(Firing one round a second in a war dominated by machine guns firing 8 bullets a second made them a curious anomaly at best. How likely is it that this shell and head - and all the others - would survive all that, for fourteen years?īesides, why keep them around for shooting, after they have passed their "Best Before Date?" Old live ammo is dangerously unstable to hold on to, and more dangerous to the collector than to the eventual target.įurthermore, the pom pom had been invented in the 1880s, and by 1914 was so archaic a weapon the British did not even bother to deploy it for their front line armies. Two others come from an Australian Boer War collection.Īlso, pom pom shells dated 1900 would have been shot off years ago, for target practice in war games, or in colonial wars in Africa or China. Three of these casings come from the McKerihen Boer War collection. In our estimation, almost totally unlikely for a lot of reasons: Some homespun militaria experts harrumph that these are not Boer War souvenirs but much later ones, from WWI. Left we offer a number of similar Boer War souvenirs found in the US, the UK, and Australia. Of which this and the samples below are examples.īoer War Souvenir 37mm Pom Pom Shell, 1900īrass shell & casing, German - Size - 1.5" x 6.5" When British sources of ammunition dried up the Boers got new stock from German sources like the Karlsruhe factory. Canadians wrote of the terror of being fired on by pom poms. Pom Pom guns, were of course, of British manufacture, but the Boer forces acquired them first, and used them so effectively in the opening months of the war the British military adopted them as well.Īt Paardeberg British and Boer pom poms fired on each other for the first time. Many claimed that this was more deadly than their explosions. The sound they made gave them their name. They were assembled in belts to be fired, machine gun style, about one per second. Pom pom shells are 37mm in diameter, 6.5" tall, and weigh about a pound.
This pom pom shell was manufactured in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1900. German Mauser rifles, Austro-Hungarian Guedes rifles, and French Creusot guns came in this way. The Germans were among many anti-British foreign supporters who supplied war material to the Boers who shipped it in to the Transvaal through the Portuguese port of Lourenzo Marques (now Maputo), and then overland by railway over the bridge at Komatipoort, to Pretoria. Boer Pom Pom Shells - 1900 - Technology of War 12
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