by John Keegan
The French machine was copied and introduced into England in 1774, but French artillery production, centred in the state arsenals, nevertheless remained superior to that of all other European countries until the end of the gunpowder age, largely as a result of the programme of standardisation and rationalisation carried through by the great artillerist Jean Gribeauval in 1763–7; his guns were still in service with the French army in 1829.26 By then, however, the state arsenal system was under threat from the commercial forces released by the industrial revolution, to which it would eventually, perhaps inevitably, succumb. Large-scale engineering in iron, heated to malleability in furnaces fuelled by the abundant supply of coal that steam-power was now lifting from mines, proved so profitable an investment for capital that successful ironmasters could, by the middle of the nineteenth century, command funds for almost any undertaking of whose profitability they could persuade a banker. Rails, locomotives, iron ships and industrial machinery were the initially favoured products; as armies (and navies) grew in size, large and small guns, for ships, for the artillery park and for the individual soldier, began to promise a seductive return. William Armstrong, a British manufacturer of hydraulic equipment, decided as a result of reading how effective artillery had proved in the Crimean War that it was ‘time military engineering was brought up to the level of current engineering practice’. Soon he was manufacturing large rifled cannon for the army and even larger guns for the navy; between 1857 and 1861 he manufactured no less than 1600 rifled, breech-loading guns at his Elswick works. An English competitor, Whitworth, quickly entered the market — both enjoyed government subsidies to undertake experiments — but both found competition overseas.27
Alfred Krupp, a German steelmaker at Essen, began to experiment with the use of steel in gunmaking before 1850; he exhibited steel, breech-loading artillery at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Steel was an intractable material; its chemistry was not fully understood; and many of Krupp’s experimental models proved too brittle and burst at proof. Eventually the technology was mastered, and in 1863 his gunmaking business went into profit when he obtained large Russian orders. By the end of the century, Krupp’s steel guns, in calibres from 77 mm. to 155 mm. (420 mm. was achieved by 1914), equipped many armies, although not the British, French, Russian and Austrian, the last two having built gun factories of their own; Krupp naval guns of 11-inch calibre were superior to their British equivalents of 13.5 inches.
At the same time the manufacture of small arms had also been revolutionised by private enterprise, centred largely in the United States. American inventors and manufacturers, located chiefly in the Connecticut River valley, were the first to embrace the concept of ‘interchangeable parts’. These, produced by automatic or semi-automatic water- and then steam-powered milling-machines, cut out components to a prescribed shape at high speed and with great accuracy, thereby altogether eliminating costly handwork to make parts fit. Rifles manufactured by this process — and the rifle rapidly supplanted the smooth-bore musket in the 1850s — could be assembled by semi-skilled workers from baskets of components with the supplier’s certainty that the buyer would find all of equal quality. The process was soon applied to the manufacture of the metallic cartridges the new rifles accepted, with the result that the British Woolwich Arsenal, where repetitive-process machines had been installed in the 1850s, was soon capable of producing 250,000 a day.
It was indeed the perceived danger of overproduction, and consequent flooding of the home market, that prompted arms-manufacturers to persist in the search for new designs that would render the existing ones obsolete, and to search for new markets overseas. Here, again, the Americans were to be the innovators. The French had in 1870 deployed a working model of that weapon which gunsmiths had long sought to perfect, a machine-gun. In its mitrailleuse form it was a crude and only semi-automatic weapon. Several inventors — the Swedish Nordenfeldt, the American Gardner — raced to produce a superior, commercial model. The race was won by the American Hiram Maxim, who in 1884 set up a company to make a weapon that was a true machine, discharging 600 bullets a minute through a mechanism powered by energy captured from each successive detonation; the operator of the Maxim gun may be regarded as a uniformed industrial process-worker, since his function was limited to that of pulling the machine’s starting-lever, the trigger, and moving the apparatus through a series of mechanically controlled arcs.28
Machine-guns, and their rather less lethal but related equivalent, the breech-loading, small-bore magazine rifle, equipped the armies of all the combatant powers that went to war in 1914. Firing as they did over a range of 1000 yards, and accurately to 500, they rapidly established a defensive dominance on the battlefield that made infantry attacks costly and often suicidal. From the first moment of the digging of trench lines in which the infantry could take refuge from this storm of steel, the generals sought to find a means of dampening its effect. Multiplication of artillery pieces was the first solution tried; it resulted only in mutual attrition by the competing artilleries, devastation of the battlefield and overtaxation both of the shell-producing industries at home and of the supply services nearer the front. The invention of the tank was the second solution; but the machines produced were too few in number, too slow and too cumbersome to impose a decisive alteration to tactical conditions. Toward the end of the war both sides were looking to the newly introduced instrument of airpower to impinge directly on the civilian morale and productive capacity of the opponent, in the hope of wearing both down; however, neither the heavy aeroplane nor the airship had yet achieved the offensive capability to alter the balance. The First World War was eventually resolved not by any discovery or application of new military technique by the high commands, but by the relentless attrition of manpower by industrial output. The fact that it was Germany which went down to defeat in this Materialschlacht was almost fortuitous; it might as well have been any of her enemies, among whom Russia did indeed pay the penalty in 1917. The means that general staffs had convinced governments would ensure peace and, if war broke out, bring victory — ever wider recruitment of men, ever costlier purchases of arms — had cancelled each other out. Supply and logistics had damaged all the combatants in almost equal measure.
Supply and logistics were, nevertheless, to bring clear-cut victory in the Second World War, and at almost marginal cost, except in human sorrow, to the principal winner. The United States, a late entrant to the First World War and at the time largely bereft of military industry, since it had made its wealth in the years after 1865 by industrialisation for its own internal and unwarlike development, entered the Second World War at an earlier stage, in 1941, and that after two years of rearmament undertaken to supply Britain and then Russia with the means to fight Nazi Germany. Rearmament had revived American industry, badly stricken by the Great Depression, but left it still with much surplus capacity. Between 1941 and 1945 its economy underwent the largest, most rapid and sustained expansion ever known; gross national production increased by fifty per cent, while war production, which increased from two to forty per cent of output between 1939 and 1943, was largely financed out of revenue rather than borrowing. Labour productivity improved by twenty-five per cent and utilisation of plant increased from forty to ninety hours a week; as a result shipbuilding output rose ten times, rubber output doubled, steel output nearly doubled and aircraft output increased elevenfold, so that, of the 750,000 aircraft produced by the principal combatants during the war, 300,000 originated in the United States, of which 90,000 were built in 1944 alone.29
It was America’s industry that overwhelmed its German and Japanese enemies, though only because American shipyards also supplied the transportation to move it. More than 51,000,000 tons of merchant shipping was built by United States shipyards between 1941 and 1945, representing some 10,000 Liberty and Victory freighters and T-2 tankers, produced by a revolutionary process of prefabrication which, for demonstration purposes, could take a vessel from start to launch in four days, fiftee
n hours; on average the United States, at the height of the Liberty-building programme, was launching three ships a day.30 Germany’s U-boats, even before they were defeated by the introduction of long-range aircraft and escort aircraft-carriers, both American-built, to the Battle of the Atlantic, could not sink such an output at the rate losses were replaced.
It was supply and logistics, therefore, which ensured victory in the largest and most terrible of wars ever fought. They thus determined that in any future conflict between conventional forces conducted as a struggle for national survival, industrial capacity, rather than any other factor, would be decisive. That no such conflict has yet followed the outcome of 1945 is the result of a parallel effort exerted by the United States during the years of its unprecedented industrial achievement to produce an alternative to warmaking by struggle at the battlefront, the atomic bomb. That weapon was the culmination of a process of technological development begun 500 years earlier, which sought to transfer demand for the energy needed for military purposes from the muscles of man and beast to a stored source. The search had begun with the discovery of gunpowder.
5
Fire
FIRE IS A WEAPON of great antiquity. In the form of ‘Greek fire’ it was first brought into use by the Byzantines in the seventh century. They guarded the secret of its composition so carefully that even today scholars debate about the exact nature of its ingredients. All that is known for certain is that it was discharged in liquid form, by a sort of syringe, chiefly as an incendiary agent against wooden structures in siege and naval warfare. It was not ‘fire’ in the modern sense of a propellant or explosive. It was not, for all the fear it aroused and mystery that surrounded it, a very effective innovation. It did not revolutionise warfare, as the coming of gunpowder would do.
Gunpowder nevertheless connects with it, for it is now believed that the basis of ‘Greek fire’ was what the Babylonians called ‘naphtha’ or ‘the thing that blazes’, a seepage from surface deposits of petroleum.1 They found no practical use for it. In China, however, about the eleventh century AD, it was discovered that intermixing naphtha-based substances from local surface seepages with saltpetre yielded a compound that had explosive as well as incendiary properties. The Chinese had earlier stumbled on the discovery that lighting fires, particularly of charcoal, on soils that contained high concentrations of sulphur also produced explosive effects. When purified sulphur was combined with powdered charcoal and crystalline saltpetre — this was perhaps first done for semi-magical purposes in Taoist temples about AD 950 — what we now call gunpowder resulted.2 Whether the Chinese used it in warfare is much disputed. There is no evidence that they made cannon (as opposed to fireworks) before the end of the thirteenth century;3 soon after that date gunpowder was certainly known also in Europe, where its secrets may have been hit upon by alchemists in the course of their eternal and fruitless search for means to turn dross into gold, and where its military utility was recognised as soon as its explosive properties were discovered. Quite how the further discovery was made that, when gunpowder and a projectile were confined within a tube, the force released by detonating the former imparted both range and direction to the latter, defies reconstruction. But it can be dated quite accurately to the beginning of the fourteenth century, since a drawing of 1326 survives that shows a vase-shaped vessel — perhaps cast by a bell-founder who was used to working in such forms — with a large arrow projecting from its neck; a gunner is applying a taper to the touchhole and the device is aimed at a castle gate.
By the fifteenth century gun technology had advanced. Cannonballs had replaced arrows and the gun had assumed tubular form, sometimes achieved by binding billets of wrought iron, barrel-fashion, with iron hoops. Nevertheless, the use of the cannon remained confined to siege warfare. Though there were apparently cannon deployed at Agincourt (1415), they could as yet do little on the battlefield but make noise or smoke; it would have been an unlucky knight or archer who got in the way of a random shot. Forty years later, however, when the French finally expelled the English from Normandy and Aquitaine, in the campaign of 1450–3, they knocked through castle walls of the English strongholds with cannon; at exactly the same time the Turks were battering down the walls of Theodosius at Constantinople with monster bombards (the Turkish taste was for guns so large that they sometimes had to be cast in situ before a siege began). In 1477 Louis XI of France (1461–83) further extended his area of control over his ancestral lands by using cannon against the castles of the dukes of Burgundy. By 1478, as a result, the French royal house was fully in control of its own territory for the first time since Carolingian days six centuries earlier, and ready to erect a centralised government — supported by a fiscal system in which cannon were the ultimate tax-collectors from refractory vassals — that shortly became the most powerful in Europe.4
GUNPOWDER AND FORTIFICATION
The cannon with which the French kings and the Ottoman Turks knocked through their enemies’ defensive walls suffered, however, from defects that gravely limited their military usefulness: they were large, heavy and mounted on immobile platforms. As a result they could be brought into action only on territory their owners already controlled, as the French did the Norman countryside and the Ottomans the water and land approaches to Constantinople. For cannon to become instruments of campaign they had to be lightened enough to be transported on wheels at the same speed as the army that accompanied them, so that foot, horse and guns could move as an integrated unit within enemy territory, thus averting the dangers that the artillery might be captured while gunners struggled to keep up with the marching force or have to be abandoned in the event of a retreat.
In 1494 the French achieved the appropriate breakthrough:
French craftsmen and bell-founders … by the [early] 1490s … had evolved a cannon that was recognisably the same creature that was going to decide battles and sieges for nearly four hundred years to come. The heavy ‘built-up’ bombard, firing a stone ball from a wooden platform that had laboriously to be lifted onto a cart whenever it changed position, had been replaced by a slender, homogeneous bronze-cast tube, no more than eight feet long, its proportions carefully calculated to absorb the progressively diminishing shock of discharge from breech to muzzle. It fired wrought iron balls, heavier than their stone equivalents but, because of that, of three times’ greater destructive effect for a given bore.5
Most important of all, the guns were mobile; because the tubes were cast in one piece, ‘trunnions’, short flanges projecting just forward of the point of balance, could be incorporated into them, by which they could be hung in wooden two-wheeled carriages. The cannon thus became as manoeuvrable as a small cart — even more manoeuvrable when the ‘trail’ of the carriage was hitched to another two-wheeled ‘limber’, forming an articulated unit to which horses could be directly harnessed between shafts; the carriage itself could be so fashioned as to allow the muzzle of the tube, or barrel (the nomenclature of the ‘built-up’ gun of hooped metal staves persists to this day), to be depressed or elevated by the manipulation of wedges under the breech. To traverse the gun from right to left or vice versa, the trail of the carriage, which rested on the ground to provide stability, was shifted in the appropriate direction.
In the spring of 1494, forty of Charles VIII’s new guns were shipped for him from France to the port of La Spezia, in northern Italy, whence, having brought his army across the Alps by the pass of Mont-Genèvre, he set off to march down the length of Italy to make good his claim to the kingdom of Naples. The city states and the papal lands that stood in his way gave up resistance as soon as they heard how quickly his guns had battered down the wall to the castle of Firizzano. In November he entered Florence as a conqueror. In February of the following year, having overwhelmed in eight hours the Neapolitan fortress of San Giovanni, which had once withstood a siege by traditional military means lasting seven years, he rode into Naples. The whole of Italy quaked at his passage. His guns had brought a true revol
ution in warmaking. The old high-walled castles against which both siege-engines and scaling-parties had so often failed were hopelessly vulnerable to the new battering-instrument. Guicciardini, an Italian contemporary, wrote that the cannon were ‘planted against the walls with such speed, the space between the shots was so brief, and the balls flew so speedily, and were driven with such force, that as much execution was inflicted in a few hours as used to be done in Italy over the same number of days’.6
Charles VIII’s Neapolitan triumph did not last. His barnstorming methods panicked the Italian states, Venice, the Holy Roman emperor, the Pope and Spain to form a league against him, and though his artillery gave him victory in the main battle of the ensuing War of the Holy League, Fornovo, he then decided to abandon Italy and return to France, where in 1498 he died. His artillery revolution, none the less, proved enduring. The new guns achieved an effect after which siege-engineers had striven for millennia without success. Hitherto the strength of a fortress had derived principally from the height of its walls. That was not exclusively the case, since water defences greatly enhanced defensibility also, as Alexander the Great found during the siege of the offshore stronghold of Tyre (332 BC), which took seven months to conclude. In general, however, the higher the wall the more difficult for the storming-party to scale the crest, while the thickness entailed by height rendered attack by siege-engines less effective. Opposed-weight engines (catapults) threw projectiles that struck only glancing blows at such walls, while torsion-machines, though working in a flat trajectory, were intrinsically underpowered. The only certain means of bringing a wall down was to attack it at its base by mining, a laborious task that ditches and moats readily defeated, and that was also open to the riposte of counter-mining.
