Between Flesh and Steel

by Richard A. Gabriel

  Regardless of the type of firing mechanism, the musket remained an inaccurate weapon with limited range and a slow rate of fire until the American Civil War. The smoothbore musket was usually ineffective beyond 100 yards. By the early 1700s, the British Brown Bess could hit a man at 80 yards with some regularity. The Americans truly revolutionized riflery when they invented the first reliable rifled barrel, the famed Kentucky rifle. The invention of rifling made it possible to hit a target reliably at l80 yards, increasing the range and accuracy of infantry rifle fire by a factor of three.10

  The rifle changed the tactical battlefield. In feudal armies, infantry was packed into dense squares to maximize firepower and to resist shock from cavalry attack. As the rifle became more reliable and firepower became deadlier at longer range, it became possible to thin out the packed masses of infantry into lines while still providing sufficient firepower and defense against cavalry. Gustavus Adolphus was the first to deploy his infantry in lines four men deep, alternating pikemen with musketeers. This innovation represented the birth of linear tactics, a tactical arrangement that remained unchanged in its essentials until almost the twentieth century. Linear tactics provided the infantry with yet more mobility without sacrificing firepower or defense, opening the way for more sophisticated battlefield maneuvers and tactical deployments. No longer the primary striking force, the pikeman had the task of protecting the musketeers from cavalry attack. As muskets became more reliable, powerful, and accurate, thinner and thinner infantry formations could be used without sacrificing killing power until, finally, the pikeman disappeared from the field altogether.

  The legacy of the pikeman remained, however, in the form of the bayonet, which is still standard issue in modern armies. The first one, a plug bayonet, was inserted into the rifle’s muzzle. Because it made the firearm inoperable, the musketeer had to rely heavily upon the pikeman for protection. By the end of the seventeenth century, the ring bayonet made its appearance. Attached to a plug below the rifle barrel, this apparatus allowed the rifle to fire while the bayonet was in place, but the attachment was clumsy and unreliable. The standard barrel bayonet attached to a permanent stud welded to the rifle barrel appeared shortly afterward, and within a decade it became standard issue in all European armies.11 The musketeer had now become his own pikeman. Musket infantry was expected to protect itself from cavalry attack and, when closing with the enemy, to fight hand to hand with the bayonet. By combining the functions of the musketeer with the pikeman, all infantry could now be armed with firearms, greatly increasing the killing power of the infantry. In 1746, the British infantry first used the fluted bayonet at the Battle of Culloden Moor, and it has remained a basic close combat tool of the infantryman ever since.12

  Still other advances increased the power of infantry. In the mid-1700s, the Prussians introduced a standard-size iron ramrod to replace the nonstandard wooden rod. When coupled with proper training of the soldier, it doubled the musket’s rate of fire.13 At the same time, the infantry began to diversify its weapons’ capability with a primitive hand grenade. The first hand grenades were hollow iron balls packed with black powder ignited by a burning wick. Within a decade, the infantry grenadier had become a standard feature of European infantry formations.

  The most significant advances in firepower and range came in artillery.14 At the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, individual craftsmen still cast artillery by hand, so no two guns or barrels were exactly alike. The weight of these artillery pieces was too great to make them mobile enough for effective use against troop formations, although they served well in sieges. Gustavus Adolphus standardized not only the size of cannon and shot, producing the first lightweight artillery guns, but also infantry barrels and musket shot. Adopted almost universally, this system of millimeter caliber measurement is still used by most modern armies.15 Adolphus standardized artillery firing procedure as well, and his artillery gunners could fire eight rounds from a single gun in the time it took a musketeer with a firelock to load and fire a single round.16

  Over the next century, the French introduced a number of innovations in artillery, including mounting the gun on wheeled carriages and introducing the trunnion to improve aiming. Until this time, horses usually pulled the artillery guns, while the artillery crews walked behind. This arrangement slowed the artillery’s mobility, and it was common practice never to move the guns once deployed on the battlefield. Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712–1786) introduced the idea of mounting the guns and gun crews on horseback and wagons, so that guns, crews, and ammunition could all move together. The invention of horse artillery greatly increased the mobility of field artillery, and commanders could routinely move the guns around and change deployments for maximum effect.17 At the same time, their guns were becoming lighter and equipped with more accurate aiming mechanisms. The result was the emergence of a deadly combat arm, field artillery, that over time would be responsible for more casualties than any other weapon.

  The range of artillery gradually increased as well, and by the Napoleonic era, cannon fire could reach three hundred yards, or about the range of a Roman ballista. Until the Crimean War (1853–1856), 70 percent of all cannon shot was solid ball shot. But as early as the 1740s, artillery gunners had various types of artillery rounds at their disposal. Howitzers primarily used heavy rounds that exploded on contact, and artillery guns with a flatter trajectory of fire used canister, chain, and grape-shot against cavalry and infantry formations. Later, these rounds were coupled with exploding charges that made it possible to burst artillery rounds over the enemy’s heads, considerably increasing lethality and casualties. During the American Civil War, rifled cannon came into its own, with a corresponding increase in range and accuracy. Later, advances in breech loading, gas canister sealing, and recoil mechanisms vastly improved rates of fire.

  The killing power of infantry and artillery drove cavalry from the field as a major killing arm. Horse cavalry gradually became lighter, and being armed with pistols, carbines, and sabers, it was relegated to filling the gaps in the line, performing reconnaissance, conducting raids, and protecting the flanks of the infantry. Cavalry did not return as a major battlefield player until the end of World War I, when the internal combustion engine made possible the first primitive tanks.18

  THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN WARFARE

  The period between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the emergence and consolidation of the nation state as the primary form of sociopolitical organization and as the most dynamic actor in international affairs. With the collapse of feudalism, the new dynastic social orders of the West developed different forms of social, political, economic, and military organization, all of which eventually influenced the course of weapons development and the conduct of war. At the beginning of the period, monarchy was the most common form of domestic political organization of the nation state. By the seventeenth century, national monarchs had gradually subdued or destroyed all competing centers of political power and parochial loyalty within their national borders. The age of absolutism, when national monarchs wielded absolute power over their politico-social orders, had begun. Consequently, various monarchs declared war upon one another at will, often over trivial and personal concerns, for almost a hundred years.

  During the seventeenth century, however, other centers of domestic power, some of them arising as a consequence of the changing economic structure, gradually circumscribed the national monarchs’ power. Expanding domestic and international economies brought into existence new classes of domestic political claimants that demanded a share in the power of the political establishment. By the nineteenth century, the empowerment of new societal segments culminated in the rise of representative legislatures that gave these new classes some participation in public policy. The increased influence of these new domestic political actors, however, was in proportion to how valuable they were to the national authorities in conducting their war and foreign policies.

  To ensure the king’s c
ontrol over his domestic realm, he built the armies of the new nation states. Control of these military forces became central to establishing and expanding monarchical power, and the new standing professional armies became the chief means of suppressing domestic dissent and protecting the monarchy from foreign threats. The early bureaucracies that were set up to achieve the monarch’s directives in the domestic realm became the prototypes of those modern civil and military bureaucracies deemed necessary to govern the modern state.

  As the social and economic structures of the new states became more complex, they gave rise to merchant and financial classes that began to challenge the monarchical order and demand a greater share in the political process. The new financial instruments—hard currencies, banking systems, letters of credit, international trade, and cross-national financing and manufacturing—used to cope with a developing international economy forced the national monarchs to depend upon the new classes more heavily to raise armies and fight wars. By the seventeenth century, national monarchs could no longer maintain armies or fight wars without the support of the merchant and financial classes.

  The development of a complex international economy made the support of the new classes indispensable. Resources available for war varied greatly from state to state, and the ability to sustain one’s position in the international arena required that economic resources remain securely tied to national aspirations and interests. Economic concerns began to drive military ambitions in equal measure with political and military concerns. The internationalization of economic affairs made it impossible for any one state to secure solely for itself the resources for war and to gain military dominance over all other states or even a coalition of states for long. In military adventures any one state could hope only to achieve marginal gains at the expense of other states. Under these circumstances, a constantly shifting balance of power among many national states came to characterize the international order.

  The economic costs of weapons and warfare increased enormously, and wars of this period often produced the near or actual financial collapse of the participants. Professional armies and weapons were expensive, and the resources required to produce and maintain a large military force led a number a states into bankruptcy.19 The loss or transfer of manpower from industry and agriculture to military service, the high costs of borrowing on domestic and international markets, and the disruption of domestic and international trade caused by national conflicts resulted in destruction and economic dislocation that often served to make even a successful war a near financial disaster. These circumstances gradually forced the national monarchs to share power with the new merchant classes that controlled the sinews of war and had the most to lose or gain economically by war.

  By the early 1800s, the transition from the old feudal orders to the modern national era was complete insofar as weaponry, tactics, and military organization were concerned. The old political order hung on for yet another century but more in form than substance. Militarily, the pike disappeared from the battlefield, and the new musket infantry came of age while fighting in disciplined linear combat formations, a form that lingered into the twentieth century. Mobile artillery also came into its own and became a major killing combat arm used in coordination with cavalry and infantry. The standing army had come into being, with organization, logistics trains, and command structures comparable to those of modern armies.

  Napoleon Bonaparte introduced yet a new element into this equation and, in doing so, revolutionized the conduct of war. Until the French Revolution, armies remained professional forces whose manpower was drawn from the least socially and economically useful elements of the population. Most soldiers came from the ranks of the urban poor or the excess rural population that had no land. Even the officer corps was drawn from the second and third sons of the nobility, leaving the first son to manage the family’s estates and business interests. These professional military forces’ loyalty was based largely upon regular pay. Napoleon instituted the mass citizen army based on conscription and developed an officer corps with men who were selected for their talent rather than their social origins. A number of industrial and agricultural innovations allowed him to extract ever larger groups of manpower from the economic base without serious disruption. Still, the size of the Napoleonic armies was impossible to maintain unless the entire social and economic resources of the state were mobilized for war. The age of modern war had dawned.

  The Napoleonic armies replaced the old enticements of loyalty to the king and regular pay with loyalty based on national patriotism fired by the ideal of social revolution. This appeal made it possible for Napoleon to raise mass armies. The idea of a “nation in arms” based on national patriotic fervor and sacrifice to ideals meant that all segments of the population were expected to contribute to the war effort. Entire national economies were now marshaled to support war, and private control of the resources of war passed to the control of the state. The state’s economic structures were required to produce the sinews of war upon command, even to the detriment of other aspects of economic and social activity if necessary. Thus the most significant contribution of the Napoleonic era was the invention of a new national model for war, the nation in arms.

  Historians sometimes call the American Civil War the first truly modern war, for it was the first conflict not only to take maximum advantage of the new efficiencies of production that the Industrial Revolution fostered but also to involve the entire populations of each combatant. Large conscript armies, larger than the world had ever seen, required a monumental industrial base to feed, clothe, and supply them for combat. The Industrial Revolution, the factory system, and machine mass production, along with technological innovations in metallurgy, chemistry, and machine tools, created an explosion in military technology. The great reduction in time between developing new ideas and manufacturing their prototypes was among the most important consequence. New concepts were quickly translated to mechanical drawings, then to models, then to prototypes, and finally to full-scale implementation, all within a very short time. The widespread introduction of technical journals accelerated the time it took for innovations in one discipline to have an impact on a related field. The result was a rapid increase in information transfer.

  Overall these circumstances led to new technologies being rapidly applied to warfare at a historically unprecedented pace, and correspondingly weapons became more lethal than ever. As new means of economic organization and impressive increases in productivity freed large numbers of men for military service without causing serious economic dislocation in the national wartime economy, the civilian population that manned the war machine’s productive base became at least as important as the war machine itself. For the first time, the production base and the civilian industrial manpower pool became legitimate and necessary military targets to achieve victory.

  The Crimean War witnessed the British Army first wielding both rifled and breech-loading artillery. Both of these improvements already had been used as early as the sixteenth century, if only as prototypes. Technical problems in barrel casting and breech sealing had prevented their operation on a widespread basis. Half the Union artillery in the Civil War comprised rifled and breech-loading guns. Rifling increased the speed of the projectiles up the barrel, enabling cannon to fire at much longer ranges and with greater accuracy. Rifled cannon also packed more penetrating power, a considerable advantage against fixed fortifications. Originally made of bronze, and later cast iron with steel reinforcing bands, the rifled breech-loading cannon could also deliver a much faster rate of fire. Improved black powder added to the shell’s velocity and range. Near the end of the war, the first primitive recoil mechanisms further increased the rate of fire and accuracy of the rifled field artillery cannon.20

  The musket had acquired rifling long before the Crimean War, and rifled muskets had been produced as prototypes in the sixteenth century. The most important innovation to Civil War musketry was the introduction of the conoidal bullet. S
haped like a small egg, the conoidal bullet had a hollow “basket” behind its penetrating head. Cast in one piece of soft lead, the “basket” expanded upon firing as the hot combustion gases filled the rear of the bullet. The soft lead expanded outward, forcing the raised spirals on the basket into the rifled grooves in the barrel. The result was a greater sealing of the propulsive gases and a tighter grasp of the rifling by the bullet. Both range and accuracy vastly improved. A rifled Civil War musket could easily kill at a thousand yards and was accurate at six hundred yards.21

  The infantry’s firepower was increasing exponentially. The Spencer carbine, a .56-caliber repeating rifle with a seven-shot capacity, appeared near the end of the war. In the hands of a competent rifleman, it could expend all seven rounds in the time it took a musket rifleman to load and fire a single round. Manufacturers also improved handguns, long the mainstay of the cavalry. Able to fire six shots of .44-caliber ball before requiring reloading, these new weapons were so effective that John Singleton Mosby, the famous Gray Ghost of the Confederacy, required each of his cavalrymen to strap six pistols to both sides of his horse’s neck. Mosby’s cavalrymen also carried two spare carbines in addition to the carbine and pistol they usually had.

  Infantry firepower continued to increase with the introduction of the Gatling gun, the first primitive machine gun. This mechanized contraption was a multibarreled gun that rotated each barrel into firing position in succession by means of a cast gear as the firing handle was turned. The Gatling gun was capable of a sustained rate of fire of a hundred rounds a minute, equal to the rate of fire from forty infantrymen. In 1870, the French deployed a highly reliable, if somewhat cumbersome, twenty-five-barrel machine gun capable of firing 125 rounds a minute and accurate at two thousand yards. In 1870, the Prussian Dreyse needlegun introduced a modern firing pin system for the rifle that again increased rates of fire. The introduction of the magazine-fed (British Lee-Enfield) and clip-fed (German Mauser) bolt-action rifles at the time of the Boer Wars increased the infantry’s firepower and mobility yet again. In the 1880s, an American named Hiram Maxim invented a truly modern machine gun capable of a sustained rate of fire of six hundred rounds a minute. The Maxim gun was so effective that all the major armies of the world produced it under license. It became the definitive weapon of World War I, the conflict that came to be called “the machine gun war.”