill employed in setting; in what respects are the Dum-Dum bullets less calculated than explosive bullets, to inflict incurable injury; and, what is the authority for the statement that the Dum-Dum bullets are consonant with international law or the usages of civilised warfare?’ Hamilton replied that: ‘According to the information supplied to me, the effects of this bullet are not more serious (indeed, I believe, they are less serious) than those of the old Snider bullet nor than those of the Martini-Henry bullet. But, on the other hand, as was clearly shown during the Chitral expedition, the Lee-Metford bullet frequently failed to attain the object with which all missiles are discharged in war, namely, that of disabling the enemy with the least possible suffering. The Dum-Dum bullet fulfils this purpose, as did the bullets previously used by the British Army, and fulfils it in the same way.’ When pressed on the wounding effect of the bullet he said that: ‘There is no doubt that the so-called Dum-Dum bullet inflicts a more serious wound than a [Mark II] bullet from the Lee-Metford rifle, but not more so than the bullet previously in use. I believe anyone can convert the Lee-Metford bullet into a Dum-Dum bullet by simply flattening its head’.
Meanwhile momentous events had been taking place on another continent. Major-General Charles Gordon had been killed in Khartoum in 1885 and the Sudan was lost by the British to the forces of the Mahdi. In 1895 the British government agreed that Horatio Kitchiner, a Major-General in Egyptian service at the time, could mount a campaign to retake the Sudan and he formed the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force of 25,000 men, 8,600 of whom were British. The campaign started in 1896 and in September 1898 the final battle took place at Omdurman just outside Khartoum. With Maxim machine-guns, artillery, Lee-Metford rifles (for the British), and Martini-Henry and Remington rolling-block rifles (for the Egyptian and Sudanese), Kitchiner’s men mowed down the attacking Dervish army. Over 9,000 were killed while the British lost forty-seven. It was an astonishing victory, albeit over less well-armed foe.
British Soldiers with Lee-Metford Rifles at Omdurman
However in February 1898 the Under-Secretary of State for War had been asked in the House of Commons ‘whether his attention has been called to a report to the effect that the British troops with the advance force in Egypt have found it necessary to alter the Lee-Metford bullet; and, if this report be correct, will he state why unsuitable bullets have been issued to the troops, to what extent the issue has been made, and the nature of the alteration?’ It was the Financial Secretary to the War Office, Joseph Powell-Williams, who replied that: ‘It has for some time past been recognised that the .303 bullet is deficient in stopping power, and a slight modification has been made on the spot in the bullets issued to the troops in Egypt, which will, it is believed, remove this defect’.
‘On the spot’ modifications suggests that Mark II bullets were converted by ‘flattening the head’ but a problem with the Dum-Dum bullet had already been identified. Because the cupro-nickel jacket no longer completely covered the lead core of the bullet there was the potential for it to strip away as it went down the barrel and this could occur even with factory-made rounds. The ordnance factory at Woolwich in England had therefore designed two different expanding .303 calibre bullets, one of which had a 3/8 inch deep hole in its nose. This created a round-nose ‘hollow-point’ bullet and after trials it was this that was adopted as the ’Cartridge S.A. Ball .303 inch Cordite Mark III’. A few months and a few modifications later it was renamed the ‘Mark IV’ followed by ‘Mark V’. To distinguish them from the modifications made in India they were all known as ‘Woolwich bullets’.
The body responsible for overseeing British government spending and proposing changes in taxation to meet demand at the time was the Ways and Means Committee. During a meeting on 14 March 1898 John Dillon, a formidable Irish politician with a talent for upsetting ministers, said that: ‘I am very anxious to call the attention of the Under Secretary of State for War with reference to the Dum-Dum bullets. We are informed that they have been served out in large quantities to the new force which has been formed for service in West Africa, a force which may be most unhappily brought into conflict with the troops of a civilised Power’ and he drew attention to the sum of £158,000 (equivalent to about £15 million today) allocated for ammunition. The Committee Chairman, James Lowther, said that: ‘That is not for the so-called Dum-Dum bullets, but for ammunition made in England, and not ammunition made in India’. Powell-Williams added that: ‘These are the ordinary bullets’. When asked to say that ‘none of this money is to be spent on Dum-Dum bullets’ Powell-Williams replied: ‘Yes’. Dillon stuck with it and asked: ‘Is the hon. Member in a position to assure the Committee that none of this money will be spent—either in supplying the troops in India with Dum-Dum bullets, or issuing them to the troops who have gone to West Africa?’ Powell-Williams replied: ‘That is precisely the assurance I would give the Committee. The bullets to which the hon. Member refers are made in India’. Dillon would not give up and said: ‘But is it or is it not the fact, and it is important that it should be stated, that these Dum-Dum bullets have been served out to the British troops sent to West Africa? It has been stated positively in the Press, and it is very important that we should have an authoritative statement from the War Office, as to whether that is or is not the case, for it is going to be a matter of discussion in the French Chamber in the next few days’. Powell-Williams replied: ‘I think I disposed of that point when I stated that the bullets included in the Supplementary Estimate are the ordinary bullets’.
Dillon was asking the wrong question because the ‘ordinary bullets’ that were now intended for issue to the army outside India, including the part of it that was with the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force, were the hollow-point Woolwich bullets but there was an obvious reluctance to say so. It may have been that Dillon’s abrasive style induced a natural disinclination to give an unreserved answer. Alternatively the British government was well aware that the wildly exaggerated claims of the injuries caused by the Dum-Dum bullet in India were arousing something of an international furore and it was anxious that a similar head of steam did not develop over the effects caused by the successor to the Mark II everywhere else. If that was the case then for quite a while it was successful.
Ten days later, on 24 March, in the House of Commons Dillon was back on the trail again and asked ‘who is responsible for the issue of Dum-Dum bullets to the troops in India; and whether the India Office has any information as to the effect of these bullets on men or animals?’ This time it was Hamilton who replied that: ‘These bullets were issued by order of the Government of India. No further sanction for their issue was necessary, nor was any such sanction either asked for or given; but Her Majesty's Government were fully informed as to the proceedings of the Government of India, and saw no reason for questioning their propriety’. Dillon then asked ‘whether Dum-Dum bullets have been served out to any troops directly under the control of the War Office; and who is responsible for the supply of these bullets to troops serving in West Africa?’ and was told that: ‘The Dum-Dum bullet has not been issued to any troops directly under the control of the War Office’.
On 7 July 1898 Dillon got a little closer when he asked ‘whether a special bullet has been manufactured to be used by the British troops in the Khartoum expedition; if so, on what grounds has it been found necessary to supply the troops with a special bullet?’ It was Powell-Williams who replied that: ‘No special bullet has been manufactured for use in Egypt. The bullet sent is that which has been adopted for general use in the Army after experiment and medical report’. When asked ‘Is that the Dum-Dum bullet?’ he replied ‘No, Sir, it is not’. Of course, Powell-Williams and Hamilton were being quite accurate in their answers. They were just being ‘economical with the actualité’.
As Churchill had noted, European armies started to complain about the Dum-Dum bullet almost as soon as it was introduced, fearing no doubt that one day it may be used against them. In April 1898 the critics were given medical support when Paul von Bruns, a professor of surgery at the University of Tübingen in southwest Germany and Surgeon-General in the Württemberg Army Medical Service, gave an address to a meeting of the German Chirurgical (Surgical) Society during which he suggested that, as a result of experiments he had conducted, the use of Dum-Dum bullets in warfare was ‘brutally inhumane’.
Surgeon-Colonel W.F. Stevenson, Professor of Military Surgery at the Army Medical School, Netley, responded by writing in the British Medical Journal on 21 May that the way this address was being reported in the press, and the questions being asked in the House of Commons, ‘are sure to conjure up before the minds of hysterical persons who have no means of knowing the facts of the case the notion that the English Government has selected for use in the English army a small-arm projectile which in the spirit, if not the letter, contravenes the agreement come to at the Congress of St. Petersburg, in 1868, not to use explosive shells of less than 400 grammes in weight. As a matter of fact, there is no doubt that the effects of the Dum-Dum bullet have been exaggerated. ... The Snider bullet was probably the most destructive small-arm projectile ever used in an army but the inhumanity of its employment in war was never suggested. When travelling at the same velocity [as the Martini-Henry bullet] it produced more extensive fractures of bones than any small-bore bullet, Dum-Dum or other. ... I have made experiments with Dum-Dum bullets; I have seen our men who have been hit with them on the Indian frontier, and I have received numerous letters from medical officers who saw and treated injuries in the Tirah campaign, and I am convinced that an exaggerated idea of their effects exists’.
Alexander Ogson (later Sir), the Regius Professor of Surgery at the University of Aberdeen and Surgeon in Ordinary (a consultant) to Queen Victoria, had been present when von Bruns gave his address and he managed to get hold of a copy of the final paper. Entitled On the Effects of Lead-pointed Projectiles (Dum-Dum Bullets), it called on the German military authorities to ‘to obtain, by international agreement, such a modification of the St. Petersburgh [sic] Convention that only allows such small-bore leaded bullets be employed in war as are wholly steel mantled, or at least mantled at their tip’. This was too much for Ogson and in September 1898 he decided to enter the fray by pointing out that: ‘Von Bruns’s experiments were made with the German Mauser bullets, some of which were altered by removing part of the mantle at the apex so as to imitate as nearly as possible what the Dum-Dum bullets were supposed by him to be. But it is important to observe that von Bruns has evidently never seen or experimented with the genuine Dum-Dum bullet. ... [his] experiments were not made with Dum-Dum bullets at all, but with soft-nosed Mauser bullets, such as are manufactured for German sportsman for use with the Mauser rifle in shooting big game. ... Hence it is clear that von Brun’s experiments were made with projectiles too unlike the Dum-Dum to justify us in at once accepting his conclusions as being true of it’.
The government strategy of keeping quiet about the Woolwich bullet, if indeed that was what it was, came to an abrupt end in March 1899 when von Bruns published his On the Effects of the Most Recent Bullets in Use in the English Army (Hollow-Fronted Bullets). In essence the conclusion was that from ‘a ballistic point of view, these bullets are equal to the full-mantled bullet, the hollow apex in no wise impeding their flight. ... [They] lose their shape more readily on striking an object than the fully-mantled, but less than bullets with an exposed leaden apex. ... Compared with the leaden-pointed bullets they produce decidedly less severe injuries of the soft parts (flesh) but equal them in destructive power should they strike bone’. In response it was once again pointed out that the comparisons with ‘leaden-pointed bullets’ were done with the Mauser bullet and not the Dum-Dum.
International politics now played their part. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia proposed a conference on arms limitation in August 1898. All kinds of ulterior motives have since been attributed to the Tsar, including his need to reduce spending on conventional weapons so that he could increase the size of the imperial fleet. Whatever the reason, on 18 May 1899, the conference opened in The Hague in the Netherlands with twenty-six nations represented. Three ‘commissions’ were set up to go through the proposed subjects for discussion with the ‘First Commission’ looking specifically at military matters. Its topic was the ‘Interdiction of the employment in armies and fleets of new firearms of every description and of new explosives, as well as powder more powerful than the kinds used at present, both for guns and cannons’. The purpose, explained Colonel J. Gilinsky of Russia, was not to proscribe new inventions as such, but of agreeing upon a moratorium, fixing a term during which existing material was not to be replaced, ‘based on the Tsar’s desire to mitigate the heavy burdens imposed on the taxpayer’.
The focus of the discussions should therefore have been on finding a way of implementing such a cost-saving moratorium but instead at the first meeting Colonel Arnold Künzli of Switzerland almost immediately proposed a ban on the Dum-Dum bullet which, he said, ‘caused incurable wounds’. The Dutch representative, General Den Beer Poortugael, jumped in and said that he had been specifically briefed by his government to ask for the absolute prohibition on the use of Dum-Dum bullets and similar projectiles because they ‘burst in the body’ and are ‘not necessary’. The British found themselves ambushed and unprepared. Even the results of the tests conducted by von Bruns were being exaggerated and the leading British representative, General Sir John Ardagh, tried to explain that the experiments were flawed anyway but by now the stories of how the Dum-Dum ‘burst in the body’ causing ‘incurable wounds’ had developed a life of their own.
Ardagh was Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office at the time but during his career he had seen service in both India and Africa. He sought directions from home and produced ‘The British Declaration on the Dumdum Bullet’. After explaining the history of the subject it said that: ‘The committee which investigated the question [of bullets with sufficient stopping power for use outside India] recommended two bullets, one which proved to make more severe wounds than the other. Her Majesty’s Government, however, rejected the one making the more severe wounds and decided to adopt the less destructive bullet, now known as the Mark IV, as giving the minimum stopping effect necessary. This bullet has a small cylindrical cavity in the head, over which the hard metal envelope is turned down. There is nothing new in this cavity in the head of the bullet. It existed in the Snider bullet, with which Her Majesty’s troops were armed for many years – a bullet which was perfectly well known to all the Powers of Europe, which was actually in use in Her Majesty’s army at the date of the St. Petersburg Convention of 1868, and to which, nevertheless, no objection was ever raised on humanitarian grounds. The Indian Government for the same reasons adopted the so-called Dum Dum bullet, in which a very small portion of the head of the leaden bullet is not covered by the hard metal envelope. Her Majesty’s Government are unable to admit that a bullet which has been adopted by them as possessing the minimum of destructive effect necessary, can be considered as inflicting unnecessary suffering and in view of the fact that until recently all rifles of all Powers fired bullets consisting of lead without a covering, and that the bullet with a cavity in the head was the bullet in use in Her Majesty’s army at the date of the St. Petersburg Convention, and for many years subsequently, they are equally unable to admit that there is anything in either the exposure of a small portion of lead or the existence of a cavity, to justify the condemnation of either of these methods of construction. The experiments conducted in this country led to the conclusion that the wounds inflicted by these bullets are not more severe – if so severe – as the wounds inflicted by larger bullets fired from previous rifles: therefore Her Majesty’s Government, while entirely sympathetic with the desire to avoid the use of missiles which inflict wounds of unnecessary severity, are unable to admit that this is involved by either of the above methods of construction’.
It was also pointed out that the Swiss and the Portuguese used bullets that were the equal of the Dum-Dum without voices being raised in protest but this made little impression and it gradually dawned on the British that the reason had nothing to do with the European powers having concern for the wellbeing of their fellow man. Instead, this was the period of history now known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’ (of which Kitchiner’s expedition was a part) with Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Portugal also staking their claim and some if not all of them saw an opportunity to score points off Great Britain to their own advantage. In the case of Russia, this was all part of ‘The Great Game’, the competition for political influence in countries bordering the North-West frontier including Afghanistan which, if the British lost, would give Russia direct access to India – the ‘Jewel in the British Crown’. The subject was highly topical and would become the background to the novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling, first published in serialised form in a monthly periodical in 1900 and as a best-selling book in 1901. Anything which could put even a small crack in the monolith that was Great Britain’s colonial power would benefit the Russians. As Ardagh saw it, ‘the whole discussion, apart from the technical implications, was a crusade against British rule in Africa, orchestrated by Russia’.
On 29 July 1899 the wording adopted by the full conference, drawn up largely by Russia, Romania and France despite the objections of Great Britain and the United States, was: ‘The Contracting Parties agree to abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core, or is pierced with incisions. The present Declaration is only binding for the Contracting Powers in the case of a war between two or more of them. It shall cease to be binding from the time when, in a war between the Contracting Parties, one of the belligerents is joined by a non-Contracting Power’.
It is widely believed today that once the Declaration was made it automatically applied to all parties at the conference but this was not the case. Great Britain continued to argue its corner and, along with the United States, Portugal and a few others, declined to be a ‘Contracting Power’, officially on the grounds that the discussions had been based on erroneous experiments which drew invalid conclusions. Unofficially it was because the British knew that they had been well and truly outmanoeuvred in a course of action aimed directly at them and didn’t like it.
In October 1898 George Wyndham had taken over the post of Under-Secretary of State for War and as soon as the conference started in The Hague rumours about what was being discussed were widespread. Even before the wording of the final Declaration had been ‘agreed’, on 11 July 1899 Wyndham was asked in the House of Commons ‘whether he will consent to lay upon the Table of the House accounts of the surgical experiments as to the effects of the Mark IV missile, on the basis of which experiments the bullet is now being served out to British soldiers sent on service to South Africa; and if he can state whether the reported condemnation of the Dum-Dum bullet by the Peace Conference at the Hague has been officially brought under the notice of the War Office authorities’. Wyndham replied that: ‘The Mark IV has been the service bullet for the British Army since February, 1898, and, as such, has been issued to our troops in South Africa. I cannot lay before the House reports either of the experiments which led to the adoption of that bullet or of more recent experiments, since they contain confidential information. These experiments were not merely, as the hon. Member suggests, of a surgical character. They were conducted to solve a number of physical problems, in considering which the humanitarian aspect of the question was not left out of sight. Our representatives at The Hague have reported the proceedings of the Conference from time to time; but these interim reports have necessarily been partial and inconclusive’. When asked: ‘Is it not a fact that this bullet has been constructed with a view to expand on striking like the Dum-Dum bullets?’ Wyndham replied with what has since come to be regarded as a classic of its kind: ‘The bullet has been constructed to achieve a number of objects, one of which is that its calibre should be greater later on than when it leaves the muzzle of the rifle’. Two days later Wyndham told the House of Commons that: ‘The Mark IV ammunition was used by several battalions of British troops at Omdurman, and was reported on favourably’.
The reason for the request for information about South Africa (and undoubtedly the motivation behind the resolve of the Dutch to weaken the effectiveness of British army by getting a prohibition on Dum-Dum and Woolwich bullets) was because of increasing tensions there between the British and the Dutch settlers (Boers). There had already been one war (1880-81) and the Second Boer War started on 11 October 1899. It descended into a guerrilla war which lasted until May 1902 and it cost about 75,000 lives of whom about 22,000 were British soldiers. The war started only ten weeks after the Declaration in The Hague and during the build-up to it the British found themselves presented with a dilemma because by then it was the Mark V Woolwich bullet that was on general issue. The Boers were not party to the Declaration but on the other hand they were neither ‘tribesman’ nor ‘savages’.
With all the uproar over ‘Dum-Dum bullets’ still hanging in the air, caused not least by Great Britain’s refusal to accept the Declaration, the British government realised that the Boers would be handed a propaganda gift if it left the Mark V in use. After much discussion and soul searching it bowed to the inevitable and reluctantly withdrew it. Wyndham was asked on 23 March 1900 whether ‘either explosive or expanding bullets have been sent to South Africa for the use of the troops there or for any other purpose?’ He replied: ‘The bullet in use in South Africa for the rifle is the Mark II solid bullet. Mark V bullets were recalled, and have never been used by the troops. Neither have any Dum-Dum bullets been used by the troops’. This last statement was perhaps a little naive because the Mark II was still just as susceptible to improvised modification as it had been during the Chitral expedition. Each side accused the other of using ‘Dum-Dum bullets’ at one time or another during the war.
The Mark VI bullet introduced in 1904 was similar to the Mark II but the jacket was made thinner so that it was more likely to break up on impact. A second ‘peace conference’ took place in The Hague between July and October 1907 and one result, under the heading of ‘Means of Injuring the Enemy, Sieges and Bombardments’, was the declaration that: ‘In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden - ... To employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’ but this added little to what already existed as far as bullets were concerned.
In August 1907 Great Britain announced that it would ‘adhere’ to the Hague Declaration but only after it had realised that the inventiveness of man was not likely to be frustrated by a mere declaration. Development was well underway of the Mark VII Spitzer (pointed) bullet which was finally introduced in 1910. This had a muzzle velocity of 2,440 ft/s and was Hague compliant in that it was fully-jacketed but appearances were highly deceptive. Described in 1915 by Dr. J. Hartnell Beavis, a former director of the British Field Hospital for Belgium, as ‘an ingenious advance on the Dum-Dum’, it was specifically made to be tail-heavy. There was no mention in the Hague Declaration that the central core had to be made of nothing but lead and so the front third of the jacket was filled with aluminium, wood pulp or compressed paper. This greatly increased its tendency to deform or topple when it hit something and this, when combined with an effect known as ‘bullet cavitation’ which was a natural consequence of the increased bullet speed, considerably amplified the internal injuries caused. It was likely to pass through its primary target and strike another standing behind but this was not considered to be a problem as long as it did sufficient damage to the first. Indeed, it was preferable that it did the same to the second. The need for a disabling round similar (if not worse) in effect to the Dum-Dum and the Woolwich bullets was satisfied and there was no international conference in the offing at which a form of words could be found which would prohibit the Mark VII as well.
After Beavis unwittingly let the cat out of the bag it was claimed that the Mark VII was ‘a Dum-Dum bullet in all but name’ but this was dismissed with a simple statement that the bullet complied with the wording of the Declaration. Nobody was prepared to be so unpatriotic as to pursue the matter because by then Great Britain was at war with Germany, a country that was paying scant attention to the other measures supposedly prohibited as a result of the two Hague Conferences including the use of poison gas. Although the Lee-Metford rifle had gradually given way to the Lee-Enfield, the Mark VII bullet would see Great Britain through two world wars with few people even today having any idea of why controversy could so easily have engulfed it. The clever internal construction was hidden inside a jacket and so what was out of sight remained out of mind.
All of this was of little or no interest to the British police. No one suggested for a moment that the Hague Declaration applied to police ammunition and police forces continued to use whatever they had for the weapons on issue. For a long time after the outbreak of World War I the most common (but by no means the only) weapon found in police armouries was the Webley & Scott .32 self-loading pistol for which the ammunition just happened to be jacketed (.32 ACP). In the 1950s the weapons available in many forces depended on what was left over from the pistols or revolvers surrendered during World War II and not handed back (see The Wartime Years – 1939 - 1945) although the Webley & Scott .380 Mark IV revolver was usually the preferred ‘purchased weapon’ and this fired an all-lead round-nose bullet.
In 1972 the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch (HOSAB) published an ‘Information Note’ (No.1/72) recommending what weapons police forces should adopt. This attempt at standardisation was largely at the instigation of the Police Federation and it noted that: ‘The selected gun must have sufficient striking energy to ensure that the opponent is incapacitated but not so overpowered as to cause excessive penetration leading to the possibility of wounding someone else beyond the target or to a serious risk of ricochets’. The nominated weapon intended as ‘General Purpose Police Revolver’ was ‘the Smith and Wesson Model 10 Military and Police Revolver in .38 Special Calibre with a 4 inch heavy barrel’. This fired an all-lead 158 grain round-nose bullet and there was no discussion anywhere about the need for it to be Hague compliant.
The first mention of the Hague Conventions, although not directly, in connection with police ammunition came in 1985. After several incidents in which the standard police bullet did not seem to have the desired effect: ‘The [ACPO] Joint Standing Committee on the Police Use of Firearms asked the Home Office Scientific Research and Development Branch (SRDB) [as HOSAB had been renamed] to investigate handgun ammunition for the police service. The chief requirements were that the ammunition should offer greater stopping power than currently available from the 158 grain round nose lead bullet, be readily and cheaply available, comply with the spirit of International Conventions, and be compatible with the Smith and Wesson model 10 revolver’. The resulting report (No. 24/85) recommended that the police change to ‘the 125 grain semi-jacketed semi-wadcutter configuration’ but introducing it proved to be a problem for those forces that used 9mm self-loading pistols. Weapons standardisation had been given up as a lost cause some years earlier and no 9mm ammunition of that description existed and so they adopted the nearest equivalent which was 95 grain jacketed soft-point. Both rounds would have been described as being ‘Dum-Dum-like’ a century earlier.
In 1988 attention turned to rifle ammunition. The recommended rifle in 1972 had been the ‘Service L39A1 Target Rifle, produced by the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, and modified by Parker-Hale Limited of Birmingham who fit a suitable telescope sight, target sights, and alternative butt’. This became known as the Enfield Enforcer and it had been chosen because many police officers were ex-servicemen and they would have been familiar with the mechanism already. The ammunition was NATO full-metal-jacket 7.62mm as ‘provided for the Service Sniper’. As had been the case with handguns, standardisation of rifles had disappeared by 1988 and there were a variety of makes in a different calibres being used by forces. In particular, some forces had adopted an ‘intermediate calibre’ rifle in either .223 or .243.
A report (No. 12/88) by SRDB noted that ‘the policy of successive Home Secretaries towards ammunition has been to comply with the spirit of the Hague Convention, even in peacetime, [and] the choice of rifle ammunition has been restricted to those full metal jacketed types which supposedly show little if any expansion or breakup on impact. ... The type of ammunition that satisfied the Hague Convention and is currently specified for police use may have serious operational limitations because of its potential for over-penetration, and that only bullets with a soft point are likely to satisfy the requirement. The police requirement may be satisfied by several different calibre weapons using the appropriate weight soft point bullet, the final selection resting on the engagement distance anticipated by the police force in the knowledge of their particular environment’. Once again, this bullet would have been described as being ‘Dum-Dum-like’ a century earlier.
The obvious gap left by there being no provision relating specifically to police ammunition was finally filled in 1990 when the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials was adopted at the Eighth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders. In its ‘General Provisions’ it requires that: ‘Governments and law enforcement agencies shall adopt and implement rules and regulations on the use of force and firearms against persons by law enforcement officials. In developing such rules and regulations, Governments and law enforcement agencies shall keep the ethical issues associated with the use of force and firearms constantly under review’. Under its Special Provisions it reads: ‘Rules and regulations on the use of firearms by law enforcement officials should include guidelines that ... prohibit the use of those firearms and ammunition that cause unwarranted injury or present an unwarranted risk’. This deliberately avoids the wording used in the Hague Declaration and does not specify which particular bullet types should be prohibited – the only requirement being that each state identifies which firearms and ammunition it considers cause ‘unwarranted’ injury or risk and therefore cannot be used by its police.
The International Red Cross, in its study of international humanitarian law in 2005, found that ‘several States have decided that for domestic law-enforcement purposes, outside armed conflict, in particular where it is necessary to confront an armed person in an urban environment or crowd of people, expanding bullets may be used by police to ensure that the bullets used do not pass through the body of a suspect into another person and to increase the chance that once hit, the suspect is instantly prevented from firing back’.
This was not meant to be in any way critical. It was a straightforward statement of fact but that is not to say that the subject is no longer controversial. When the Swiss police announced its intention of adopting an expanding bullet in 2006, the local branch of Amnesty International objected. Dismissing the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms as though they were irrelevant it said that: ‘We still think that as these bullets are prohibited for use in wartime that Switzerland, as the depositary state of the Geneva Conventions [sic], should not introduce them’. The Swiss Medical Association also ‘expressed its concerns about new ammunition that causes permanent injury or which results in an increase in life-threatening injuries’. However a spokesman for the Swiss Federal Police said that ‘Germany has been using expanding bullets for about four years and the mortality rate has not risen as a result. ... The bullets in use at the moment generally pass through the body. ... Expanding bullets should not do this ... [and] this will avoid the possibility of two or three people being struck by the same bullet’.
If the use of expanding bullets by the police can still generate excitement, their use by the armed forces does so even more. However, battles where an army in uniform has a stand-up face-to-face fight in fields and open country with the uniformed army of another state are the exception. The combat environment today is far more likely to be urban with the ‘enemy’, many of whom are no less fanatical than their predecessors, concealing themselves amongst, and dressing like, the local population. This increases the potential for ‘collateral damage’ with innocent parties being hit by bullets which over-penetrate or ricochet. Military forces are questioning why they are restricted in the kind of ammunition they can use when the conditions surrounding such use are not that different from those encountered by the police. In some cases they are even working alongside the police but a solution is far from simple. Even if the British government were to just unilaterally announce that it no longer intended to apply the Hague Declarations to its armed forces because of the change in the way wars are being fought there is now a more formidable obstacle to overcome.
According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court adopted in Rome in 1998: ‘An International Criminal Court ("the Court") is hereby established. It shall be a permanent institution and shall have the power to exercise its jurisdiction over persons for the most serious crimes of international concern, as referred to in this Statute, and shall be complementary to national criminal jurisdictions. The jurisdiction and functioning of the Court shall be governed by the provisions of this Statute’. After ‘affirming that the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole must not go unpunished’ it then, without questioning whether the wording of the 1899 Hague Declaration was still relevant given the imaginative ways that have since been found around it, specifically makes: ‘Employing bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core or is pierced with incisions’ a War Crime (Article 8).
As we have seen, the British government has been ‘recommending’ the ammunition that can be used by the police since 1972. In September 1998 the Home Office Police Scientific Development Branch (PSDB, as SRDB had been renamed) published its Performance Specification for 9mm 95 Grain Jacketed Soft Point Ammunition for Police Use and this emphasised that hollow-point ammunition was not acceptable. However, in September 2007 the PSDB reviewed the 1998 specification and produced its Comparison of 9mm 95 grain Jacketed Soft Point with Selected Hollow Point Ammunition. Strangely for a document of such importance it makes no mention of the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms as being relevant despite quoting from both the 1899 and 1907 Hague Declarations which it admits ‘are only strictly applicable to armed conflicts between participating nations’. It does make the point that the police in both Finland and Sweden had adopted jacketed hollow-point bullets after extensive trials and intensive scrutiny to ensure that it complied with international humanitarian law and the PSDB conducted its own trials to reach the conclusion that ‘consideration should be given to the use of hollow point ammunition as an appropriate configuration for police firearms operations’.
The story of extraordinary phenomenon that was the short-lived career of the ‘Dum-Dum bullet’, from its rise as a solution to a very real practical problem to its notoriety created, at least in part, to satisfy the Victorian morbid appetite for gruesome details – the more gruesome the better – to its denunciation as a result of questionable medical experiments to its fall as a victim of international political intrigue, has long since been forgotten. Reality has been almost totally replaced by mythology and when the Met announced in May 2011 that it intended to change from 95 grain soft-point to 124 grain hollow-point ammunition the force had to stoop to the level of arguing that the bullets were ‘not Dum-Dum’. The days when a sensible and informed discussion can take place seem to be as far away as ever.
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If you have any information on developments to do with police firearms in your force/area please contact mike.policehistory@yahoo.com.
© Mike Waldren