Forward into Battle
Page 12
Again, in another attack on the same day he reports that:
We rushed forward by groups, each being mutually supported by the others, a manoeuvre we had practised frequently during peacetime. We crossed a depression which was defiladed from the enemy’s fire. Soon I had nearly the whole platoon together in the dead angle on the opposite slope. Thanks to poor enemy marksmanship, we had suffered no casualties up to this time. With fixed bayonets, we worked our way up the rise to within storming distance of the hostile position. During this movement the enemy’s fire did not trouble us, for it passed high over us toward those portions of the platoon that were still a considerable distance behind us. Suddenly, the enemy’s fire ceased entirely. Wondering if he was preparing to rush us, we assaulted his position but, except for a few dead, found it deserted.43
Finally, Rommel makes an interesting observation about the power of modern artillery:
… The whole clearing was subjected to intense shrapnel fire. The shells rained down like a sudden thunderstorm. We tried to find shelter behind trees and used our packs to form improvised breastworks. The intensity of the bombardment made it impossible to move in any direction. Although the bombardment lasted several minutes, there were no casualties. Our packs intercepted a few of the missiles, and the bayonet tassel of one of the men was torn in shreds.44
The above passages reveal precisely how innocuous the much-vaunted ‘modern weapons’ of 1914 could actually be. There did not seem, by and large, to be any reason for thinking that a great revolution had suddenly taken place. There seemed to be plenty of justification for the continuity in tactical affairs which had generally been assumed before the war. The British commentator Spenser Wilkinson had summed up this feeling in 1891, when he observed that:
It is true that within certain narrow limits, which can be precisely specified, the defender is strengthened by modern improvements in firearms. But it is not true that this results in a great or sudden change in the relations of attack and defence, either in regard to battle as a whole, or in regard to the general course of a campaign. There has been no revolution in tactics or in strategy, but certain modifications long since realised have become more pronounced. The balance of advantage remains where it was.45
Spencer Wilkinson seems to have grasped a vital truth about this tactical debate which many modern commentators have totally missed. At no point during the nineteenth century did anything very much seem to change. It was always accepted that steady improvements in firepower would be going on all the time, but that these would be balanced by a gradual lightening of the fighting line and a gradual improvement in the sciences of leadership and morale building. From the very start of the century to the very end, some prophets of doom could always be found who believed that the bayonet charge was finished. The rifle enthusiasts of the Napoleonic wars had seemed to suggest as much, as had the Chasseurs of the 1830s. Others had said the same after the wars of the 1860s and 1870. Plevna, the Boer War and Mukden had all seemed to prove the point yet again. But for all that, the bayonet charge did nevertheless continue to work in practice.
An important feature of the bayonet charge was that there was very little real alternative. If one were to follow the advice of the Daily News correspondent at Plevna, for example, one would have used either a wide outflanking movement or a prolonged approach by trench warfare. Neither option was particularly inviting, even though the idea of encirclement did actually gain a great deal of support from the time of the American Civil War onwards. The Prussians were especially fond of this tactic during the Franco-Prussian war, and it later lay behind their great Schlieffen Plan itself. The British also found by their experience in South Africa that some form of encirclement could be very helpful indeed, and the Japanese used it frequently in Manchuria.
Encirclement of the enemy did not take as long as sapping forward; but it still took quite long enough, and exposed the encircling forces to a loss of contact with their main body. It also traditionally required a great superiority of numbers as well as an enemy who would obligingly stand and watch while you rolled him into your trap.
All of these considerations meant that encirclement was frequently either impractical or very risky. For a much quicker and apparently more certain solution the odds often seemed to favour a frontal attack.
Once a frontal attack had started, the choice was between a ‘battle of killing’ and a genuine assault to close quarters. Here again the choice would be highly unattractive, although commanders could not help but feel that a ‘battle of killing’ would mean precisely what it said. For example Hamilton reports one battle in which the Japanese were faced with just this problem:
… it was quickly realised by regimental officers and men that the fire was too hot to admit of a prolonged duel between troops in the open and troops under cover, and that the only alternative to going back was to go forward. Instinctively the whole line endeavoured to press on.46
Here we again find the logic of the ‘flight to the front’ as described by Ardant du Picq and his school. It did not seem to be possible to stand still under fire, and it would certainly not have been decisive. If men were going to be hit anyway, then they might just as well have achieved something positive to compensate for their sacrifice.
Behind the tactical assumptions carried into the First World War there lay a great deal of sound reasoning, based upon both concrete examples and abstract principles. Repeated attempts had been made to challenge this reasoning, but the requisite body of proof had always been found wanting. Every time firepower had seemed to make some great stride forward, the power of the bayonet had somehow managed to keep pace. It was only impractical visionaries who would try to deny this and suggest that improved firepower had at last made no-man’s-land genuinely impassable. There really did not seem any good reason to listen to men like Morand with his steam machine-guns of 1829, or to the Polish financier I. S. Bloch with his highly abstract arguments of 1897.47 The case for the other side was very strong indeed, and at the time it seemed to be even stronger.
Today we like to think of late nineteenth-century bayonet enthusiasts, such as de Grandmaison or Dragomirov, as being little more than dangerous cranks. By stressing one particular element in war they certainly sacrificed the overall balance of their views; but in the perspective of their own day they were quite right to choose the offensive as the element which needed to be stressed. This was the part of war which had been made more difficult by improving technology, and yet it was also an unavoidable necessity imposed on any Commander. In these circumstances it was logical to find a counter-balance to firepower in the shape of morale and the spirit of aggression. These things were apparently solidly based in the psychological and racial sciences of the day, and had been analysed in a century of careful debate. They were known and trustworthy instruments which seemed to be increasing in power as much as the new weapons themselves.
In the First World War it was not only cannons and machine-guns which finally did prevent movement across no-man’s-land; it was also the extraordinarily strong morale which had been built up in every army. It took three years for the armies to crack, and even then some of them never did. To this extent, at least, the pre-war interest in morale had not been in vain.
The Alleged Rifle Revolution in the American Civil War
Within their own terms of reference the European armies had prepared themselves well for the First World War. They had examined new technologies such as the magazine rifle or the ‘Aerial Torpedo’ (the HE shell), but they did not believe these would radically change the shape of the battlefield. Believers in firepower perceived a continuum of infantry tactics from Frederick’s drilled ‘automata’, through Wellington’s allegedly steadily-volleying regiments, up to the present day. Since infantry had always fought by massed fire, the Maxim gun was merely doing mechanically what a platoon of Potsdam grenadiers would previously have done manually. Conversely the believers in morale and the offensive could trace a no less respectable continuum fr
om Napoleon’s 1805 column attacks covered by skirmishers, to the 1905 Japanese bayonet dashes prepared by musketry. If technology had made preparatory fire a little more important to an assailant than it had been in the past, that did not seem to make a very decisive difference to the time-honoured relationship between attack and defence.
Perhaps one important reason for this complacency was the need for an inter-arm balance in the debate. If the cavalry could still see a chance to fire on foot and then charge mounted, the artillery could just as easily imagine a battle in which their shells destroyed literally everything. If the infantry believed they could fight their own way forward by fire and movement, the engineers were thinking more about creating impenetrable defences with mines, electrified barbed wire and deep, concrete-lined bunkers. Imagination was free during the forty years since the last major European war, and because there was little central co-ordination to the debate, its constituent parts tended to cancel each other out. No one could tell just where the actual balance should be struck, so they carried on behaving normally.
The shock by the start of 1915, therefore, was not so much a realisation that new elements had entered the nature of combat, but that one side of the pre-war debate had apparently been proved right and the other wrong. The debate reached a clear turning point, since for the first time in a century there seemed to be a new style of warfare that almost everyone could agree was radically different from that of the past. Maybe this was really true: it makes an interesting question to which we will return in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here, however, that a decade or so after the Treaty of Versailles, most armies were looking forward to fighting their next war in a novel manner compared to what had gone before.
We have already seen how a succession of prophets had prematurely announced this revolution at several different moments during the nineteenth century. The new warfare’ had been heralded, variously in the Crimea, in 1870, and at Plevna. Manchuria had impressed more commentators than usual, and, in Britain at least, the Boer War had made a profound impression.48 None of these claimed revolutions had really stuck in the public consciousness, however, and traditionalists were reassured to think that the battle of Omdurman, as late as 1898, could still be won by cavalry charges and infantry squares.49
It was only in one part of the world that a belief in the arrival of ‘the new warfare’ had become deeply rooted before 1915, and survives to the present day. This was in America, where the novelty of the Civil War of 1861–5 impressed the population even more deeply than the Franco-Prussian War had impressed the French. In France the 1870 war was settled by a couple of ‘Napoleonic-style’ lightning campaigns, whereas in America the armies seemed to lack the tactical ability to reach clear-cut decisions on the battlefield, and fighting dragged on for four years. Worse, the indecisiveness of the battles meant that the North’s victory could be won only by a systematic attack on the Confederate economy. By naval blockade, mounted chevauchée and scorched-earth marauding, the Southern civilians were made to pay for their rebellion. Nothing quite comparable was seen in the European wars of the Victorian era, although more bitter scenes had certainly featured in the campaigns of both Wellington and Napoleon.
The Civil War could obviously be seen as a break with the traditions of the past. Before First Manassas in 1861 the USA had never put more than 20,000 men into a battle, but by the end of the Civil War over three million Americans had passed through the armies, and many battles had been fought with over 30,000 men on each side.50 Before the 1860s the Americans may have read much about Napoleon’s exploits, but they had perhaps paid more attention to his glitter and glory than to the stern demands he had made upon his subjects. It must have come as a major trauma to find that the Civil War cost a third of a million Union and Confederate dead (to all causes, including disease), and maybe half a million wounded.
If these novelties had been the only ones to strike the American public during the Civil War, they would probably still have been acclaimed as ‘the birth of a new warfare’, even though they contained nothing particularly new to Europeans. However, there were several other technical factors at work as well, which went at least some way towards persuading even the Europeans that something new might really be afoot. There was the first truly widespread and sustained use of steam power in war – a massive expansion on Jackson’s early use of a steam launch at New Orleans in 1815. There were iron-clad warships, observation balloons, and ‘torpedoes’ (hidden, percussion-detonated mines for both land and sea); and a number of prototype terror weapons ranging from machine guns to exploding bullets, and from railway mortars to poison gas. Making a particularly strong impact upon the general public, there was a recognisably modern newspaper coverage of the campaigns, including biting satire against many of the generals and a lovingly gruesome emphasis on the dead, the dying and the bereaved. All this meant that the war not only felt new by reason of its duration and scale of privations, but it also looked new in its machinery and presentation.
The cornerstone of the Civil War’s supposed modernity, however, consisted of the new rifles and cannons deployed in battle, which were widely assumed to have changed the whole nature of tactics. By 1865 every infantryman carried a rifle sighted to around 1,000 yards; most of the cavalry had repeating pistols or carbines, and a considerable proportion of the artillery was also rifled. In theory this made a huge increase in firepower, and many are the tactical analysts, both past and present, who have produced their own version of the following sentiment:
The introduction of the rifle musket and its conoidal bullet in the decade between 1850 and 1860 was to have the greatest immediate and measurable revolutionary impact on war of any new weapon or technological development of war before or since. When and if tactical nuclear weapons appear on the battlefield, presumably they will have an even greater effect. But certainly not even the high-explosive shells, airplanes or tanks of the twentieth century were to have effects of contemporary scale and significance comparable to the rifled musket in its early days.51
It is certainly hard to see that the British use of the Minié rifle at Sebastopol had an effect on the musket-armed Russians comparable to an attack by tanks and planes, or that the Austrian Lorenz rifles at Solferino could put down a wall of fire equivalent to the HE bombardments of the Somme or Passchendaele. Nevertheless, the impression remains strong in many people’s minds that the Springfield and Enfield rifle muskets carried by Civil War soldiers made for devastatingly more lethal scales of firepower than anything seen before.
It is not difficult to show that this assumption is totally misleading,52 since many of the Civil War battles were fought in close country where long fields of fire could not often be found. The great range of the new rifled weapons could not usually be exploited even if the troops had been suitably trained, which they generally were not. Whereas in the Zulu War of 1879 we hear of range markers being laid out to 700 yards from a infantry position,53 there seems to have been little comparable to this in the Civil War, where the normal exhortation, as in the past, was simply to wait until close range and then aim low. When fields of fire were specially cleared, they usually extended no more than 50–100 yards. Eyewitness accounts seem to suggest that in combat the average range for musketry in the war as a whole was 127 yards, and 141 yards for 1864–5. Out of a sample of 113 references to range, the author found 70 (or 62%) showing fire at 100 yards or less, 96 (or 85%) at 250 yards or less, and 100% at 500 yards or less.54
Although these average ranges are considerably longer than those in Wellington’s infantry fights, they are probably not so very much greater than those familiar to continental Napoleonic armies, and generally not vastly incompatible with Napoleonic expectations overall. There had been no marked increase in the rate of fire with rifle muskets over that with smoothbores, so the total number of shots that could be fired at an attacker before he could reach a defender was surely not much greater. There is also a strong impression, from many accounts of Civil War combat,
that after only a few opening shots at these ranges the two sides would approach closer to each other for a static exchange of fire. This might last a long period of time – possibly until the full load of forty or more rounds had been expended by each man. Hence only a small proportion of the total bullets fired (and therefore casualties inflicted) would be at the longer ranges, even though those ranges themselves might exceed Napoleonic norms. It is probably worth adding that due to the smallness of the aiming mark he can see, regardless of the qualities of his weapon, the average soldier under the stress of combat in any era is incapable of very much accuracy with a shoulder arm at ranges greater than the Napoleonic ‘fifty or a hundred yards’. In most wars it will therefore be within that zone that the majority of the killing takes place, and it seems that the Civil War was no exception.
If the range and rate of fire of Civil War musketry showed little change from Napoleonic times, the same was also true of combat formations. The chief drill manual of the war was Hardee’s translation of the French chasseur-inspired tactics of the 1850s, which advocated formed bodies two deep moving at double quick time, and also provided encouragement to the skirmisher.55 These tactics could perhaps be claimed as an early response to the battlefield problem of heavy rifle fire; but it is clear that their full gymnastic rigours were properly applied in America no better than they were in Europe. On the contrary, American tacticians often seemed to revert to the slow and heavy columns, or succession of lines, that Jomini and Bugeaud had argued against, and which the chasseurs had been specifically designed to avoid. Time and again in the Civil War an enormous mass of troops was herded forward on a very narrow frontage, leading to notorious ‘slaughter pens’, such as Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, or the Union attacks at Kenesaw Mountain and Cold Harbor. These were the same tactics that had often been discredited against Wellington in the Peninsula, no less than against Andrew Jackson at New Orleans. It was pretty inevitable that they would meet the same fate in the 1860s as they had fifty years earlier, and we need not look for any new power of weaponry in order to understand the results.56