Whenever I see or read something on something like the famed “Pickett’s Charge”, the standard infantry philosophy was to march shoulder to shoulder, and when a cannon ball, grape shot, or some other explosive blew a hole in the line, guys in the rear would run up to fill the gaps.
Why?
Wouldn’t it be harder to hit an attacking force who had massive gaps and holes in the ranks? I would think that just replacing bodies with more bodies would just make the artillery boys jobs easier.
Anyone know the logic of this tactic? Is it a remnant from the Revolutionary was, or is there some actual logic to it?
It’s a result of muzzle loading muskets. Massed fire is the only way to hit anything. Without effective rifling, muskets are terribly inaccurate, so mass fire is what works. You take the hits from artillery and the like, fire your volleys, then in with the bayonet. Artillery wasn’t yet the Queen of the Battlefield.
Interesting… Ok, I can understand your first point. But let’s go back to Pickett’s Charge. He was marching his men into artillery hell for 3/4 of a mile before musket fire could have even been returned. The’d probably have to be even closer to hit anything.
I am currently listening to "Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army Of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865, by Carlton McCarthy and he said that no one used bayonets. They didn’t want to carry them, and most were just left behind to be picked up by the quartermaster, who would give them to the calvary, who didn’t use them much, either.
So, maybe it worked better on paper than it did in practice?
I am not an expert on the ACW but one factor may be that the Civil War was at a transitional point in the development of weapons technology. Artillery was becoming more accurate, more mobile and quicker firing; infantry weapons were also beginning the move from smooth bore muskets unlikely to hit a barn door at 100 paces to quick firing rifles nominally accurate out to 1000 yards. I can’t say is this was a factor in Pickett’s “Charge” but shoulder to shoulder had been the necessary formation since the introduction of fire arms for the reasons silenus said and it was what the Civil War commanders had been taught. It took time for the lessons to be learned and, of course, the tragedy was in many cases the lessons had not been learned in 1914.
The standard answer to reduce your losses from artillery as you approached was to use your own artillery to destroy or at least neutralise that of the defenders and I seem to recall that is what Lee tried to do. Dredging my memory - didn’t Lee thinking the Federal artillery had been destroyed when it fell silent when in fact it was just conserving ammunition?
On the bayonets, leaving them behind may reflect the amateur nature of the ACW armies. I don’t think this would have happened during the Napoleonic Wars. With a smooth bore musket taking ages to reload, the bayonet was essential for close quarters work both in attack and defence. Without a bayonet you are just a guy with a really clumsy club!
I think you can make a strong case that Civil War strategy and tactics were generally terrible. The war was much longer and more costly than either side expected. Nobody could figure out how to win.
Although they were muzzle-loaders, the standard issue infantry weapons used by both armies in the US Civil War (the Springfield 1861 and the Enfield 1853) were in fact rifled muskets, accurate to several hundred yards. Military doctrine however changed slower than the technology so it was still believed that massed fire was the most effective method. Also, effective infantry meant courage and steadiness in the heat of battle. This was really only achieved thru absolute discipline in terms of never breaking ranks and running. Panic would spread and the whole line could fall apart if gaps weren’t quickly filled.
That being said Picket’s charge was simply a terrible miscalculation on Gen. Lee’s part. By his own admission it was the biggest mistake he ever made. He underestimated the Union’s artillery strength and over-estimated the psychological impact of a massive Confederate charge over open territory. Also the mindset over casualties back then was much, much higher. In WWII acceptable losses (in Western armies at least) were in the single digits. During the American Civil War regiments could routinely lose 30, 50, 60% of their men in one battle.
A realisation that the Minié ball had made Napoleonic tactics obsolete had yet to sink in, though both sides learnt some as the war went on, and trench warfare, barbed wire and underground mining all made their appearance in the war, fifty years before WW1.
Defensive tactics outstripped offensive tactics by the time of the Civil War. Accurate rifled weapons favored the unit defending because volley fire wasn’t needed for the best effect. It still had its uses (volley fire is very impressive and scary to face) but firing a rifle whilst on the move wasn’t much as help to those attacking. The only hope was to maintain unit cohesion and hope the unit didn’t break on the advance.
Bayonets are both overestimated and underestimated. Many folks work from the idea that there were very few bayonet casualties and assume they were useless, but the fact is: if you are facing a unit with bayonets that is getting close you probably are not going to engage but flee. Bayonets are mostly for scaring the defenders out of their position.
While the rifled musket was a more effective killing machine than the smooth bore musket that had dominated warfare up until the mid-19th Century, the rifled musket was not all that fearsome. It still took from 15 to 20 seconds to load the thing and its effective range was not much more than 400 yards. Most commanders did not want their soldiers to open fire at any more than 250 yards simply because their fire was ineffective outside that range.
At three rounds per minute it took a bunch of soldiers firing together to put a destructive fire on a target. This was the reason for all the close order drill – to put a substantial body of infantry within killing range of a target and to put killing gun fire on the target. Open order and squad and half-squat maneuvers just did not result in enough fire on the target. All that changed when repeating rifles with long range capabilities and automatic weapons were put in the hands of common soldiers. It wasn’t the mine ball that transformed combat, it was the Mauser rifle and the Maxim Gun.
Confederate artillery at Gettysburg did manage to suppress the Union artillery in the critical sector of Pickett’s Charge. The three batteries at the Angle were pretty well destroyed or driven off leaving the Union infantry along the stone wall without adequate artillery support, unlike the positions on either side where the attack was pretty well broken up or substantially weakened before the infantry can into contact.
Everyone thinks they’re smarter than the folks who actually had to do this stuff in 1863.
Pickett’s Charge was, obviously, a dreadful error, but it was an error based not on the assumption that men are bulletproof but on the erroneous belief that the Union center was not actually as well defended as it was. Lee had spend das attacking the Union flanks and believed, wrongly, that they would pour more of their strength in to those. The Union anticipated the attack in the center.
Frontal attacks often worked. Spectacularly. Not that day.
I heard it suggested (by a park ranger at Antietam, I think) that the men tended not to use their bayonets because Americans have a cultural aversion to stabbing, as opposed to other modes of violence. I found that idea curious, yet not implausible.
John Keegan suggests bayonet use is underestimated. Apparently the statistical studies that form the basis for our estimation of weapon effects were conducted from the records of field hospitals; thus mostly capturing the wounded who were brought there. But bayonet fighting involves a significant amount of re-wounding and a high fatality rate, probably because it takes place inside critical distance. That’s the concept based on the observation that animals (including humans) will flee/avoid danger/confrontation at longer ranges, but inside a certain proximity, fight. And fight savagely, in the case of humans. That’s a major reason city fighting is so destructive of life; it tends to take place at very close range.
Keegan feels that a lot of bayonet victims were finished off in close combat and never brought to aid stations (being clearly dead), thus prejudicing our understanding of the rate of bayonet injuries.
One thing I’ve noticed with historical soldier anecdotes is that troops doing a lot of marching tend to shed the gov’t issued gear that they think they are not gonna need.
One WW2 anecdote was that some infantryman tossed away their gas masks, for example, while in the field. It means that there will be less weight that they need to carry.
If Civil War soldiers were tossing their bayonets, it’s possible that some were tossing them because they were trying to reduce weight.
The big problem with the bayonet was not the absence of blood lust on the part of the combatants but in getting close enough to your opponent to use the thing without getting shot while getting there or having you opponent run away before you came to close quarters.
You are assuming that Pickett had perfect information.
The Union artillery was assumed to be mangled or destroyed by CSA artillery bombardments. Unknown to the Confederates, they were overshooting the Union position. Also there was a fence in the middle of the field that slowed down the “charge” as the Rebs had to climb it.
So given Pickett’s knowledge of the situation and the fact that despite the two factors above that it came so close to succeeding, it is hard to fault his tactics.
I don’t know if I’d go that far. The machine gun was probably the most profound change in the firearm warfare era, but the rifled musket/Minie Ball was probably on par with the bayonet as far as lesser changes go.
I mean, the bayonet let the armies be more generalized- an army no longer had to have dedicated pikemen and musketeers, since a infantryman with a long musket and bayonet essentially had his own pike. This caused the shift into the classic tactics people think of as Napoleonic- basically the infantry would march up in formation to about 50 yards or so, fire volleys until one side or the other would start to waver, and then there would be a bayonet charge to break the opposing regiment.
This was pretty much the standard set of tactics from the early 1700s up through literally the US Civil War, at which point, the Minie ball combined with the rifled musket essentially rendered the bayonet charge irrelevant, as the effective range of a Civil War rifled musket was considerably in excess of the 50-70 yards of the smoothbore musket. So a charging regiment might have twice or three times as far to charge, which would give the defending regiment a chance to potentially fire twice without reply, and the longer range means that adjacent defending regiments could also effectively fire on the charging regiment as well. The issue wasn’t that bayonets weren’t effective, it’s that the bayonet charge suddenly was quite outmatched by the defensive firepower of rifled muskets.
The US Civil War was essentially the point when the switch to rifled muskets had happened, but the tactics hadn’t been figured out yet. In a sense, it was very similar to WWI, but without machine guns, explosive shells or tanks, and at a shorter range. The problem was that the only real way to fight was to line up at 100-150 yards and slug it out- you couldn’t really do bayonet charges or much of anything else.
WWI was really a conjunction of those 3 new technologies being used, but with late 19th century tactics, and without much reference to the lessons (not) learned in the US Civil War. That’s the primary reason for the carnage- nobody had cracked the nut of how to actually maneuver without getting mauled by artillery and machine gun fire. Tanks were what cracked that nut. WWII tactics were more centered around infantry/tank coordination in response to lessons learned in WWI. In places without much in the way of tank action, infantry battles were as deadly and as static as ever. And today’s force-on-force tactics aren’t that much different; we’re more mobile and have far greater communications, but ultimately a platoon of M1A1s along with a company or two of infantry is going to attack in much the same way that their great-grandfathers in WWII would have.
Union artillery noticed this effect during the Confederates’ preparatory barrage and intentionally slacked their counterfire, attempting to simulate the effects of a well-aimed attack on their batteries.
In other words, Union artillery intentionally reinforced the illusion of being put out of the fight during the artillery duel phase, so as to preserve their ammo (and, by not provoking an aim correction from opposing artillery, preserving strength as well) for the inevitable infantry charge phase.
It was a standard strategy of Napoleonic tactics. Most U.S.A. and C.S.A. commanding officers were trained at the same military academies.
Confederate General Nathan B Forrest best describe the basic tactics of the early years of the war when he said, ‘‘Get there first with the most men’’ (or “Get there firstest with the mostest”). Massed numbers of soldiers should carried the day, in theory. However, gatling guns, grape-shot, and long range rifled weapons increased the advantage of the defenders.
The military leaders on both sides (of the U.S. Civil War), however, all shared the same basic military training as well as the basic concept of how an army should be built and how a war should be fought. The military training as well as tactics of the civil war was geared towards emulating the grand armies created by Napoleon.
While that’s not implausible, I’d like to add that I’ve found reloading a muzzle loader is a whole lot easier if the bayonet is not attached to the muzzle. Pickett’s infantry were expected to walk shoulder to shoulder for almost a mile (approx 1760 yds). Their massed rifle fire wouldn’t have been effective beyond 300 yds (probably at lot less), and bayonets are only effective within 2 yds. Bayonets are most effective when you don’t have time to reload.
Even the ancient Greeks knew spearmen were more effective in formation. This same mentality informed the use of the bayonet. A bayonet formation with gaps in the line is not a formation at all but rather a mob, and is much easier for the enemy to repulse. Imagine being the soldier in the front who has lost the soldiers to his left and right. If these casualties are not replaced, the soldier will either be easily killed or will turn and flee.
With that: One hypothesis is that relatively few people were killed by the bayonet because (in most cases) one side or the other turned and fled before or shortly after contact. The attacker, therefore, must present a united front if they wish to intimidate the defenders. There is a reason people sang songs about their “burnished rows of steel.”
These leaders were informed by the experiences of over a hundred years of bayonet-and-musket warfare, most especially the Napoleonic War. Napoleon had immense success charging tightly packed columns directly into enemy formations and watching them shatter like glass. These ideas did not appear in a vaccuum. As mentioned above, Civil War leaders were slow to adapt their practices to the new, deadlier battlefield. This is not a unique event. Everyone in every war struggles to catch up to technology.
Never underestimate simple human stupidity. Even considering the realities of the situation and the military tactics of the age, Pickett’s Charge was still an inexplicably bonehead move no matter how you slice it. When people insist on asking “why” something did or did not happen, “stupidity” is very often a valid answer.