From a book I read the cost of a single Spencer rifle was 5 times the cost of a comparative muzzle loader. In addition completely new ammo had to be manufactured for it using a completely different process from the much simpler cap and balls of the other guns as well as figuring out ways to get all that special ammo to the men on the field on a consistent basis. The sheer logistics of it at the very eve of the Civil War made it highly impractical except for small batches to be used by specialized units.
Not just the British, but the entire British Empire was using .303 rifles.
Also, I know Americans like to rave about the Garand but the reality was the rifles used by the British, Americans, Germans and Russians were all pretty much of a muchness in a broad sense, accurately firing .30-calibre rounds accurately to more than 300m and working in a wide range of conditions and environments.
George Washington’s men kinda started out doing this sort of thing, and found out very quickly why it didn’t work back in the days of the musket. The British would advance in a line, which you would think would make them easy targets compared to Washington’s men who were scattered and were taking cover behind trees and whatnot. And at first the line is an easy target. But then the line reaches the first group of soldiers. That small group of soldiers now finds themselves outnumbered and overwhelmed by the British line, so they break and run. And the line advances. Now it gets to the next group of Washington’s soldiers, and again, it’s one or two soldiers or at most a small group against a whole line of British soldiers, so again they are outnumbered and they break and run. And so forth.
With the weapons of the time, the only way to stop a big advancing group of soldiers was to stick another big group of soldiers in their way. Anything else will get you overrun and defeated.
With this type of fighting, your men also don’t need to be too highly trained. Training costs money and resources. Just gathering up huge numbers of men was a huge logistical nightmare. Disease was also a huge problem. Back then, more men died of disease than died in battle. Firing and reloading a musket quickly isn’t easy, so the emphasis back then was constant drilling on how to fire quickly.
One thing to keep in mind is that the old basic flintlock musket was king of the battlefield from the 1600s up through the 1800s. While a flintlock looks quite a bit like a modern rifle, it wasn’t used like a modern rifle. Before the musket, the most effective groups on the battlefield were archers surrounded by men with pikes or spears. The archers could shoot at the enemy, and if the enemy drew close they faced a wall of pointy things from the pikemen. When fighting at a distance though, the pikemen didn’t really have anything to do, and once the fighting got close-up, the archers were no longer effective. The musket could fire at a distance, and with a bayonet on the end it could also effectively serve as a pike. Now all of your men served both purposes, making distance fighting and close-up fighting more effective. Bayonet fighting was an integral part of the battlefield back then, with bayonets accounting for roughly a third of battlefield casualties. George Washington got his backside kicked up and down the battlefield by the British until he went into Valley Forge, where, in addition to nearly starving to death, his men got some proper training in bayonet fighting.
Leading up to the Civil War, there were two minor tweaks to the design of the musket. First, the flintlock was replaced with the percussion cap, which made the musket much more reliable and much more immune to weather. If you fire a flintlock in the rain, the most likely result is that it just goes click. You won’t be able to get a spark off of your wet flint and steel. The second change was the invention of the Minie Ball, which, despite the name, wasn’t a ball at all but instead was bullet shaped. A musket gets more and more difficult to load as you shoot it, since black powder fouls up the barrel and makes it more and more difficult to shove the next round down into it. A hunter can stop and clean his barrel after every few shots, so a rifle back in the 1700s for a hunter was no biggie. But armies couldn’t use them because soldiers couldn’t stop and clean their barrels every few shots. The Minie Ball fixed that. It had a hollow skirt at the base of the “bullet”. The Minie Ball was smaller than the barrel bore, so you could shove it down a fouled barrel and it wouldn’t get stuck. When fired, the hollow skirt (being soft lead) would expand and grip the barrel rifling.
These changes seem relatively minor, but they had a huge impact on the battlefield. A smooth bore musket pretty much always shoots curve balls, since the round ball will randomly contact the barrel as it travels down and will come out spinning. It will shoot straight for maybe 50 to 75 yards. After that, which way the ball goes is anyone’s guess. A rifle-musket shooting a Minie ball is just as accurate as a modern rifle. Some Civil War era marksmen were able to hit a man-sized target at a distance of 500 to 600 yards. Smooth bore muskets didn’t have sights because they weren’t really necessary. You can aim one by using the tang screw (the screw that holds the barrel in place at the back end of the musket) and the bayonet lug as sights of sorts, but that’s it. The Springfield Model 1861 musket had flip-up leaf sights. With both leaves down it was sighted for 100 yards, and it had one leaf for 300 yards and another for 500 yards. The British pattern 1853 Enfield musket had a much better stepped/flip sight that incremented in 100 yard steps from 100 yards to 900 yards, though realistically, hitting anything beyond about 500 to 600 yards was going to be mostly a matter of luck.
Military planners expected musket fighting during the Civil War to be pretty much the same as musket fighting for the last 200 years. But that proved not to be the case. Those subtle changes in musket design had a huge impact on the battlefield, as did changes in military tactics. Bayonet fighting went from being of primary importance on the battlefield (again, roughly a third of all casualties) down to being only used as a last resort, accounting for less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties, where it remains to this day. In earlier wars, if you needed to punch through a line, all you needed to do was mass enough men and charge. When they tried this in the Civil War, you ended up with things like Pickett’s Charge, which not only did not punch through the line, but when Pickett was asked to reform his men after the charge, he replied that he had no more men.
So tactics were changing during the Civil War. Those big groups of men lining up and shooting at each other, which didn’t make much sense to you, worked extremely effectively in previous wars, but was starting to become much less effective, and the shift to more modern tactics was starting to take place. Generals were understandably a bit reluctant to try out new tactics, since that usually just ends in getting your own men killed, so the change was a bit slow. Some say it was too slow, and disasters like Pickett’s Charge could have been avoided since previous similar charges had also failed. But generals need proven battle experience to know what works and what doesn’t. It took them a while to get that experience.
Excellent piece engineer_comp_geek. Just a couple of observations.
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Even in Napoleonic times, a frontal assault was a risky affair. The poor effective range of the musket made it attractive, but even then if the enemy got off more than 5 or 6 volleys you’d be in trouble. The very last attack ordered by Napoleon was at Waterloo when his Guards were beaten back by Maitland’s division.
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The rifled musket and the breechloader, by increasing the range of the weapon ensured that an attacker was under fire for longer. The basic principle remained, an attack force could only take so many hits before it petered out, however, now they would be in range much earlier, which meant that chances of success reduced drastically. WIth US Civil War era muskets, they rate of fire was about the same as earlier muskets, but with breach loaders that also increased and eventually, magazine fed rifles would arrive a generation later and that would be that for the old style of fighting.
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The era of the ACW was still a transitional era. As stated above, although muskets were rifled, for the most part they remained the same weapon as that of the preceeding 250 years, a muzzel loader firing three or four rounds a minute.
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This meant that a frontal assault was not totally a bad idea. Marching in line under heavy fire takes a lot of guts. The American troops in the ACW had that in spades. However after a certain when the fire got too hot they would break, or hunker down and the attack would peter out. Like at Gettysburg or Cold Harbor. The professional European troops of the same era were different, they were drilled to continue to advance and fight and close ranks. In the ACW, you had Pickett’s Charge. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, atGravelotte, the entrenched French (like Union troops at Cemetary Ridge) blasted the Prussians Guards, but unlike the Virginians and South Carolinians 7 years prior those guys continued the attack and managed to dislodge the French, albeit with horrific casualties.
This led to the belief that properly drilled and trained troops could succeed, and this would not be totally erased until 1914.
That’s why I mentioned the Sharps rifle. It could use the existing paper cartridges and caps and was still more effective. As you note here, it did cost more (not sure if it was 5 times as much, but it was definitely more expensive) and they would have needed training for both use and repair as well as spare parts, but they could have used it a lot more. The Spencer rifles were, after all, deployed officially (and, like the others were deployed a lot more unofficially by wealthy officers or just men buying their own weapon to use). I think it was one of the really big missed opportunities for the North that they didn’t deploy something like the Sharps/Spencer/Henry’s rifle in greater numbers or in coherent regiments early in the war when it was possible to snuff out the South early with a few very decisive and crushing victories.
Yeah, I agree…was an excellent summation of formations and how the change from flintlocks to caplock muskets changed tactics and rendered older tactics obsolete. Like with WWI, often the tactics weren’t able to keep up with changes in technology wrt the leadership. They were either unable to see a solution or they could conceive of a solution but had no idea how to implement it given the time constraints, so fell back on the tactics and training they knew.
Another thing that many people aren’t aware of is that Civil War era rifle-muskets were probably the worst standard infantry weapon to get shot with in all of history. They made worse wounds than the round ball muskets before them and they made worse wounds than the higher velocity cartridge rounds that followed them. The rounds were sub-sonic (barely), but they were huge hunks of lead. Not only were they great at shattering bones, but they also made a wide wound channel right from the start, unlike a modern high velocity round which penetrates quite a bit before the wound channel starts to spread out. This was something that was noticed by army surgeons at the time, but was only fairly recently confirmed with ballistic gel type tests.
Couple that with the primitive state of medicine at the time, and the rifle-musket had a fearsome reputation. If you got shot in the arm, you lost the arm. If you got shot in the leg, you lost the leg. If you got shot in the head or the torso, you were done.
Knowing that, men still had to get in line and march under heavy fire. That takes an incredible amount of guts.
One indirect change was a lessened impact of artillery in battles. During Napoleon’s time, cannons were a decisive weapon in battles. You could line up cannons outside of the effective range of infantry counterfire and blast away at a line of infantry that couldn’t shoot back.
The increased range of infantry weapons by the 1860’s ended this tactic. Now if you were setting up a cannon on the battlefield, the opposing infantry could target it. The use of artillery would remain limited for several decades until tactics were developed that enabled artillery to be emplaced well behind the battle line with fire being directed by forward observers.
Was the Spenser, “That damned Yankee rifle that you load on Sunday and shoot for the rest of the week”? Or something like that.
Just to add to engineer_comp_geek’s excellent post, back in the time of smooth-bore muzzle-loading muskets, what was even scarier than a charge from opposing infantry was a charge from cavalry. With the slow-shooting, short-range muskets, the defenders couldn’t shoot enough of the cavalry to keep them from riding right up to the line. The only way to defend against it was getting a solid line of men with pointy things (bayonets worked fine), which horses will not want to run into. [Typically, if you knew a cavalry charge was coming, you’d get your soldiers to get even more compact and shoulder-to-shoulder than usual, with another line of guys facing backwards and on each side in case any cavalry rode through a gap in the line]
If an 1812-era army deployed like a WWII platoon, with the men all spread out behind cover, the enemy cavalry would just ride around killing the soldiers one at a time (or ignore them and ride past to start killing the generals and whomever else the soldiers were supposed to be protecting).
Sure is. If you fire one shot per day.
I agree that the fanboyism of the Garand is only equaled by the fanboyism of the 1911 but wouldn’t semi-automatic fire result in a higher practical rate of fire?
If you have enough room, couldn’t the dispersed rifle shooters inflict disproportionate casualties by outranging the compact line of infantry as it closed in, pulling back, outranging them again, especially if they moved by horse or sneaked through dense terrain?
What did wrok, especially for the militia, was putting them behind any sort of wall.
The inability of the Northern manufacturing industry to make large quantities of any weapon, to begin with, had a lot to do with it. Time and again, firms proved to be overly optimistic about quantities and delivery dates. Most of them had never made firearms before, some had never made anything in quantity before. Even the well-established concerns like Colt and Remington struggled and there was a limit to how much they could expand their factories, especially in an age when capitalists were expected to bear all of the investment cost without government aid. They would have had to make a huge capital investment which, once the war was over, could never have been remunerative. (And some, like the Spencer factory, did go out of business once the market no longer wanted its product.)
In later wars the government would advance capital to produce these wholly uneconomic production capacities, and write most of the investment off once the war was won.
The key to a reliable breechloader was the solid, deep-drawn center-fire brass cartridge case and developing that to a sufficient degree to be good enough didn’t happen until the 1880s.
No, I think it was the Henry rifle that the quote came from, though I don’t know if it was ever more than apocryphal.
On a purely rounds per minute basis, yes, but the reality is you can crank rounds out of a Lee-Enfield (or indeed any cock-on-closing bolt action with a 60 degree bolt throw or less) at a really high rate - the standard training for British soldiers in 1914/1915 was 15 aimed rounds a minute, which is an average RPM of one shot every four seconds. That doesn’t sound like a huge number, but remember, these are aimed shots - each one will hit its target. Also, the magazine only holds 10 rounds so you’ve got a reload factored in there too.
If you just want to do a Cyril Figgis and yell “Suppressing Fire!” while cranking rounds out as fast as you possibly can, you can get to around 30 rounds per minute - ie an averaged out RPM of a shot every two seconds, and you’d be looking at a couple of reloads in there as well.
Quite. For instance;in this video.
True in WWI. The US M1903 was altogether comparable to the rifles of the other powers, in fact arguably a copy at least in part of the German one. But the M1 aka Garand was categorically superior to the bolt action WWI/pre-WWI rifles most other powers kept as standard in WWII. That’s just a fact certain UK/Commonwealth fans don’t want to accept. You can reasonably argue that the qualities of the standard infantry rifle by WWII were a fairly small element of the total effectiveness of an army’s weaponry, but as far as rifles went the M1 was a significant step ahead of bolt action. Some other semi-auto’s used in smaller numbers by other combatants were comparable to the M1. And the German move to all men equipped with selective fire ‘assault rifles’ (the real original ‘assault rifles’) late in the war in some units was another step ahead. Was the Lee Enfield about comparable to the Stg.44? It gets ridiculous at a certain point.
OTOH that didn’t extend to all US small arms. The US squad automatic weapon the M1918 aka BAR was adequate but not on really equal footing with the best interwar developed/adopted magazine fed squad auto weapons, and that category of weapon didn’t necessarily compare favorably to the German concept of a ‘universal’ machine gun (ie MG34/42) in each squad.
The BAR did have an advantage in that it didnt have to be crew served, one could fire it from the hip. But yes, the MG 34 was superior in most other ways.