50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  The trench mortar gave the infantry a weapon that could be carried by one or two men and was capable of firing a shell of significant size at the enemy.

  The French in World War I also used a small, 37 mm cannon on a tripod, but that was a flat trajectory weapon mostly useful for countering machine gun nests, and its shell was far smaller than the trench mortar’s. Trench mortars come in a variety of sizes. The British in World War II used a 50-mm (2-inch) mortar that one man could carry and operate. The Japanese had a similar gun with a curved base plate. Some GIs called it a “knee mortar,” supposing that the curved base plate fit over the gunner’s extended leg. One or two American soldiers tried to fire it that way and ended up with broken legs. U.S. trench mortars in World War II were in calibers 60 mm, 81 mm, and 4.2 inches (106.6 mm). The 4.2 inch mortar was not limited to short ranges. It could send a shell 6,000 yards, or about 3 1/2 miles. It took the shell about a minute to go that far.

  Using the 4.2 mortar, a good crew could put half a dozen shells in the air before the first one landed. The Warsaw Pact countries and some other nations used a 120 mm mortar. The Chinese and North Korean version was a superb weapon, as any veteran of the Korean War will affirm. NATO has since adopted a 120 mm mortar. Some modern mortars are rifled, a system that increases range and accuracy at the expense of simplicity and speed of fire.

  The introduction of the trench mortar made it possible to lay unprecedentedly heavy fire on enemy positions. In World War I, the trench mortar was used extensively by German “storm troops” during Ludendorff’s 1918 offensive. In World War II, mortars were everywhere. And the trench mortar’s simplicity has made homemade mortars popular with guerrillas all over the world.

  Chapter 36

  Traveling Forts: Armored Vehicles

  National Archives from Marine Corps

  U.S. troops take cover behind a tank during a firefight near Hongchon, Korea, in 1951.

  German infantrymen were ready for another assault by the English. The English had been attacking almost continually for the last two and a half months.

  When they weren’t sending swarms of men at the German line, their artillery was pounding the trenches. Not a tree was standing. Not even a blade of grass.

  Their guns had churned the fields of Flanders into a muddy morass. It looked like something Breughel might have dreamed up if he were painting a landscape of Hell. Then the Germans saw some things that looked as if they might have come from Hell. They were metal rhomboids with caterpillar tracks running all around them. They had no windows that anyone could see, but from a projection on each side, each of these monsters had machine guns or light cannons.

  They fired as they waddled and wobbled across the mud, rolled right over shell craters and trenches. After a few moments of shock, the German landsers recovered their wits and fired at the strange machines. Their bullets bounced off.

  This day, September 13, 1916, would forever change the way war was waged.

  The tank had appeared.

  It almost hadn’t. And this premature appearance did nothing to enhance its chances for a future role in war. The tanks did drive back the Germans, who knew of no way to deal with them. But one by one, the machines broke down for a variety of reasons, and the British had no vehicles that could tow them back, few mechanics who could repair them, and fewer spare parts with which to repair them.

  The tank was the most promising British effort to break the unholy dead-lock that the Western Front had become. With their artillery, the Allies and Germans had been pounding each other to pieces. Infantry trying to break through the enemy trench lines had been hung up on barbed wire and mowed down by machine guns. Between attacking and repulsing attacks, the men in the trenches had to cope with such delights as poison gas and midnight raids. Worst of all, there seemed to be no way to end this horrible war. The tank was designed to mash down barbed wire, crush machine gun nests, straddle trenches, and cut down their defenders. If it could do those things, it could end the war.

  In prewar days, when nobody thought pastures could be turned into cratered swamps and that the whole of Europe between the Alps and the North Sea could be divided by intricate trench lines, the more radical military thinkers advocated armored cars. (Most of the rest thought horses were still the essence of military mobility.) The Western Front, it turned out, became just about the worst possible terrain for anything with wheels. In some spots, horses sank into the mud up to their shoulders. It wasn’t too good for them, either. Armored cars did turn in sterling performances in the deserts of Palestine and Mesopotamia, but not in France or Belgium.

  Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Swinton was an official British combat historian (an “eye witness,” was the Royal Army classification). In 1914, he saw tractors using an American invention, the caterpillar track, pulling artillery. The caterpillar tractors were not handicapped by the rough and muddy ground. Swinton proposed armored vehicles using caterpillar tracks to British headquarters in France. The generals there had the same reaction as King Archidamus of Sparta (see Chapter 9), although they didn’t express their feelings so honestly. They fervently believed that battles were decided by human valor. Use of machines was unworthy, underhanded, and dastardly. They rejected Swinton’s proposal.

  Swinton sent a copy of his paper to a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hankey, who was secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defense. At that time, all matters concerning military motor vehicles were handled by the navy, so the proposal ended up with the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill.

  Churchill was impressed and got the support of the prime minister. By this time, Swinton, still in France, had managed to get some interest from the GHQ in France for his “armored machine gun destroyer.” There was more bureau-cratic battling, especially after the resounding failure of the landing at Gallipoli.

  The Dardanelles expedition had been Churchill’s brainchild. He was ousted from the cabinet and his influence became negative.

  Some machines were eventually built and passed tests for serviceability. By this time, Douglas Haig (see Chapter 27), who had lost hundreds of thousands of men to German machine guns on the Somme, was desperate for something to counter the guns he had once scorned. He demanded the armored machine gun destroyers, which were now officially called tanks: to confuse the Germans, they were said to be mobile water tanks for use in the desert.

  Colonel Swinton, who had been promoted to command of the Tank Corps, opposed the premature use of tanks. He wrote a memo on the conditions that should be met before tanks were introduced. Terrain, weather, the availability of reserve tanks, repair facilities were among the conditions. The Somme battlefield in September 1916 met none of them. And there were too few tanks.

  Haig’s staff appeared to have been delighted with the tanks’ failure. They wrote a scathing report that result in an order cancelling future production of tanks. That might have buried the tank for a generation if it had not been for Major Albert Stern. Stern, an important financier in civilian life, believed in the tank and was a friend of the prime minister. Stern visited his friend, and the cancel order was cancelled.

  Haig dealt the tanks another blow when he demanded them for this offensive at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. Shell fire and rain had turned the area into not only a swamp, but something just short of quicksand. The tanks were defeated by General Mud. Later, at Cambrai, the tanks, following a plan devised by a brilliant staff officer, J.F.C. Fuller, won a solid victory, although one infantry outfit, the 5th Highlanders, was not enthusiastic about tanks and did not follow them closely enough. Unfortunately, that sector was commanded by a General von Walter, an old artilleryman, who brought his field pieces close to the front and trained his gunners to hit moving targets. The Germans knocked out 11 British tanks before the Highland infantry arrived to silence their cannons.

  Fortunately for the Allies, the German generals generally could see no value in the tank. The French, though, were enthusiastic. They built more tanks than the British. On
August 8, 19l8, 600 French and British tanks attacked the Germans. Ludendorff later called it “the black day of the German Army.” It convinced Ludendorff and the kaiser that the war could not be won. They later changed their minds, but the rest of Germany did not. On November 11, 1918, the war ended. Germany lost.

  One reason for that loss was the German contempt for the tank. The new generation of German officers changed that. When Germany rearmed, it concentrated on tanks, close air support, armored personnel carriers for infantry, and self propelled guns. These were grouped into panzer (armored) divisions.

  The German generals devised new tactics for them, based, ironically, on the writings of Fuller and a British military commentator, B.H. Liddell Hart. Fuller and Liddell Hart advocated “torrents” of tanks, which would bypass strong points, sweep into rear areas and disrupt supplies, communications and the whole command structure. Using these tactics and with the aid of its then-ally, the Soviet Union, Germany conquered Poland in about two months.

  After a lightning campaign (“Blitzkrieg”) in Denmark and Norway, the Germans turned on France, a nation reputed to have the best army in the world.

  France had been joined by Britain, its ally in the last war. The allies had more tanks than the Germans, and some of them were bigger and had heavier armor, but they kept them scattered among all their troops. The concept was that tanks were “mobile pillboxes.” The German panzer divisions lanced through the allied armies on May 10, 1940. France surrendered on June 21st. Before that, the British evacuated their expeditionary force, which left most of its equipment on the beach.

  The German Blitzkriegs were wars of movement, as far removed from the stalemate of the Western Front as could be imagined. The Blitzkrieg had to be modified, however. New weapons, the anti-tank land mine, infantry rocket launchers like the U.S. “bazooka,” recoilless guns and fighter-bombers armed with rockets all ended the comparatively carefree life of the tankers. But tanks permanently changed warfare and are still a most important part of any army.

  Chapter 37

  Air Power on the Sea: The Aircraft Carrier

  National Archives from Navy.

  Navy dive bombers attack Japanese ships during Battle of Midway. Note smoke from burning Japanese ship.

  Before the First World War, relations between Britain and Germany became strained when the two countries engaged in an arms race. The Germans felt that a great power had to have a great navy as well as overseas colonies. The British felt that survival on their islands required that they have a navy superior to any other in the world. So each began building more and better battleships.

  Battleships, floating steel fortresses carrying guns far more powerful than any that could be used by a field army, were symbols of military might. They were called “capital ships.”

  The arms race ended with World War I. At the end of the war, the mighty German High Seas Fleet — which spent most of the war in the Baltic and never reached a higher sea than the North Sea — was no more. Britain had more battleships than any other country, but many of her “battle wagons” were old, slow and had only 12-inch guns. A new threat to British sea supremacy was shaping up far from Europe. Two Pacific powers, the United States and Japan, decided to build new battleships. Unlike Germany in the previous naval arms race, neither country was thinking about Britain. The Japanese worried about the Americans, and the Americans about the Japanese.

  In 1915, Japan announced a program to build 16 battleships and battle cruisers. The battle cruiser was a ship, pioneered by the British and the Germans, that looked like a battleship but had thinner armor. It was faster than a battleship but carried the same heavy armament. The U.S. Congress passed a law authorizing creation of a navy “second to none.” The United States began building 10 new battleships which, like those of the new Japanese ships, would carry 16-inch guns. In response, the British began building four enormous — 48,000-ton — battle cruisers and started designing battleships with 18-inch guns. A new, three-runner naval arms race was beginning.

  At this point, the United States took advantage of two facts. First, Britain was broke and exhausted by the late war and could not hope to out-build the American shipyards. Second, Japan just didn’t have the industrial capacity to compete in an all-out arms race. The United States called on the other countries to join in a naval arms limitation treaty. The treaty, the Washington Treaty of 1921, imposed a moratorium on capital ship building and set limits for the world’s major naval powers. Britain and the United States were allowed to have the largest navies, Japan, the next largest, and France and Italy somewhat smaller fleets. France and Italy, like Britain, had been impoverished by the war and were happy to have an excuse for not spending a lot of money on battleships.

  Japan, which had been one of the Allies, but which was untouched by the war, was less happy. The Japanese saw the terms, which let them have less than the Americans or British, as evidence of Anglo-American racial prejudice. They were right. But they couldn’t hope to compete with the Americans in an arms race. So they accepted the treaty, and the long-simmering Japanese-American rivalry grew hotter.

  When the treaty was signed, the United States was building two battle cruisers, which would be the first such ships in the American navy. Both battleships and battle cruisers were considered capital ships. To keep from exceeding its capital ship quota, the United States altered the construction of two battle cruisers to make them into a new type of ship — aircraft carriers. The projected battle cruisers would make excellent aircraft carriers because they were so big and so fast. Size was important, because the larger the ship, the more space planes would have to take off and land. There was no way a ship could be built that was as big as the average air field, so all navy planes but the big patrol bombers had to be constructed to have a maximum of lift. That was also why speed was important. During take-offs, the carrier headed into the wind and proceeded at full speed to enhance the plane’s own take-off speed. The two former battle cruisers became the U.S.S. Lexington and the U.S.S. Saratoga, which for many years were the world’s biggest, fastest, and most powerful aircraft carriers.

  They weren’t the first. In the U.S. Navy, the U.S.S. Langley (named after aircraft pioneer Dr. Samuel Langley), a converted collier, had preceded them.

  During World War I, the British had experimented with aircraft carriers. The H.M.S. Furious had a flight deck, but it was too short and located behind the funnels, which created too much turbulence. Furious could handle only amphibian planes that landed in the water and had to be winched aboard the ship.

  In the U.S. Navy, cruisers and battleships had been carrying seaplanes on catapults since 1912. These aircraft, too, landed on the water and were hauled up to the deck. The British then built the H.M..S. Argus, which had an unbroken flight deck, but Argus was not commissioned until after the war. Meanwhile, the Japanese had not been idle. Japan commissioned its first ship designed from the start to be an aircraft carrier in 1922. That ship, Hosho, entered the Imperial service 12 years before Ranger, the first purpose-built American carrier, was commissioned.

  Aircraft carriers required specialized planes and highly skilled pilots because they provided such limited take-off and landing space. Arresting gear helped to slow landing planes, and carriers built during World War II had catapults to help their planes become airborne. Still, to a high-flying pilot, his carrier was a tiny dot that might be moving faster than most craft on the ocean.

  And if he were flying any kind of bomber, his target was usually even smaller.

  Carrier-based bombers were considerably smaller than their land-based coun-terparts. There were three kinds — high-level bombers, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. Bombs dropped from high altitude had more penetration than those released at a lower level, but if dropped on ships that were under way, their chances of scoring a hit were extremely small. The U.S. Navy invented dive bombing so its planes could hit those small, fast-moving targets. Dive bombing was dangerous, because, to a gunner on the surface, th
e plane appeared immobile, only getting bigger as it approached the ship. Even more dangerous was torpedo bombing, because the plane appeared equally immobile while flying just above the water.

  Aircraft carriers were now firmly established in the world’s navies, but they weren’t considered capital ships. Until 1937, the world’s navies concentrated on rebuilding their old battleships — even battleships those that weren’t so old.

  When the Japanese battleship Nagato was commissioned in 1920, she was the most powerful battleship in the world. Nagato’s armor was increased, raising her displacement by 6,000 tons. Her speed stayed the same, because she received new engines. And the range of her 16-inch guns was increased by allowing them greater elevation. In 1937, limitations on capital ships ended and all naval powers resumed building battleships. The United States built the most, but Japan built the most powerful. Musashi and Yamato were two monsters each carrying nine 18-inch guns and displacing 72,908 tons when fully laden.