Within eighteen months the Union had organised its railways on an integrated war footing, despite the railroad companies’ objections – it took the threat of building an entirely new competing line between New York and Washington to persuade the existing lines to provide a through service. In peacetime the railroads, the country’s biggest industry, had employed its best and brightest executives, and these naturally gravitated to the top of the Union government.
Thomas A. Scott, the Assistant Secretary of War, had been the general superintendent of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad – a background which led him to create a separate corps to build and to run the railroads. In April 1862 he chose Daniel C. McCallum, a Scottish immigrant, poet and architect, and general superintendent of the rival Erie Railroad, to take control of the Union’s railroads, first on the eastern front and then, for the last year of the war, over the entire country. Crucially, McCallum was given full authority over the generals whose troops and supplies he was transporting. By contrast in the South ‘the so-called director of railroad transportation was pretty much a nullity’, wrote Allan Nevins in The War for the Union.
For a time McCallum was overshadowed by the extraordinary Herman Haupt, the greatest single talent ever employed on military railroads. Haupt was a West Point graduate, a professor of mathematics and engineering, the author of a standard work on The General Theory of Bridge Construction, and, even more relevantly, a friend of Scott’s. He was originally employed only to repair bridges, but, for a turbulent and creative year until he resigned in a huff, he also built railroads. Haupt was a towering, dominating presence – ‘Mac took the office and I took the field,’ he said grandiloquently – with a genius for problem solving in the best American tradition.
In the words of Thomas Weber,4 ‘Haupt took pleasure in surmounting difficulties and was delighted to find a badly tangled situation which he could clear up with his magic touch … this humourless man was responsible for developing not only the general principles of railway supply operation, but also detailed methods of construction and destruction of railroad equipment. Moreover he not only built, he organised. On one line, on which three or four trains a day had taken five hours to cover thirty miles, he organised five daily convoys each way, each consisting of five or six trains.’ It was said that the specially-equipped ambulance trains he organised were worth an extra 100,000 men to the Union armies.
The strains were appalling. In McCallum’s words, ‘It was by no means unusual for men to be out with their trains from five to ten days, without sleep, except what could be snatched upon their engines and cars while the same were standing to be unloaded, with but scanty food, or perhaps no food at all, for days together, while continually occupied to keep each faculty strained to its upmost.’
Haupt – and McCallum’s – most spectacular achievements, though, lay in the railroads they built. By the end of the war the Unionists had built 2,165 miles of military railroads. They also learnt how to rebuild with astonishing speed the bridges and track destroyed by the roving Confederate cavalry. Haupt’s fame was made by one such incident, when he rebuilt a 400-foot bridge 80 feet above the River Potomac in nine days, in bad weather, without enough men or equipment. The feat inspired Lincoln’s famous remark to his cabinet, ‘That man Haupt has built a bridge across Potomac Creek … over which loaded trains are running every hour, and, upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.’
Haupt left a tradition of such achievements behind him. After he had resigned, a 780-foot bridge over the Chatahoocee River was rebuilt in four and a half days. According to the chief engineer, ‘The work of reconstruction commenced while the old bridge was still burning, and was somewhat delayed because the iron rods were so hot that the men could not handle them to remove the wreck.’ The Union forces’ legendary powers of reconstruction inspired the famous cry of despair from a Confederate soldier asked to help blow up a tunnel: ‘There isn’t any use ‘cause Sherman carries ‘long duplicates of all tunnels.’
Sherman was Haupt’s spiritual successor. In Weber’s words, ‘It was Haupt, more than any other single man, who laid down the principles and practices which enabled Sherman to carry through his brilliant campaigns in the South in the last two years of the war,’ campaigns in which Sherman proved himself the supreme railway general, with a unique understanding of their possibilities – and their limitations.
Sherman was no neophyte. In 1849, as a lieutenant, he had been in charge of protecting the surveyors pioneering a railroad route across the Rockies. During the Civil War he relied greatly on Lewis Parsons, McCallum’s deputy and successor, a regular army quartermaster with a unique understanding of the potential capacities available if both rail and river were used for mass transport. Parsons had shown his ability before Sherman’s arrival on the western front when he had conveyed 10,000 men from central Kentucky in a mere four days to reinforce Grant at Vicksburg, an unprecedented demonstration of the railways’ capacity to influence a distant operation.
Railways, more specifically the line round the southern end of the Appalachian mountains from Chatanooga to Atlanta, were the key weapon in Sherman’s indirect approach to the conquest of the South; a strategy so revolutionary that it was properly analysed only sixty years later when Basil Liddell Hart published his book Sherman, soldier, realist, American.
In the summer of 1864, while the main Union army was bogged down in Virginia, Sherman, backed by his superior, General Grant, who understood railway warfare almost as well as he did, first swept along the tracks to Atlanta before swinging north to wreak havoc behind the lines of the South’s army. ‘The Atlanta campaign,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘would surely have been impossible without the use of the railroads from Chatanooga to Atlanta … that single stem of railroad supplied an army of 100,000 men and 35,000 horses for the period of 196 days.’
Sherman also understood the railways’ limitations. As Liddell Hart put it, ‘Sherman was a master strategist because he was a born quartermaster … he showed more joy of a small increase in car-loads than over a large reinforcement of troops.’ He was fully aware that General Maclellan had had to use half of his 20,000 men in Virginia to guard the Baltimore & Ohio. He abandoned the railroad line for his famous march through Georgia because he understood the superiority of river transport in hostile territory: ‘They can’t stop the Tennessee River and each boat can make its own game.’ By contrast any ‘railroad running through a country where every house is a nest of secret, bitter enemies’ would inevitably suffer – ‘bridges and watertanks burned, trains fired into, track torn up … engines run off and badly damaged’.
The American Civil War ended just as the great Helmuth von Moltke became Chief of the Prussian Great General Staff. He was a career soldier with a strong belief in railways. He had invested his life savings in them, and was a director of one of the many German railway companies whose promoters looked for well-placed friends, supporters and directors in the closed ranks of the Prussian aristocracy. Moltke had a clear idea of railways’ importance. Like many other Germans, he hoped, in Dennis Showalter’s words, ‘that the industrial, economic and technical progress made possible by the railways would bring Germany together’. As far as it was necessary he also hoped to shape the Prussian railway system to military purposes. Above all, as he told the Reichstag, ‘Our Great General Staff is so much persuaded of the advantages to be derived from obtaining the initiative at the outset of war that it prefers to construct railways rather than forts.’
Like most European observers, Moltke had dismissed the American Civil War as a war conducted by amateurs. Although he had McCallum’s reports translated into German, he does not seem to have absorbed the lessons they contained. For this much-vaunted master of the use of railways in warfare did not understand their limitations as well as Sherman, and had none of McCallum’s capacity for organising lengthy supply lines.
Moltke shared Napoleon’s obsession with time and speed, an obsession which naturally
led him to appreciate the railways’ potential. To him, wrote Dennis Showalter, ‘Victory in war was not merely a function of numbers; it depended at least as much on the time needed to bring these numbers into action … railways were thus an enormous help in buying time for a state without significant natural frontiers, yet surrounded by potential enemies’ – the French to the West, the Russians and Austrians to the east and south.
A wrecked German ammunition train, destroyed by shell fire in World War I
He faced one basic problem: Germany’s railways were owned by a dozen different companies, and until 1872 he could not rely on any central controlling mechanism. But this diversity could be an advantage. In the 1866 campaign against the Austrians he could claim that, ‘We have the inestimable advantage of being able to carry our field army of 285,000 men over five railway lines, and of virtually concentrating them in five days on the frontiers of Saxony and Bohemia. Austria has only one line of rail, and it will take her forty-five days to assemble 210,000 men.’5
The railways enabled him to disperse his troops in three widely-separated armies along the four-hundred-mile Prussian frontier with Bohemia. In doing so, as Martin van Crefeld has pointed out, Moltke was making a virtue out of a necessity. He had to use all five lines because the Prussians had started mobilising well after the Austrians. Not surprisingly, the Kaiser was worried that the Austrians could, in theory, attack any one of the armies separately. In the end Moltke was able to bring overwhelming force to bear at the crucial point and gain a correspondingly overwhelming victory. Nevertheless he and his staff clearly expected too much from the railways. In Denis Showalter’s words, they were regarded ‘as a sort of magic carpet. Most of the regimental bakers, for example, were retained at the depots in order to make maximum use of the permanent facilities there. As a result inedible loaves of bread arrived in the theatre of war from as far afield as Cologne.’
The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 has often been hailed as a masterpiece of railway warfare. In fact it demonstrated the same limitations as the war with the Austrians four years earlier. After the 1866 campaign Moltke had instituted a special lines of communication department within the General Staff, to enable mobilisation to be centralised and thus speeded up. It was. Before 1870 individual corps had assembled at their headquarters, then separated into trainloads before being transported to the concentration areas at the frontier. In 1870 they assembled only once, at the frontier. Using all six railway lines at his disposal he could have 360,000 men available in three weeks, 430,000 in four. His success in transporting the troops to the frontier, and the subsequent crushing German triumph, created the legend that railways were indeed a magic carpet which could waft troops to victory. This was far from the truth. The war certainly proved that they were an incomparable means of mobilising the largest of armies at the most distant of frontiers: but that was most definitely that.
The Prussian General Staff may have been better prepared for war than the French, but their railways were not. French trains were faster, their networks better co-ordinated, more of their lines double-tracked, their stations were bigger, they had more rolling-stock. Finally, French organisation was sufficiently superior to enable them to run half as many trains again with the same facilities as the Prussians. Moreover – and this is the very reverse of the myth – their network was more suited to the war than the Prussian. Although most French railways led to Paris, there was amply sufficient mileage along their Eastern frontier to enable the French to mobilise at least as fast as their enemies.
Special narrow gauge railway transports British troops towards the front line.
The French failure was not logistical but political. In the late 1860s the Emperor Napoleon III was growing steadily more unpopular. ‘Because of the fear of revolution,’ observes William McElwee, in The Art of War, ‘regiments were normally quartered in garrisons as far removed as possible from their depots and recruiting areas lest the troops be contaminated by local political feeling. The double journey which every regiment had to make, first to the depot to embody reserves and draw war equipment and then to the Concentration Area, placed an intolerable burden on an already overstrained railway system … cross-country journeys were often virtually impossible, and troops and material piled up in indescribable congestion and confusion in the Paris stations and at the large junctions.’
As a result the troops arrived at the front usually without supplies, often without their officers, and, more often than not, drunk and disorderly from the liquid refreshment required to alleviate their long ordeal by train. When on 6th August, 1870, the twenty-third day after mobilisation, the French army fought its first defensive battles at Spliechen and Worth it numbered only 270,000 men against 462,000 German. Half the reserves were not yet in: and the whole army lacked most of its equipment and supplies.
After delivering troops to the frontiers, the railways played only a minor, supporting role in the famous, crushing German victory, and during the fighting after the main campaign they proved more nuisance than they were worth. The German railway staffs, drawn from a dozen different systems, worked badly together and the Prussians still lacked a central supply organisation, so contractors simply pushed as many supplies forward as possible, cruelly exposing the army’s inability to organise distribution from the railheads. The army had to live off the (fortunately rich) land, and during the siege of Paris in the winter of 1870–71 the Prussians had to suspend most military operations for two months to look for provisions.
During the campaign itself the destruction of a single viaduct at Fontenoy-sur-Moselle, which carried all the German military traffic, could have halted the Prussian advance if it had happened a month earlier – a month during which the Germans had captured Mezières, which provided them with an alternative route. During the winter of 1870–71 French saboteurs ensured that a whole army corps had to be employed guarding the lines, and the Prussians had to build a loop line round a tunnel at Nanteuil-sur-Marne when six mines exploded by francs-tireurs filled it with 4,000 cubic yards of sand.
After 1870 railways proved a tarnished weapon. In their campaign against the Turks in 1876 the Russians had forgotten that their own gauge was wider than that used on the winding lines in the Ottoman Empire. It took them ten weeks of painful loading, offloading and reloading to transport their army over 425 miles of twisting and winding railway, twice the time it would have taken the soldiers to march directly the 250 miles between their frontier and their destination.
Twenty years later General Kitchener relied on railways in his campaign against the Mahdi in the Sudan. He – or rather his chief engineer, Percy Girouard – had shown that lines could be built at high speed in an emergency, even through the desert, provided only that there was no enemy interference. But one young war correspondent, had understood the railways’ potential problems. ‘Victory,’ wrote Winston Churchill, ‘is the beautiful, bright-coloured flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed. Yet even the military student, in his zeal to master the fascinating combinations of the actual combat, often forgets the far more intricate complications of supply.’
Kitchener’s great rival, Lord Roberts, had not grasped the lesson which the Prussians ought to have learnt in 1870–1871, that the ‘intricate complications of supply’ included the ease with which saboteurs can force a theoretically superior, theoretically triumphant army onto the defensive. In the Boer War of 1899–1902 railways enabled the British to pursue their opponents far into the interior, but, in the words of Thomas Pakenham,6 ‘the troops still went hungry when they stepped far from the railway: and the repairs to the railway could not keep up with the pace of an ox.’ Lord Roberts had ridiculed the idea of building an additional railway line to increase the capacity on the three hundred miles of single-track, narrow-gauge railway on which the British troops in the Orange Free State relied for all their supplies. The Boers naturally exploited the British weakness with a special Irish Brigade dedicated to wrecking the line – and
ensuring that much of the army’s strength was dissipated in manning hundreds of hot, lonely, often ineffective blockhouses guarding it.
No General Staff was less prepared than the Russian, its eastern army entirely dependent on the Trans-Siberian railway. When war broke out against the Japanese in 1904 the line consisted of 5,000 miles of single-track railway with two crucial gaps, one where a tunnel was incomplete, the other round Lake Baikal where the line was a mere sketch on the drawing-board.* It took their troops under General Kuropatkin six weeks to reach the Sea of Japan – weeks longer than the sea voyage from Russia’s Black Sea ports. The delay was a godsend to the Japanese, who emphasised Russian problems by cutting the railway line behind the wretched general.
The Russians had not fully learnt the lessons of railway vulnerability in 1904. Ten years later the Prussians seemed determined to ignore the equally obvious problem of railway inflexibility. In 1870 their timetable system had worked perfectly. As Michael Howard puts it in The Franco-Prussian War: ‘Railway timetables were drawn up, so that every unit knew the exact day and hour that it would leave its barracks and reach its concentration area. Mobilisation and deployment would follow one another in a single smooth and exactly calculated operation.’ In 1914 mobilisation had become deployment, eliminating the historic interval between the two, used by diplomats through the ages as a breathing-space to make one last effort for peace. This didn’t matter in 1870, but legend has it that the compression proved fatal in 1914 when the system had been refined to be able to operate on an even larger scale. The demands on the system, and the men operating it, were enormous – hence the saying ‘The best brains produced by the War College went into the railway section and ended up in lunatic asylums.’
The World the Railways Made Page 38