BTW, I thought I'd join the trawl back through the "past". I followed Bryan's link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjUTZH_Vdxs

and found the impressive evidence he mentioned. I also found a still of a bullet that had passed through an apple, seemingly, leaving most of the skin intact.

Personally, I think the important thing is not so much what a bullet does to an apple, as whether the bullet/apple analogy is a sound one for modelling the sort of collision that would have been involved in Mansfield's theory.

There never was nothing.