Socket Bayonet

Origins

The first bayonets were daggers with a tapered handle that was pushed into the musket's muzzle. The Plug Bayonet turned a musket into a short pike, but once it was fitted the musket could not be fired, and a soldier who fixed it too soon or too late was helpless. At Killiecrankie in 1689 Highlanders charged government troops before they could fix their plug bayonets and cut them down. The answer was to put the blade on a sleeve that went around the barrel instead of into it. Ring bayonets were tried first, and by the late 1680s the French army, under the influence of the engineer Vauban, had a true socket bayonet: a tube with a slot that passed over a stud on the barrel and turned to lock. It was quickly copied, and by about 1700 most European armies had given up the Pike.

Design & Construction

A socket bayonet has three parts: the socket, a steel tube that fits over the muzzle; a short curved neck that offsets the blade so that the musket can be loaded past it; and the blade. The blade was usually triangular in section, which made it stiff, light and very good at piercing, and hard to parry. The British Land Pattern bayonet for the Brown Bess Musket had a blade about seventeen inches long and was held on by a zig-zag slot in the socket; the French bayonet for the Charleville Musket had a locking ring from 1763. With the bayonet fixed, a musket was over six feet long.

Combat Use

With the socket bayonet an infantry line could fire volleys and then charge without changing weapons, and it could form a square against cavalry. British infantry used the bayonet charge to devastating effect in the eighteenth century, at Culloden in 1746 and in the American Revolution, where American militia without bayonets were often swept away. The Continental Army learned the lesson, and at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781 it was the Continentals' own bayonet charge that broke the British line. In the Napoleonic Wars bayonet charges were more often threatened than actually carried home, because one side usually broke first. Most wounds in the period were caused by musket balls and artillery, but the bayonet decided who held the ground.

Legacy

The triangular socket bayonet survived into the rifle-musket age on weapons like the Pattern 1853 Enfield and the Springfield Model 1861 of the American Civil War. From the mid-nineteenth century it was gradually replaced by sword and knife bayonets that could also be used as tools, like the Pattern 1907 Bayonet. But the idea of a blade on a socket around the muzzle continued in the spike bayonets of the Second World War, and the socket bayonet remains a symbol of the musket age.