Thank god for civilized warfare.
Yeah, I think this is really the key. Part of what made big 18th century set piece battles possible is that well-trained musketmen could fire and advance almost as quickly as they could fire in place. The advent of rapidly reloadable and accurate rifles meant stationary infantry could crank out a lot more aimed shots, which is what decisively tipped the scales towards the defenders.
A major war between two roughly-equally matched forces armed with rifles would have resulted in a long bloody stalemate as well. It’s just that there wasn’t one prior to WWI. The ACW was fought mostly with muskets and in the Franco-Prussian and Austro-Prussian wars the Prussians managed to mobilize quickly enough to overwhelm their foes. The closest thing to it was the Crimean, which was only partly fought with rifles and which did, in fact, devolve into bloody local stalemates when roughly equal rifle-equipped sides met.
The popular narrative that the stalemate on the Western Front emerged because of machine guns, improved artillery, airplanes, gas, tanks, etc is wrong. If the French had mobilized in 1871, it’s quite likely the same thing would have happened with both armies equipped with single-shot rifles. The real blunder made by the people running the war is that they didn’t realize until very late in the war that all that fancy 20th century technology gave them all the tools they needed to break the stalemate. They just had to figure out how to use them effectively.
If by musket you mean smoothbore muzzleloaders accurate to fifty yards and by rifle you mean rifled muzzleloaders accurate beyond 200 yards you are mostly wrong, at least later in the war. The Enfield 1853 and Springfield 1861 were the primary guns of the later part of the war and were both rifled. The extended effective (you hit what you aimed at) range of rifles meant you no longer had to “wait until you see the whites of their eyes,” making it more like WWI.
Seconding dropzone, but with less gentility: idiotic stereotypes make for idiotic history.
Bet you anything Agar, Gatling, Maxim, Lewis, Browning, and Hotchkis were cheap Jews too.
Yes, right, if you want to be pedantic the Civil War was mostly fought with rifled muskets, not muskets. Better range certainly tipped the balance and changed tactics a little, but the rate of fire was still similar to a smooth bore musket. That’s what I’d argue is the more important distinction.
With muskets, your soldiers are spending the majority of the time reloading. If you imagine infantry in formation firing by ranks, adding the “advance” step to the aim-fire-reload-advance sequence doesn’t really make much of a difference in your overall rate of fire because it takes longer to reload than to aim and fire anyways. With breech-loading rifles, though, where reloading only takes a few seconds and aiming is usually the most time-intensive part, stationary infantry gains a large advantage in terms of rate of fire.
It’s certainly arguable that with the advent of rifled muskets, fluid set piece battles were no longer the most effective tactic (for defender or attacker), but it was still perfectly possible to have them. It wasn’t until the high rate-of-fire breechloaders became common that the defender’s advantage became so great that they became essentially suicidal for the attackers.
Moderator Warning
This is an official warning. Racist comments like this have absolutely no place in GQ. Do not do this again.
Wilson Agar: Unknown affiliation; based his gun on a coffee grinder, so he might have been Lutheran.
Richard Gatling: Freemanson! :eek: ; probably raised Christian
Hiram Maxim: Atheist with an affection for Buddhism, raised Christian
Isaac Newton Lewis: Unknown affiliation, but he graduated from West Point in the 1880s, so he’s unlikely to be a Jew. Declined royalties on his guns sold to the US after it entered WWI, leaving $1million on the table when that was REAL money, so not likely to be cheap, either.
John Moses Browning: About as Mormon as you can get.
Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss: Unknown affiliation; probably Christian
You will note that the “probably Christian” comments are based on the fact that, despite the Old Testament given names in that list, there were few Jewish industrialists in the US in the 19th Century.
I’m guessing that Leo meant the comment as sarcasm and was comparing md2000’s comments to a racist one.
Thanks again for the replies. Am I right in reading GreasyJack and other posters that Europe got caught with its pants down by for lack of a better term being ‘out of practice’ fighting other developed nations? Did the period of peace pre-1914 play a big role in allowing technology to march on without the tactics and strategy accommodating it?
I’ve been reading about the first few months and the build-up to war in Max Hasting’s Catastrophe; which touches on this in the minds of the higher-ups. The impression I get of the British in particular is that their wars were typically colonial wars; Kitchener’s experience in the 19th century; from Sudanese tribesman to the Kaisers army. A rude awakening indeed.
My take on it isn’t that they got caught with their pants down, but that they fully realized that the war was likely to result in a grinding stalemate if one side couldn’t seize the advantage early on. That was the whole idea of the gamble the Germans took with their war plan, hoping to knock the French out early with a surprise attack. If they’d thought they had a chance to beat the French by tactical maneuver or better logistics or morale, they would have just attacked through Alsace-Lorraine, but instead they made the the exceedingly risky attack through the Low Countries.
The point I was making about technology is that the stalemate developing didn’t depend on all the 20th century things like machine guns, planes, etc, but still would have happened even just with armies equipped with breechloading rifles. It’s simply due to the vagaries of history that such a war didn’t happen earlier.
The real blunder of the leadership wasn’t that they failed to predict that the stalemate would develop-- they obviously did and tailored the war plans to maximize their chances of avoiding it. It was that once the stalemate did develop they had no idea how to break it and kept trying incredibly bloody massed attacks that had little chance of success. As a result, the war just ground on until the attrition was too great for one side.
In hindsight of having seen the Second World War, we know that those 20th century technologies were the key to breaking the stalemate and achieving a tactical victory, but it’s arguable whether their failure to do so in the First World War was due to the primitive state of those technologies or simply due to a lack of understanding of how to use them effectively.
That is how I read Leo’s comment as well, particularly in light of his comment that “idiotic stereotypes make for idiotic history.”
There were some warnings. Against opponents armed relatively well, European Armies took heavy casualties, see the second Anglo-Afghan War. They had seen the murderous casualty rates of the Russo-Japanese war. So the fact the war was going to be bloody was well known.
Some points to consider
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It is not at all true that the Generals of 1914 pursued outdated tactics out of stupidity. Its easy to criticise, until you realise that having troops march in formation and deliver volleys was the only real way to maintain communications and coordination. Portable radios were a generation into the future. Moving in small and dispersed fireteams as we do today was impossible.
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The Western Front was a case of millions of troops being hinged on unturnable flanks; the North Sea and the Swiss Border, which in turn meant frontal assaults had to be made. Unfortunately the sheer mass and depth of the troops meant that concentrated attacks on small fronts would not be possible as enough defenders could be brought to bear to stop breakthroughs.
Do note that the way the British won the war in 1918 was using a formula which in broad strokes was the same as what they had tried the previous two years, attack on a narrow front with secondary assualts elsewhere using coordinated infantry, artillery and cavalry (tanks) to breakthrough and exploi. They just did not have the technology beforehand.
- If anything the Generals underestimated the ability of the battling nations to bear and replace losses. Pre war it was presumed that if a stalemate occurred neither side would last long as they would quickly run out of men and material. Unfortunately modern industrialised nation states could continue to provide a steady supply to the front.
That’s what made the Germans revolt and send the Kaiser away, was it not?
Tell that to the attackers at Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, Pickett’s Charge and a whole slew of other US Civil War battles.
Prior to the US Civil War, the tactics were basically to march up within musket range, fire a volley or two, and then close with bayonets until one side broke and ran.
With rifled muskest and Minie balls in the US Civil War, this was suicidal, even if neither side was dug in, because with directed musketry, an infantry unit’s effective range was well over 200 yards.
So both sides learned that the best way to avoid being hit and yet keep shooting at the attackers was to take cover in sunken roads and ditches early on, and as the war went on, they started creating their own trenches to fight from, and in many cases like Vicksburg, Cold Harbor, and others, there were extensive trench networks very similar to WWI trenches.
This is also why US Civil War cavalry was much more like classic Dragoons, in the sense of mounted infantry who fought on foot, rather than Hussar-style cavalry that fought from horseback- they’d have been absolutely slaughtered in a cavalry charge against infantry. So they stuck to fighting each other on horseback, and when they did fight infantry, like Buford at Gettysburg, they did it dismounted.
All that the breech loading, cartridge firing rifles managed to do is extend the range that all this took place at.
Machine guns just added to the firepower, and removed any chance that fast moving cavalry could actually get anywhere in time to do any damage.
Oh no? Take a look at the battle of Gravelotte in the Franco-Prussian war, where Prussian casualties caused by French Chassepot rifles were horrific.
Exactly my point. The only way the Prussians won the decisive victory they did in that war was that they managed to mobilize so much more quickly. If the French had gotten enough rifle-equipped men in the field in time, they could have easily stopped the Prussians in their tracks. The result would have likely been a stalemate not unlike what happened in WWI.
Well, the term"suicidal" may be a bit relative in these situations. Even if the casualties were often horrific, it was still possible for infantry to attack defending rifle-musket equipped infantry across open ground and they did so frequently during the war. With breech-loaders, that would be completely impossible without a seriously overwhelming numerical advantage.
As I said, the old set piece style battles probably weren’t the most effective tactic with rifle muskets, but if both sides were wanting to have them they still could. That’s more or less what happened in the Civil War-- both sides wanted to win a decisive victory early in the war and so were willing to meet each other in open battle. It wasn’t until the later part of the war when the Confederates were clearly on the run that they adopted more trench-warfare like tactics.
The Kaiser wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, by most accounts.
He had Nicholas going for a while.
All those telegrams deploring the mobilization, Nicholas went with his treaties and the Brits wouldn’t take him and family to safety.
Moderator Note
The warning for Leo Bloom has been rescinded.
Let’s try to keep comments like that out of GQ, though.
[/hijack because I don’t feel like opening an ATMB]
Huh. I was upset, honestly. Moped around, didn’t tell my wife, didn’t sleep well, took half a Klonopin. Because “a warning” is from SD to that individual, as well as a “warning” to all insofar as it is public record. I was planning to ATMB it, with perhaps only one real comment with a “/ sarcasm” line.
This place is the only virtual community I have, and enjoy it, and am comfortable that some people enjoy mine, and often am happy to encourage first-time posters to dive in.
And especially because I know and like this place, I was most upset thought I “know” and respect a number of mods, all in at least that they could read understand context, tone, and register, and that SD, GQ at least, valued the craft of writing. As opposed to, say, writing lol or emoticonning every damn sentence.
I don’t know why that was even assumed to be racist, although, correctly, the racist definition of a Jew began in the 19th century, when in fact “Semite” and “anti-Semite” were coined. I was wondering if “racism” subsumed all bad things here except misogyny. It did cause me to remember one of my favorite Simpson’s lines, where Krusty finds out his father is a rabbi, and mutters that all his life he was an anti-Semite and now he’s just a self-hating Jew.
I will close this with a comment made by a friend who I told about this. He said not only was the SD Admin’s reading and judgement wrong, but they should have known I was joking, because they know I’m relatively intelligent and would’ve known that cheap Jews, obviously, wouldn’t have invented machine guns, because bullets are expensive. They would have cornered the sniper’s gun industry. <---- This is a joke in a recall and sharpening of a previous joke about historical theses supposedly made by “rational thinking” under obviously wrongheaded principles. I will try to leave suchlike comments out in the future, unless absolutely necessary.
And with that I close this post. I’d also like to thank those who endeavored to have the warning rescinded, sparing me further tsuris.
Leo
[/hijack]