The Bayonet: Plug Blades at Killiecrankie to the Trowel and Sawback

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The dictionary traces the bayonet to Bayonne, but the first recorded version appears in a Chinese military manual of 1606 that describes a 22 inch gun knife for breech loading muskets. In Europe, the French plug bayonet of the Thirty Years' War jammed a wooden handle into the muzzle, which meant a soldier could not fire once the blade was fitted. At Killiecrankie in 1689, Jacobite Highlanders fired one volley at 50 yards, dropped their muskets and charged while government troops fumbled to plug their barrels. The defeated commander, Hugh Mackay, is credited with the socket bayonet, an offset blade on a sleeve that locked around the muzzle and let soldiers fire and reload with the blade fixed, making pikemen obsolete.

Designers then loaded the blade with other jobs: sword bayonets for the short Baker rifle, German sawbacks dropped in 1917 after Allied propaganda, and the American trowel bayonet of 1870, retired in 1881. Before 1914 armies obsessed over reach, the French Lebel with its bayonet reaching six feet, until trench walls made long blades useless. Bayonets caused under 2 percent of casualties in the 18th and 19th centuries and under 1 percent in the Civil War; the charge worked mainly as psychological shock.

• The trowel bayonet was promoted as a weapon, entrenching tool and a tool for plastering log huts and stone chimneys.
• After Britain adopted the shorter SMLE in 1904, writers warned German soldiers had an eight inch better argument, and a longer bayonet followed in 1908.
• Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine, out of ammunition, broke the Confederate attack on Little Round Top with a downhill bayonet charge.
• The so called human wave attacks in Korea were often five man teams that crept up at night to open a small breach.
• Bayonet charges still occurred in the Falklands in 1982, at Sarajevo's Vrbanja Bridge in 1995 and in Iraq in 2004.