Why didn’t the US Army and War Department pursue procurement of breech loading rifles as the primary infantry weapon, as opposed to muzzle loading rifles? The advantages of breech loading firearms were already well understood at the time.
Expense. They were equipping arguably the largest armies in the history of the world to that point, and money mattered. At the beginning of the war they were badly short of weapons. Whatever its weaknesses, the Lee Enfield was
- Affordable,
- Available for purchase from Europe, and
- It worked.
Breech loaders were much, much more expensive, very new (the famed Spencer repeater did not exist until 1860) and harder to get. When you have to arm 100,000 new troops, 1000 Spencers will not do. They also consumed more ammunition, which at the beginning of the war was also in short supply
Something important to note is that this is 1861, and no one was using smokeless powder. A battlefield quickly became covered in smoke, often before infantry were effectively shooting at each other. Aimed shots in such a situation were not all that aimed at all, and so massed volleys were still your best bet for a truly devastating effect.
It’s further worth noting that the use of a rifle with individually aimed shots requires skill, calm and training, and is tactically very different from massed fire, requiring individual action and being further from your buddies. Most Civil War troops were not well trained and a frightened man can’t aim for shit, and the more alone you feel on a battlefield the more frightened you will become, and the likelier that you will panic and go to ground or run away. Keeping troops together - the “feel of cloth” as it’s called - was important to maintain unit morale.
The Union did issue a lot of breech loaders in the latter half of the war. In a few cases Union troops actually bought their own breech loaders.
Pedantic nitpickery: The Union Army didn’t issue Lee Enfields, primarily due to the fact that they wouldn’t exist for another 40 years. The Pattern 1853 Enfield was the first rifle used by both sides (in conjunction with older smoothbore muskets,) quickly phased out by the Union in exchange for the Springfield 1861.
The AK-47 wouldn’t exist for another 87 years and yet, somehow, the South acquired a vast number of them.
It was too expensive. Basically, the issue is logistics. Unless you are going to rearm the entire army with a specific rifle and specific cartridge size you will have to support both (or more) types, have the training and spare parts for both types and could get a situation where some regiments are out of ammo while others have plenty but they can’t share. You can’t scavenge rounds off of either enemy dead or your own, either, unless they happen to be equipped with what you are. Since re-equipping the entire army was thought to cost prohibitive, especially during a war, it was felt that the best course was to stay with the muzzleloaders from a logistics perspective.
In addition, you also had a lot of people in US Army procurement who felt that soldiers would ‘waste’ ammo if they could fire rapidly, which they could with either breech loaders (compared to muzzleloaders anyway) or even the repeating rifles of the time (IIRC, the Henry’s rifle came out in like 1858). Until fairly recently US military procurement had a huge conservative streak wrt new weapons systems and saving money…something that’s cost a lot of young Americans their lives in subsequent wars all the way through Vietnam.
There was, believe it or not, a 66 year old General named James Ripley who was in put in charge of buying weapons for the American Army in 1861. Ripley was a believer in the traditional methods of combat and didn’t go for any of those new-fangled ideas. He figured that things like breech loaders and repeating rifles were just a passing fad. If a muzzle loading one-shot musket was good enough for Napoleon, if was good enough for Ripley.
The result was that the Confederates were able to buy up tens of thousands of weapons in Europe. Many people have pointed out that even if Ripley didn’t want the weapons, he should have bought them up anyway to deny their use to the Confederates.
That opinion would persist, worldwide, well into WW1 with magazine cutoff switches.
(Usually internal, stripper clip loaded, magazines but there were rifles with removable magazines permanently attached to the rifle.)
CMC fnord!
The first widely used breech loading rifle was the Dreyse needle gun which was the primary infantry weapon of Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The British had evaluated it in 1849-51 and decided it was “too complicated and delicate” for service use.
The Sharps rifle was patented in 1848, and was actually used to some extent during the Civil War, but wasn’t in widespread use until after the war (and was retooled for metallic cartridges). I think the main reasons it wasn’t adopted earlier is that it cost more to manufacture than the main battle rifle at the time (Enfield 1853 IIRC). Even without metallic cartridges, it had a greater rate of fire and it kind of sucks that it wasn’t used more widely simply to save a few bucks.
WW1 hell. That attitude lasted well into WW2 among the British. They stayed with the Mark 3* and #4 Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles the whole war, even after the superiority of the Garand had been established.
The Dreyse M1841 was introduced in 1841 and the standard rifle in the Prussian Army by 1848. There’s a video here of a Dreyse M1841 manufactured in 1851 in Sommerda, in service in 1854 in the 12th Regiment of Foot, 5th Battalion rifle number 173 being range fired. It still amazes me that if properly maintained a bolt action rifle this old can be fired as reliably as the day it was manufactured.
Although the French Chassepot, introduced 1866, was considered the better rifle of the two. Still, you can’t argue with military victory.
The Americans started out WWII with the M1903 Springfield still as its standard issue rifle. We had officially converted to the M1 Garand but they’re hadn’t been enough of them produced yet for them to replace the Springfields.
The philosophy of ‘make do with what you have and replace if you have to’ continues as the WW2 weapons were used in the Korean war and in the Viet war, M-14 were the initial basic training weapon with Viet bound infantry getting introduced to the early failure prone M-16. My Marine combat friend liked to use the AK-47 since if the Cong heard the distinctive sound they would come out of hiding like a prey hearing a friend.
That’s a great way to draw friendly fire.
Yeah, it’s pretty amazing that these guns are still able to work seemingly just as well as they did over a hundred years ago if they are properly maintained. The loading cycle there is pretty similar to a Sharps rifle, though I assume it has a primer in the (paper) charge since I didn’t see him putting a cap in (I don’t know that much about the M1841). At any rate, there were other options that the US Army could have used that would have been more effective (as noted, the Henry rifle was actually a 16 shot repeating rifle available in 1860 that had an even faster rate of fire. There was also the Spencer lever action rifle), but chose not to, mainly due to cost.
Thanks for the cool video though…was definitely interesting!
The marine was not alone, the cong were…bang.
Arguably the Spencer carbine did save the Union. Or at least it allowed for a victory at Gettysburg. Buford’s cavalry was armed with Spencer breach loading carbines and were able to fight a delaying action on the 1st day which allowed the trailing army to occupy the high ground.
You hear this a lot. I don’t quite grasp why. Soldiers firing from the prone with some spacing and cover are far more difficult to hit. Imagine 10 soldiers on each side, each with the same muskets, and one stays in a massed formation 10 abreast and the other spreads out and fires from the prone.
A rudimentary combat model would say every round the prone soldiers fire has a higher probability to hit the grouped soldiers, since they are much bigger targets and if you miss left or right you probably hit a different soldier.
And vice versa for fire going the other direction. Yeah, they could mass fire and hit a single prone soldier for sure…while losing several of their own.
Now, one huge problem was you couldn’t reload muskets from the prone. This would be the obvious thing to fix as soon as you could if you were in charge of weapons procurement…
This of course was not how it worked historically, and I don’t think civil war generals were morons, there must have been good reasons for it. I just don’t quite understand what they were.
Maybe it had to do with short weapon ranges and battlefield spacing?
Like if you have 1000 men, and you keep them in a single tight group, and the enemy is all spread out in the prone, when you get to the edge of musket range of the enemy, since the enemy are spread out, your 1000 men might only be in range of 100 men of the enemy. So 10 to 1 firepower advantage, you win even though your guys are really easy to hit.
While more recent weapons, 300-500 meters is easy plinking range for a man-sized target standing up. Even a novice shooter can probably hit the 300 meter target half the time.
That was due to considerations of supply. The British had billions of rounds of .303 ammo.