Forward into Battle
Page 13
Civil War generals do not appear to have been very interested in minor tactics, and set up no authoritative body to analyse and develop doctrine, or to create élites that might specialise in assault techniques. This meant that battles were usually fought with somewhat rudimentary tactical concepts, leading to toe-to-toe firefights where both sides hoped to win by firepower, but where the defender was usually better prepared and held most of the trumps. Whether or not he used fieldworks, the general atmosphere of these encounters is well caught in the following passage:
… it was a stand-up combat, dogged and unflinching, in a field almost bare. There were no wounds from spent balls; the confronting lines looked into each other’s faces at deadly range, less than one hundred yards apart, and they stood as immovable as the painted heroes in a battle-piece … and although they could not advance, they would not retire. There was some discipline in this, but there was much more of true valor.
‘In this fight there was no manoeuvering, and very little tactics – it was a question of endurance, and both endured.57
This in itself helped to make tactics less brilliant than they might otherwise have been, but the problem was compounded by failures in higher battle-handling. All too many Civil War commanders found they lacked the conviction, the staffwork, or the understanding necessary to convert a local victory into a break-through and pursuit at the grand tactical or ‘operational’ level. Despite the many difficulties involved in ‘breaking into’ an enemy position, it could sometimes be done; but there was a further crucial problem of generalship when it came to ‘breaking out’. In the absence of a reliable method of achieving this, each local success seemed merely to increase the list of casualties without hastening the end of the war.58
By 1864 the Civil War soldiers had grown weary of throwing themselves into slaughter pens which created no armistice, so wherever possible they tried to apply more elusive tactics – elusive primarily from the enemy’s fire, but also from their own officers. This was an era when the armies had advanced beyond the status of ‘veteran’ to that of ‘old lag’, wise in the ways of the system. It was an era of ‘shadow boxing’, when regiments ordered to make an attack might content themselves with advancing a few yards and firing for two or three hours, and whole armies might manoeuvre skilfully against each other, but decline close combat when they had the chance.59 In the Eastern theatre the non-battle on the Mine Run stands as a classic example of this ‘live and let live system’,60 while in the West the near-platonic minuets of Sherman and Johnston, between Chattanooga and Kenesaw, are even more famous. It took a very strong-willed commander, such as Hood at Atlanta or Grant in the Wilderness, to persuade the armies to return to their previous assault doctrines; but when they did so it was unpopular with the troops and led merely to increased human losses without compensating tactical gains.
Many commentators have seen the trend to ‘live and let live’ in 1864 as a move away from European formalism and towards ‘Indian’ or ‘American’ skirmish tactics. This would be convincing if the skirmish lines of the period were able to make co-ordinated assaults in the manner of the 1870 ‘Prussian Rush’ demonstrated at Le Bourget in 1870, but there is little evidence that they were ever intended to do so. The few successful skirmish attacks that can be found are usually at night or in mist: two conditions that were generally neglected until at least the First World War. In the Civil War the skirmish line was regarded as an auxiliary or standoff means of fighting.61 For serious assault work a heavier formation was preferred, right up to the end. General Upton at Spotsylvania refined the concept by training his men in follow-up action for each element in the assault, but even he was still using a reinforced brigade column to beat down the enemy’s earthworks. In his drill manual written after the war, on the basis of the war’s lessons,62 he still expects troops to fight mainly in double ranks, reserving fire to ‘deadly range’ in a distinctly Napoleonic manner.
Apart from standoff skirmishing, the other element of the ‘live and let live system’ which the Americans embraced with enthusiasm was the use of fieldworks. Like Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, they believed their inexperienced armies were weak at manoeuvres in the open, and needed the additional stiffening of entrenchments. General McClellan had seen the siege of Sebastopol, and leapt to the conclusion that it showed the shape of wars to come. General Halleck had also argued for something similar in his influential pre-war handbook,63 and his advice was applied from the very start of the war, even when inappropriate. This excessive respect for fortification was as much the result of theoretical book-learning by West Point graduates – who were all expert engineers – as it was a practical adaptation to the tactical system adopted by the armies by 1864. A vicious spiral set in, whereby the advanced tactics of mobility and counter-attack were progressively neglected, but the elementary tactics of static fire and mud-digging became universal. Many commentators have wrongly attributed the emphasis on fortification to the power of new weapons, whereas it probably owed more to a failure of creative tactical thinking.64
Civil War infantry fighting does not seem to have progressed far beyond the level reached at New Orleans. However, those who seek a ‘revolution’ in the 1860s claim that at least the infantry rifles could now outrange artillery. The whole relationship between infantry and artillery is deemed to have altered in favour of the former, and Union casualty statistics from the Wilderness battle are often quoted to show that cannon now caused only 9% or less of the casualties.65 This, alas, is a classic case of drawing too wide a conclusion from too narrow a data base, since the Wilderness battle was recognised by contemporaries as the one least favourable of all to artillery. General Grant sent home over 100 of his guns from that battle, and found most of the rest of them were confined to roads in thick woodland.
We must remember that at Malvern Hill the Union artillery is credited with 50% of the Confederate casualties, and at Gettysburg it was the most effective instrument in the destruction of Pickett’s charge. Nor is there any evidence that Civil War infantry had become more adept than Wellington’s troops at chasing off enemy field guns. In both cases it seems that isolated batteries were vulnerable when they came too close, but massed artillery supported by infantry was safe enough. Where guns were lost to infantry or cavalry, the gunners were usually overrun with cold steel rather than shot down from long range.66
Mention of the cavalry brings us to the one area that really did show a revolution in Civil War tactics. At the start of the war the cavalry was few in number, not always well led, and rarely given a role in pitched battles. It fulfilled its destiny merely as outposts, scouts or couriers, until the Confederate J. E. B. Stuart showed how it could grab both booty and glory by raiding away from the main army. This had the unfortunate effect of removing it still further from the pitched battles, and it was only in 1864, after the Union cavalry had been reformed, that a new main battle role was found. Sheridan, however, then led a cavalry corps for the Army of the Potomac which managed to combine operational mobility with high tactical firepower and shock. His men were equipped with repeating Henry or Spencer carbines, and would engage the enemy in a dismounted firefight before charging home on horseback with sabre or revolver. In the Appomattox campaign this system successfully loosened up the sluggish progress of the infantry and restored fluidity to operations.67
The value of Sheridan’s carbines was based more on a high rate of fire and volume of fire than on precision or long range. As such, they leapt ahead a generation to the design qualities of the SMG and automatic assault rifle, rather than to the accurate, long-range but single-shot rifles of late nineteenth-century theory. They were so far ahead of their time that their true significance was widely missed – making perhaps the only solid foundation to the claim that the Americans of the 1860s were radically more advanced than their blind and effete European counterparts.
The mainstream of European development stayed with the long-range, single-shot rifle. Early models had been present in large numbe
rs in the Civil War, but, as we have seen, their range was rarely exploited. The truly revolutionary development in this direction was to come in the Franco-Prussian War, where the fields were often much more open and the volume of fire could be much heavier. Whereas the Civil War rifle musket had still been a fairly clumsy muzzle loader, the chassepôt and the needle gun were both breech loaders. In theory, at least, they could manage six or ten rounds per minute, in place of one or two from the rifle musket. Especially with the chassepôt, sighted to 1,200 metres, a hail of lead could be maintained at long range by the use of ‘coffee mill’ fire – a process by which the infantryman used his left hand to hold the rifle to his right hip at 45° to the horizontal, and his right hand to load, fire and work the bolt as fast as he could.68 The result was that even though long-range fire could be properly aimed no better than in any other war, it could now be made effective and dangerous in a way that it had not been in 1861–5. When a battalion’s ‘coffee mill’ rifle fire was combined with the indiscriminate long-range fire of a mitrailleuse battery, it could make a vast beaten zone that enemy infantry would hesitate to cross. In battle it was often found that two opposing infantry lines would settle down to their static phase of fire when they were some 400 or even 1,000 metres apart.
Modern commentators have often incorrectly derided the contribution made by the mitrailleuse to the tactics of 1870,69 but still less widely recognised today is the contribution made by the cavalry. It is true enough that a number of charges failed against infantry, especially those made by the French. Margueritte’s famous final effort at Sedan, for example, was launched in a mood of suicidal despair rather than realistic hope of tactical gain, although even then his command remained sufficiently intact to charge a second time, a few minutes later.70 Nevertheless, the German cavalry did sometimes make effective attacks, of which the most celebrated, but misunderstood, is the so-called ‘death ride’ of von Bredow’s brigade at Rezonville. This has often been dismissed as another futile Balaklava – and the ‘death ride’ tag is itself more than expressive. Yet the truth is that two depleted cavalry regiments, totalling some 804 troopers, took a whole French army corps by surprise, overran its guns, paralysed its command functions for three hours, and prevented it from making an attack that could have been strategically decisive. They were finally beaten off only by French cavalry, not by the infantry or artillery. Admittedly the Germans suffered around 60% losses, but, as a cost-effective expenditure of casualties in order to win battles, their sacrifice can scarcely be faulted.71
Returning to the infantry, most armies were at this time equipping their troops with breech loading rifles. They believed that the newly increased volume of fire made genuinely long-range shooting worthwhile – provided that sufficient ammunition was available. The British, in the Zulu War of 1879, hoped to open fire at 1,000 yards or more with their Martini-Henry falling block rifles, although in practice it was often much less. However, the sheer volume of lead could usually hold the enemy at 150–300 yards’ distance, and even if he successfully came closer it would normally only be in manageable numbers. At Isandhlwana, however, the British line was overwhelmed when the immediately available ammunition was exhausted, and the Zulus sensed that they had ‘won the firefight’.72
By 1895 the British had digested these lessons, and with the Lee Metford magazine rifle – but also still with the Martini-Henry itself – they were advising against aimed fire at more than the ‘decisive range’ of 400–500 yards. Unaimed fire was acceptable at ranges up to nearly a mile, since a ‘doctrine of chance’ would ensure that at least a few of the shots hit their mark. However,
… it is a waste of ammunition, even if the range be known, for bad shots to fire individually at ranges beyond those for which the fixed sight can be used, and for good shots beyond 800 yards.73
In a French formulation of a somewhat similar point, de Grandmaison claimed that in Napoleonic times the crucial range had been 100 metres; in 1870 it had been 4–500 metres; with the M1874 Gras rifle it had been 5–600, and with the M1886 Lebel magazine rifle it was 800–1,000. De Maud’huy said that in 1800 infantry would break at 20 metres, but in 1910 at 200 metres.74 A 1908 German view of defensive tactics advocated only sparing use of massed fire beyond 1,200 metres, but annihilating fire at medium range (800–1,200m) and short range (below 800m). The longer the range, the slower the rate should be; and skirmish fire was to be reserved for shorter ranges than massed fire. It was also claimed that every country wished its troops to hold their fire in the attack for as long as reasonably possible.75
All this is as remote from Wellington’s aggressively mobile counter-attacks at 30 yards as it is from the largely unaimed Civil War volleys at 100 yards or less. In 1870 we had entered a new world of long-range fire, in which attacking infantry had to negotiate a much wider beaten zone than previously, before coming to the decisive final crossing of no man’s land. The Americans’ claim that they had seen the shape of modern warfare already in the 1860s, and had fully mastered it then, is surely wide of the mark. Nor was it to be confirmed by their subsequent tactical showing when they first came into action at San Juan hill in 1898, or Belleau Wood in 1918.
Pleasure Train to Berlin76 – The Alleged Influence of Louis de Grandmaison on the French Army in August 1914
In their Civil War the Americans suspected they were entering a new age in warfare, not solely because 98% of their armies were new to the military life, but because futurist military analysts had prematurely announced a new age of rifles, trenches and infernal devices of every kind. In 1914, however, the French army set out to war expecting relatively little to have changed since 1870. The troops wore the same uniforms and were due to fight on very much the same battlefields, supported by a network of permanent fortifications which included some of Vauban’s original works. Field artillery and rifles had not dramatically increased in effective battle range since 1870, although the incomparable rapid-firing soixante-quinze had replaced Napoleon Ill’s cranky old muzzle loading cannon, and the chassepôt had found an eminently worthy successor in the Lebel magazine rifle.77 Therefore, there was a strong feeling that the new battle would in fact be the second round in a continuing struggle, rather than a break with the warfare of the past.
Many lessons had been learned from 1870, of course. This time the new war was not entered with ‘lightness of heart’, but with a carefully studied ‘reluctance’ in face of overwhelming aggression. This posture secured powerful allies in place of diplomatic isolation, and the support of a mass citizen army rather than merely a small band of Bonapartist mercenaries. The rail-born mobilisation had also been carefully studied and ran like clockwork, bringing five French armies to their correct positions and on time – quelle différence avec 70!78 Only the British arrived late and with fewer troops than they had promised: but what else could one expect from this perfidious neighbour? The BEF’s mobilisation may have run smoothly according to its own lights, but it exasperated the French and led to a long trail of misunderstandings. Once fighting had started, the Mons position was held for only a few hours; only half the available troops fought at Le Cateau, and then Sir John French panicked and tried to make off to the ferry boats at St Nazaire!79
Some of the lessons learned from 1870, however, were less than constructive – notably the new perception that all French territory was henceforth sacred. Bismarck’s cynical attempt to allow France an African empire as compensation for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was deeply unacceptable, since provinces could no longer be bartered away as they had been under the dynastic statecraft of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the Third Republic the whole of France belonged to all its people; it was no longer the personal estate of some king or emperor. This was not merely a political imperative for a government which relied on the support of a nation in arms, but was also a matter of deep religious and racial concern.
The popular mind at this time was filled by the rantings of spurious experts who claimed pseudo-scientifi
c support for the most garish forms of chauvinism, bigotry and prejudice. There was a hothouse atmosphere which produced both the expiatory Catholic pilgrimage movement of the 1870s, and the proto-fascist, anti-Dreyfusard Boulangism of the 1880s and 90s.80 The cult of Joan of Arc was harnessed to the military crusade for La Revanche when it was discovered that this witch, lawfully executed in 1431, was born in the self-same Lorraine which had been partitioned by the Burgundians in the fifteenth century, and was now partitioned by the Germans once again. Her statues proliferated throughout France, and her shrine at Domrémy became a symbolic bastion of virtuous defiance against an unrighteous invader. Works of science fiction showed how the great battle to liberate the lost provinces would be fought at the villages of Coussey and Neufchâteau on the banks of the Meuse, overlooked by Domrémy itself.81 The Russian General Dragomirov, a leading advocate of the bayonet assault, wrote articles in praise of Joan, and the patriotic writer Péguy, inspiration to de Gaulle and Pétain alike, wrote not one agonised play on the subject, but two.82
All this meant that the inevitable future war had to be fought with the single aim of regaining the lost provinces at the quickstep. No French war plan could be contemplated without an immediate offensive towards the East, and the Germans could absolutely depend upon this taking place.83 At a lower level of policy, also, the army’s embattled military traditions and political tendencies made it highly sensitive to anything that might seem to reflect badly upon its honour or panache. It defeated the ‘masonic plot’ to replace its red and blue uniforms with dingy camouflaged combat dress.84 It abhorred the republican government’s political interference with appointments, and the use of the army to disendow the Jesuits. Still closer to home, it resented the dilution of its long-service, well-indoctrinated conscripts by shorter-term recruits who would be less capable of complex manoeuvres.85 Most importantly of all, however, it felt that racial, psychological and spiritual factors all made it inappropriate for French soldiers to stand on the defensive.