The primary piece of artillery used in the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, was the Field Cannon. The Field …show more content…
There were only two different kinds of mortars used at The Battle of Yorktown, the Coehorn mortar and the Dictator. Each mortar had a barrel-shaped tube that would sit on a flat wooden baseplate, unlike the Cannon and the Howitzer. Most mortars were equipped with large brass handles that made it easier to move them onto its base quickly. The mortar used "a fixed trajectory (around 45 degrees)" (11th Pennsylvania Regiment. n.d.), and the distance the round traveled was adjusted by changing the amount of the powder charge that the Americans and British would pack into the breech. The propellant that the mortars used would explode in midair sending shrapnel in different areas. These propellants had a variety of weights. The Coehorn mortar used the smaller round which weighed 90 pounds, and was made from rocks and steel and had a range of roughly 1,700 yards. The Dictator mortar, the biggest one out of the two has the heaviest round. This round was made from concrete and steel weighing in at roughly 200 pounds with a range of approximately 4,600 yards. This round took two soldiers to load into the tube. Using this type of propellant was good to use against their nemesis while in their