by John Keegan
Without roads, armies could not supply themselves by wheeled transport except of the roughest sort, and they had to depend on either ships or bullocks, the latter being the commonest beast of traction and burden from the fifth millennium BC (attested by archaeological finds in what today is Poland) to the early nineteenth century AD in India and Spain.9 In both those campaigning theatres Wellington, for example, woke and slept with the search for ‘good bullocks’ ever on his mind. ‘Rapid movement’, he wrote in August 1804, ‘cannot be made without good cattle, well driven and well taken care of’; earlier, in India, he had made the same point: ‘the success of military operations depends upon supplies; there is no difficulty in fighting, and in finding the means of beating your enemy either with or without loss; but to gain your objects you must feed.’10 For a commander like Wellington with the money to buy more, bullocks had the advantage that they could be eaten as well as driven for transport, and he used them for both purposes. Few other commanders have been so well provided. Bullock trains were in general too valuable to be slaughtered for the soldiers’ cooking-pot, a consideration that automatically limited an army’s speed and range.
Alexander the Great, for example, was as dependent as Wellington on bullocks and oxen — the latter the more mature version of the former — for tactical mobility. But he reckoned his tactical range no more than eight days’ march from the point of bulk re-supply, usually a maritime depot, since an ox ate its own load over that period. As a consequence he could campaign over long distance only if he could keep close to his fleet train or if he sent representatives ahead to purchase food and forage, either for cash or for the promise of repayment after victory, a transaction into which treacherous Persian officials were increasingly ready to enter as Alexander’s offensive against Darius prospered. For his farthest march from home, that of 326 BC between the River Indus and the Makran in Baluchistan, a distance of 300 miles, he assembled a stockpile of 52,600 tons of provisions, enough to supply his army of 87,000 infantry, 18,000 cavalry and 52,000 followers for four months. Since an animal train would have consumed their loads, and the men eaten their thirty pounds of personal provisions, well before the march was complete, he counted on an accompanying fleet to re-supply him along the Indian Ocean coast, and the seasonal monsoon to refresh the rivers from which he would take water at their estuaries. The logistic calculations were well founded. The stockpile, if regularly unshipped and distributed, would have sufficed to provision his army in plenty. But that year the monsoon blew so as to confine Alexander’s fleet at the Indus mouth, with the result that three-quarters of his army was lost on the march through the deserts of Baluchistan.11
This disaster supplies an extreme example of how heavily logistics impinge on warmaking, even that of the most care-taking and talented general; it gruesomely exemplifies Wellington’s maxim that ‘to gain your objects you must feed’. Few commanders in ancient or pre-modern times, except those of Roman armies operating at the extremities of the imperial road network or those keeping close to a water-borne supply train, could campaign outside their home territories with a freedom unconstrained by logistic consideration. Even the Romans ran into difficulties when they left their roadheads behind, while large armies might risk starvation within territories they controlled, as Napoleon’s marshals discovered in Spain in 1809–13. A great part of the quartermastering problem derived from the perishability of food in all periods and places before canning and the provision of artificial foodstuffs was developed in the nineteenth century. Parched or milled grain was a staple for soldiers throughout history, and kept them in fighting trim when supplemented by oil, lard, cheese, fish extracts (an essential element of the legionary’s diet), wine, vinegar or beer and perhaps some meat, cured, salted, dried or slaughtered at the point of consumption.12 Even the best quartermaster’s diet, however, was deficient in fresh essentials, so that in times of shortage soldiers, just as much as long-voyaging sailors, were prone to succumb to diseases of malnutrition. Resulting debility bred the epidemics that regularly struck armies massed for battle or during the prolonged operations of a siege.
Military diet was revolutionised in the middle of the nineteenth century by the appearance of canned meat (as early as 1845, though by a process that threatened lead-poisoning to those too dependent upon it, and the cause of many deaths in Franklin’s Polar expedition), evaporated milk (1860), dried milk powder (1855) and margarine, invented under competitive rules set by Napoleon III to find a substitute for butter for his soldiers in the 1860s.13 The northern armies of the American Civil War largely subsisted in the field on the products of the Chicago stockyards, though more often in salt than canned form, while their Confederate enemies had to make do with such unpalatable if traditional staples as maize meal and dried peanuts (‘goober peas’), and starved for meat because supply from the great herds of Texas was denied to them by Union control of the Mississippi River; as early as 1862 a Confederate wrote to his wife, ‘We have lived some days on raw, baked and roasted apples, sometimes on green corn and sometimes nothing.’14 Northern soldiers also experimented with industrially processed dry potatoes and vegetables and a canned mixture of coffee extract, milk and sugar, all unpopular, but luxuries to the hungry rebels who captured any.
Ultimately, however, the Northern armies were better fed than the Southern because their quartermasters controlled the 30,000 miles of American railroad laid by 1860 (longer than that of the rest of the world’s combined) in the ratio of 2.4:1, and continued to lay more in each month of a war in which a prime task of the Union soldiers was to pull up every stretch of Confederate track — irreplaceable from the South’s narrow economic base — they crossed. Railways revolutionised warmaking on land, and the American Civil War was the first to demonstrate that trend. Indeed, it is often now represented as a purely railway war, in which the North’s success in first cutting the rail connections between the populous south-east and the productive south-west at the Mississippi line, and then dividing the south-east’s internal system by seizing the Chattanooga-Atlanta link in 1864, fragmented its territory into zones that lacked economic self-sufficiency, and ensured the ultimate collapse of Southern secession, through want of supply to the fighting armies, even though, ragged and hungry as they were, they could defy the Union on the battlefield to the end.15
That view distorts the relative contributions that combat and logistics make to victory, however. Logistic supremacy on its own rarely wins a campaign against a determined enemy, as McClellan found in the Union’s Peninsula Campaign of 1862, while states economically at the end of their tether, as were both Germany and Japan in 1944–5, may continue to inflict demoralising setbacks on their opponents.16 Nevertheless, Napoleon’s blunt maxim has an overriding truth: victory goes ultimately to the big battalions, and the coming of the railway age ensured that the states which could raise big battalions were at least enabled to transport them speedily, swiftly and at all seasons to a chosen place of deployment. Those nations, the United States apart, lay in the industrialising zones of western and central Europe, where extensive networks, first laid to connect factories with ports in Britain and Belgium, were rapidly extended within France and Prussia and then, more slowly, eastward to bring the agricultural areas of Austria-Hungary and Russia into a common system; between 1825 and 1900, the length of locomotive track within Europe grew from nothing to 175,000 miles; it was carried in tunnels and on bridges, and crossed every one of the continent’s natural barriers, including the Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees. The journey from Rome to Cologne, sixty-seven days’ marching for a legion, by the year 1900 could be completed in less than twenty-four hours.
It was the railways’ east-west axes, not their north-south, that made them militarily significant, however, for it was on the frontiers between France and Germany, Germany and Austria, and Germany and Russia that potential conflict festered. So important to national defence were the railways held by the Prussian, later Imperial German, government that by 1860 half had been tak
en into public ownership, and the whole twenty years later. In 1866 the Prussian Guard Corps was deployed within a week, in twelve trains a day from Berlin to the front with Austria, conclusive evidence of the superiority of rail over road movement in military operations and a stark warning that a state that did not integrate its transport and mobilisation policies must in future risk defeat at the hands of another which did. Prussia defeated Austria in 1866 largely by means of these superior numbers; it was able to hurry to the opening engagement, while its defeat of France in Alsace-Lorraine in 1870 stemmed directly from French mismanagement, admittedly on an inferior network of rail reinforcement and re-supply.17
The lessons of the wars of 1866 and 1870–1 were taken to heart by all European general staffs, not least the German itself, which by 1876 had established its own railway department with authority to oversee the building of new track within the Reich, so as to ensure that military needs would be served in time of war; small rural railway stations at the borders with France and Belgium were equipped with platforms a mile long, so that several troop trains might disgorge whole divisions of men and horses in a single visit. In August 1914 such feats of deployment were readily achieved. Between 1–17 August, Germany, the peacetime strength of whose army stood at 800,000, not only multiplied it six times by mobilisation of reservists, but transported in that period 1,485,000 men to the front with Belgium and France, ready and equipped to fight as soon as detrained. Its enemies matched the achievement. France’s military management of its railways was as good in 1914 as it had been bad in 1870, and French transportation staffs actually showed greater flexibility in transferring needed troops to threatened sectors in the crisis of the battle of the Marne in September than the Germans did. Austrian mobilisation was as efficient as the German; even the Russians, on whose suspected organisational incapacity the German General Staff had counted to win it six trouble-free weeks on the eastern front in which to complete victory in the west, surprised itself, its allies and — very badly — the Germans by the speed with which it concentrated its First and Second Armies in Poland.
The mobilisation of 1914 justified all the efforts the European general staffs had put into the perfection of railway organisation for war in the forty preceding years of peace; enormous armies — 62 French infantry divisions (of 15,000 men each), 87 German, 49 Austrian, 114 Russian — were picked up from their peacetime garrison-places and decanted on to the field of battle, together with several million horses, within a month of the outbreak.18 Once arrived, however, they found that the almost miraculous mobility conferred by rail movement evaporated. Face to face with each other, they were no better able to move or transport their supplies than Roman legions had been; forward of railhead, soldiers had to march, and the only means of provisioning them was by horse-drawn vehicles. Indeed, their lot was worse than that of the well-organised armies of former times, since contemporary artillery created a fire-zone several miles deep within which re-supply by horse was impossible and re-provisioning of the infantry — with ammunition as well as food — could be done only by man-packing.
Of course, the loss of mobility presented itself more urgently in a tactical than a logistic form: in the heart of the fire-zone, infantry could scarcely move at all, and then at catastrophic human cost; not until the introduction of the tank in 1916 were units of men able to manoeuvre once again while in direct contact with the enemy. The logistic dimension nevertheless dogged armies throughout the First World War, not least because the effort to win superiority within the fire-zone by increasing the weight of fire delivered demanded an ever larger trans-shipment of munitions between railhead and guns, which could only be undertaken by horses. As a result, horse fodder became the single largest category of cargo unloaded, for example, at French ports for the British army on the Western Front throughout the period 1914–18.
The problem reappeared in the Second World War, when the German army, deficient in motor transport because the German engineering industry had to devote its resources to manufacturing tanks, aircraft and U-boats, and in any case because it was chronically short of fuel, actually took into service more horses than it had done between 1914 and 1918 — 2,750,000 as opposed to 1,400,000; most died in service, as did the majority of the 3.5 million horses mobilised by the Red Army between 1941 and 1945.19 It was only the American and British armed forces that could tactically re-supply their troops in the line through motor transport alone, and then thanks to the unique productive capacity of the American oil industry and automobile plants. So ample, indeed, were American resources that they sufficed not only to supply the US army and navy with all the trucks and fuel they required but to equip the Red Army also with 395,883 trucks and 2,700,000 tons of gasoline, thus providing the means, as the Soviets themselves freely admitted later, by which it advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin.20
The burden thrown on rail, horse and motor transport during the great wars of the industrial era was infinitely larger than that borne by the supply trains of earlier armies, even those of the gunpowder age. Food, fodder and impedimenta — tents, tools, perhaps some bridging equipment — were all that those of edged-weapon armies were asked to carry, while the munition needs of gunpowder armies were small. But the industry of the mass-production age, which rolled the steel and cast the engine-blocks by which transportation was revolutionised, also spewed out the shells and bullets that mass armies devoured in ever larger quantity. Rates of consumption increased exponentially. Napoleon’s artillery at Waterloo, for example, numbered 246 guns which fired about a hundred rounds each during the battle; in 1870 at Sedan, one of the most noted battles of the nineteenth century, the Prussian army fired 33,134 rounds; in the week before the opening of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, British artillery fired 1,000,000 rounds, a total weight of some 20,000 tons of metal and explosive.21 The demand for quantities of that sort caused a ‘shell crisis’ in 1915, but the famine was staunched by a programme of emergency industrialisation in Britain and the placing of large contracts with factories working at under-capacity elsewhere. British and French industry thereafter never faltered; the French, who had planned before the war for an expenditure of 10,000 75-mm. shells per day, pushed production to 200,000 per day in 1915 and in 1917–18 supplied the arriving American expeditionary force with 10,000,000 shells for its French-built artillery, as well as 4791 of the 6287 aircraft its air corps flew in combat. Germany, though forced to find an artificial substitute for the nitrates denied it by blockade, increased production of explosive from 1000 tons a month in 1914 to 6000 in 1915; even the much despised Russian factory system pushed shell output from 450,000 per month in 1915 to 4,500,000 in 1916, a tenfold increase.22
The capacity and complexity of the European and American arms industries that arose in the nineteenth century had no parallels in former times. Stone Age man had mined and worked flint on a commercial basis, but the manufacture of bronze weapons and armour had always been a craft industry. The coming of iron had led to an expansion of output and even to standardisation: the Roman army maintained a network of arms factories to produce the legionary’s hooped armour, helmets, swords and javelins; the workers’ skills were regarded as so important to the state that in 398 a decree was issued for them to be branded as a deterrent against desertion.23 The barbarian invasions, however, threw arms-making back into private hands, though the art of manufacturing chain-mail was thought rare enough to come under state regulation. Charlemagne ordained in 779 that any merchant caught exporting mail-shirts should forfeit all his property, an order reissued in 805; it has been estimated that the weight of chain-mail worn by his mounted men, when summoned for war, represented, at about 180 tons, the output of several years’ work by the chain-smiths of his empire.
The making of plate armour, an extremely complex metallurgical and fashioning process, concentrated arms manufacture even more narrowly; the best was produced in royal workshops, of which that at Greenwich was the centre in England. However, the apogee of plate armour-making c
oincided with the appearance of gunpowder, which both rendered it obsolete and at the same time created a surge of demand for powder, ball, cannon and personal firearms. Metal cannonballs were at first found so expensive to purchase that masons branched out into the manufacture of stone substitutes. The production of powder was constrained by the intrinsic shortage of potassium nitrate, saltpetre, which — until an industrial process for its manufacture was developed in the nineteenth century — could only be found in places where bacterial action on urine and faeces had deposited it into the earth, usually in caves and stables where livestock was kept; its collection and use were widely taken under state control.24 Firearms, though increasingly subjected to state manufacturing monopoly (as, for example, in Britain at the Tower of London), were made as well in quantity by private gunsmiths, located particularly in the smaller German states. The founding of cannon, however, was from the start seen by kings to be a necessary prerogative of their power, and with the coming of the artillery revolution at the end of the fifteenth century the history of state arsenals really begins.
Cannon-founding was an art first developed by bell-founders, the only craftsmen who understood how to cast molten metal in large shapes (a technique developed in the eighth century), and who worked in the only material at first considered suitable to withstand gunpowder shock, which was bronze. During the sixteenth century, however, experimentation began with cast iron; initially the products were found suitable only for use at sea, since they had to be made thicker and heavier than a bronze equivalent in order to absorb the energy of a given weight of powder. Eventually most siege-guns, as well as ships’ cannons, were iron cast. Experimentation with casting meanwhile produced great improvements in bronze field-artillery. Jean Maritz, a Swiss who entered French state employment in 1734, realised that a better barrel could be produced if it were cast solid, rather than hollow, the bell-casting practice, and then bored out. Boring would make for a better fit between ball and tube, so reduce the charge of powder needed to achieve a given range, and ultimately make for a lighter and more mobile weapon. No boring-machine of the necessary power — derived hydraulically — yet existed, but one was perfected by his son, who in consequence was appointed master of the royal arsenal at Ruelle, and then of all other national gun-foundries in France.25