The Killer Angels and Gettysburg feature Lt Col Fremantle, of the Coldstream Guards, who had a jaunty vacation traveling for a few months with Lee, but wasn’t acting as an official observer. Lee also had a Prussian and an Austrian in his entourage at Gettysburg. THAT Count von Zeppelin observed the workings of the Union’s balloon corps and probably learned a thing or two he later put to use inventing Heavy Metal music. Foreign observers probably got a feel for logistics using trains, though Prussia already knew a bit.
But it is the second question in the title that puts this thread in GD rather than GQ. Watching Pickett’s men, they saw the expensive folly of a massed walking charge, in daylight, across 3/4-mile of open ground, against a dug-in enemy firing rifles capable of hitting what they were aimed at a couple hundred yards away, and with cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, and cannon in front of them spraying them with shot, shell, and canister. Why didn’t they learn anything from that? These observers were of the generation before the commanders of WWI and should have taught them the lessons they learned from the Civil War, but they didn’t seem to learn that one, even as rifles got better and machine guns became common. Just how bloody stupid were they?
You know that the men who came over to observe the US civil war mostly didn’t become senior generals immediately upon returning to Europe, right? It took quite some time for them to become authorities whom European generals who take seriously. In addition, the US was still viewed as (and honestly, frequently really was) a provincial backwater, and the Europeans viewed that sort of bush warfare as being not totally related to the sorts of “sophisticated warfare” that they were engaged in. And the generals you note in the 1860s mostly weren’t the exact same generals who were in charge fifty years later in the 1910s.
With respect to machine guns in particular, they weren’t up to snuff in the American Civil War. The Gatling Gun specifically was so prone to jamming and so inaccurate at range that even the Confederates who faced them didn’t have any respect for them.
Well, probably there is a bit of thinking of Americans as uncouth barbarians, and what could they possibly learn from us? But I think part of it was the same thing that caused us to learn less from the war than we should have (or to forget the lessons so quickly)…the institutional mindset of the military. Individually, I have no doubt that European observers learned good lessons, but translating that into changing the mindset of their entrenched military establishments is another matter.
Consider…the US watched the Europeans make the same mistakes as Pickett during the majority of WWI. We had observers over there, AND we had gone through the Civil War and supposedly learned lessons about industrialized warfare and how deadly massed fire was to openly advancing infantry. Yet, when we entered the war we tried the same stupid shit of doing massed infantry charges into the teeth of long range rifle and machine gun fire. We hadn’t learned a gods damned thing, seemingly.
Well, the Prussians learnt not to draw wars out for 4-5 years, as in the 7 Weeks War and the Franco-Prussian War ? But they probably already knew that.
However, there weren’t that many wars in Europe or America for the next 50 years to practise in. Anyway, people don’t learn lessons from watching other people; only by doing the wrong thing themselves.
Did the Americans ‘learn’ in that war or for the next ( the Spanish-American & Crushing the Philippines ) ? Had the Americans ‘learnt’ from the costly fumbling of the Crimean War ? ( McClellan was an observer, sent by the Secretary of War, Mr. Jefferson Davis. ) General Lee may be an admirable man, and a great general, but to the end he had this habit of throwing men into mincing machines, reinforcing failure. People sometimes have to do what is necessary rather than what is ideal.
I think the Europeans learned the lessons of the Franco-Prussian war quite well. They learned that modern wars between industrial powers were to be won by rapid mobilization, disciplined maneuver, and concentrated artillery – all techniques that were significantly more advanced than the undisciplined American slugfest five years earlier.
Until the invention of the tank, was there really much alternative to mass infantry charges against a dug in enemy? If even they did not learn it from the American Civil War, one might think the European generals would have learned not to rely on these in the first few months of WWI, but they carried on using them. What else did they have? (At least along the very long and static Western front, where flanking was not really an option.)
The Europeans did learn lessons from the American Civil War. They learned that a long drawn-out war between two roughly equivalent powers would be a bad war. They also learned the railroads and telegraphs had picked up the pace at which a war could be fought. So they put these two ideas together and came up with the principle that a country that mobilized fast enough could strike a decisive blow and win a war before the other side had really gotten ready to start fighting. You had to fight a war quickly and avoid having it last long enough for both sides to get fully mobilized - if that happened a war could drag on for years.
They were all Men of their time. They saw just what they expected to see. What they did not see were alternatives to massed attacks. Even in WWII we were obliged to storm the beaches on D-Day because no one knew of a better way.
It worth’s remembering that after the Union and Confederacy had sacrificed tens of thousands of men in massed infantry charges, during the very last major battle of the Civil War (Petersburg), General Grant finally came up with an idea. He had skilled miners from Pennsylvania tunnel under the Confederate lines and set off explosives.
It’s easy to criticize the military tactics of the First World War, but not so easy to come up with better alternatives. Automatic weapons were still big and heavy at the time. Attempts at portable ones weren’t all that useful, so defenders had a firepower advantage. Tanks weren’t used until the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and they were slow and prone to breaking down. The inside of a tank could get very hot and fill with fumes, and those manning it weren’t even especially safe from attacks.
Tanks, of course, were developed and built in large numbers, and their value was well-appreciated. It’s not like no one was trying to find a better way.
Well, it didn’t work in the Civil War. (Although from what I’ve read of it, it could very well have worked at Petersburg, if the execution of the post-explosion attack hadn’t been so badly botched.)
But really, mining under enemy walls and emplacements has been done for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Before the introduction of explosives you would set fire to the tunnel’s beams directly under what you wanted to collapse and let Nature take its course.
Full-bird Colonel Brinkmann is now Branch Chief of Operations at the Military Policy and Operations Division of the German Army, so I think he might know what he’s talking about. It’s 151 pages of PDF goodness, so if anyone finishes first please spoil it for the rest of us.
“The relevance of the U.S. Civil War as the first modern war lies in a number of
aspects. The American Civil War emphasized the necessity to plan and conduct warfare in recognition of the vital relationship between economic, social, political, and military factors. Support and motivation by a people are the base for the political will of a nation to formulate and achieve its aims and interests. Economic resources are the prerequisite for sustainability of the war effort and technological innovation. Carried by the willpower of the people the armed forces must attain the best protection of its soldiers through modern equipment, operational ingenuity and adaptability, superiority of technology and forces, as well as reliable logistics support to provide for unhindered support of forces and means.”
Whereas the Germans in particular were not able to look past the idea that War was to be won by the side that mobilized it’s forces before the other side, and that the objective was to defeat/annihilate the other side’s army.
They might as well have been, because they were fought much the same way. This thread is not about WWI, but perhaps the discussion might show how the idiocy of headlong charges against entrenched positions and concentrated small arms fire could have been–should have been–seen 50 years earlier and the brilliant minds of Europe’s militaries could have come up with something else.