Could one guy with a M-16 have changed the Battle of Gettysburg?

Great Debates
1

This may not be a great debate, but watching the Discovery Channel show on the science of the BoG and Pickett’s charge, I wondered if one Confederate soldier with a modern M-16 rifle and unlimited ammo could have changed the outcome. An M-60 machine gun would be better of course, but I wonder what the absolute minimum would be.

A couple of things come to mind: The rifle couldn’t be fired continously, to avoid overheating and jamming, so the gunner would have to take it easy, but how much lead could he sling? Would that have been enough to allow Pickett to succeed? I think it would have. The union soldiers would have hunkered down behind the stone walls to weather the attack, and the Rebs would have broken through as Lee planned. I’ve always thought that if they did break through the middle of the union lines, then they would have the problem of enemy in front, AND in back of them. (I still want to go back in time and shake Gen Lee by the ears, shouting "What the Hell were you thinking, Man??"

I also was amazed that all of the issues of the civil war seem to mean nothing to us now. Can you imagine the US populace getting irate enough over any issue, much less states rights and slavery, to go out and slaughter five or six hundred thousand of each other?

2

one guy would always stand the chance of being killed by a stray shot before having any significant effect

3

Short answer: No.

He would have a large portion of the Union army shooting specifically at him as soon as he made himself stand out. These men generally had fairly accurate rifles with good range and considerable stopping power. Some had highly accurate rifless with long range. Then there were the cannon firing explosive and cannister shot. Full modern body armor wouldn’t help much and he’d’ve quite possibly been killed long before he reached his weapon’s effective range, making the fact he posessed it moot. It was a LOOOOOOOOONG way across that field.

A modern machine gun with unlimited ammo and barrels, as was shown in WWI, could protect a position for a long time but a single gun would call attention to itself, bringing down all of the Union artillery.

4

No way one guy with an M-16 changes Gettysburg, or any other major battle. You could kill a whole slew of guys, but you aren’t going to overpower entire battalions of infantry. They can fire a heck of a lot of shots, plus you’re going to be just as vulnerably to artillery fire as anyone else.

Let’s say you’re on the Union line fending off Pickett’s Charge. How many men can you kill with your M-16? Well, if you have unlimited ammo let’s say you start plugging away the moment they come out of the bush. Realistically you have little chance, if you’re an average shot, of hitting anything specific until they get within 400-500 yards; at their starting distance (a mile) you’ll be lucky to hit anyone at all.

But at 500 yards I could certainly be hitting someone with 90% of my shots, so let’s suppose I take an aimed shot every five seconds between 500 and 300 yards. I would estimate it would have taken the Confederate troops, at the very most, 120 seconds to cross that distance, which gives me 24 shots. I bet I could kill or cripple at least 20-22 men.

Once they get to 100-300 yards I could probably fire faster, say an aimed shot every 4 seconds. Giving them another 120 seconds to cross that distance I can fire an additional 30 shots. However, I can only fire 6 more shots after my original 24 before I have to change my magazine. That only takes five or ten seconds, but I lose two shots at least, so let’s say I get off 28 shots. At this distance I would essentially never miss, so give me 27 kills.

From 100 yards to contact I can pretty much spray the line and kill more guys than if I aim… I figure I could fire off 4-5 magazine of ammo in a minute, and possibly kill or badly injure 50 men.

So I’ve killed a hundred men - but we’re assuming

  1. That rifle and cannon fire doesn’t kill me or even force me to take cover, and

  2. That I can see what I am aiming at at long distances, which in the Civil War is not likely - smoke from gunpowder was a major problem for aiming.

Realistically I’d say I could kill 50 men, not 100, because it’s just not going to be as easy as I have described, especially the gunpowder smoke. And since I have probably shot some men who would have been shot by someone else or killed by shrapnel - believe me, me and the boys from the 20th Maine aren’t too worried at this point about setting arcs of fire - if I hadn’t shot them first, I may not be adding more than 30-40 marginal kills to the equation.

And this is an extreme case; Pickett’s Charge presented ten thousand targets marching straight at the Union line for damn near a mile. In most skirmishes I’m not going to have that sort of opportunity to kill men en masse. No, an M-16 is not going to change the battle singlehandedly.

You would have much more luck with an M-60 or an M-243 and unlimited ammo, which allows you to hose down the enemy line; you’d kill hundreds of men in a situation like that.

5

Yes RickJay, I agree with you.

I honestly believe that the only technology which would have made a seriously major difference would have been to have had say, eight, Phalanx gatling gun systems as used on US NAVY Aegis class destroyers to kill incoming Exocet missiles.

And they would have had to have opened up with a massive onslaught when the charge was still a mile away.

But these kind of “what ifs” are so moot. I mean, if you’re prepared to introduce a Phalanx system say, then why not night goggles? And if you had night goggles, why not take your Phalanx system to the enemy’s camp site in the dead of night and set up a killing field?

6

I realize most of these “what ifs” are pretty silly, and maybe this one is even more so. Possibly the absolute minimum for Lee to have won at Gettysburg would have been something available to him then, such as somehow ripping down the wooden fence that seemed to hang up Pickett’s charge, or if he had decided that it would be better to pick a better spot later on.

I just wondered what the bare minimum of a modern weapon would be to have swung the battle. I’m sure an M1A1 tank would have done it, but that would be overdoing it (and just as ridiculous).

What would have really been funny would have been some of the non-lethal stuff just now coming out. Can you imagine the chaos if Lee had unleased the microwave heat ray, maybe the sticky foam, the nausea inducing low-freq sound waves, or the best of all: the really really smelly stink bomb, which I’m told completely removes your will to fight. Oh well…

7

Any kind of automatic weapon fired from a fortified position would have been really good for suppressive fire at long range. Are we assuming you can just use 100 round drums, or whatever they make that’s big, change hot barrels, fix whatever breaks, and just blast away with three shot bursts continually? If so, then it would be useful to keep the enemy from moving around much. But, I don’t think near as useful as the artillery of the period.

Or, sort of what RickJay suggested in the paragraph about machine guns. One thing about the .223 is that it will go a long way. But, downrange energy gets pretty sucky with such a small bullet at long range.

Once you get close enough to really do any damage with an M-16, the weapons of the period were more than sufficient to take you out.

8

What if Lee had access to a 1920’s style “death ray”?

I am so very, very sorry. I know it’s wrong but I just couldn’t help myself. Please forgive me.

9

Uh, I guess we aren’t assuming it can be fired continually. That’s what you get for getting all fired up about a good historical “what if?” but not paying attention.

M-16s used to be viewed as really unreliable. That’s changed. They are still viewed as being less reliable than the AK-47 and variants.

I think that one .50 cal machine gun could have changed the Battle of Gettysburg certainly. That thing has a really nice effective range and loves to be abused. Audie Murphy comes to mind.

10

I knew that was coming…

11

A single tank is still vulnerable to infantry swarming over it and setting it on fire. It carries a limited amount of ammunition and can only fire in one (or two, counting a body-mounted machine gun) direction. A shell from a Parrott gun could take off a tread and then it’s stuck.

12

Of course, soldiers in 1863 would doubtlessly run in terror from a tank.

I would say that the absolute minimum weapon you would need to make a substantial difference if you only had one weapon would be an infantry machine gun, like an M-60. I think we can safely say such a weapon would make a big difference because, in fact, such weapons made a HUGE difference when they appeared on the scene of warfare. The use of machine guns in colonial wars, and of course eventually in WWI , enabled gunners to kill hundreds of men in a single engagement. Civi lWar troops, advancing closely together, would present a dream target; a good machine gunner could chop men down by the score. With unlimited ammo and spare barrels, you could slaughter five hundred to a thousand men in a single skirmish. My 40-50 kills with an M-16 pales in comparison.

Indeed, I would say that such a gun is the ideal choice. A big artillery gun or something doesn’t really do you any good in the context of the time - how’re you going to spot it? If you can take just one weapon, take a machine gun with a high rate of fire and large ammo drums. An M-243 can be fitted for 250-round drums and you can change the barrel very quickly, so that would be my choice.

13

I’m gonna go with no. Sure, they didn’t have machine guns then. But it’s not like there were only occasional salvos being shot off. Lead was flying everywhere. Rifles, muskets, cannons, you name it. So it’s not like the battle was turned for one side by a lack of firepower.

One soldier with an M16 would most likely have been much more effective than a single soldier without one, but wouldn’t have made a big difference overall.

14

Battles are also won or lost on morale. If say you were armed with a .50 cal sniper rifle like the ones special forces are equipped with today you could pick and choose your targets and stay out of effective enemy firing range. If Lee had something like this and could keep his line from any impetuous charges it might have goaded the Federal forces into attacking his lines. In many conflicts where the Southern forces were dug in the federal forces suffered heavy casualties.

Consider this. If an army saw its generals dropping one by one from enemy fire which it couldn’t locate it might cause them to make a rash reaction or at least disorganise and demoralise it as a fighting unit. An army does not need to be wiped out to a man to cease becoming a fighting element. It only needs it’s will removed. The officer corp’s resposibility was to make sure their charges conducted themselves against the enemy. Remove the officers and you cease having a fighting element; it then becomes a mob or rabble.

IIRC a .50 cal sniper rifle has an effective range of about a mile. With telescopic sights its a very effective weapon for just such a use. In my shooting experience I have made and seen shots made at distances which normally no one would expect. My brother and I when on our farm could get our .22 cal carbines to hit targets over 300 yards away. It looked like we were firing mortars though because of the bullet drop.

15

I like your idea SunTzu2U , and I bet the .50 cal sniper rifle, and scope, was not too far out for the 1860’s technology. If some smart gunsmith had come up with that, it may have done the trick.

16

As did the sniper rifles of the Civil War. With scopes, too. And they were good for wrecking morale and picking off officers. You’ve no doubt heard General John Sedgewick famous last words*, “Those fellows couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—” The fatal shot was fired from half a mile away.

    • Is this quote apocryphal? It sounds like a joke.
17

Hey, could one guy with a theater nuclear weapon have changed the course of Gettysburg?

18

Gettysburg nothing.

My fantasy Civil War ended when we nuked the Rebs at Bull Run.

19

The “limited amount of ammunition” an M1A1 Abrams tank carries is 40 maingun rounds (10 of which are HEAT rounds), some 11,400 7.62mm machinegun rounds (With a full load) for the completely stabalized coax machinegun, and about 900 rounds for the (internally controlled) TC’s .50-caliber machinegun. It’s completely sealed from the outside; infantry could swarm ontop of it, but the most they could do is break the more vulnerable sights. If they had flamible liquids, or landed a good cannon shot in the rear grate, they could kill the engine (Note that any cannon within several kilometers of the tank and in sight will probably be dead very, very quickly). And an Abrams can withdraw much faster than infantry can advance while still being able to shoot much more accurately than the cannons of the period. It’d be either a very accurate or very lucky cannon shot to hit a tank in a vulnerable spot, if not impossible (Hull-down possition). And that’s assuming the enemy infantry even wants to come near this huge metal war machine.

A single M-16 might not change a battle very much, but a tank would be devestating. Granted, it’d only be good for a single battle, or to guard a single location, as I think you’d find it hard to top off the gas tank…

20

If one machine gun can guaruntee to hold the line at one point and tie down a couple of regiments, it frees up other troops to overwhelm another part of the line.

Possibly one of the most effective weapons for breaking up a massed infantry charge would be airburst mortars.

Indirect fire would make it a very defensible weapon, field artillery at the time was direct fire and would not be able to hit a well screened mortar crew.

A well drilled mortar crew could easily release more firepower than a rifle equipped regiment, or more, likely a lot more.