Perpetuating a military myth

Tony Long rounds up the technological advances which made the American Civil War so different from preceding wars. In the process, he continues perpetrating a modern myth about a genuine military problem:

Although disease killed more men than actual fighting, technological advances in small-arms weaponry and artillery resulted in casualty figures disproportionately high for the numbers of troops engaged.

The introduction of the Henry and Spencer repeating rifles, which allowed sustained, rapid and accurate fire from much farther distances than before, reduced the classic infantry charge to a virtual suicide attack. Pickett's desperate charge at Gettysburg is probably the most memorable example, but the futility continued to the end of the war.

A few problems with this section: the Henry and Spencer rifles, innovative and deadly though they were, had little to do with the example given: they were primarily used by the Union cavalry, and Pickett's Charge was emphatically not a cavalry action. The horrific casualties in that action were inflicted by artillery and regular infantry rifles. The intended point is valid, however, that infantry weapons were becoming much more dependably deadly, yet infantry tactics were still quite similar to those used in the War of 1812 and earlier.

(It's telling of the hidebound nature of the military mindset that a half-century later, the major combatants in World War I were still hurling infantry across open fields into the teeth of even more devastating firepower.)

It's hard to deny that generals are often wedded to "the old way of fighting", but in this case, there's a damned good reason for it: They. Had. No. Alternative.

Wars from the Crimea to the Spanish Civil War generated mind-boggling casualty figures for an insurmountable technological reason: command and control deficiencies that were not (and could not be) addressed until 1939. Let's step back a few centuries and walk through how the problem developed.

Armies are unwieldy things to manoeuvre in the field, even without the presence of complicating factors like hills, valleys, streams, and woods. The limiting factor has always been the ability of the commander(s) to get their orders to the troops. In pre-gunpowder battles, the army commander would generally give his orders before battle was joined, face-to-face with his subordinate commanders, because issuing orders once battle had been joined was difficult-to-impossible. As soon as the armies came into contact, the only thing the army commander had to change the course of events was his reserve formation (if any).

Troops in close physical contact with the enemy are too busy trying to kill-and-not-be-killed to pay any attention to shouted orders from behind, and anyone close enough to be heard by the front line was also close enough to be killed himself (in fact, shouting orders was a time-honoured way of drawing the enemy's attention on to you personally). Even if you could communicate orders successfully, getting them obeyed was unlikely — the quickest way of starting a rout was for troops to start backing away from the point of contact. Human self-preservation instincts quickly overwhelm obedience to orders and panic is contagious. Most battle casualties were actually inflicted after the battle line broke . . . and most of the casualties would be trying to get away from the enemy (see Keegan's The Face of Battle or Hanson's The Western Way of War for examples).

Ancient and medieval battles tended to be head-on affairs because it was too difficult to arrange any sophisticated manoeuvering, except the reserve. It was a common adage that the commander who committed his reserve last would win the battle. Battles would follow a fairly standard timeline (please pardon the vast over-generalization here):

1. The preliminaries — projectile troops engage their opposite numbers (slingers, archers, and javelin men), both sides trying to sweep away the enemy's light forces in order to reach the enemy's main body.

2. The meeting engagement — the forward troops come into contact with the enemy (infantry or dismounted cavalry in the centre, light troops and mounted cavalry on the wings).
3. The battle continues until one side or the other starts to suffer greater casualties and the line wavers.
4. The weakening side breaks, and troops start to fall back from the battle line.
5. The remaining front-line infantry either die or surrender, and the pursuit begins.

Exceptions to this general timeline were when one side had a disproportional number of troops, or where a detached formation entered the battle after it had begun. In almost all cases, the army commanders had little to do with the eventual outcome after the armies were engaged.

Gunpowder was a huge game-changer. Armies no longer needed to get into close physical contact with the enemy to cause casualties. This allowed subordinate commanders to actually exercise control of their troops during the battle. It was now possible — but risky — to move units even after they had engaged the enemy. But technological limitations still ruled what was possible: early firearms were inaccurate and very slow to load. You still needed masses of soldiers to provide enough firepower. The human voice is still the only way to convey orders, so unit size was practically bounded by the need to be large enough for maximum firepower, but small enough to be under command of a single leader.

As firearms improved, it became possible to get the same effective firepower from smaller groups of men, allowing finer control of the battle, but still limiting the range over which a unit of troops could be spread to the range of the human voice.

The arquebus was replaced by the musket, muskets by rifles, rifles by repeating rifles, but the range of the human voice hadn't changed at all. By the time of the American Civil War, a dozen men could be as militarily effective as a hundred men using older firearms . . . but the range of communication was still limited to the same as it had always been.

In the ACW, armies became larger and larger, but the ability to directly command soldiers remained limited, which meant that even though the weapons were becoming far more deadly, the number of soldiers in a given area remained high (higher density of soldiers means more targets for the enemy to hit). By WW1, armies were now hundreds of thousands of men, but command-and-control still had the same limits. Artillery had become orders of magnitude more effective and deadly . . . and the densely packed infantry paid the price. Machine guns, mortars, and grenades also gave greater benefit to the defender, so that every attack was guaranteed to be a bloodbath for the attacking troops — win or lose.

Until wireless communication became militarily practical, command and control of troops in the field had the same practical limit. Even in WW2, the physical properties of radio sets limited them to higher levels (in the French army of 1940, for example, only one radio was typically provided to a tank squadron, which seriously limited the ability of the squadron commander to use his tanks).

I've obviously skipped a lot of detail here, and there's probably lots of points that real historians would argue over, but I think the main point is valid. It's said not to attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but it's also true that one can easily attribute to stupidity what is really a historical limitation. This is one of those cases.

Update, 10 April: Darrell Markewitz commented:

One military aspect to the Civil War — fighting from semi-prepared field positions. With increased weapon accuracy, effective contact ranges had increased. Now simple positions like kneeling behind a rail fence (a situation unthinkable to commanders in the early 1800's) suddenly gave a huge advantage to the survival and effectiveness of those troops. Actually *aiming* your weapon was suddenly important, if not critical, and accuracy greatly increases in a crouch!

It would be interesting to have some idea how many of the individual soldiers were rural rather than urban — with the implication of increased skill in effective aiming.

Your point about command and control is well stated. If anything, I would almost expect REDUCED ability for the small unit commander as improvements in firearms created more and more raw noise — being generated by increased firing rates ('fire at will' over 'volley').

Is there a matching development of the 'squad' over the 'platoon' as the basic infantry unit?

I don't have any information directly addressing the development of smaller tactical units/sub-units. It seems to make sense that actual "command" duties would be delegated to non-coms as the relative firepower of individual soldiers increased, but I haven't seen anything directly stating that this is how it occurred.