Watching Alamo with a friend of mine, I was reminded that until relatively recently, foot soldiers and (especially) their COs were outfitted with pretty elaborate duds. And not just for going on parade, either: They wore them into the mud and the blood of battle, proving that being the Official Drycleaner to His Majesty’s Royal Army must have been a plum job at the time. Seeing the people carrying the guns wearing bright silver buttons and suits with multiple breasts was nearly as striking as watching presumably sane men stand still as other presumably sane men shot volleys of massed musket-fire at them.
Of course, by WWI this was dead. The troops getting trench-foot in Verdun were dressed pretty oddly by our standards (especially with the lower-leg wrappings… what the hell was up with that?) but nobody was polishing a golden epaulette while wating for the ‘over the top’. The troops in the US Civil War tended to dress pretty snazzily, modulo equipment and material shortages, but I don’t know if it was still being done in the Spanish-American War in the 1890s. So I’ve just paramaterized the final conflict as well as I can: Somewhere between the US Civil War and the First World War.
If I’ve remembered correctly from the “Guns of August”, the French Army worn their distinctive red trousers in the early months of the war. So I’d think that WWI was likely the last war with spiffy field uniforms.
They must have been easy to see from the machinegun nest.
Don’t forget that the British lost their ruling class charging those machine gun nests with swords.
I think Tuchmann writes about it, along with the French “elan” bayonet charges in red pants. The British officers led charges with a sword and a pistol. They were the well educated, wealthy guys who would have served in government. Their counterparts were killed in WWII flying bombers.
Here’s what Keenan has to say about this in his First World War (p. 75):
The heavy calvary wore brass helmets with horsehair plumes, the light calvary wore “frogged” (?) jackets and scarlet pants. The infantry of metropolitan army wore blue greatcoats, red trousers and calf length boots. All made of heavy wool too…
The British learned their lesson on flashy uniforms in the Boer War. The Germans had wisely thought ahead. Surprisingly, the Russians were mostly in the modern style as well. The Austrian calvary was still old-fashioned but the army was kitted out modernly. Most of the rest of the smaller nations involved had kept the flourishes, at the start, at least.
While brightly-colored jackets, feathered plumes and shiny brass epaulets glistening in the sun would mark today’s infantryman out for a sniper round between the eyes, these uniforms were well adapted to the demands of 18th and 19th century European warfare. The firearms of the era had a fairly short range, and were pretty inaccurate even within that. The only way to effectively utilize such weapons were to create concentrations of fire against a target by massing your infantry into units. Each unit had to be constantly positioned and repositioned relative to each other and the enemy throughout the chaos of the battle, without benefit of radios or GPS locators. Distinctive infantry uniforms allowed officers to more easily assertain their troops’ disposition and react to the flow of battle.
While this paradigm had slowly eroded over the later half of the 19th century (US Civil War, Boer War), many European military thinkers dismissed these “peripheral” engagements as irrelevant to continental European warfare. World War I finally blew the Napoleonic paradigm to smithereens. The interesting exception, as noted, is the British army. Besides having had the recent lesson of the Boer War, the British Army was MUCH smaller than its continental counterparts and therefore more flexible about experimenting with and embracing institutional changes.
And as a final aside, although the French may have marced off to the trenches of World War I looking splendid in their field finery, they didn’t stay that way long. Mud, blood and dust can rapidly transform the most brightly-colored uniform into passable camoflage.
The shift from elaborate to practical field uniforms was due to the colonial experience of the nations involved. The British fought the First Boer War in scarlet tunics and white helmets, but the Second in the khaki they’s developed in India. And while the French Metropolitan army was still in dark blue greatcoats and pantalons rouge, its colonial troops came back to Europe to fight in mustard-brown uniforms.
Old Imperial Germany did have experience in colonial warfare, and had sent troops to China in khaki, but kept its European army in wool with fancy piping and Hessian cuffs and decorative buttons on the velt flap over their butts. As mentioned, the Austrian infantry was more practical, since they’s been so disasterously dressed in brilliant white during the Risorgimento and the Seven Weeks War, so they switched to neutral pike grey with tailoring inspired by their long tradition as huntsmen.
As for the Russians and their simple, durable gimnasterka pullover tunic: that was due to the anti-western nationalization of Allexander III, who was disgusted by how 19th Century armies dressed in either the French or Prussian style, depending on which had more recently defeated the other (his same Russifaction drive decreed that Russian nobles had to appear at court functions in pre-Catherine the Great costumes with fur trim and pointy hats).
As an aside, the old preference for elaborate uniforms was defended as having the practical use of improving morale. Do soldiers fitght better if they have more pride? Do worksers behave more professionally if the men wear ties ant the women skirts? Note the example of the he Canadians, who went to WWI in high stock collars. When these uniforms wore out, the British resupplied them with their own stand-and-fall collars, but the Canadians re-cut them into stock collars again.
Anyway, in answer to the OP, my answer it the German army in WWII. Compared to the simple battle dress of the Allies (especially the M1 field jacket of the US Army, adapted from a mechanic’s jacket) the Germans still had outdated ideas about how to dress for combat: look at how much leather they wore. While the Allies used light, maintainable cotton webbing, the Germans had to maintain leather belts and boots and pouches in rain, mud and freezing weather.
Those wool leg wrappings are called puttees, and they provided insulation during the cold months. They were also useful for sealing the tops of boots when walking through puddles and muddy fields.
I don’t know about cavalry charges, but Keegan tells of a battle early in the war, at Loos, where six British infantry divisions formed up into perfect columns, “as if carrying out a parade-ground drill”, and marched straight across an open meadow towards a line of German machine guns. The defenders had a field day; one gun alone was estimated to have fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The Brits kept coming, and the Germans kept firing. Of the 15,000 men who took part in the attack, over 8,000 were casualties killed or wounded. Finally the British columns broke and ran, and the Germans simply stopped firing out of mercy. (The First World War, pp. 201-202)
If you visit the King’s palace in Copenhagen, you will see a memorial to the 12 soldiers of the King’s Guard, who fell in 1940, as the germans invaed. These me were dressed in full regalia-including the bearskin hats.
Unfortunately, their heroism was in vain, as they had only carbine rifles…the germans had machine guns.