This entry was posted on 7/11/2010 12:11 PM and is filed under Footnotes.
‘Armour made from bullet-proof custard’. How could I resist reading an article with that headline? After all, it contains references to two of my favourite things! Under that headline The Daily Telegraph reported this week that a newly developed gel used in combination with Kevlar material can absorb high energy projectiles like bullets more effectively than many more layers of Kevlar alone.(1) It promises better protection for soldiers and law enforcement officers who will also benefit from lighter and more comfortable body armour. The connection with custard is, apparently, the way the material responds at the molecular level when struck. I can’t say I’ve intentionally hit custard before (it’s never been in my bowl long enough to be subject of a physics experiment) and I don’t own a gun, but the article got me thinking about the quest for the ultimate body armour.
Crafting the best body protection for men at arms has absorbed armourers for thousands of years.(2) The collections of the Royal Armouries in the UK and USA, for example, are filled to the rafters with helmets, cuirasses, arm- and leg-guards from a thousand years and more, graphically illustrating the consummate skill of craftsmen working in cloth, leather and metal.(3) The history of arms and armour mirrors the development of human societies, sadly so often predicated upon making war. In recent years it has been a rich vein for documentary makers. Ancient Discoveries, Ground War, Warriors with Terry Shappert and Weaponology have all attempted to explain to the general public the evolution of the soldier’s tools of trade through the ages.(4)
The subject certainly has a wide and fascinated following. Like many of my blog readers I’ve been involved with the re-enactment – a.k.a living history – world for several years. The men and women who spend their spare time and weekends researching, rebuilding and displaying ancient warfare play an important role in deepening our understanding of the subject in consort with mainstream archaeology and classical scholarship. Many appear on TV documentaries for the BBC, History or Military Channel speaking as experts on Celtic, Greek or Roman or Mediaeval arms and armour often assisting the presenters to oversee scientific tests under controlled conditions. More often than not – to everyone’s surprise but the re-enactors’ – the hi-def slow-mo photography reveals that the old armourers knew a thing or two about materials, design and fighting techniques, or at least enough to give the men fighting on their side an advantage over their opponents in the defensive equipment stakes. In rebuilding and using them re-enactors gain great insights into the advantages and shortcomings of a wide variety of arms and armour. Modern designers of defensive equipment might consider consulting with re-enactors of period warfare to pick up some ideas.
Sometimes it seems the more we advance the more we go backwards. Police engaged in conflicts with rioters from Canada to South Korea look much like their ancient forebears wearing helmets and their extended neck guards, body armour with padded shoulder and groin protectors, and leg guards, not to mention their shields in either circular hoplon-style or rectangular Roman-inspired scutum. They might improve their effectiveness by studying Greek and Roman military doctrine to optimise the use of their equipment. In another juxtaposition of ancient and modern times, watching a BBC America news report last week about British troops in sun-scorched Afghanistan I was struck by the image of a young squaddie in action behind a wall of sandbags or rubble in his characteristic ‘washing bowl’-style helmet, stripped of combat fatigues but for Kevlar body armour and athletic shorts (presumably because of the fierce heat), looking for all the world like a warrior from the army of Alexander the Great.
Students of ancient warfare know that metal plate was not always the first choice of the warrior of old. Ancient craftsmen well understood the weaponry of their times and how they were used. Almost counter-intuitively the citizen armies of Athens, Corinth and the other Greek-speaking poleis often wore cuirasses made of layers of linen glued together. This stiff matrix, cut and stitched into sections, was assembled into a linothorax to protect the shoulders, chest and abdomen.(5) Clearly the men who wore one believed it effectively fended off glancing blows from the curved kopis or falling arrows and, amazingly, recent tests of reconstructed material by the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay do actually prove the effectiveness of this linen laminate. The wearers were also practical men: compared to bronze alternatives these relatively lightweight cuirasses must have been a considerably more comfortable option standing under the midday sun on an exposed Greek plain. Indeed, the same university experiments also showed that sweating actually helped to conform the laminate to the soldier’s body making movement easier too.
Equally ingenious, the Iron Age Celts of Central and Eastern Europe are credited with inventing chain mail, which assembles rings of bronze or iron into shirts capable of withstanding slashing blows from a sword.(6) The skill of these ancient craftsmen is all the more amazing when one sees specimens of chain mail close up, many rings being 1cm or smaller in diameter often containing tiny rivets to attach the flattened overlapping ends. Always open to copying a good idea when they saw one, the practical Romans realised the benefits of this high technology and quickly adopted it for their own legions in the Second and First Centuries BC.
Roman armourers had a few tricks of their own. Soldiers in Augustus’ army did not only wear chain mail. It co-existed with an apparently home grown Roman solution. Laminated or articulated segmented plate armour – lorica segmentata as it is often called – appeared around the time of Drusus the Elder’s campaign in Raetia and Noricum in 15BC to judge by fragments found at Dangstetten and depictions of troops on the Arch of Cottius in Susa dated to 14BC.(7) Certainly by the time of the combat missions in Germania (12BC-16AD) it was in widespread use. Made of overlapping plates of iron or steel riveted to leather straps and buckles, it offered the wearer upper body protection from sword blows and spear thrusts, while allowing a wide range of rotational movement. It would also be a mistake, however, to imagine only legionaries in segmented armour since auxiliaries may also have worn it, Trajan’s Column notwithstanding. Uniformity of arms and equipment was somewhat less rigidly imposed in the Roman army than popularly imagined.
I’ve often been critical of film and TV depictions of Roman soldiers and generals wearing leather (or worse still leatherette) body armour, but a fascinating new book written by Raffaele D’Amato and illustrated by Graham Sumner has led me to have to change some of my preconceived notions. The use of linen, felt, padded cloth or leather for the subarmilis, an arming doublet with a fringe of strips (pteryges) around the arms and waist worn by officers of the rank of centurion and above, is well known. Their more general use as body armour is not.
In Arms and Armour of the Imperial Roman Soldier 112BC-AD192 (Frontline Books, 2009) D’Amato and Sumner show there is compelling evidence that fabrics and leather were used with or in lieu of bronze or iron for cuirasses and other defensive kit.(8) The authors cite Plutarch who in a passage about Crassus’ defeat at Carrhae distinguishes between rigid metal and flexible organic body protection.(9) They also show examples of quilted tunics depicted on an inscription from Urso in the Cordoba Museum, leather fragments from Vindonissa, and point to leather, felt or linen corselets or jerkins shown on Trajan’s Column. (10) Sumner’s depiction of Favonius Facilis of Legio XX Valeria Victrix in a whitened leather corselet instead of the usual iron chain mail shirt is striking if not controversial.(11) If the authors are right, many of the muscled cuirasses worn by Roman emperors and generals represented on statues, such as the iconic Augustus from Prima Porta now in the Vatican Museum, may have been leather after all – boiled, embossed and decorated with appliqués of bronze attached, and optionally with details picked out in colour.(12)
By the time gunpowder and the musket ball had become ascendant on the Eighteenth Century battlefield, metal plate had all but disappeared to be replaced by colourful jackets of wool. In the Twenty-First Century ceramics, exotic fibres, gels, plastics, even nanotubes are finding their way into the defensive panoply of the modern soldier with his drab camouflaged man-made fabrics. Yet even the best materials we can produce today are not without problems. Recently the US Army recalled 44,000 combat helmets as a resulted of a Justice Department investigation into an Ohio-based military contractor.(13) Army officials said tests had shown that the helmets would not protect a solider against a rare but “worst case scenario” of being hit by multiple gunshots at a specific angle. It was a point disturbingly demonstrated in a recent TV documentary which showed that a single shot with a semiautomatic rifle aimed at one of the new design German Stahlhelm-inspired helmets from about 20 feet away would penetrate right through, front and back, leading the presenter to conclude that armour plays as much a psychological role in boosting the soldier’s sense of invincibility as much as any actual protection it might offer.
The craftsmen of old understood and exploited this psychological aspect to judge by the amount of decoration on the helmets and body armour of ancient world soldiers. Just as the British soldier of the Eighteenth Century looked resplendent in his red coat, tricorn hat and white breaches, so the Greek hoplite cut quite the image in his horsehair crested Argive or Corinthian helmet, decorated linen cuirass and painted shield. Like peacocks attracting a mate they also sought to intimidate and warn off rival suitors.
The modern battlefield, like its ancient antecedent, is a dangerous place. It is ironic that in the English language an instant cure-all should be called a ‘silver bullet’. Real world bullets can and do kill. Perhaps in the final analysis, there can be no defensive armour that can be guaranteed to completely protect the wearer from all weapons, nothing like the one given to Bilbo Baggins made out of mithril, a silvery metal stronger than steel but much lighter in weight, and crafted by the elves in the mythical world of the Lord of the Rings.(14) Perhaps armour is more about psychology than protection after all. But that should not stop the attempt to create the ultimate armour. May the men and women in white coats perfect their recipe for bullet-proof custard. The men and women in khaki who defend our freedoms deserve the best protection our modern-day armourers can make. Just as in the ancient world, their lives depend on it.
Lindsay Powell is a historian and the author of the groundbreaking book, Eager for Glory: The Untold Story of Drusus the Elder, Conqueror of Germania. He divides his time between Austin, Texas and Wokingham, England. See his website at http://www.Lindsay-Powell.com
References
Raffaele D’Amato and Graham Sumner, Arms and Armour of the Imperial Roman Soldier 112BC-AD192, Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2009.
