The lethal history of the dum-dum bullet

There was once a bullet that did so much damage it was banned by the Hague Convention of 1899. Its use remains strictly illegal in warfare today.

Memorably dubbed the ‘dum-dum bullet’ after the place it was first manufactured at the British military arsenal in Dum Dum – a historic city in the Kolkata area of India’s West Bengal – the bullet may be illegal, but it’s still used by police forces around the world, including in New Zealand.

Professor Maartje Abbenhuis, a war historian from the University of Auckland, was so fascinated by this deadly bullet that she dedicated several years to writing a book about it: The Dum-Dum Bullet – A Lethal History 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press).

Abbenhuis says the book ended up being really difficult to write.

“It began with a story of why this particular thing was controlled and restrained in the laws of war and then became a book saying, ‘Look at what this bullet actually did! Look at the violence it caused!’”

Her inspiration came while she was working on an earlier book on the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, an initiative to improve the rules governing warfare.

“The 1889 Convention decided that employing bullets that expand on impact, creating awful wounds, should be illegal in war,” she says.

The intent of the law was to force militaries to use more ‘humanitarian’ bullets, commonly referred to as ‘full metal jacket’ (FMJ) ammunitions, which have a soft lead core encased in a harder metal, like copper. These bullets enable guns to shoot faster and cover much greater distances, with one extra characteristic.

“These were bullets that didn't wound very heavily,” says Abbenhuis. “Because of their design, they went straight through bodies quite cleanly, and that meant doctors could fix the wounds they made more easily.”

Before these FMJs, she says, all bullets did what dum-dum bullets did: “Made a mess, a giant mess”.

“But the problem in the 1890s was the British had been using these so-called humanitarian bullets in their colonial wars in places like India and Africa and realised that their enemies weren't being stopped [a military term of the time, which effectively meant ‘being killed’]; so they decided, for military reasons, to adapt them to also cause deadly wounds – hence the creation of the dum-dum.”

A wider context here is colonial forces considering ‘natives’ inferior so that injuring and killing them in a brutal fashion was therefore not their moral concern.

But Abbenhuis’s research also shows that the British had adopted these bullets as standard-issue for all their soldiers, to be employed in all types of warfare, in 1898, a year before the Hague Conference.

As a result, the conference was a public relations disaster for them because even though Britain didn’t sign up to the dum-dum convention at the time, the world came to see any use of these bullets as immoral.

And the more people around the world got to hear about the damage they did, the more of an outcry there was, says Abbenhuis.

“Given this period also coincided with the ability of newspapers to publish photographs, the public could see for themselves the gruesome wounds these bullets inflicted.

“This meant average people were worried, governments were worried, even the military was worried because how will you get a soldier to fight if they know that they're going to get blown apart by these things? There was almost a hysteria around this awful bullet.”

Yet the irony was, she says, that while governments, like the British, had to look like they were keeping ‘to the letter of the law’ after 1899, they also had to deal with the consequences of facing actual dum-dum bullets in their own wars, including during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and First World War.

“The other irony is that while soldiers couldn’t officially employ dum-dum bullets, they often did by rubbing off the hard casing of their full-metal jacket ammunitions. And ordinary people used them all the time, especially while hunting because it was easier to kill with these bullets than with the FMJ ones,” she says.

Dum-dum bullets were made and sold by private companies all over the world, including in Auckland at the Mt Eden Colonial Ammunition Company.

“They weren’t controlled by governments or the military, so they were being produced for profit.”

Another grim aspect is how the bullets were manufactured, she says.

“You needed little fingers to fill the cartridges, so children, young teenagers, girls and boys alike, were used as labour and there were always accidents at these factories which killed and maimed many of them.”

Altogether, Abbenhuis says millions and millions of people and animals have died because of expanding bullets.

“When you first look at it, you think how can you possibly think this is a problematic thing, it’s a tiny little bullet? But this one little bullet was, and is, incredibly violent and lethal. It’s also readily accessible.”

She says the attempts to regulate use in the laws of war raises fascinating ethical and moral questions about ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ weapons and who has the right to use them that are highly relevant today; particularly given the epidemic of gun violence in places like the US.

And it also raises important questions for New Zealand, Abbenhuis believes.

“Our government has banned certain types of deeply violent lethal weapons, including semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines, because of their murderous results. But these weapons can still be used in warfare, whereas dum-dum bullets that are considered too deadly for that use are readily available for everyday use, easily bought and sold online and in gun shops.”

In fact, says Abbenhuis, they’re favoured by hunters because they kill animals so effectively and are also used by our police force.

“So that leads to the question: why do we regulate guns but not their bullets?”

The Dum-Dum Bullet – A Lethal History 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press) is available now, in hardback and online.