WW1 GERMAN FUZES METALLIC MATERIALS EVOLUTION

Choices of materials in peacetime

The constraints of wartime enonomy

As early as the first months of the war, the increasingly from the beginning of the positions and siege war, the artilelry started to require huge amounts of ammunitions of all calibres, heavily sollicitating the war industry of the fighting countries soon helped with mobilzed private industry. While France and Great Britain kept a relatively easy access to the copper and other metals mines of their vast colonial empires, Germany was rapidly submitted to a strict maritime blockade, cutting the access to its rare colonies and foreign providers.

Therefore this nation quick had to find the huge quantities of copper needed for its war fabrications from other channels completing its parce own continental natural ressources and stocks : looting the occupied countries (for instance the church bells), collecting the metallic pans and decoration items, and intensive recycling of the used cartridges and fuzes gathered on the battlefields. The use of these devices as souvenirs and base for trench artwork was strictly prohibited in the German Army and severly punished.

From 1915 - 1916, with the war continuing, these alternative copper sources proved insufficient and one started to see increasing quantities of fuzes manufactured with less noble metals but more abundant and cheaper. It is remarkable to observe that all the new German fuzes designed introduced after 1915 are made with less and less or no brass, replaced by more common materials.

This is how the following materials were progressively introduced :

• low alloyed aluminium (92 % aluminium, 5% tin, 2% copper)

• zinc alloys with different compositions (for instance 90% zinc, 4% copper, 3% aluminium, 1% lead) and having poor and variable properties

• Zamak, in German "Zink, Aluminium, Magnesium, Küpfer" in classic proportions 94% zinc, 4% aluminium, 1% copper;

• steel (97% ironr, 1% manganese, 0.5% carbon plus some alloy element in small proportions such as nickel, chrome or wolfram)

Apart from steel, these less noble materials were easy to cast thanks to a very low melting temperature. Also, their machinability was really good, as well as their recyclability. On the other hand, they presented poor corrosion resistance properties. If that latter characteristic was not acceptable in peace time when ammunitions had to be stocked for long periods in depots, it was less crucial in war time when shells and fuzes were almost used by the voracious artillery units as quick as they were produced.

The difference of corrosion resistance properties between brass and less noble materials is evident when comparing these two items of Dopp Z92nF time and percussion fuze found on the battlefield more than 100 years after their use.	This EHZ16 percussion instant fuze was dewsigned in 1916 and from the origin meant to be produced from steel and zinc alloy.