What is a shovel and what are its applications?
Does the question "what is a shovel?" even require any elaborate answer? After all, there are few things more trivial than this tool, one might think. In the first Polish encyclopedia, written in the middle of the 18th century by Benedykt Chmielowski, under the Horse entry falls the famous phrase "everyone can see what a horse is". While everyone can see, not everyone knows that this humorous interjection is followed by an exhaustive description of the animal, because any object, even the most common, can hide more than can be seen at first glance.
What does it mean to shovel?
More specifically, we will first address what a shovel means in purely utilitarian terms. Nowadays, the term in question is so spread that shovel means virtually any type of digging tool smaller than a classic shovel or spade.
It can come in a folding, expandable, detachable version, as well as with a fixed handle. The handle, the length of which usually oscillates between 30 and 55 cm, can be made of wood, steel or other metal, as well as modern high-strength plastics.
The size of the steel blade is about 20 x 15 cm. Shovels often allow them to be used as a machete or saw, thanks to the appropriately sharpened or serrated edges. The option to lock the folding blade in a half-open position is used to use it as a pickaxe or hoe. Survival models even offer integrated compasses, ring wrenches, bottle openers or rope cutters. Shovels often come with a carrying case for additional ease of transport in a car, backpack or when clipped to a belt.
What does shovel mean - where did its name come from?
It remains to find out one more thing, namely, what the shovel means in a linguistic context, where the association of this instrument, which is used by almost all uniformed formations and civilians, with sappers comes from.
The reference to sappers comes from the broad meaning of the word. Contrary to what may come first to mind when we currently speak of a sapper, i.e. a soldier who disarms explosive charges in a special outfit, for hundreds of years "sappers" have been referred to the general engineering troops. Such formations, whose tasks included the creation, but also the destruction of fortifications and reinforcements, were particularly fond of using shovels. They also did so many years before shovels became standard equipment for infantrymen as infantry shovels, under which name this tool officially appears in the Polish Army.
The term saper found its way into the Polish language from French, but in searching for its root word we go all the way back to the Latin sappa, which means... a tool that is a variant of a hoe or pickaxe. In fact, one might be tempted to say that history comes full circle here. Although the name sapper comes from sapper, but the term "sapper" derives from the ancestor of the modern shovel, which made it possible to perform similar, both civilian and military tasks.
Shovel as a weapon
It is worth mentioning one more use of this seemingly completely innocent tool. The shovel as a weapon has been used for millennia. Of course, it was only an ancestor, not a faithful counterpart of the instrument as we know it, but the use of shovels, hoes and pickaxes and various variations on their theme for combat purposes is confirmed as far back as ancient Rome, even before our era.
However, one would be wrong to assume that shovel combat became a thing of the past with the advent of firearms. On the contrary, first the declining popularity of typical white weapons, then the transfer of fighting to tight trenches during World War I, and finally, during World War II, the increasing popularity of machine guns over long rifles with bayonets led to something quite different. The shovel became a weapon of contact combat for many soldiers, such as Red Army soldiers with submachine guns or participants in the trench warfare in France three decades earlier. Despite the fact that the tool was designed for something else, it performed quite well in this role, especially during urban and trench warfare, and, most importantly, it was generally available to virtually every infantryman, as opposed to even small arms.
The shovel like weapon intrigued the Soviets to such an extent that they even created the concept of a shovel mortar. What's more, they didn't stay with the concept and in the 1930s produced a light mortar firing 37 mm caliber grenades, in which the shovel's shaft served as the barrel, while the folding blade formed the basis of the whole structure. Ultimately, this solution proved so impractical, too large and heavy as a shovel, too inaccurate and offering too little firepower as a mortar, that it was sometimes abandoned as excessive ballast during hostilities.
Today, there is still one formation that takes shovel warfare very seriously, and it originated, of course, in Russia. Quite surprisingly, this is a formation whose shovel is rather unsuitable for engineering purposes due to the nature of the operations carried out. This is because it is about special forces, or more precisely, the Specnaz. Russian commandos not only master to perfection fighting with a shovel in close quarters, along with setting up grabs and levers, but also use it to flare enemies at a distance. The throw of a sharpened shovel in its effectiveness equals what can be achieved with a tomahawk or axe.
Fortunately, we can focus on using shovels for decidedly more recreational tasks, using them for camping, gardening or off-road excursions. You can find the best shovels for everyday, peaceful struggles at MILITARY.EU.