WWI was the first major war that involved guns of the type that are still used today. The first of this type being the Canon de 75 modèle 1897 that the other powers managed to copy just prior to the war.
The salient features are:
Breech loading
Hydraulically stabilized (i.e. the gun did not need to be re-sighted after each shot, massively increasing the rate of accurate fire)
Cased ammunition
self contained firing mechanism.
All of which made modern artillery more effective by orders of magnitude than the artillery of Napoleon’s day.
The other major advance was the development of radios. It used to be that a gun crew had to get close enough to their target so they could see what they were shooting at. This obviously meant that their target could see them and shoot back at them - and artillery is easier to hit than infantry. But radios allowed the guns to be moved back out of sight and rifle range with easily concealed observers sighting the targets and directing the artillery fire by radio.
To add to this, the technique of building with logs had been used for centuries in Northern Europe, by rich and poor alike. It made use of an easily available building material and resulted in a sturdy, long-lasting, well-insulated house, in less time than many other methods. It was also easily adapted by European emigrants to the US, at least in areas where trees were plentiful, and copied by their neighbors…
On a completely different subject, the Spanish Inquisition was not meant to threaten the Jews of Spain into converting to Catholicism. That had already been accomplished by expelling from Spain any Jews who refused to be baptized. The Inquisition was set up because Ferdinand and Isabella, along with much of the Spanish clergy, correctly guessed that not all of the conversos had converted based on a sincere change of heart; it was intended to root out those who were still following Jewish religious and cultural practices in secret.
I think that “quick0firing” needs to be added to that list. Specifically, the feature called “quick-firing” refers, iirc, to the design that vented gas from the propellant charge back through the barrel to blow out any stary bits of burning gunpowder, thus eliminating the need to sponge out the barrel a la Molly Pitcher.
Breech-loading eliminated the ramming step; quick-firing elimiated the spnging step, and these guns could put out many more rounds in a fgiven period of fire than before. Cased ammunition stored and handled more safely (and without getting wet in the rain). End result was an enormous increase in effectiveness.
When I see “quick-firing,” I automatically think of the Indians. Originally, they could get off 10 or so arrows in the time it took a European to load and shoot one shot. If they had really understood just what was going on, that there was this mass of Europeans waiting to flood the continent, they’d have simply exterminated everyone and been done with it.
It’s worth mentioning that artillery targeting via radio (effectively a Second World War develoment, as those in the First were uncommon, effectively immobile, and unreliable, thus sharply limited in practical use) can be conducted with varying degrees of effectiveness. American profligacy in providing so many radio sets throughout their military, and specific training in coordinating artillery and radio, paid off very well. Unlike artillery in Axis armies, American artillery could be called on by many different units at all levels of the table of organization without going up the chain of command for permission, and furthermore the American spirit of the times was to cooperate as much as possible even if rules were bent. Also, US Artillery units were well-supplied and seldom had to save ammunition. As a result, American troops almost anywhere could call on a bewildering variety of guns and get rapid, accurate fire missions when they wanted fire support. Germans at the time were amazed, assuming that what they saw represented a vast artillery park somewhere out of sight; actually the Americans were coordinating and employing their guns much more effectively, rather than having unlimited numbers of them.
This is not to say Americans had every advantage – the German optics were much better, and German artillery was of high quality (both moral and material). Soviet artillery was, if possible, even more numerous, and usually well-supplied; the Soviets relied extensively on the use of artillery as part of their “scientific” theory of war. But their tactics (not to mention their supply trains) were better suited to set-piece battles, lacking flexibility of response, and were hampered by a rigid chain of command.
If you look at this part of the Wiki article, you’ll see that Sherman was cashiered for having something like a nervous breakdown. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but a big part of the issue was that, very early in the war, when everyone thought it would be a quick, romantic romp, Sherman was telling people it ould be long and hard and bitterly destructive, and he was warning people that the South was much more capable and determined than Northerners thought.
Of course ultimately this all turned out to be exactly true.
So later in the war, when rumors were swirling about Grant’s drinking, Sherman would say this; the implication being “…and I wasn’t all that crazy, was I? So Grant’s not all that drunk.”
Here is an interesting page regarding Grant’s drinking. I have seen, (but not quickly found), a quote from Grant (that is echoed in two quotes in the link) in which he noted that he was a “bad” drinker in that one or two glasses of wine often knocked him right out. (It is pretty hard to be staggering around drunk when one is sleeping off two glasses of wine.) The closest we have to evidence that Grant was ever a “drunk” is his California Army service from 1852 to 1854. For those two years he was separated by most of the continent from his wife and family, performing fairly mundane duties that drove him nuts. His superior officer threatened to court martial him for drunkeness and he resigned his commission, ostensibly to keep the charges from being repeated in public to his wife and father. At the time of his resignation, several of his fellow officers urged him to fight the charges as false.
I would guess that Sherman’s remark was, as Sailboat noted, ironic. Sherman was being called “crazy” in the papers at about the same time that slanders about Grant’s drinking were being bruted about–the summer and fall of 1862–and that Sherman was remarking how they had survived the slanders together.
Well, let’s not sail the colonists too short- they were some pretty tough customers. The Powhatan weroance Opechancanough (the brother and successor of Wahunsunacock [aka Powhatan] and uncle of Pocahontas) certainly gave extermination the college try during the (incorrectly dubbed) Good Friday Massacre of 1622, when his (braves or armies, depending on how you define the terms) led numerous simultaneous attacks throughout Virginia with the clear purpose of destroying the English once and for all. His forces killed about 1/3 of the 1000 or so colonists (percentage-wise the greatest blow ever dealt America), but because a couple of Indians who were friends with white families warned them there was some last minute resistance that drove off the invaders with amazingly short notice and with some damned hard fighting.
The 1622 massacre makes for some almost head exploding moral and ethical debates. On the one hand, Chief Opie (so called not from disrespect but because weroance Opechancanough gets old typing) was a cold blooded old bastard who thought nothing of killing women/children/unarmed prisoners/livestock/Indian allies of the English/etc., and the (by some accounts Christian convert) Indians who warned them saved many lives and acted according to Christian principals. OTOH, if Opie had won that day it would most definitely have halted English settlement for a long time and his people would have kept their lands, thus it’s hard to weigh the braves who warned the whites as to whether they were devout Christians, traitors, very goodhearted human beings, or people who damned their race.
For those not familiar with James Town history, how the colonists took revenge on the Powhatans in 1622 is pretty interesting and like something out of a Greek tragedy. In 1644 Opie tried the same attack again and killed far more colonists (white and black) numerically but far fewer percentage wise, as by that time the English were far more numerous. To make matters even more interesting Opechancenough may have been the man referred to in Spanish chronicles as Don Luis, a brave who had led a slaughter on a Spanish mission in the Chesapeake in the 1570s which would make him at least 90 years old in 1644 (when by accounts he was so ancient he had to be carried onto the battlefield on a litter). Opechancanough was himself killed in the aftermath of the 1644 attack.
On a more general note, the role of the musket in the subjugation of the Indians was definitely important, but almost as much for psychological warfare as for military reasons. (The sound and the flash of the thing usually so terrified Indians the first time they experienced it that it set them into retreat, though they soon learned that while it was deadly its owners weren’t unbeatable.) Far more indigenous lives were taken with another European weapon, however- the steel sword. It was sharper than the Indians knives, capable of cutting through a spear, did not have to be reloaded, was usable in any weather, etc., and the soldiers were far more efficient with it than they’re often given credit for (i.e. they weren’t samurai, but they most definitely had some skilled and deadly martial arts of their own). Indians valued captured swords more than they did muskets for military use; muskets they valued for hunting but it would be many years before they really used them for artillery purposes.
You say that “It’s true that more people died from artillary shells in their trenches than from anything else.”. I would suggest that in the end more soldiers were killed by artillery than machine guns- is that not true?
[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Well, let’s not sail the colonists too short- they were some pretty tough customers.
[QUOTE]
Still, I recall a history prof of mine way back when telling us of the “Tip of the Iceberg” theory. For this theory, he was referring more to later on, when the colonists, or even Americans by now, began seriously pushing westward. The Indians in, say, the Great Plains had little idea how many of these white men there were back East and didn’t take much notice of these few scraggly-looking ones first venturing out. He said the Indians were seeing only the tip of a giant iceberg but did not know it. By the time they realized what was going on, the momentum was against them.
Everyone knows the story, of how huge numbers of the public all across Europe got involved in buying and selling tulips as an investment, of tulip prices spiraling upwards for years, fueled by nothing but speculation, of how rich people would mortgage their family estate to buy a single bulb, and were left penniless when the bubble burst.
Actually:
It was not caused by public speculation. The rise in tulip prices was the result of unwise legislation.
The public were not involved. The legislation in question only affected contracts between the tulip farmers and the flower markets.
The rise and crash of the tulip prices happened within a very brief period. And within a small area. It wasn’t Europe wide, as some think.
The prices were nowhere close to those claimed. Mortgaging your house would have bought a ton of bulbs.
Nobody was actually buying tulips at their inflated prices. The deals were options contracts, which were not realized, and they only had to pay a small fraction of the price.
By rights it should be an obscure footnote in financial history. It has become famous based on rumour and legend.
The real story is that it did happen, but not with tulips- it was with Beanie Babies.
Regarding the Indians not understanding just how many whites there were waiting at the starting gates, there’s a story that when Pocahontas visited England in 1616 one of her “courtiers” was her brother-in-law, the shaman Uttamatomakkin, who was secretly to do reconnaissance for her father/his father-in-law Chief Powhatan by cutting a notch on a long staff for each white man he saw. He did so on the trip over, cutting one for each sailor, then cutting one for each white man he saw on the docks when they sailed into London, and then discarding the stick later the same day when he realized he’d be coming home with a toothpick if he kept cutting notches. (It may have something to do with his report [if the story’s not apocryphal] that Opechancenough, who had never been much enamored of whites to begin with, decided to exterminate them. (His brother Powhatan had, after some initial hostilities, grudgingly accepted them for their trade goods and as possible allies in his wars with other tribes but “Opie” rightfully saw that they weren’t worth the price.)
