Engines of War

Home > Other > Engines of War > Page 9
Engines of War Page 9

by Christian Wolmar


  In the South, General Lee, ever innovative, conceived of using them in an offensive way with a rail-mounted gun. At the battle of Savage Station in June 1862, a 32-pounder mounted on a flat car and protected by strong oak planking on the sides and roof, was pushed along by a train. It was, however, of limited use since it was confined to the railroad line, ensuring it had a restricted field of attack. The Federals also showed interest in the idea and an ‘ironclad railway battery car’ was manufactured at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Pittsburgh in August 1862. It was a bizarre beast, a 30-foot-long flat car with a 6in cannon mounted on a revolving platform, and protected on the sides. Haupt was not impressed, and shunted it into an old siding, but the idea gradually took hold and several of these cars were eventually produced and saw active service in the later stages of the war, being hitched to the front of a locomotive to give maximum vision and reach, and pushed along. Armoured trains were, though, a sideshow, as they would, with several notable exceptions, remain.

  The most fundamental lesson of the use of railways in the Civil War was, of course, the sheer logistical advantage which they offered. General Sherman’s calculations, mentioned above, demonstrate that the railroads enabled armies to be bigger and to be supplied from bases much further away than previously. Trains could not only carry far more than mules, but they travelled faster and ensured the supplies remained in a better condition. While Civil War-era steam locomotives were unreliable, they were more dependable than irascible mules that not infrequently lived up to their reputation for stubbornness. Moreover, new locomotives could be built faster than mules could reproduce! The military historian Christopher Gabel suggests that ‘the advent of the steam-powered railroad boosted logistical output by at least a factor of ten’.32

  On the wider question of the precise effect of the railways on warfare, the Civil War raised issues that were rather more complex than they might initially appear and over which military historians still argue. While there is no doubt that the railroads created a highly efficient new form of supply which enabled armies to be equipped for the first time from bases far away, the precise effect of this innovation is difficult to unravel. For example, once the troops disembarked from the trains at the railhead, the logistics were no different from those faced by Napoleon or even the Romans. It was back to mules, horses, carts and marching. As Gabel points out, ‘up to the railhead, supplies and reinforcements travelled on the industrial-age railroad. Beyond the railhead, transportation depended upon muscle power. In other words, it was often easier to move troops and supplies hundreds of miles from the home front to the railhead than it was to move even a few miles beyond it. Like water behind a dam, armies gathered in large, nearly unassailable masses around their railheads.’33 Thus the military leaders in the Civil War learnt that it was often easier to move troops hundreds of miles on rail than it was to get them to the battlefield perhaps just ten or fifteen miles from the railhead. Haupt quickly understood that bunching and crowding at railheads had to be avoided at all costs, but ensuring that obstructive generals used to getting their own way understood this vital point proved, at times, impossible.

  The railways not only brought supplies and troops to the front, but as their importance became increasingly recognized by the military authorities, several battles were fought over attempts to establish control of a particular line. Both sides, as we have seen, embarked on orgies of destruction, targeting crucial lines in enemy territory, leading to ever more sophisticated methods of wrecking railways in an effort to make it as difficult as possible to bring them back into use. The railways determined, therefore, not only the location of several of the main battles, but also their outcome. As with the French troop movements to Italy, the American Civil War not only showed that it was possible to conduct a military operation at some distance from the supply base, provided there was a railway, but also that there had to be a well-organized system of detraining troops and transporting goods away from the railheads, or otherwise the advantage of having a rail line would be lost. The Civil War, which was bloody and prolonged, also showed how the railways allowed a major increase in the scale of warfare, the numbers of men involved and the level of logistical support. Together with the advent of the telegraph, introduced as an adjunct to the railways, the whole speed and pace of war were transformed.

  Certainly the efficiency of the supply lines made possible by the railroads increased the intensity and length of the war. Not only did they allow both sides to build up and maintain far larger troop concentrations than ever before, but they obviated the need for foraging by armies. In much of the Western Theater, there was no agricultural development which would have allowed armies to live off the land in that way and therefore it was only thanks to railroad supply lines that battles could take place there. Thus the railways made it possible for more frequent and intense offensives to be launched during a war, but an unexpected consequence was that the railways made it more difficult for an outright winner to emerge from these battles because losing armies either could be resupplied more easily or they could cut and run. As Gabel points out, ‘an army sitting on a railhead, when threatened with attack by an enemy relying on wagons, often could be reinforced by rail before the muscle-powered attacker could destroy it’.34 Alternatively, when the North got the upper hand, the fact that its armies could amass vast quantities of supplies and troops meant, quite possibly, a swifter end to the war than might otherwise have been the case.

  Finally, there is the even wider question of whether the Civil War would have occurred at all, or with the same result, had it not been for the railroads. The railway historian Slason Thompson argued that ‘it is not impossible that [secession] might have succeeded in 1850 when over 40 per cent of the nation’s inhabitants formed a truly “solid” South and the opposition 60 per cent was scattered from Skowhegan, Maine to the Mississippi with no completed means of transportation at either end’.35 While such suggestions may be speculative, there is real substance to the fact that the Civil War was a product of railway technology. Given that, there is a juicy irony. While in the Civil War the railroads exacerbated the scale, length and intensity of the war, within less than a decade they would be feted for bringing the nation together. The start of the construction of the transcontinental line to join the two coasts had been delayed by the outbreak of the war, but got under way in 1863 in the west while the conflict was still raging and two years later in the east when it ended. The skills developed by the United States Military Railroads in building new railroads and quickly rebuilding destroyed ones helped ensure the rapid completion of the transcontinental. After the war many of the civil engineers and lower-level engineering employees who had worked for the Union railroads joined the Union and Central Pacific railroad companies and were responsible for the erection of those huge timber trestles that were thrown across every gap from ravines in Nebraska to deep chasms in the Rockies. What Lincoln had termed ‘beanpoles and cornstalks’ had a large role in ensuring the two coasts linked up. When the line was completed in 1869, the iron road which had exacerbated conflict soon became etched in the public consciousness as the iron sinews that bind the nation together. And it is that peaceful aspect of the railways which lives on in popular memory today. However, all too soon, railways in Europe would be harnessed for bellicose purposes. Despite the fact that several military officials from Europe had crossed the Atlantic to observe the war, many of these lessons were not taken on board by the military, who had to relearn them in numerous conflicts leading up to the First World War.

  FOUR

  LESSONS NOT LEARNT

  The early years of the second half of the nineteenth century saw a series of three major wars in central Europe, culminating in the Franco-Prussian War, in which the railways played an increasingly significant role. Prussia, which was in the vanguard of a new German nationalism and would be the prime mover of unification in 1871, was involved in all of them and would use the railways to particularly good effect.

 
The first of these conflicts, the German-Danish1 War, which broke out in 1864 while the American Civil War was still raging, was fought in such a limited area and on such a small scale that the railways played little part, though that was partly the result of a failure by the Danish to understand their potential. The war was triggered by a foolhardy Danish attempt to integrate the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein2 in northern Germany more fully into Denmark, in breach of previous treaties and against the wishes of its big southern neighbour. The Prussians made immediate use of the railway when, in the space of just six days in January 1864, they quickly despatched by rail an infantry division comprising 15,000 men and 4,600 horses – around a third of the Prussian forces deployed in the war – from Minden in North Rhine-Westphalia to the outskirts of Hamburg 175 miles away. Later, considerable amounts of supplies were rushed up north using the railway from Hamburg but otherwise the railway played little part in the conflict. Even these modest movements, however, showed that congestion and chaos could easily develop at railheads if proper arrangements were not made for unloading and onward transportation of supplies. During this short war, the Prussians made several attempts to speed up the process of taking off supplies from trains by using mobile unloading ramps but these experiments met with little success, and the perennial problem of failing to clear railheads quickly of both troops and supplies was never adequately addressed in the two subsequent Prussian wars. A French military attaché, partipris of course but nevertheless worth quoting, noted that the mobilization by the Prussian and Austrian allies ‘was less impressive’ than the Italian campaign seven years earlier when Napoleon sent his troops to Lombardy.

  The result of the German-Danish War was never in doubt, as Prussia and Austria – allies this time but soon to be enemies – united with far greater forces to teach the small Scandinavian monarchy a lesson. As soon as the Prussian President, Otto von Bismarck, announced his intention to occupy Holstein, the Danes gave it up and retreated to Schleswig, hoping to hold off the Prussian-Austrian army long enough for the Great Powers – Russia, France, Great Britain – to intervene. It was a miscalculation as none of them wanted to become involved despite fears of the growing strength of the German Confederation, leaving the Danes to fight on their own. The Danes made a further retreat in early February 1864, abandoning the Danevirke, an ancient earth fortification dotted with fortresses that proved impossible to defend with the forces available. Although Schleswig-Holstein was not well served with railways, this retreat from the Danevirke would have been far easier and resulted in fewer casualties had they used the line running up to Flensburg, twenty-one miles away, a major town with a population sympathetic to the Danes. Instead, the retreat, which began at night in order not to alert the enemy, has been likened to Bonaparte’s march from Moscow half a century previously as it was carried out in terrible conditions, with many men succumbing to the cold. Instead of a journey of a couple of hours on the train, the men marched for up to eighteen hours fighting rearguard actions against the enemy with the loss of more than 600 men killed or captured.

  There is much conjecture among historians as to why the railway was not used. One possibility is that the departure of the train, which was in steam and waiting at the railhead near the Danevirke, would have caused too much noise, alerting the enemy to the retreat. Another is that the train crew, like many local people, were of German ethnic origin and therefore unlikely to help evacuate the Danes. The most likely, though, seems to be that the Danish did not understand the value of the railway for logistics, even though retreating by road was much slower and entailed the abandonment of sixty pieces of artillery which could then be used against them.

  After the debacle of the Danevirke retreat, it was only a matter of time before the Danes, despite enjoying some success at sea, were defeated and, following various truces and negotiations, the outcome of the war was never in question. Under the Treaty of Vienna signed at the end of October 1864, the Danes ceded Schleswig-Holstein to the Prussians and Austrians, costing Denmark 40 per cent of its land mass and population. It is unlikely that the Danes’ failure to take advantage of the railway in their retreat made any difference to the result of the war, but using it might have saved some lives.

  The second of these Prussian wars set the two allies in the Danish war against each other over its spoils, Schleswig-Holstein, and was on a much larger scale. Like the American Civil War which had just ended, this was a civil war setting the North against the South, but there the similarity ended. There was none of the passion raised by the American Civil War as the conflict was in effect a manoeuvre by Bismarck to force the Habsburgs, who ruled Austria, to concede the leadership of the German Confederation to the Hohenzollerns, who ruled Prussia. And rather than lasting four years like the American Civil War, it was all over in a mere seven weeks with just a single major, and decisive, battle, at Königgrätz.

  The railways were crucial to the planning of the war and the deployment of the troops to the front line. Prussia had sent observers to the American Civil War, and detailed information about Haupt’s successful organization of the railways had percolated across the Atlantic thanks to a German translation of General McCallum’s war memoirs, which contained a detailed account of the role of the railways in that conflict. The Prussian Army chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke (the elder Moltke), widely recognized as ‘the greatest military organizer of the nineteenth century after Napoleon’,3 had long been aware of the railways’ importance in war. He had shown a ‘precocious interest in railways’,4 even though his use of them eventually proved not always as effective as this preoccupation with the iron road might have suggested. As early as 1843 he had written an article extolling the virtues of the railways as a weapon of armed conflict: ‘Every new railway development is a military benefit, and for national defence it is far more profitable to spend a few million on completing our railways than on new fortresses.’5

  Consequently, the Prussians began to organize their railways systematically to prepare for the advent of war. They planned to create a dedicated section based closely on Haupt’s idea of having a separate corps of men to build – and, importantly, destroy – railways. This was only to be established in the event of war breaking out, but as soon as the conflict began early in the summer of 1866, a railway section (Feldeisenbahnabteilung) was set up for each of the three Prussian armies,6 composed of a mix of military and civilian personnel, a radical innovation for the age. The military members were drafted in from regiments of engineers, while the Prussian State Railway supplied qualified men able to operate and maintain the railway. The three Prussian railway section units were mobilized as soon as war broke out and each had its own repair train, with a locomotive at each end. In a complex and bizarre procedure, as the train ran slowly down the track it was preceded by a hand trolley propelled by four men and carrying an officer and a bugler. When an obstruction was discovered, the bugler would sound the alarm and the train brought up to undertake repairs. If the enemy started attacking, the train could be hauled clear by the locomotive at the rear.

  The very nature of the Prussians’ military strategy relied on successful exploitation of the railways. Moltke’s appointment had coincided with the reform of the conscription system to ensure it covered a far greater proportion of the male population than previously and included reservists who could be called up with little notice. The Prussian Army was proclaimed to be ‘the nation armed’ and was therefore dependent on rapid mobilization from all around the country, which was only made possible by the effective use of the telegraph and the railways. According to van Creveld, the historian of war logistics, during the campaign against Austria, ‘the railway network dictated not merely the pace of Prussia’s strategic deployment but also its form’. 7

  Much has been made of Moltke’s genius in organizing the mobilization of his forces, but the efficient bringing together of an army of nearly 200,000 men and 55,000 horses to confront the Austrians on the Bohemian battleground was more down to
luck and the existence of sufficient railway lines rather than careful planning. His use of the five railways was even given a name, ‘the strategy of external lines’, to describe a tactic that was subsequently employed in both 1870 and 1914. While it appeared very clever and carefully planned, the scheme was in reality born of necessity and hastily cobbled together as war loomed. The Prussians had originally intended to concentrate their forces around the border town of Görlitz in Saxony but they mobilized late, even though the war had been long planned by Bismarck, and consequently the Prussians had to make use of all five lines leading to their frontier, with the result that their forces were deployed on a 200-mile-wide arc. There is no doubt that the deployment was efficient and successful. The troops and their horses were brought to the front in just twenty-one days on these five railways, and the speed of mobilization undoubtedly contributed to the Prussian victory. Moltke boasted that Prussia had the advantage of being able to transport the army on these five lines, mobilizing them twice as quickly as it would take Austria, which had only one line.

  Moltke, like most successful military leaders, was lucky. If he had been forced to continue using the railways for a prolonged conflict his army would have found itself desperately short of supplies as the lessons of the supply difficulties during the Danish conflict had not been learnt and the facilities were inadequate. To compound the difficulties, Moltke had failed to ensure that his rail expert, Count Herman von Wartensleben, stayed in Berlin to sort out the inevitable mess and instead took him to the front. This deprived the system of a directing mind, allowing the local quartermasters, who had no strategic view of the situation, to rush in excessive amounts of supplies to the front line irrespective of whether the railheads could handle them or not. The resulting blockages were exacerbated by the shortage of rolling stock, which was caused by empty wagons not being returned but used for storage. Despite being aware of the importance of the railways, Moltke appears to have been far too relaxed about the whole process. According to van Creveld, during the deployment of the troops, ‘it is said that an officer visiting Moltke during this period found him lying on a sofa and reading a book’, which was reportedly a popular novel of the day, Lady Audley’s Secret, an early, rather racy, detective novel.

 

‹ Prev