Fifteen Eighty Four

When is a bullet too deadly to use? When it is banned in the law of war. But why, in a world of deeply violent weapons, would a bullet be considered too violent when these others are not?

Entitled The Dum-Dum Bullet: A Lethal History, my new book narrates the history of small arms ammunitions through the industrial era. It argues that guns do not kill, but their bullets do, and that it was the introduction of a new bullet design in the 1850s that launched a new era of gun violence that shocked and excited.

The first iterations of these ammunitions, most commonly known as Minié bullets, were so deadly that commentators during the Crimean War called them ‘angels of death’. Their destructive power was so revolutionary that it helped to inspire the signing of the first Geneva Convention (1864), which provided medics with unfettered access to battlefields to treat soldiers wounded by them.

When these bullets were adapted to also explode on impact, the results were so dramatic that it led the Russian Tsar Alexander II to call for another treaty banning their military use. The St Petersburg Declaration (1868) was the first modern law of war to regulate a weapon because it was too destructive. As was argued at the time: no soldier would willingly go to war if these weapons were employed.

Nevertheless, over the coming decades, even more destructive small arms ammunitions were devised and deployed. By the 1890s, the world was inundated with rifled guns shooting projectiles that guaranteed death. Thus, when a smokeless gunpowder bullet was invented that seemed to create ‘clean’ wounds that were more easily treated, a new era of ‘humanitarian’ bullets (and thus ‘humanitarian’ warfare) looked like it had dawned. Very quickly, however, inventors adapted these smokeless ammunitions to make them wound as destructively as the older black-powder bullets had.

The first military force to formally employ expanding small arms ammunitions powered by smokeless gunpowder was Great Britain. Its use of ‘dum-dum’ bullets (named after the West Bengal arsenal where they were first manufactured) in campaigns in India and Sudan met with outrage. According to commentators, dum-dums were too destructive and thus unconscionable. As such, when the delegates at the first Hague Peace Conference met in 1899, they outlawed them.

Rather ironically, however, in the wake of The Hague, expanding small arms ammunitions became commonplace. Hunters hunted with them. Police policed with them. Most pistols shot them. Yet when the use of expanding small arms ammunitions was discussed in a controversial setting, be it a war, murder or act of state violence, the label ‘dum-dum’ was often employed and, almost always, to denounce the agents who shot with them. The dum-dum label then became an easy identifier of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – a label that could identify friend from foe, be it an enemy, criminal or devious personality. Throughout the wars of the first half of the twentieth century, including the two world wars, the dum-dum label offered a rhetorical device to attach normative weight to a weapon that was as ubiquitous as it was lethal.

Caption: A propaganda postcard circulated in Germany during the First World War to underline how unconsciounable the enemy French were for deploying dum-dum style ammunitions. The caption reads: ‘The infamous Dum-Dum bullet: Germany’s enemies employ such weapons!’

Source: Postcard, c. 1916, Liersch & Co., Gustav, Berlin, Landesarchiv Baden Württemberg, Signatur labw_1-116544-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_bullet#/media/File:1.-Weltkrieg_Propaganda_Darstellung_französischer_Dum-Dum-Geschosse_ca._1916.jpg

The Dum-Dum Bullet by Maartje Abbenhuis