The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Dumb Question Time

Re: Dumb Question Time

Richard Gadsden — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:12:24 -0000

The core historical reason for the reinvention of mass infantry formations in the fourteenth century was as a response to heavy cavalry. After the invention of the stirrup (somewhere around the fall of Rome), any competent horseman could be trained to couch a lance, and a charge of heavy cavalry with couched lance could shatter infantry. Roman-style legions with shield-and-sword and Viking-style shield-and-axe forces disappeared; the last big battle between a shield-wall and cavalry is Hastings in 1066.

But if you armed infantry with spears (in this military sense, they're called "pikes") and you trained them to form lines with rigid discipline, then they could hold off a cavalry charge. Of course, the cavalry could just ride around you, but knights generally couldn't be held back from charging - and you get Bannockburn (1314) and the Swiss revolts.

Over time, these formations were given offensive clout with ranged weapons - the Welsh and English longbow, then the Italian crossbow, then the early muskets, but still protected from cavalry by the pikemen. Then (c.1700) came the invention of the bayonet, which made your musket into a makeshift pike at need, and formations went from 50-50 pike-musket to 100% musket-with-bayonet, which is the army that Napoleon was using.

Field artillery could break up the solid formations, as could a volley from another musket-armed regiment, and then a charge, either of infantry with bayonets or of cavalry, could shatter the formation. Once accurate ranged fire became possible with the rifle (technically, rifles had been around for a long time, but they took forever to load because you had to ram the bullet all the way down the barrel through the rifling; the Minié ball changed all that in the mid-C19), cavalry charges basically disappeared - horses just make too big a target - and solid block infantry formations also became ever more dangerous, as soldiers in both the Civil War and World War I soon discovered.

Re: Dumb Question Time

bloodofpatriots — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:30:59 -0000

Wow! So many great comments. I won't rehash all the true things said so far, but I'll add one more reason to the list of why troops were used in mass formations in the American Civil War: Shock effect.

The theory is that a regiment that loses a man at a time might not even know the full extent of its losses until after a battle, and you desperately want your enemy to have knowledge of just how many of his fellows you've slaughtered around him. This is best accomplished by having him watch 20 or 40 or 100 of his pals all get mown down at once. You demonstrate to the enemy that his life is cheap, but your bullets are cheaper, and he's more likely to cower, to fire wildly or to turn tail and run.

So your massed volley fire scythes down a whole bunch of soldiers all at once, and in addition to seriously depleting the combat effectiveness of the unit you've just struck -- by reducing its manpower by a large chunk instead of nickle-and-diming -- you also aim to panic those who survived the slaughter and to take the wind out of the sails of the next unit in line coming to take the same punch.

Your job, to paraphrase that bastard Forrest, is to hit the enemy firstest with the mostest firepower. Destroy his ability and willingness to fight back by showing him the mass slaughter of his comrades.

Sometimes it worked out, and sometimes it didn't. In the great slaughter of the Union's assault on the sunken road at Fredericksburg, Union troops caught in the maelstrom of Confederate fire broke formation, hugged the ground and prayed. After Pickett's Charge, the shattered remnants of the attacking Confederate formations reportedly (and famously) begged Lee to let them try the charge again.

One result was that unit effectiveness was often rated by the percentage of casualties a given unit was able to absorb before it broke.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Sorn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:13:36 -0000

Dude, thanks. Apologies to everone for recomending the wrong book.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Midland — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:12:58 -0000

Point taken, to a degree. Though I don't think it prevented the European military attaches from considering the ACW an amateur affair.

Hell, the Europeans were still patronizing the the Americans as amateurs right up until 1945. The British, in particular, doing so in spite of the endless string of humiliating, disasterous defeats inflicted on them by the Germans and Japanese. British historians are still pushing that notion today, although I'm not sure any of them since Churchill have done so in discussing the Civil War.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Midland — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:45:51 -0000

A good example of parallel development. From the limited reading I've done on the topic, Bantu warfare before Shaka was a lot like Achaean warfare in the Illiad: bands of warriors clustered around charismatic leaders shaking out in a rough line, lots of posturing, and eventually one side moves up and pushes the other off the battlefield.

Shaka emphasized drill, exercise, drill, tight formations, more drill, high speed march and deployment, and the double envelopment of the Buffalo Horn formation. Against a poorly organized line or mass of opposing spearmen, it must have been a devastating mode of attack.

Frederick the Great used the oblique attack under the same kind of conditions--his entire army, drilled for maximum speed and efficiency, massed on one flank, instead of with both flanks in the case of the Buffalo Horn. His advantages were the same, and his methods failed under the same circumstances: an enemy that could hold its line under the impact of the sudden, massed attack and shatter it with firepower.

Firepower had increased enough in Napoleonic battles that a simple attack formation advantage could not be depended on to bring victory. Most particularly, simply having more mass in your attack formation would not guarantee a breach of the enemies line. You had to lay out plenty of skirmishers (light infantry fighting in open lines, using cover if available) to clear the maneuver area between the opposing armies, find a weak spot, prep it with massed artillery if you had the time, and hit it with sudden, overwhelming force.

Napoleon was a master of pre-battle maneuver, which tended to give him a positional advantage when an actual battle occurred. His French armies were fine marchers and skirmishers, he had the best artillery in Europe, and he was a master at reading terrain and massing fire and flesh at the right spot to crush an enemy army regardless of how carefully the opponent had prepared.

By the time of the Civil War, Wellington's techniques for using massed, aimed fire had thinned formations somewhat in Western armies. Direct assaults on enemy positions could succeed, but seldom did. While simple descriptions of attacks talk of one side running at the other and the other running away, that is not how it usually worked. Literally, most attacks consisted of one battle line approaching the other at a walk or a trot, stopping to trade fire at fifty yards or so. A lot of people would get shot, then either the attacker retreated or the defender retreated. When one side actually ran hard enough at the other for combat to get hand to hand, casualties were usually massive on both sides.

Well-planned, successful small scale and large-scale attacks involved line formations overlapping the enemy flank. If, say, in the smoke of battle, a regiment in line could catch an enemy regiment, also in line, from off to one side and at an angle, they could fire down the length of that line without getting shot up in return. That would break the enemy line, regardless of how elite they were. The they would run away until someone rallied them and got them back into formation.

On a larger scale, you might get an entire corps striking an enemy line at an angle. The attacking force, if properly deployed, would not be in column, but would have have multiple lines with multiple brigades in each line, each brigade consisting of three to six regimens in line formation. The second and third lines of brigades would be deployed by their generals as the first line lost cohesion due to casualties, terrain, or maneuver, deploying past or around them to strike at weak points in the opposing army as they became visible. The mass of fire from this formation might drive the enemy line back, or there might be a series of small exchanges in which enemy regiments and brigades would break one after the other, in a chain reaction, as their flanks were exposed.

In one encounter in the Wilderness, the elite Union II corp was strung out in line in the woods facing facing south towards the Confederates of Longstreet's corps. Longstreet found a logging trail that led across his front from west to east. He took most of his his brigades up this road and stacked them up in a shorter line, several brigades deep, to strike the Union left at a severe angle. The attack, driven through thick underbrush broke the formation of virtually every Union regiment in the II corps over the course of an hour. Hancock told Longstreet after the war, "you rolled me up like a wet blanket."

On the attack, armies used more and more skirmishers in the later years of the war, until some attacks in cluttered terrain were little more than large scale skirmishes in formations dense enough that they virtually had the firepower of actual battle lines. There was no substitute, however, for a dense line formation in the open, as there was no other way to bring sufficient firepower to bear on the enemy to destroy a battle line. This resulted in horrendous casualties and many failed attacks. The need to bring enough firepower to bear on the battlefield to break an enemy line, particularly if it were dug in, led to the development of rapid firing artillery, machine guns, and indirect fire--artillery fired from out of rifle range, using map coordinates and forward spotters with flags, telegraphs, telephones, and eventually radio.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:55:53 -0000

"Arditi" (Daring Ones), not "Airditi." Feh. I'm sure the shoes were good, but not that good :)

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:53:03 -0000

While this is broadly true (and I broadly agree) I'd put in a big plug for the first forty percent of "The First World War," which is really the book he should've written and left standing, instead of tagging on a rehash of the rest in the later chapters: a marvelous and evocative study of 1914, and both the political and military cultures that destroyed themselves between July and December.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:48:29 -0000

This is still essentially lesson number two (after "for ****'s sake don't get anything snagged on the line once the green light's on to jump") for the airborne; it's all about LGOPs (Little Groups of Paratroopers.) Re WWI: Where and when things "worked" after Napoleonic warfare collapsed like a neutron star in the winter of 1914, it had a lot to do with proto-versions of exactly what Grunthos describes. You had Maxse's division at the Somme, the French essentially making up modern fire-team tactics as they went at Verdun (and the Germans repaying the compliment with better automatic firepower deployed downwards to platoon level in their spring offensive of 1918), Attaturk making do and mending at Gallipoli to devastating effect before he rinsed and repeated against the Greeks in 1920-21, the Italian Ariditi (a much more important inspiration for the Rangers, Devil's Brigade, etc. than any anglo-saxons would admit) taking strategic peaks in the Dolomites (remember the location shots in "Krull"? Try climbing that under fire) from much larger units of scared, care-worn Hapsburg conscripts.

Great, great graf on Normandy, Grunthos. That's "The Longest Day" in seven lines. Great comment period. Lots and lots of great comments -- great thread! Hulk happy. Rest now.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:34:41 -0000

Yup. And in pretty much every war from then to 1914 where there's rough technological parity between sides it just gets worse and worse but no one seems to notice. They were all seduced by the early French collapse in 1870 (and then ignored the months of guerrilla bloodletting and the Commune's lesson in urban war.) Still much too much of it around in the "maneuver" warfare of World War Two to be palatable as well.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:30:41 -0000

Carrington packs a lot into these short grafs. A lot. Despite their Napoleonic legacy of firearms drill, there were signs during the Boer War that the British were getting lazy when it came to firing for effect rather than just target accuracy. (Also, in that fight they relied quite a bit on reservists and enthusiastic volunteers who did pretty badly maneuvering over relatively open terrain -- Colenso's probably the worst example. This may well have inspired the disastrous caution of the professional officers using their heirs at the Somme.)

By August '14 that was largely fixed and the BEF (British Expeditionary Force, the professional "poor bloody infantry") may have been the most terrifying large body of rifle shots in Europe, other than maybe the Hapsburgs' Tyrolean units. There are suggestions that a few platoon- and company-level units could get off nearly twenty shots a minute from their Lee-Enfields. (These were bolt-action weapons. That's about once every three seconds, try that **** out at somebody's farm of a Saturday.) At First Ypres, during the "Kindermord" when whole brigades of Germany's industiral-era middle class who'd been hiking buddies on student holidays before the war and enlisted together were mown down like tall daffodils, their well-educated officers thought it was machine gun fire. Nope. Enfields in the wrong hands. Firepower made moving people die a *lot*.

The key -- tied to by so many excellent comments about replacement, dilution (FNG disease), and dissolution through attrition in this post and the earlier one -- is Carrington's observation that "by 1916 these soldiers were -- basically, all dead." There were some commanders smarter than the average bear, though, demonstrated graphically by those who were not. Ivor Maxse (remembered by a nice biography called Far From A Donkey) of the 18th Division, who were basically volunteers from suburban London and the Home Counties, drabbled his men out into no-man's-land in small fire teams right up to the edge of the barrage, then jumped the emerging Germans at bayonet-and-forehead level. Took all their objectives, relatively light casualties, and backhandedly invented the creeping barrage.

The alternative was about too horrible to bear. Prince Edward Island (Canada), where Anne of Green Gables is set, lost roughly half a generation of young men the first morning. The Tyneside (Newcastle and Sunderland, shipbuilding towns with a curious accent who for better or worse gave us Sting) and Lancashire (the industrial English northwest incl. Manchester) had similar results. In urban Lancashire, it was custom when someone died in those long, narrow, identical grey streets to shutter everyone's windows for a week out of respect. As the lists came in from the Somme, there were neighborhoods in Preston, Bolton, Solihull, Lancaster whose windows didn't see sunlight for nearly a year.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:12:50 -0000

"By that time" in the second graf is Waterloo. Continuity goes out the window on Friday night.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:11:26 -0000

Wrt Waterloo, also because (British authors have glossed this over for two hundred years, part of the whole "Dutch courage" legacy that shorts their cross-Channel neighbors) the Dutch field artillery on the Allied side did quite a job sticking it in the mud and cordite trading shots with the French batteries all through the decisive day. This, along with the Scottish and Flemish squares that canceled out the genuinely scary French heavy cavalry, allowed Wellington's specialist regiments (mostly the Guards and the literally green-jacketed Rifles regiments he'd leaned on through the later stages in Spain) relative freedom of maneuver.

For a couple of decades maneuver warfare had been Napoleon's house because he'd figured out how to use punch to cancel out firepower. (Except when the other side just had so many freakin' bodies you couldn't shoot them all, for which see Christmas 1812 to the fall of Paris in 1814, particularly the Battle of Leipzig.) By that time, between the murderous Prussian D and Wellington's wedding of firepower to maneuver (at a psychological, if not entirely a strategic, level) the tables got turned.

Then, exactly as Pesto says, the technology caught up. (It had by the Fifties, that whole Light Brigade thing was a piker compared to the Battle of Solferino, whose stupefying butchery kick-started the Red Cross because, even in a harder, physically filthier age, sane humans needed to salve wounds that bad.)

Re: Dumb Question Time

Yes — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:00:53 -0000

Amen. Less useful against the enfilading fire of Galaga, though.

Re: Dumb Question Time

BruceR — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:09:37 -0000

William J. Hardee's Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (1855) was actually the standard. Copy here: http://home.att.net/~MrsMajor/1862.htm

Re: Dumb Question Time

BruceR — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:04:58 -0000

More like 30 wide, in point of fact, but the point's the same. The standard building block of the column was the 80-90 man company, in a three-deep formation. Columns stacked them one behind the other, at varying distances. Line formations put them side-by-side. But the company grouping itself didn't vary.

Re: Dumb Question Time

BruceR — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:57:27 -0000

Smoothbore muskets, depending on the type, are actually lethal out to 200-400 yards. It's the accuracy that's the problem.

Note, as well, how many of the Civil War's battlefields had restricted sightlines (Wilderness, the Corn Field at Antietam). Combine that with powder smoke, and it's been an open question for many years how much of a difference rifling the muskets really should have made to the practice of drill.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Ha! — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:13:31 -0000

Because computers are still, and forever might be, very stupid. You would still have lots of helper programs, but a person in the suit would still be very likely. You could do remote control, but their are all sorts of problems with that too, including jaming.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Thunderbeagle — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:15:44 -0000

Can anyone answer Andybhoboken's last point? How did commanders get those 'poor dumb bastards' in the front rank to stay in formation and not turn tail when two infantry columns were preparing to fire on one another? Was the prospect of your sargeant shooting you for cowardice incentive enough, or something along those lines? And how did they decide who had to stand in the front line? Did they draw straws? Rotation from battle to battle? Or were there enough brave/foolhardy volunteers to not make it an issue? Were unit cohesion/crowd dynamics enough to stifle the jitters of the soldiers up front?

It seems like this must have been a key practical and ethical problem in Napoleonic infantry tactics. Let me know if you have the answer.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Carrington — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:53:41 -0000

Point taken on Fields of Battle: Face of Battle made Keegan's reputation, History of Warfare was his late-stage magnum opus (and a risky venture), much of the rest of his work was pot-boilers.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Carrington — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:50:28 -0000

Point taken, to a degree. Though I don't think it prevented the European military attaches from considering the ACW an amateur affair.

And certainly there was a sharp contrast between the Union/Confederate army and the Prussians, Austrians, or French -- to the extent they planned for mass conscription, the mobilization was to crystallize around professional cadres. This was very different from the Union and Confederate "mobilization" which was cobbled together on the fly, on the basis of state-level militia structures.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Bill — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:46:35 -0000

In Reply to Cisko.

I reviewed "Fields of Battle" when it came out. It is not a great book. (Bear with me. I do not have my clips.) As I recall, in it Keegan complains that other historians have focused too much on McClellan's psychology to explain his failures. Yet, when Keegan tried to explain McClellan, his entire explanation focuses upon psychology. Unfortunately, that was typical.

Another problem with Keegan is he frequently makes assertions without evidence.

Re: Dumb Question Time

SeanH — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:06:25 -0000

Also, can someone talk about the importance of staying in ranks, and why marching together is so important?

One other issue that's kind of been touched on with marching in formation is the logistical problem of getting a bunch of soldiers from point A many miles away to point B in decent order. Zeke brought up the problem of maneuvering without everything degenerating into chaos, but on long marches there's also the traffic jam problem any freeway driver is familiar with.

Until mechanized infantry came along marching was the only way to get your army to the fight and traffic jams slow the overall pace of your army and waste very precious time. Marching in formation, one unit can match cadence with the unit directly ahead of them and so on down the line so that your entire column is making steady, synchronized progress rather than jamming up at every bottleneck.

Like Omar Bradley said, good generals study tactics, great generals study logistics. Getting there first so you can dictate the terms of the battle is the most important part of the fight and it's pretty much impossible for a marching army to move efficiently without a good marching order.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Roger Tompkins — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:45:07 -0000

COD, Close Order Drill, from the time of Pharoh to Marine Corp Recruit Depot 2009, is the difference between a mob and an infantry unit.

1.Thankfully the vast majority of people abhor killing other people and won't do it if they can avoid it. The first step of adjusting men to kill when told to is training them to respond immediately to a superiors orders. "Fall In!"

2.Take somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 men and place them in an area 100 yards square. Then move those men on to transportation and unload them in another 100 square yards somewhere else. Do this as rapidly as possible because more people are dying every minute while the moving occurs. "Platoon, Right Face! Forward March! Platoon, Halt! Fall Out and board this bus!"

3.In a company formation everone can hear the shouted words of the company commander. In a platoon formation everyone can hear the raised voice of the platoon commander. In a squad formation everone can hear the normal spoken voice of the squad Leader. When stuff starts blowing up you can still hear the platoon commander shout.

4.When you're concentrating on staying in step and in formation you're concentrating less on the fact you might be about to die.

5.A discipled formation can be aimed just like a single rifle can be.

Re: Dumb Question Time

Andrew Tillman — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:12:22 -0000

Are you saying modern rifles tumble the bullet in the air? That is certainly not true. The bullets may tumble in the body, but they don't tumble in the air.

As to WWI rifles being more accurate then assault rifles. The are several reasons for that.

Barrel length, modern assault rifles have shorter barrels, which reduces weight. Weight is also a factor as it reduces recoil, but for soldiers it is better for them to have a lighter rifle.

Also, the design for modern assault rifles is NOT to knock down anything it hits, it more for volume of fire. The way infantry works in firefights is fire and maneuver. One team will use suppressive fire to fix and pin down the enemy, another will move to the flanks to kill it. For suppressive fire you don't need an accurate rifle, you don't care as much about accuracy. That is also why squads now carry things like the SAW (Squard Automatic Weapon) which gives them more automatic firepower.

Re: Dumb Question Time

malikuzo — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:05:42 -0000

As a US student in a Swazi high school, i remember learning the history lessons of Shaka Zulu's Buffalo Horns formations. Those revolutions in military tactics transformed how battles were fought, and resulted in widespread growth of the Zulu sphere of influence.