50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

  William Weir

  William Weir, author of New Page Book's 50 Battles That Changed the World, takes another look at the history of warfare, focusing on the hardware that served those famous battles, as well as others not as glorious. Included are:

  • Individual weapons-from spears to the submachine gun.

  • Crew-served weapons-from battering rams to "Big Bertha".

  • Unmanned weapons-from punji stakes to "Bouncing Betty" landmines and trap guns.

  50 Weapons That Changed Warfare even includes devices that, strictly speaking, are weapons carriers, such as tanks and bombers, but which have had enormous effects on the conduct of war. This book describes the effects of these weapons and how and why they changed warfare-from the bloody carnage produced by hand weapons throughout history to the never used but universally feared fusion bomb, whose sole purpose is to destroy millions of people while leaving buildings intact. Each weapon is not only described, but also illustrated to give a clearer picture of its usage and effects.

  William Weir

  50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

  Dedication

  For Emma.

  May she grow up to a world in which warfare is only history.

  Acknowledgments

  Any work of history owes a huge debt to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons the author does not know and may not have even heard of. That’s especially true if the subject is invention, even invention of weapons. And it should be noted that inventors of these bloody devices were not necessarily bloody-minded.

  Many inventors of weapons, such as Hiram Maxim, with his machine gun, and Alfred Nobel, with dynamite, thought their inventions were so powerful they would make war too horrible, and the world would try to settle disputes in a more peaceful way. The inventor of the spear probably considered it nothing more than a way to bring more meat to the family cave. The inventors of riding and the composite bow aimed to make it easier to herd cattle and sheep and protect them from predators, not to make it easier for Genghis Khan to conquer most of the known world. Like the inventors of barbed wire, they were thinking of the cattle business, not the battle business. The Wright brothers were mainly interested in soaring through the air with wings, like birds. They may have had some thoughts about faster transportation, possibly also the use of planes in war. But it is most unlikely that they had any inkling of the way their invention would be used in World War II.

  Other inventors, of course, knew very well what their innovations would do.

  Callinicus knew that his “Greek fire” would annihilate enemy fleets and enemy sailors, but his object was not killing people but saving Christian civilization.

  David Bushnell, who built the first submarine used in combat, was interested only in freeing his country from British domination.

  It should also be said that new weapons have made war different, but not necessarily more horrible. Genghis Khan, in the course of a few years, managed to kill 20 million people, which in the 13th century was quite chunk of humanity. And he did this primarily with bows, arrows, and swords.

  In addition to the inventors, anyone writing about the development of weapons over the last million or so years had to rely on the testimony of writers who have seen them and seen their effects. Finding those writers would have been impossible without the research staff at the Guilford, Connecticut, public li-brary and their librarian colleagues around the country and around the world.

  That’s just the work involved in writing the book. To produce what you’re reading took the efforts of another team: Mike Lewis, my editor at Career Press/New Page Books and his colleagues in the editorial and production departments. Mike had the concept of a list of 50 weapons that changed warfare, and my agent, John White, convinced him I could handle the project. Finally, and most important, there’s my wife, Anne, who not only put up with me hog-ging the family computer, but read every chapter and contributed much helpful criticism.

  If, after all this help, you find any mistakes, there’s only one place to lay the blame: on the evil spirits that inhabit my computer.

  — Guilford, Connecticut, November, 2004

  Introduction

  For the last few thousand years, wars have been fought with weapons.

  For long stretches of time, they have been fought with the same, or similar, weapons. For example, flintlock smoothbore muskets were the basic infantry weapons for more than a century. When, in the early 19th century, they were replaced by percussion smoothbore muskets, soldiers got a more reliable weapon, but they didn’t have to change their tactics. A little later, they were given percussion rifled muskets. The musket looked almost the same. It had a percussion lock, and it was a muzzle-loader. About the only difference was the rifling grooves in the barrel. Generals didn’t see why they should change their tactics. That’s why the American Civil War is the bloodiest war in our history.

  Most of the weapons that change warfare eventually become obsolete. The weapons that replace them may further change warfare, or they may not. The muzzle-loading rifle was quickly replaced by the breech-loading rifle, and the breech-loading single-shot by the breech-loading repeater. The repeater let troops fire faster. The muzzle-loading rifle had taught infantry the need to disperse and take cover. The breech-loader made firing from cover much easier, which meant that infantry opposing it had to move faster and in smaller groups. That was a substantial change. When the repeating rifle replaced the single-shot breech-loader, soldiers could still fire from cover, but they fired much faster.

  That should have required infantry opposing them to move faster and in smaller groups. Troops in the Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War learned that the hard way, but most European generals at the beginning of World War I hadn’t even learned the lessons of the American Civil War. But then the machine gun appeared as a major weapon. In World War I, Hiram Maxim’s brainchild demonstrated that tactics needed a drastic revision. The machine gun is still with us, but thanks to the tank it no longer owns the battlefield. The tank and its aerial partner, the dive bomber, took over ownership of battlefields early in World War II, but the “blitzkrieg” they created was quickly countered by other new weapons such as antitank land mines and shaped-charge rockets and artillery shells.

  One war-changing weapon that did not become obsolete was Greek fire. In the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries, it was the ultimate naval weapon. Then it was lost. It didn’t get a chance to become obsolete. While it was in use, though, it preserved the life of the Byzantine Empire, which profoundly changed the history of Europe, and the history of the world.

  Most weapons that changed war were used over a long period of time. One was used only twice, but it has changed the way people thought about war and waged war for a long time. Whether nuclear weapons will continue to have this effect cannot be predicted, although it is certainly hoped for.

  This book will look at how 50 weapons changed war in much the same way as my previous book, 50 Battles that Changed the World, looked at the most important military encounters in history. Each of the following chapters will explain how the weapon in question changed war, usually through showing how it was used in battle. It will also describe, in easy-to-follow terms, how the weapon worked. The weapons are presented in roughly chronological order —

  roughly because, with many weapons, it’s difficult to say exactly when they went into use. Not all are like the tank, the introduction of which can be pin-pointed at September 13, 1916. Bows and arrows were in use by 9000 BC and probably had been invented thousands of years prior. And even with tanks, there are qualifications. They are the most powerful of a larger class of weapons: armored vehicles. Armored v
ehicles go back at least as far as the Hussite Wars of the 15th century. But when we discuss armored vehicles, we’ll start with World War I, because that was when they began to permanently change warfare. The same is true of armored ships, which were first used by the Korean admiral Yi Sun Shin in 1592. Yi’s armored ships foiled a Japanese invasion, but they played no further part in warfare. So we start our discussion of armored ships — which include cruisers, battleships, and aircraft carriers — with the era when the C.S.S. Virginia and the U.S.S. Monitor revolutionized naval warfare.

  Their records of making major changes in warfare was the reason these 50 weapons were chosen. For instance, the revolver is one of the weapons listed but the semiautomatic pistol is not, although most modern handgunners agree that the “automatic” is a more efficient weapon. The reason is that the revolver permanently changed cavalry fighting, but by the time the semiautomatic pistol was perfected, cavalry had become obsolete.

  At the end of the book, I’ve included a list of “honorable mentions,” weapons that didn’t make the list of the 50 most important, with explanations as to why they were not chosen.

  Chapter 1

  Getting to the Point: The Spear

  African elephant hide shield and an assortment of spears. The spear is still being used in some remote locations.

  The first warriors probably used whatever weapons they could find on the ground. Sticks, stones, and bones have all been used to smash, pierce, or otherwise do in an enemy. Most likely it wasn’t long before people began improving what they found. One of the earliest, and certainly the deadliest of these first purpose-made weapons, was the spear. The improved club may have been first, but there’s not much you can do to improve a club as a weapon. In a battle, you’d use it the same way you’d use an unworked tree branch.

  Some ancient warriors may have noticed that a partially burned stick tends to have a pointed end — the fire consumes the outer layers of the wood first.

  Then the warrior saw that if he scraped the charcoal off the stick, the point became even sharper. Better yet, it was much harder than the original wood. If he took a fairly long stick — a straight branch or a sapling — and sharpened one end with fire and scraping, he’d have a formidable weapon. A few years ago, such a weapon was found between the ribs of an elephant skeleton preserved in a German bog.

  Perhaps about the same time, people began breaking stones to get a sharp edge for cutting meat and scraping hides. They quickly learned that the best kind of stone for this was flint or obsidian — hard, glassy minerals that could be given an extremely sharp edge by chipping. As they developed the technique of chipping, they produced thin, sharp-edged, needle-pointed blades. Then somebody tried mounting one of these blades on the edge of a pole to make a new and even deadlier type of spear. The next big step, of course, was the use of metals — first copper, then bronze, then iron — for weapons and tools. Bronze-tipped spears appeared in the Near East around 3500 B.C., and metal-headed spears continued to be the most important weapon of war in most armies until the late 17th century A.D.

  The spear goes so far back in prehistory that there’s no way to know exactly how it was first used in war. The most primitive people modern anthropologists study tended to use the spear as a throwing weapon. These people, like the very ancient spear-wielders, relied on hunting for a good share of their food. A human can seldom get close enough to a game animal to kill it with a spear thrust. A thrown spear is much more effective. So when hunters went to war, they used their spears the way they had learned to use them on their frequent hunting expeditions: They threw them.

  Things were different when people gathered in towns and relied on farming for food. The proportion of people to game animals became so high that hunting could no longer be an important source of food. Townspeople got far less practice throwing spears, but they had many more activities that called for close cooperation and teamwork by many people — such things as building temples and digging irrigation canals. They developed a form of warfare that fitted their lifestyle. They appeared on the battlefield as a closely packed mass of spearmen, line after line of them. They charged, holding that formation, and were able to knife through more scattered opponents. This was the first appearance of the phalanx, a formation that made the Swiss infantry the terror of central Europe in the 15th century A.D. and didn’t disappear until the invention of the bayonet at the end of the 17th century.

  The phalanx prompted the invention of body armor. A mass of infantry made a good target for javelin throwers, or especially for archers. But an armored phalanx was more than a match for a larger number of archers, as the Greeks demonstrated at Marathon in 490 B.C. Greek phalangists became the most sought-after mercenaries in the eastern Mediterranean. Philip II of Macedon incorporated the phalanx into his military machine, and his son, Alexander, took that machine and conquered the world between Greece and India.

  The Romans then modified the phalanx by organizing their troops into companies called maniples, which took the field in a checkerboard formation.

  Instead of a long thrusting spear, the first two lines of maniples had two new types of throwing spear, called pila. One pilum was lighter than the other. The Roman legionary threw that first, then, after he advanced a few steps more, they threw the heavy one. A pilum was about 6 feet long. About half of that length was wooden shaft, the rest was a long iron rod tipped with a small spear head. The Roman soldier’s target, of course, was an enemy soldier, but he wasn’t discouraged if the enemy caught his pilum on his shield. The long iron head made it impossible to chop the spear off, so the pilum, especially if it was the heavy one, tended to drag down the enemy’s shield. The Roman then ran up to his enemy, stepped on the trailing spear shaft to pull the shield down entirely, then finished off the enemy with his sword.

  The spear developed into a wide variety of weapons called pole arms. There were winged spears, with two projections on the blade to keep the spear from penetrating farther than necessary for a kill. (A spear that penetrated an enemy too far to permit its withdrawal could be a severe embarrassment in combat.) Some spears, such as the Japanese naginata and the European glaive, were cutting weapons — short, single-edged swords mounted on poles. A spear with an ax blade and a hook added became a halberd, and an extra-long spear was called a pike.

  The Swiss phalanxes of renaissance times used pikemen to stop enemy cavalry so the phalanx’s halberdiers could close in and chop them up.

  Those were infantry weapons. When horsemen carried a thrusting spear, it was called a lance. Alexander the Great relied on his lance-armed heavy cavalry to deliver the knock-out blow after his phalanx succeeded in holding enemy forces in place. The lance was the principal weapon of European cavalry from the Dark Ages through the 16th century. The use of the cavalry lance declined in western Europe after muskets became common, but Napoleon was so impressed by the Polish cavalry lancers he saw that he reintroduced the lance to his armies. The Poles and the Russians were still using lances in World War II.

  Cavalry also used throwing spears at times. Greek cavalry in the Peloponnesian War used javelins instead of lances. They did not have stirrups, and without stirrups only the most skillful rider could use a lance without having his own weapon push him off his mount. The Libyan horsemen in Hannibal’s army used short iron javelins, which they threw with both hands, while the Gaulish cavalry in the same army used a javelin that looked like the Roman pilum. In more modern times, the descendants of those Libyan cavalrymen, the Spanish jinetes, used javelins as their basic weapons.

  In Europe, in China, and in Africa, the spear was the most common, most basic weapon of fighting men from the earliest times until the widespread use of gunpowder. In central and western Asia, another weapon was supreme for almost as long a time. For a very short time, it was also supreme in England. We’ll discuss this in the next chapter.

  Chapter 2

  Death at a Distance: The Bow and Arrow

  Tartar archers. One man is using the str
ength of his legs to help him string his powerful bow. The other uses two rope loops to train himself how to position his hands.

  King Edward III had invaded France and was plundering the countryside.

  His army consisted of 10,000 men. About one third of them were armored knights or men at arms with almost all the rest infantry archers. King Philip VI of France intercepted the English near the town of Crecy. Philip had about 12,000 men, 8,000 of them armored knights and 4,000 Genoese mercenary crossbowmen.

  When they were well within range of their weapons, the Genoese opened fire. The English replied with two surprises. The first was the fire of the three bombards Edward had brought across the channel. These small, primitive cannons did little damage, but their flashes and thunder were terrifying to men who had never faced gunpowder weapons before. The second surprise caused far more damage. The English archers rained arrows on the Genoese, who thought they were beyond arrow range. The English outnumbered the Genoese, and they could shoot five times as fast. Terrified by the cannons and the hail of arrows, the Genoese fled.

  The French knights then charged, riding through the retreating mercenaries. The French aimed for the dismounted English knights, standing between wedges of archers protected by lines of sharpened poles. One could gain more honor, the French believed, by fighting knights than by cutting down infantry varlets. The archers turned their attention to the French horsemen.

  Few of the French knights reached within striking distance of the English.

  The charge became a chaos of dead knights, dead horses, and wounded, mad-dened horses crashing into other horses. The first wave of French cavalry was almost destroyed, but successive waves kept galloping up from the rear. By the end of the day, one third of the French army was dead. The English losses came to about 100. The Battle of Crecy introduced the English longbow to the continent of Europe and made England, for the first time, a major military power.