The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Ibid., 60.

  2. Lawrence H. Keeley, “Giving War a Chance,” in Deadly Landscapes: Case Studies in Prehistoric Southwestern Warfare, eds. Glen E. Rice and Steven A. Leblanc (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 332.

  3. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 387.

  4. Robert L. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 25.

  5. Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 94.

  6. Ibid., 91.

  7. Keith F. Otterbein, How War Began (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 3, 62.

  8. Ibid., 40.

  9. Jean Guilane and Jean Zammit, The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory (London: Blackwell, 2005), 25, 73.

  10. Otterbein, How War Began, 50.

  11. Ibid., 56.

  12. Ibid., 64.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Keeley, War Before Civilization, 49.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid., 53.

  17. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 67.

  18. Keeley, War Before Civilization, 105.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Otterbein, How War Began, 195.

  21. Keeley, War Before Civilization, 84. Of the approximately 230 tribal groups that Keeley studied throughout the world he found only 8 “that sometimes spared male adult captives for any reason” (213).

  22. Guilane and Zammit, Origins of War, 88.

  23. Keeley, War Before Civilization, 99.

  24. Ibid., 101.

  25. Otterbein, How War Began, 161.

  26. Quoted in Keeley, War Before Civilization, 100.

  27. Ibid., 143.

  28. Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai: A Military History (Oxford: George Philip [Osprey], 1977), 10.

  29. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men, 33.

  30. J. E. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 29.

  31. Guilane and Zammit, Origins of War, 215.

  32. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 56.

  33. Ibid., 44.

  34. Ibid., 83.

  35. J. F. C. Fuller, Armament & History: The Influence of Armament on History from the Dawn of Classical Warfare to the End of the Second World War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), 24.

  36. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 29.

  37. Bernard Mishkin, Rank & Warfare Among the Plains Indians (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 31.

  38. Robert Fagles, trans. The Iliad (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 551.

  39. Ibid., 423–24.

  40. Ibid., 425–26.

  41. Ibid., 554.

  42. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 46.

  43. Ibid., 52.

  44. H. Frölich, Die Militärmedicin Homer’s (Stuttgart: Enke, 1879).

  45. K. B. Saunders, “Frölich’s Table of Homeric Wounds,” Classical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2004): 1–17.

  46. R. Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe, c. 1200 BC (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

  47. Fagles, ed., Iliad, 426.

  48. Ibid., 195.

  49. Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York, Alred A. Knopf, 1989), 213.

  50. Fagles, Iliad, 423.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 41.

  54. Hanson, Western Way of War, 224.

  55. Estimating the weight of ancient armor is just that—estimating. What bronze armor has been excavated is so badly corroded as to make calculations of weight extremely difficult. Jack Coggins in his Soldiers and Warriors: The Fighting Man; An Illustrated History of the World’s Greatest Fighting Forces (Doubleday, 1966), 19, goes into this in thoughtful detail, and I have tended to use his calculations. Some historians, for example, O’Connell in Of Arms and Men and Hanson in Western Way of War, favor much heavier weights. O’Connell puts the cuirass alone at 30 pounds (13.6 kg), while Hanson ups it to between 30 and 40 pounds (13.6–18 kg).

  56. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men, 36, puts the hoplite helmet at 20 pounds (9 kg), which seems excessive, but G. B. Grundy, cited in Hanson, Western Way of War, 49, actually wore an excavated helmet of this period and says: “I have tried on a Greek helmet at Delphi, and I have also tried on various helmets of genuine armour dating from various periods in the Middle Ages. The iron of the Greek helmet was extraordinary thick, and its weight was, I should say, nearly double that of the heaviest helmet of the medieval period.” Hanson finally plumps for five pounds (2.3 kg), 72.

  57. Hanson, Western Way of War, 78.

  58. Ibid., 79.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Coggins, Soldiers and Warriors, 20.

  61. Hanson disagrees. He states that the panoply was disablingly heavy (Western Way of War, 78).

  62. Ibid., 45.

  63. Quoted in Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 50.

  64. Ibid., 140.

  65. Fuller, Armament & History, 26.

  66. Quoted in ibid., 153.

  67. Quoted in ibid., 154.

  68. Quoted in Hanson, Western Way of War, 91.

  69. Cited in ibid., 87.

  70. Coggins, Soldiers and Warriors, 20.

  71. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 186.

  72. Quoted in Fuller, Armament and History, 25.

  73. Hanson, Western Way of War, 209.

  74. Ibid., 203.

  75. Ibid., 201.

  76. Quoted in ibid., 124.

  77. Quoted in ibid., 203.

  78. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 108.

  79. Ibid., 152.

  80. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 74.

  81. Ibid., 77.

  82. Ibid., 35.

  83. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 136.

  84. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 88.

  85. Lendon, Soldiers & Ghosts, 118.

  86. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 88.

  87. Ibid., 83, Hanson goes for the higher figure and states that Alexander “killed more Hellenes in a single day than the entire number that had fallen to the Medes at the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea combined!”

  88. Ibid. For example, Dr. Albert Devine puts the figure for Persian losses at 15,000, including wounded and captured. General Sir John Hackett, ed., Warfare in the Ancient World (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989), 116.

  89. Quoted in Coggins, Soldiers and Warriors, 50. The physics of the pilum seems a little contradictory. On the one hand the weapon must have enough straight-on kinetic force and structural integrity to pierce a shield, yet the long iron shank had to be pliable enough to bend when embedded. The penetration could only be achieved if all the force was directly behind the spearhead (and perhaps this was the function of the iron knob at the base of the shank on some pila). Any deviation in flight and the shank would have bent prematurely on impact and dispersed the kinetic energy uselessly.

  90. Quoted in O’Connell, Of Arms and Men, 68.

  91. Quoted in Coggins, Soldiers and Warriors, 71.

  92. Adrian Goldsworthy, Roman Warfare (London: Cassell, 2000), 52.

  93. Ibid., 54.

  94. For example, Hanson estimates 50,000 (Carnage and Culture, 104); Polybius puts it at 70,000; Livy at 45,500.

  95. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 103.

  96. Ibid., 110.

  97. John Warry, Warfare in the Classical World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 156.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Bryan Perrett, The Battle Book (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1992), 101.

  2. Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai Sourcebook (London: Arms and Armour, 1998), 150.

  3. Quoted in Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai: A Military History (Oxford: George Philip [Osprey], 1977), 34.

  4. Quote
d in Morris Bishop, The Penguin Book of the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1971).

  5. David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book, vol. 2, Christian Europe and Its Neighbours (London: Arms and Armour, 1996), 158.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Matthew Bennett et al., Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World, AD 500–AD 1500: Equipment, Combat Skills, and Tactics (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 33.

  8. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 157.

  9. Bennett et al., Fighting Techniques, 35.

  10. Quoted in Robert Hardy, Longbow: A Social and Military History (Somerset, UK: Patrick Stephens, 1976), 51.

  11. “Battle of Duplin Moor,” Battlefield Trust, http://www.battlefieldtrust.com/resource-centre/medieval/battleview. Hardy puts English knights and men-at-arms at 33 killed.

  12. Quoted in John Keegan, ed., The Book of War (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 49.

  13. Quoted in ibid., 59.

  14. Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 15.

  15. David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book, vol. 1, Warfare in Western Christendom (London: Arms and Armour, 1995), 246.

  16. Turnbull, Samurai, 45.

  17. Jack Coggins, Soldiers and Warriors: The Fighting Man: An Illustrated History of the World’s Greatest Fighting Forces (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 90.

  18. Quoted in ibid., 89.

  19. Maurice Keen, The Pelican History of Medieval Europe (London: Penguin, 1968), 121.

  20. Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book, vol. 2, 109; and Eduard Wagner et al., Medieval Costume, Armour and Weapons (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000), plates 26–35.

  21. A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, A History of War and Weapons (New York: Crowell, 1966), 126.

  22. Ewart Oakeshott, A Knight and His Weapons (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1964), 49.

  23. Quoted in Turnbull, Samurai Sourcebook, 205.

  24. Norman and Pottinger, War and Weapons, 160.

  25. Quoted in Philip Haythornthwaite, The English Civil War, 1642–1651: An Illustrated Military History (London: Brockhampton, 1998), 48.

  26. Ibid., 49.

  27. Oska Ratti and Adele Westbrook, Secrets of the Samurai: The Martial Arts in Feudal Japan (Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1973), 189.

  28. Turnbull, Samurai Sourcebook, 178.

  29. “Arms & Armour,” Regia Anglorum, http://www.regia.org/warfare/sword.htm.

  30. Oakeshott, Knight and His Weapons, 61.

  31. Hardy, Longbow, 72.

  32. Bennett et al., Fighting Techniques, 28.

  33. Ewart Oakeshott, A Knight in Battle (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1971), 36.

  34. Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book, vol. 2, 244.

  35. R. C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097–1193 (Cambridge University Press, 1956), 127.

  36. Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book, vol. 2, 295.

  37. Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 41, 44.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. At the beginning of its war of liberation, America struggled to acquire significant quantities of saltpeter from the British-controlled West Indies. Figuring out how to manufacture enough domestically was a priority that John Adams, for one, felt acutely. To James Warren in October 1775, he writes: “We must bend our attention to salt petre. We must make it. While Britain is Mistress of the Sea and has so much influence with foreign courts we cannot depend upon a supply from abroad. It is certain it can be made here.… A gentleman in Maryland made some last June from tobacco house earth … the process is so simple a child can make it.” Quoted in Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: The Story of the Revolution as Told by Participants (Harper, 1958), 776. When George Washington discovered, at the war’s outset, how little powder was in store, Brigadier General John Sullivan recorded that “he did not utter a word for half an hour.” Erna Risch, Supplying Washington’s Army (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1981), 341.

  2. Bert S. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 76.

  3. Ibid., 75–76.

  4. Quoted in ibid., 67.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid., 101.

  7. Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Anchor, 2002).

  8. Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai Sourcebook (London: Arms and Armour, 1998), 227.

  9. Quoted in Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 183.

  10. Quoted in ibid., 199.

  11. Quoted in Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 222.

  12. Quoted in W. H. Fitchett, Wellington’s Men (London: Smith, Elder, 1900), 363.

  13. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 116.

  14. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), 123.

  15. Quoted in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 134.

  16. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 257.

  17. Donald R. Morris, The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), 571.

  18. Duffy, Military Experience, 224.

  19. Quoted in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 380.

  20. Quoted in Rory Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 124.

  21. Quoted in ibid., 125.

  22. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 226.

  23. Quoted in Commager and Morris, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 1111–12.

  24. Quoted in John Keegan, The Face of Battle, 124.

  25. Philip Haythornthwaite, The English Civil War (London: Brockhampton, 1998), 30.

  26. Arcadi Gluckman, United States Muskets, Rifles, and Carbines (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1959), 33.

  27. Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (New York: Norton, 2001), 195.

  28. Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 135.

  29. Charles Knowles Bolton, The Private Soldier Under Washington (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 115.

  30. Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (London: Batsford, 1977), 64.

  31. Quoted in David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 305.

  32. Quoted in ibid., 65.

  33. Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 140.

  34. Gluckman, United States Muskets, 37.

  35. Rothenberg, Art of Warfare, 65.

  36. Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 139.

  37. Rothenberg, Art of Warfare, 65. Paddy Griffith, in Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1997), 38, claims 800 rounds per casualty.

  38. Quoted in David Chandler, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough (London: Batsford, 1976), 131.

  39. Griffith, Forward into Battle, 28.

  40. Major General B. P. Hughes, Firepower: Weapons Effectiveness on the Battlefield, 1630–1850 (London: Arms and Armour, 1974), 165.

  41. John J. Gallagher, The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776 (Cambridge, Mass.: De Capo, 1995), 130.

  42. Muir, Tactics, 102.

  43. Ibid., 165.

  44. Captain Mercer, quoted in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 370.

  45. Muir, Tactics, 135.

  46. Quoted in Jay Luvaas, ed. and trans., Frederick the Great on the Art of War (New York: Free Press, 1966), 78.

  47. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 246.

  48. Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 136.

  49. Duffy, Military Experience, 247.

  50. Quoted in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 158.

  51. Quoted in Holmes, Redcoat, 254.

  52. Quoted in Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 207.

  53. Quoted in Griffith, Forward into Battle, 25.

  54. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 205.

  55. Howard H. Peckham, The Toll of Independence: Engagements & Battle Casualties of the Amer
ican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 41, 62.

  56. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 86.

  57. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay, 1995), 123.

  58. Quoted in Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 51.

  59. Quoted in Gallagher, Battle of Brooklyn, 119.

  60. John Rhodehamel, ed., The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (New York: Library of America, 2001), 269.

  61. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 234.

  62. Quoted in ibid., 217.

  63. Quoted in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 386.

  64. James Thatcher, Military Journal of the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (Corner House Historical, 1998), 284.

  65. Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 152.

  66. Anonymous, Memoirs of a Sergeant: The 43rd Light Infantry During the Peninsular War (Stroud, UK: Nonsuch, 2005), 60.

  67. Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Signet, 2001), 206.

  68. George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels & Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (Cleveland, OH: World, 1957), 56.

  69. Quoted in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 95.

  70. Quoted in Commager and Morris, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 1105.

  71. Quoted in ibid., 387.

  72. Haythornthwaite, English Civil War, 53.

  73. Quoted in Muir, Tactics, 47.

  74. Duffy, Military Experience, 245; and Muir, Tactics, 46.

  75. Muir, Tactics, 46–47.

  76. Philip Haythornthwaite, Weapons & Equipment of the Napoleonic Wars (London: Arms and Armour, 1979), 67.

  77. Quoted in Griffith, Forward into Battle, 31.

  78. Quoted in Duffy, Military Experience, 76.

  79. Quoted in Robert L. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 118–19.

  80. Quoted in Muir, Tactics, 262.

  81. Quoted in Commager and Morris, The Spirit of Seventy-Six, 1233.

  82. Quoted in Fitchett, Wellington’s Men, 388–89.

  83. Haythornthwaite, English Civil War, 121.

  84. Quoted in Rhodehamel, American Revolution, 607.

  85. Cardinal John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University (1852), quoted in Gary Mead, The Good Soldier: The Biography of Douglas Haig (London: Atlantic, 2007), 41.