Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  The control of Vietnam’s railways was crucial to the wider battle between the Western and Communist forces. According to Wohl, writing at the time of the engagement, ‘the United Nations long range strategy in this struggle is to reopen the routes from the sea into the interior, while the communist aim is to extend their land transportation system into Southeast Asia to the Gulf of Siam and the Bay of Bengal. Both the United Nations and the communist strategies hinge upon control of the Vietnam railroads.’

  Soon, though, it was all over for the French. They could not retain their tenuous supply line on the railway and, with the war becoming increasingly unpopular at home, they left after being decisively defeated at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the remarkable battle where the guerrilla army of the Viet Minh came out of the jungle to triumph over the French. The Saigon-Hanoi railway was left in a sorry state, with huge sections of line missing, removed by the Viet Minh to build lines in the territory they occupied. When the Americans started arriving in force in the early 1960s in support of the pro-West South Vietnamese regime against the Viet Cong 12 insurgents, they immediately recognized the importance of the line and funded the reconstruction of tracks on the 600-mile section between Saigon and Hué, close to the 17th Parallel, the border between North and South. However, it proved impossible to provide a reliable service because of the constant attacks by Viet Cong forces – no fewer than 800 between 1961 and 1964 alone – and soon large sections of the track had to be abandoned. It meant that road transport, ever vulnerable to ambush in the Vietnamese countryside, became the principal line of communication, along with expensive helicopters, for the American war effort. Once the war escalated, the Americans frequently targeted the northern section of the main line between Hanoi and the border under Communist control, but again many sections remained in use thanks to rapid repair. However, the railways were a secondary route as most supplies were sent along the famous Ho Chi Minh trail, a jungle pathway that was gradually expanded into a road able to take the trucks supplied by the Russians and Chinese. By the end of the war, the railway on both sides of the border was virtually derelict, requiring a massive effort to bring it back into use involving reconstructing more than 1,300 bridges and twenty-seven tunnels. With almost limitless supplies of labour available, this huge task was carried out remarkably quickly and the first train on the hugely symbolic ‘Reunification Express’ ran on the final day of 1976, just twenty months after the Americans had suffered the humiliation of fleeing their embassy in Saigon.

  Between the Korean and Vietnamese wars, India and Pakistan had briefly been at each other’s throats when Bangladesh separated off from Pakistan in 1971, and railways were inevitably involved. The Indians, rather suspiciously, had completed a railway crossing over the Ganges at Farakka a month before the outbreak of the war, eliminating a bottleneck on the route between India and what would become Bangladesh. According to John Westwood, a senior railway official said that without the crossing ‘it would have been well-nigh impossible to have moved the necessary troops and supplies’.13 When the Indian Army invaded Bangladesh, railway personnel quickly repaired damaged routes, including laying a 25-mile line through to the town of Jessore in just ten days. While this brief war showed that railways were still important for the military in this type of conflict which involved substantial movement of troops, it was one of the last times that the logistics of war were dependent on them.

  Armoured trains, too, were still used long after it may have been considered that sophisticated aerial weaponry would have made them redundant. In the post-war period, the Russians retained their long-standing interest in these behemoths. In the 1960s, they deployed sophisticated versions of armoured trains along the Chinese border to deter any possible attack during a period of tension between the two biggest Communist nations. They were also used by the Russian military in various campaigns against separatist insurgents, notably in 1990 against Azeri nationalists and in both Chechen wars of the 1990s and early 2000s. Remarkably, the Russian government, in February 2010, announced that it intended to put two armoured trains back in service in order to fight insurgents in the North Caucasus. This was in response to a series of terrorist attacks against railways in Russia mostly by Chechen or other separatist groups.

  The Russians, too, were involved in the development of mobile rail-based missile launchers, which can be seen to be a sophisticated version of an armoured train. There was a brief flourish of interest in this concept by both America and Russia towards the end of the Cold War, when the two superpowers both began to work on railway-based intercontinental ballistic missiles mounted on armoured trains, which had the obvious advantage of mobility over the silos used for most of these weapons. The Russians spent the 1970s developing a highly sophisticated system with missiles that were capable of being launched from both silos and trains. After considerable difficulties, and the scrapping of several prototype models, a formidable rail-based weapon was produced. In 1987, the Soviets deployed launchers for the SS-24 missile, which were nuclear-armed rockets with a payload equivalent to more than 550,000 tonnes of TNT and capable of reaching the US with their range of 6,000 miles. Apparently only one test missile was ever fired from a rail-based launcher and, according to Russian news sources, it reached its target in Kamchatka, in eastern Russia, without the US spy satellites being able to ascertain the whereabouts of the train from which it had been launched.

  The trains were unremarkable in appearance as each one consisted only of three missile launch cars, two or three diesel locomotives, an electrical power generating car, a command and control car, and two support and accommodation cars, and consequently spy satellites could not distinguish them from ordinary freight traffic. Most of the time, the rail launchers were kept in special sidings, but they were able to start rolling at a moment’s notice and could cover up to 600 miles per day, making detection virtually impossible. They were capable of travelling on most of the Soviet rail network, but would not have been capable of firing on sections, like much of the Trans-Siberian, which were electrified with overhead wires.

  Even with access to information released since the end of the Cold War, it is somewhat unclear how many trains were ever built. There were thirty-five missiles and trains were designed to carry up to three each, implying that around a dozen were deployed. The trains were eventually scrapped in favour of road- or silo-based systems in 2005, to the surprise of some Russian military commentators such as Yury Zaitsev, a research adviser at the Russian Academy of Engineering Sciences, who felt that rail offered undoubted advantages because road-based launchers, capable of only very slow movement, were ‘a sitting duck’ while ‘a rail network, on the other hand, can ensure missile systems’ stealthy movement. When the Americans considered building a rail-based missile system based on the Russian model, they concluded that ‘there was only a 10 per cent probability of 150 Satan missiles hitting 25 rail missile complexes (twice the number Russia had at the time) spread on a railroad network of 75,000 miles’.14 This demonstrated the effectiveness of this type of system and therefore Zaitsev concluded that it could only be the high cost of maintenance which caused the Russians to scrap rail-based missiles.

  In contrast, the US efforts to put missiles on trains did not get very far, although there were two abortive schemes. The idea of installing missiles on trains was first mooted in the US in 1959 and a test was carried out to assess whether the vibrations on the tracks would affect the mechanism. This seems to have been successful and a plan was announced for thirty trains, each with three Minuteman missiles, but the scheme was scrapped on the grounds of cost by the incoming administration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. A similar scheme was revived in December 1986, when President Ronald Reagan announced that there was to be a ‘rail garrison’ system for basing part of the so-called Peacekeeper Intercontinental Ballistic Missile force. In order to make the hundred-strong missile system less vulnerable to attack, half the missiles were to be mounted on a set of twenty-five trains, which would e
ach have two locomotives, two security cars, two missile launch cars, a control car, a fuel car and a maintenance car. The trains were to be parked in shelters located on air force bases throughout the continental United States but would be ever ready to be dispersed in the event of an attack. The project was developed for five years but scrapped in 1991 before deployment as Cold War tensions eased.

  In the 1980s, Britain also decided on a mobile missile launch system for its nuclear warheads but instead of basing it on the railways, deployed its Trident nuclear missiles on tremendously expensive submarines, on the grounds that the UK was rather too small to hide rail-based launchers and that, in any case, turning the country into the equivalent of a huge aircraft carrier would have been unacceptable to the British public. However, the British government did request the state-owned British Railways to make civil defence preparations for nuclear war in the mid-1950s. Old carriages, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, were fitted with modern communications equipment to act as mobile emergency control offices and communication centres for government officials in the event of a nuclear war. These works were carried out in secret but later it emerged that at least four of these trains had been formed in 1962, following the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were moved around between half a dozen secret locations, including Faversham, Tunbridge Wells, Derby and York, but appear to have been returned to British Rail in the early 1980s and at least three survive as passenger coaches on preserved lines.

  Missile trains were the swansong of the military use of railways. There is the odd exception, with armoured trains still being deployed in Russia, which is forever beset with insurgents, and in North Korea, where Kim Jong-il travels around his country in his personal one, but that is more a neat commentary on just how much the Dear Leader trusts his fellow countryfolk rather than on the effectiveness of such use of the railways. Military equipment and tanks are occasionally carried on railways, and troops may still sometimes be moved around on trains, but in truth railways will never again be fundamental to the way conflicts are fought. General Van Fleet may have been wrong when he wrote in the late 1950s: ‘No form or combination of forms of transport appears likely to challenge the key place of railroads in the military logistical picture… military planners know they must look to railroads for the great bulk of the military requirement for transport in the future as in the past.’ However, that merely illustrates the military’s perennial mistake of forever fighting the last war when predicting the needs for the next one. Van Fleet was not alone in his mistake.

  Just as the military took so long to exploit fully the value of the railways, they were also slow to realize when the rules of the game had changed completely. Railways did play a crucial part in what was known as TTW (transition to war) planning by both NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the Cold War. Rail remained integral to the preparations of both sides in the wargame exercises of the Cold War when NATO actively prepared for an invasion of Europe by the Soviet Union. For example, the dimension of NATO tanks was determined by their ability to be transported on railways, which was the only way to move them rapidly over long distances and preserve their battleworthiness prior to fighting. And rail was used by the Russians to transport tanks during the Hungarian and Czech crises of 1956 and 1968 respectively.

  Yet, the age of the railway war was coming to an end and, inevitably, military leaders began to understand that a different form of warfare was becoming necessary because of technological developments in both weaponry and transport. Warfare is now mostly conducted through the use of sophisticated weaponry that can be targeted with unerring accuracy, even if it goes wrong on occasion and wipes out innocent wedding guests or Chinese embassy officials. Large-scale set-piece warfare involving massive armies of hundreds of thousands of men on both sides has become impossible with the development of ever more sophisticated aerial weaponry, delivered both by aircraft and by missile launchers. The trenches of the Somme would today be wiped out by a few well-aimed rockets probably fired from drones at no cost of life to the side dominating the air. Nothing better illustrates the changing nature of warfare than the death toll in the Afghan war which, after many years, still amounts to far fewer than the number killed in just one day in a typical First World War battle. With far smaller armies being deployed, there is no longer any need for railways to transport troops and, in any case, transport methods have greatly improved. Huge troop-carrying aircraft can ferry soldiers around the world with remarkable speed and once in the war zone, with tarred roads now almost universal, they can be carried long distances in modern trucks or, in unsafe areas, flown in by helicopter. The other type of modern war, the guerrilla insurgency, offers little role for the railways apart from, as we have seen, the deployment of the occasional armoured train, but even then only if the insurgents do not have access to anti-tank weaponry. Such wars have, however, proved very destructive to railways in various places. Railways are ultimately easy to sabotage and therefore are an obvious target for insurgents. In parts of the world, notably in African countries such as the Congo and Angola, where the government forces are not strong enough to prevent these attacks, whole railway systems have been put out of commission more or less permanently by warfare.

  It was not happenstance that railways changed the nature of war. They were tailor-made for it. To ensure safety and to operate efficiently to a timetable, railways need military discipline. Right from the beginning, they attracted military personnel and were run like private armies, with uniforms and a clear distinction between officers and men. They were the first large corporations and consequently developed their own police forces. Their rules and regulations became enshrined in law. In a practical sense, too, they were eminently suitable for military use. They maintained and renewed their own equipment, from engine sheds and stations, to locomotives and the track. They were familiar with the challenge of repairing damage from accidents and natural disasters promptly, and they employed permanent maintenance teams who could easily be called upon to respond to military attacks. They were flexible, able to adapt by operating on alternative routes or even creating by-passes to circumvent obstacles. They were often built with military objectives in mind or at least with strategic aims being taken into account when routes were selected. For example, two of the world’s greatest railway projects, the American transcontinental across the US completed in 1869, and the Trans-Siberian, which triggered the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-5, had military objectives.

  For about a century, broadly from the Crimean War to the Korean, railways were an essential part of the conduct of war. This age of the railway war may only seem like a short episode in the long history of warfare, but it was a period in which several of the bloodiest conflicts in history took place. And that was no coincidence. The railways enabled carnage on that scale to take place, from delivering large numbers of men and unprecedented quantities of ammunition to the front lines, to moving troops around theatres of war rapidly, and taking away the wounded and the dying efficiently in ambulance trains.

  While the age of the military railway is now over thanks to technological changes in both weaponry and transport, for more than a century the railways determined the nature, size and length of wars, but what about the outcome of these wars? There is no doubt that on numerous occasions the railways – or, more accurately, the effective use of the railways – were crucial in giving one side in the war an advantage over the other. That strange little railway from Balaklava, the first genuine military line, was certainly helpful in breaking the siege of Sevastopol but was probably not decisive to the outcome. In the first genuine railway war, the American Civil War, the North’s better railways were certainly helpful but it is very difficult to assess whether they were decisive since the North would probably have won anyway as it had industrial and economic might on its side. Its better railways were simply a reflection of its more advanced state of economic development.

  The ability of the Prussians to reach the battle of Königgrätz more quickly than the Austrians was
important, too, but probably more in ensuring the war was short than in determining its outcome since the Austrians were pretty hopeless militarily, as they demonstrated later in the First World War. In the Franco-Prussian War, the side with the better railways lost. However, that merely highlighted the fact that it was not good enough simply to have superior equipment – true of weaponry, too – but it was vital to employ it to best effect. The result, therefore, was more the product of the chaos on the French railways at the beginning of the war, which immediately put the country at a disadvantage.

  In the colonial wars waged by Britain, the railways probably were decisive. It is doubtful if the British would have been able to subdue the Mahdi in Sudan, let alone the Boers in South Africa, without them. Certainly, Churchill had no doubts about that. As for the Russo-Japanese War, it would never have happened without the railway which was not only a casus belli but the only means by which the Russians could reach Manchuria, where the conflict took place.

  As for the two world wars, it is undeniable that they could not have been fought with such devastating consequences without the railways to deliver more and more men and supplies with unrelenting efficiency. If the railways were not responsible for the outbreak of the First World War, their availability – or lack of it – was crucial at every stage and they were undoubtedly fundamental in creating the ghastly and prolonged nature of the conflict. At the outset, the Germans were helped by having a superior railway system tailored to launching an offensive, but ultimately they were unable to make that advantage tell because the railway war only lasted a few weeks. While the Germans initially won the war of movement, France, after absorbing the initial shock of the invasion, survived and eventually prevailed. All that meticulous planning by Schlieffen and Moltke came to little because they had underestimated the logistical constraints of the railway age. Nor did having the best line of communication guarantee success. The battle of Verdun, for example, showed that the side with an inferior supply route could resist an attack provided sufficient resources were devoted to improving it. More important than the relative strength of each railway system was the fact that at the stage of technology pertaining at the time of the First World War, the defending side in any battle had a natural advantage thanks to the railways. Moreover, by simply allowing armies to become bigger, the railways made it more difficult for an attacker to gain a decisive advantage. Larger defending armies with good logistical support just proved harder to destroy. The First World War demonstrated this in spades, and it was only the mechanisation of warfare that allowed the tables to be turned a little as tanks began to be able to overrun fixed positions.