One of the cool things about having really smart commenters is that you can lean on them when you're stumped.
So as everyone knows, I've been doing a ton of reading about the Civil War. Marching, obviously, keeps coming up. There's a lot about the concept of marching, forming the line and forming ranks that is simply flying over my head, as I've never read much about war, or served in the military. Can I ask a few of you to talk some about the importance of forming a line in the Civil War? Also, can someone talk about the importance of staying in ranks, and why marching together is so important?
There are some obvious answers that come to mind, but I sense that I may be missing some more important reasons.
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This may be wrong, but I always thought it had to do with single shot guns. The first line fires and then squats to reload, the next line fires while their reloading, providing cover...
Agreed. Has to do w/ older fashioned guns taking longer to reload so volley type war scenarios were common with one side firing, then reloading while the guys behind them fired etc. I'm sure there was a pattern but it must have been really crappy for the guys in the front since they were huddled together and most likely took the biggest casualties.
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.
Slow firing and also generally inaccurate. You wanted a wall of bullets flying towards the enemy so that some of them would hit. I don't know if it still applied in Civil War days when rifles started seriously replacing muskets (although many units still used muskets), but traditional British tactics had been to emphasize concentration and rate of fire over accuracy, in the knowledge that if you shot enough bullets some of them would hit. This was generally successful world-wide, although not against farmers with hunting rifles hiding in trees.
Relatedly, I believe that much of the carnage of the Civil War was caused by the armies failing to change their tactics to match new technology. With muskets, maximum range was about 25 to 50 yards and anything beyond that and the bullet wouldn't even hurt if it hit you. Rifles increased accuracy and range to hundreds of yards. But if you used the same tactics with rifles that you had with muskets, suddenly you have lines of people on both sides dead where before it might be a few here and there.
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.
Also, the British red uniform was a psychological weapon in the musket era that became a liability when rifles were introduced.
I think eric is right.
In a more general way, it was important to keep the unit physically cohesive, so it could focus firepower, and so it could maneuver together on the battlefield as things changed. If the unit needed to fall back, it needed to fall back as a group, and not get scattered, because once it scattered it wasn't effective against other units. You didn't want to break up into a bunch of tiny groups that could be defeated or surrounded by the enemy.
The same goes with advances: if the enemy's line broke and you chased them, you had to keep from scattering yourselves during the chase.
All true. A single soldier with a weapon was not an effective weapon. Instead imagine that the weapons were cohesive company sized blocks of 50-100 men, maneuvered and fired by officers. Infantry combat is based on delivering mass fire, and this is how you do it with muzzle loading firearms.
Because the firearms of the time were relatively inaccurate and took a long time to reload, you needed people to line up in close formation in order to fire an effective volley. Similarly, the infantry charges of the time required lots and lots of soldiers to move simultaneously in a small space. Attempting to do either of these things without carefully drilling the soldiers to move together, much less switching between formations or moving from place to place, will result in a big jumbled mess of men that can't accomplish anything. This is also why flags and musicians were important; they were a large part of how soldiers in formation understood what was going on and received their orders.
If you're still curious, ask anyone that's ever been in a marching band in a parade. something as simple as turning a corner with a big line of people becomes total chaos if you don't know what you're doing.
As the above posters have said it is largely due to innaccurate single shot weapons. Now obviously being in a massed line makes it easier for the enemy to hit you with their innaccurate single shot weapons than if you were spread out, but the benefit of massed volley fire offensively outweighed the costs.
The benefits massively outweigh the costs, in fact. Additionally, there is a huge defensive benefit, as an intact infantry unit can absorb terrifying casualties and remain effectively able to defend itself, while a dispersed unit is easy pickings for enemy cavalry in particular. In the history of combat in the muzzle loader period, intact infantry units are basically never driven from the field, whatever the casualty rates. A broken unit, though, is defeated whatever the actual level of casualties.
Right, this is my marching per se was regarded as so important; the drill and discipline are what made it possible for soldiers to have any measure of defense in this era and so attracted an almost religious level of attention, in much the way that personal courage did in Athenian warfare: they meant life and death to the man next to you.
During the Napoleonic era, the French attacked in columns (hundreds to thousands of soldiers in a long line about four soldiers wide). Against most armies, this worked well. Against Wellington? Not so much, as his forces were well-drilled enough to bring enough firepower to bear on advancing columns before those columns could breach and scatter the British lines.
Pioneering the tactics that would help gamers win Space Invaders in the 80s.
Amen. Less useful against the enfilading fire of Galaga, though.
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.
go here
Not sure what the civil war era D&C Manuel was called but if you can find a copy of it it would explain it much better. Basically without proper D&C everything becomes a gaggle of flocking geese.
Not to reply to myself but it was Steuben's blue book that was used. I was half-sure that there would have been an update but oh well.
The link is
here for a limited preview not sure if there's an open source copy but there probably is somewhere.
William J. Hardee's Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (1855) was actually the standard. Copy here: http://home.att.net/~MrsMajor/1862.htm
Dude, thanks. Apologies to everone for recomending the wrong book.
To echo the folks above, my understanding via limited reading on the Civil War is that formation, firing lines, etc were closely tied to the type of weaponry available at the time, e.g. single-shot rifles that took soldiers a stomach-churning amount of time to reload.
The individual soldier was not very useful because of his weapon. However, line up three firing lines of 20 soldiers each, and you got a position that's very difficult to advance upon.
In The Face of Battle, John Keegan's description of tactics at the Battle of Waterloo includes (IIRC) a few points about infantry tactics. Massed infantry were good at firing off volleys of musket fire, which helped make up for the inaccuracy of pre-rifled weapons. They were also pretty secure against cavalry charges, since horses (not having big horns or tusks) are very reluctant to charge straight into a solid block of bodies.
Massed infantry, however, is very, very vulnerable to artillery -- canister shot and grape shot can mow the front lines down, and cannonballs can rip through a line of soldiers. In fact, IIRC, one of Napoleon's problems at Waterloo was that the ground was muddy and his artillery couldn't bounce cannonballs through infantry as they would ordinarily have done.
So if you had your infantry lie down or spread out they'd be less vulnerable to artillery, but they couldn't attack as effectively and they'd be very vulnerable to cavalry. But if you massed them for an attack or to deal with cavalry, they could easily be wiped out by artillery fire.
A lot of the technology was different by the 1860s, of course. Whether military tactics had caught up to the technology is a different matter, and one I'm not really qualified to speak to.
They had not, which is why the battles were so famously ghastly. The Minié ball, and rifling had greatly increased range and accuracy, but officers still wanted to close with the enemy.
A parallel occurred in WWI when soldiers were sent to charge machine guns with bayonets.
Though, interestingly, there's a pocket industry of academic arguments regarding the Somme. Ironically, that the British Army ca. 1914 knew quite well the impact of rifles, and they fought in the loose formations they had adopted during the Boer War.
Nevertheless, by 1916 these soldiers were -- basically, all dead. And the British generals, rightly or wrongly, didn't trust their new drafts to operate aggressively in loose formation. They went over the top in (fairly) close formation (at about 5 yards between each soldier).
And so, another 20,000 British and Canadian soldiers were dead by the end of the first day.
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.
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.)
"By that time" in the second graf is Waterloo. Continuity goes out the window on Friday night.
Marching, forming the line, and forming ranks, are all related to control of resources in combat. As a commander, one needed to be able to martial your manpower in a predictable and efficient manner, so specific "forms" of utilization were developed. "Forming ranks" (regular arrays of soldiers in uniform units of measure) enabled a commander to see what assets were available for deployment. "Marching" transported them so that they arrived at the same time, still in those organized units, ready to be deployed. "Forming the line" enabled the commander to direct his firepower as a unit, and as was as stated, a combat manuever based on the weaponry of the time.
To emphasize what you wrote: Maneuver. Maneuver. Maneuver. It's all about the commander being able to maneuver his forces on the battlefield. As you note, some parts, such as forming a line, are technology dependent, but the over all principals of maneuver and the underlying reasons for them are the same. This is why they still teach drill in boot camp.
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.
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.
I've been reading up on the Civil War a bit too. One of the interesting things I've read is that the tactics didn't always match the weaponry. What Pesto and others said above is true, but more so for the Napoleonic and Mexican Wars. By the time you got to the Civil War, you had advances in rifle technology that dramatically increased the casualty rate--easier to load rifles that had a longer range of accuracy. By the end of the war you even had primitive machine guns.
It's interesting that you had phases like the siege of Petersburg that were more like WWI than ever before--a trench warfare stalemate.
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.
In addition to what everyone else said, one thing to point out is that Civil War weapons were much farther advanced than the tactics used during the war. The rifled musket, and later weapons such as repeating rifles, revolutionized combat, but someone forgot to tell the officers, who relied largely on Napoleonic tactics that were taught to them at West Point. That's the main reason why the War was so bloody: ways of thinking hadn't caught up with new technology. This isn't unique to the Civil War, either: the same thing happened in Belgium in 1914. You could even say that the latter stages of the war, from Vicksburg on, set the stage for the trench warfare combat of the early 1900's.
In Keeping Together in Time, William McNeill argued that close-order marching was important not only tactically--in terms of volley fire--but also psychologically. Marching, like dancing, is a form of synchronized movement that creates a sense of cohesion in a group. This can be very important when you're trying to turn a group of raw recruits--many of whom are poor people with no ideological commitment to the war being fought--into disciplined soldiers.
That's certainly the main rationale for marching drills in the military today: in tactical terms, close-order formations in the age of machine guns and airplanes are a form of suicide. Marching made more sense tactically during the Civil War, but I'm sure it also served the purposes of social cohesion.
You beat me to it! Going back to classical times, one of the most important parts of drilling was this psychological effect (commanders probably often didn't even know this, only that it worked). This is not only to increase unit cohesion, but to overcome the natural and quite profound resistance to killing that is a part of human nature (one study of guns dropped at Gettysberg showed that a substancial portion of soldiers never fired their weapons, instead pretending to and reloading, evidenced by large numbers of weapons that were double loaded, triple-loaded, or more). For most of the history of warfare, the more you could get your troops to act reflexively with the rest of the group, the better.
This factor was a big part of Gen. McClellan's power. He was an excellent driller, and early in the war when the soldiers were mostly scared novices, drilling gave them a sense of confidence and cohesion. You can find many, many quotes from soldiers who loved "Little Mac" for "making them soldiers," by drilling, marching, and disciplining them. Of course, he was egotistic, slow, and paranoid, but he did instill professionalism.
Just as important (maybe more) than any psychological or morale effects is that drilling provides discipline and practice for maneuver on the battlefield. It provides for the orderly movement of troops and prevents units from getting mixed up with each other, at least in theory. The more practiced a unit is in drilling, the more successful it will be at maneuver. The comparison to dancing is apt.
It would also have a negative psychological impact on the enemy; facing thousands of enemy soldiers who move in formation as one is pretty daunting.
The discussion above of the reason for marching in ranks and forming a line are all accurate. The one thing to keep in mind, however, is that by the time of the Civil War, the accuracy of weapons and the distance at which they were accurate had improved greatly. In the early 19th century, muskets weren't very accurate and had a range of a couple hundred yards at best. Frontal attacks could generally be made because you could march within a couple hundred yards, fire a volley and then charge. The defenders could fire a volley and maybe two by the time the attackers arrived at the line. By the Civil War, the rifles used were fairly accurate to 600 yards +. Thus, in a frontal assault on a fortified position, the defenders could get off four or five volleys before the attackers could reach the position. In addition, the rifles had paper cartridges which made reloading faster. The combination of these factors resulted in the carnage that occurred in the major battles. The military commanders didn't adjust tactics to the new realities of the battlefield.
Interestingly, modern rifle engagement ranges are approximately the same as the 600 yard figure quoted above -- or generally less, about 300 yards.
Modern rife range has dropped because the accuracy of modern rifles are less than they were in WWI era. Modern assault rifles tumble the bullet end over end. They overpower the charge for the weight of the bullet. It does more damage on impact but it is less accurate at a distance. Prior to WWI rifled infantry dominated the battle field. One of the keys to winning any battle is to be able to engage you enemy at a longer range than they can engage you. Prior to WWI that meant having the longest range rifle. However in WWI it became clear that artillery and heavy weapons (machine guns) would dominate the new battle field. Infantry would take cover and then pop up to fight when the enemy was closer. It was no longer important for riflemen to kill at a distance but it was much more important that they stop dead whatever they hit.
The military rifles of the WWI period are the some of best rifles every made. The 30'06, Mauser 98, Lee-Enfield. Machined from solid stock instead of stamped like modern rifles, balanced for long distance accuracy, they never really got much better at pure target shooting than those rifles.
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.
I've read a lot about the Civil War, and count the MIT Prof. on it as a friend. So I can say most of the above statements are accurate, but also part of the reason there were so many casualties. The guns of the Civil War were rifles, not muskets, which was a recent innovation. Rifling the barrel of the gun dramatically improves accuracy and range. So, as per Pesto above, when the primary weapon was the musket, you had to be closer than 100 yards to have any degree of accuracy, and it was still bad. So, to do any damage there had to be a massed group of men firing, creating basically a close-range "wall of bullets." This meant you had to drill them on how to move as a group, and taking fortified positions meant having so many men moving steadily closer that the artillery couldn't kill them all before they reached the target.
But rifling the musket suddenly increased the range to half a mile, and made the individual soldier far more accurate. Now snipers were possible, and well-defended pockets of soldiers could hold out for a long time against soldiers on the march in a big block. So one could argue that a lot of the marching, massing, drilling tactics were outdated, especially when trying to take a defended position. But most Civil War generals, with the notable exception of Longstreet, failed to grasp this until late in the war. So you had battles like Fredericksburg, where nearly 6000 men died assaulting a low, small stone wall, because there was so much artillery and the rifles were so accurate the men could not get close before they died. Eventually, both Grant and Lee realized how outdated these massed assaults were, and that led to the trench warfare of Petersburg.
I wouldn't disagree, of course. But the advantages of increased range (rate of fire for rifled muskets wasn't really any different than the earlier smoothbore muskets, and accuracy doesn't enter into it for regular infantry.) only provided such a distinct advantage if you were firing from a fixed defensive position. Its still all but impossible to deliver effective fire on the march. And sure enough, by late in the war, both sides were digging defensive fortifications and waiting for the attack from the other side, e.g. seige of Richmond.
That's part of what I was attempting to say. Small groups of defended soldiers were much more efficient with rifling. Longstreet realized this early, everyone else realized it late. Hence the trench warfare later on.
Well, there were a lot more breech-loading weapons used in the Civil War than had been used previously. So that cut down the reload time to a few seconds instead of half a minute or so. And it was really the combination of breech-loading and rifling that allowed for snipers - with a muzzle-loader, you basically have to be standing to reload, but breech-loaders could be reloaded while lying on the ground, in a tree, etc.
You saved me a bunch of typing, that was what I was going to say. I will add that by the time Grant took over the Army of the Potomac the soldiers had learned to dig in at the start of any engagement.
One saving grace for the poor civil war soldier was that they were still using black powder so after the first couple of volleys no one could see to aim and loading a civil war musket was a cumbersome task so the number of bullets flying around was kept to a minimum.
These problems were solved by the time of WWI, to horrifying effect.
My favorite book on civil war military stategy and tactics is Bruce Canton's Army Of The Potomac trilogy. I think I've read it three or four times.
The folks who are telling you that it has to do with the single-shot weapons used by most infantry at the time are right. If you can fit it into your reading schedule, "American Rifle: A Biography," by Alexander Rose will give you a great deal of understanding regarding the way weaponry affects military practices. It's very readable.
These earlier comments address your question TNC, but some of these earlier comments Zeke, JD, and Scott are erroneous in regards to the accuracy of Civil War era weaponry.
Infantry tactics at the time of the Civil War were based on the use of the smoothbore muskets. Muskets have limited range and accuracy. Firing lines and massed charges in that case make a lot of sense. But the Civil War musket was rifled; it was still a muzzle-loader, but it had much more accuracy and a far longer range.
Read the Killer Angels, -- an excellent Pulitzer Prize winning novelization of Gettysburg battle and per that novel, the Southern General Longstreet was one of the first to recognize that the Napoleonic mass of fire/wedge tactics no longer worked. When a defensive line occupies a dug in position a frontal assault is almost impossible.
Fredericksburg, Pickett's charge at the aforementioned Gettysburg -- I could go on but this poor tactical understanding is in direct correlation to the high casualty rates of CIvil War battles.
Reggie,
Thanks for the clarification. I second guessed myself in using the term "rifle." It seems the guns in question hovered somewhere between musket and what modern readers would think of as a rifle (e.g., Civil War rifles still loaded through muzzle).
But the combo of old-school tactics with new-school tools? You're right, of course. Death, death, and more death.
Hence the term Muzzleloader to refer to these rifles. If you wish there are a ton of sportman societies that still use replicas of sprinfields, spencer's etc. to hunt with.
The modern repeating rifle is a relatively modern invention but the first Henry Model lever action was made in 1866, I think, and by 1873 Winchester had released it's famous Winchester Model 1873 which looked remarkably like the Henry.
Interesting factoid, the Cheyenne and the Souix at the Little Big Horn had Henry and Whinchester Repeating rifles but the soldiers were still using civil-war era springfields because the army thought soldiers were too dumb to understand how to use a repeating rifle.
Hence the term Muzzleloader to refer to these rifles. If you wish there are a ton of sportman societies that still use replicas of sprinfields, spencer's etc. to hunt with.
The modern repeating rifle is a relatively modern invention but the first Henry Model lever action was made in 1866, I think, and by 1873 Winchester had released it's famous Winchester Model 1873 which looked remarkably like the Henry.
Interesting factoid, the Cheyenne and the Souix at the Little Big Horn had Henry and Whinchester Repeating rifles but the soldiers were still using civil-war era springfields because the army thought soldiers were too dumb to understand how to use a repeating rifle
Sorry about the double post.
You're certainly correct to point out that the civil war was mostly fought with rifles, not smoothbore guns, and therefore the need to concentrate for massed volleys didn't really exist in the way that my first post suggested, although most of the officers still thought and led in Napoleonic terms. I ought to have thought of that and spelled it out as clearly as the excellent subsequent posts did. I stand corrected, but the other aspect, that coordinated drill was necessary to move large blocks of soldiers in a relatively compact battlefield with any degree of cohesion, was certainly still the case in the 1860s.
Shoot. My first post on the blog, and Steven Donegal made all my points quicker and more concisely. Back to the ether I go.
You're talking about two related but distinct concepts in military training and tactics. The purposes of learning to march in formation, or drilling, was best stated by the legendary Baron Friedrich von Steuben when he was helping to build the American Continental Army:
"to enable a commander or noncommissioned officer to move his unit from one place to another in an orderly manner; to aid in disciplinary training by instilling habits of precision and response to the leader’s orders; and to provide for the development of all soldiers in the practice of commanding troops."
Forming a line is related in that it requires lots of practice in quickly arranging soldiers into organized group firing positions.
During the Civil War, to get from one place to another you had to walk, so it was essential to march your soldiers in orderly formation. You would get where you were going faster, maintain morale, lose less soldiers to desertion because officers could keep an eye on them and quickly count the ranks (20 men per line, for 10 lines, etc.), keep your supply lines organized, and as a bonus terrorize the hell out of the locals. The sound of a battallion marching in step sounds like steady thunder on the horizon.
Forming a firing line fell out of fashion as a tactical matter by the end of the civil war. There were a lot of reasons for this, but it had a lot to do with the technogical advancement of going from muskets to rifles.
During the Revolutionary War soldiers were armed with muskets - little more than a (mostly) straight metal tube that you would pack with gunpowder and a lead ball, point in the general direction of something you didn't like, and light the bitch on fire. The only way to guarantee you'd hit anything was to line up a bunch of guys in a row and have them all shoot at the same time. (Incidentally, this is the origin of firing squads - you needed a squad to hit anything on the first try).
By the time of the Civil War, most soldiers were armed with Springfield rifles. Rifling (a spiral shaped groove down the inside length of the barrel) caused the bullet to spin, making the new guns wickedly accurate. The first Civil War battles were fought using the rank firing formations of the Napoleonic Wars, but due to the new firing accuracy the body counts were staggering. You couldn't just stand your soldiers in front of a line of rifles and hope less of your guys would get hit than theirs like you could with muskets. See, e.g., The Battle of Antietam, for what happens when you try.
By the end of the Civil War firing in ranks was basically abandoned. Generals were experimenting with trench warfare, and both sides had adopted the tactic of placing soldiers in covered firing positions, softening up the enemy with artillery, mounting a mass charge, and then mopping up with cavalry. See, e.g., Gettysburg.
Hope this is somewhat informative. There's obviously TONS of material out there on this that's really interesting.
19th-century warfare was generally fought by massed units - men tightly grouped together and attacking or firing more or less in unison. These units operated in a line - one unit adjacent to the next. Against a roughly equal army, units could trade fire indefinitely and achieve no effect except to rack up large amounts of casualties.
The best way to achieve a genuine victory was to achieve what was called an enfilade - to be to the side of one of the enemy's units while your unit was facing towards it, allowing your unit to fire much more effectively than the enemy's unit. The two main methods of achieving an enfilade were the breakthrough and the envelopment.
A breakthrough occurred when you were able to mass a significantly greater force along a weaker portion of the enemy's line. Ideally, the weaker unit(s) would break under fire or suffer severe casualties, allowing you to divide the enemy's line into two parts. You could then enfilade each part at the break point.
Tactically more difficult, but more likely to be effective if pulled off, was the envelopment. An envelopment was a maneuver to move enough of your units to one end of the enemy's line (while keeping the enemy's line from moving itself) to achieve an enfilade on the end of the enemy's line.
An echelon attack was an attempt to fake out the enemy. One unit would advance. Then another in another part of the line, and another, and so on. If it works, the enemy doesn't know where you really intend to attack. He's stuck in a double bind. If he concentrates his forces to prevent a breakthrough, you can envelope him. If he spreads his forces out to prevent an envelopment, you can achieve a breakthrough somewhere along the line.
Another thing to keep in mind is Communication... When all communication has to be done via written note or face-to-face, keeping your group together was critical in getting them to receive new orders. This was particularly well expressed in the Shaara trilogy.
Some great posts from the commentors above, both as to the historical reasons behind the formations and as to the technological advances that were making them obsolete. To my mind, the Civil War marks the beginning of the transition to industrial warfare, both in terms of the technological benefits of industrialized manufacturing, and in terms of the scale and management of armies. This transition really hits hard with the trench warfare of WWI.
You can get a feel for both sides of this by visiting the Gettysburg battlefield. On the one hand, you can walk the field of Pickett's Charge, and envision the blocks of men marching into rock-throwing range of each other. On the other hand, you can poke around Little Round Top and Devil's Den and imagine sharpshooters setting to work on distant targets. The first action is straight out of the Napoleonic wars, while the latter is more like a WW II engagement.
I'll second the recommendation of John Keegan. Faces of War is a great book, but given your interests, you might want to check out Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America instead or in addition.
Totally agree re: Gettysburg. Great examples.
Petersburg is a better example of the civil war being a precursor to the first world war. Even to the point of trying to blow a hole in the lines with a tunnel full of dynamite (it didn't work in WWI either).
Second on Keegan's Face of Battle... but I found Fields of Battle disappointing: a travelogue mixed with a rant on the bestiality of American weather.
Man, sometimes I have to double-take and realize our reality is now Sci-Fi. We've gone from formations and trench warfare to Laser Anti-Missile defense and drone warfare in a blink of human history.
Anyone laying bets on Power-Armor?
Wide scale Power Armor use like is invisioned in most Sci-Fi, ie powered infantry, is unlikely simply because the costs would be so huge and the training involved would be to long and intricate and low cost low learning curve is the point of infantry. Power Armor, if it ever becomes a reality, is more likely to be used as Tanks that have the ability to deploy in urban environments.
Assuming costs stay the same. The same used to be true about rifles. They were custom made by hand and It was out of the question to supply an entire army with rifles until the nineteenth century. When the Springfield Armory (NOT Eli Whitney) developed replaceable parts it brought the cost down considerably.
Power armor is not too likely when you can take basically the same technology, throw a processor in it and have a battle robot. Why bother to fill the armor with wetware?
True. However, if we are still using wetware in future I could definitely see us evolving squad based combat into even a more individualistic way.
I don't know if anyone here has ever played Metal Gear Solid 4, but one of the main themes in the game is nano-machines augmenting soldiers not so by making them stronger or faster, but by making information exchange between squad members almost instinctual. It's a pretty solid and realistic argument for how to upgrade the soldiers of tomorrow. Firepower isn't nearly as important as real-time intel these days.
The theme isn't really clearly presented in the single player game. But it's vividly demonstrated in the multiplayer element. If weapon-fire, friend or foe identification, and GPS "radars" become standardized and micro-nized, I could definitely see the definition of unit cohesion changing drastically.
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.
Twenty years down the road, might could be thirty. The long pole in that tent is a portable power supply that is both light enough and powerful enough to be useful, and sufficiently robust to stand up to being shot at. It would be a sad, sad day if your MightySuit(TM) suddenly became ambulatory scrap metal just because some damn fool shot a hole in your battery...
All the other pieces are on the table. Powered exo-skeleton? Check. Light-weight anti-small-arms armor? Check. High-tech vision and communications gear? Check. All that's missing is the engine.
As with everything else, though, cost is going to be the limiting factor as to how many get built, and where and how they end up deployed. JD said they'd basically be urbanized tanks, and that's not a bad prediction, at least initially.
Hey, TNC, you are certainly not the only person to whom this subject has been a mystery. I've always wondered why the hell field commanders would line a bunch of mooks up to get shot at (let alone sometimes put them in red coats!), and now I know.
Thanks for having the cojones to say publicly "I don't know". I'm the richer for it, and I bet several thousand other readers are too.
Wearing different colors to be able to identify what side every one is on is almost as old as war itself. The reason for the red uniforms of the british army is that during the english revolution it was the cheapest color of bright dye available.
Don't know if this is true for the British, but I was taught that the redcoats were specifically blood red to mask injuries: soldiers with minor injuries could continue to fight and the enemy would not be able to determine a casualty rate, only the mortality rate. This is what the Romans did, particularly for the 'officer' class, and the British Empire copied them... or so I was taught. I have no cites however...
As for differentiating sides, that function seems to be accomplished with headgear/helmetry. See uniforms of the Napoleonic era for examples.
I think the "red to hide blood" argument was invented after the fact. But there was definitely a psychological aspect to the red coats - a line of guys with guys in bold red is going to have much more of an impact than if they were in blue or gray or brown.
Apologies for confusion in replying to self: couldn't reply directly to NYC_Charles in the following comment (no idea why...) So I'm doing so here.
I'm not certain what you mean here. My understanding is that the Roman infantry initially wore red tunics for, more or less, 'traditional' reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with warfare and very quickly learned the utility of doing so. So, yeah, nobody ever said "Hey, lets go into battle wearing red to mask injuries", but rather "Hey, I was in a battle the other day and was injured. Because I was wearing read, the enemy never found this out and neither did the troops I command. So I was able to rally and win the day."
I'm failing to grasp either distinction or difference here: The psychological impact of seeing soldiers in bold red("lobsters" they were sometimes called) bearing down on you may be equal to, but likely less than, the psychological impact of aiming your weapon at those same lobsters and not being certain you hit them. Either way, the perception of the enemy is the rationale given. However, the other aspect is the perception of your fellow soldiers... or, in the case of officer corps, the soldiers you command. If they perceive that you are not injured they are less likely to lose heart.
I'm not at all qualified to answer this, and there are already many logical, more knowledgeable replies, but armies were forming lines of various sorts well before the musket. Think of the Greek phalanx. So there also seems to be a long, fundamental tradition where the line itself was a weapon, and individual soldiers the cogs in that machine.
And a quick pop culture reference (hopefully not too nauseating): In the third film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson gives an amazing bird's eye view of Rohan's calvary scrambling to reform their line when they realize they've got a new adversary fast approaching from a different direction. And as they pull together, you feel how much stronger they will be in facing the next test.
I don't actually know whether this correct or not, but it certainly seems that part of the slow learning curve with regard to massed formations in the Civil War stemmed from the long, long history of using mass formations in warfare. After all, major battles had been fought in big blocks and lines for centuries, whether with muskets or with spears, swords and shields. I imagine that the transition to dispersed formations and trench warfare was more difficult than a modern observer can really understand int he face of that much precedent.
Nothing to contribute to what's already been said, but wanted to say that this was a neat little education for the afternoon. Thanks for asking what wasn't a dumb question at all!
Not sure if someone has already recommended this, or if you have already seen it, but these lectures are really great:
http://academicearth.org/courses/the-civil-war-and-reconstruction-era-1845-1877
David Blight Kicks Ass......
:)
One important thing to keep in mind when reading about 19th century warfare, and especially criticisms of commanders "wasting lives" by moving troops in easily-shot-at blocks, is that we are looking at the Civil War from the other side of World War I. We have grown up watching representations of combat in World War II and Vietnam, not realizing as we watched that we were looking at a form of command and control unknown to, and generally considered impossible by, 19th century commanders.
Much of the futility of WWI trench warfare came from the combined experience of 2000 years of pitched battles. From the Greeks onward, it was taken as given that soldiers needed to be massed and directed by specially trained elites in order to keep them motivated and oriented on important objectives. The concept that soldiers could be trained to fight cohesively in small groups, maintaining their own initiative and morale, and intelligently responding to the tactical environment, would have been a fantasy from the perspective of Lee or Grant. Civil War commanders understood the value of breaking up the line, taking cover, and overwatch firing... they called this "Indian-style" fighting, and agreed that it reduced troop exposure, but saw it as useless if you wanted to take a prepared position. And it was. It took the millions of deaths attendant to WWI to force the necessary innovation, and that change was to train lower level officers, NCOs, and even privates in what we now recognize as modern infantry tactics. People wonder why WWI generals were seemingly so stupid; well, they were faced with a total (and completely counterintuitive) reversal of everything they knew about combat psychology.
Even after WWI, these phenomena were not fully understood. It wasn't until the US Army did its groundbreaking mass survey of WWII GIs that military theorists came to grasp the power of small unit cohesion, whereby an army can maintain command and control and obtain its objectives by relying on the private soldier's dedication to aiding his immediate comrades-in-arms.
Think about the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Everybody gets dumped on the beach in a confused mess, but because the captains, lieutenants, and sergeants have been fully trained and briefed about objectives, forces, tactics, and alternative options, they are able to form cohesive small units and sustain the assault. Morale on the beach is not sustained by a flag, or stirring exhortations, or rigid command structures; it is sustained by high levels of drill and reliance on the soldier's dedication to coordinating with the guy standing next to him.
This was a massive, massive revolution in military theory and practice. Civil War generals were in no position to see it, and even if they had envisioned the idea, they had neither the communications tools nor the troop training resources to put it into practice.
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.
"Arditi" (Daring Ones), not "Airditi." Feh. I'm sure the shoes were good, but not that good :)
Just one more thing to add that I may have missed but don't believe anyone has touched on yet. Firstly, I'm pretty bummed that I missed out and this awesome history nerdfest and only get to catch it at the end. I just wanted to point out that by the time of the American Civil War, those sort of double lines, infantry squares etc were really becoming pretty obsolete. Many historians look at the Civil War as the first war of the 20th century, because it presaged the use of guerrilla tactics, long rage accurate firearms (like Enfields) and even trench warfare. So although many units could be seen marching in formation, they would rarely conduct any sort of firefight in formation. During the Napoleonic war or the Revolution, one out of every few hundred rounds would hit someone. The rifled barrels that were being used by the infantry in the Civil War made it necessary to take cover, behind trees, or fences, or on the reverse slope of hills. Lastly, after happily reading all of your takes on the Civil War, I just wanted to share some of my favorite books on the subject. Maybe to lighten up a pretty dark subject. Bernard Cornwell writes really great historical fiction, sort of like Patrick O'brien or CS Forester. He's most well known for Napoleonic War stuff, but also has a series called the Nathaniel Starbuck chronicles, about the son of a famous abolitionist who ends up in Virginia right as the war starts. Sorry for the long rant, when I see a chance to nerd out I seize it.
Fidelito
I am slow at typing and so you beat me to recomending Bernard Cornwell while I was still typing.I am glad to see that you enjoy MR Cornwells books as well.I just started reading his "Saxon Chronicles" this week .
C.s. Forester is also great .His book "Kill the French" is a great . I read that this is the book that made MR Cornwell want to start his own series .
Let's hope that he will write some more" Sharpe' books
I don't think I can agree here. Most generals still did use these type attacks well into the war.
A good example would be the charge made by the union at the Mule Shoe in the Battle of Spotslyvania Courthouse in 1864.
Colonel Emory Upton formed 12 Union regiments, some 5,000 men, in columns of four ranks, three regiments to a line, with bayonets fixed atop their muskets.
Only the muskets of the front three regiments—men from Upton’s own 2nd Brigade —were primed for firing. Upton had given strict instructions that the men not stop for anything—not to fire, not to reload, not to help their wounded —until they breached the Muleshoe, a bulge in the arc of Rebel works.
Abandoning the standard attack—a line of men charging in a wave—he condensed his troops into a human battering ram, a tight column of men surging at lightning speed with one aim: to breach the enemy’s entrenchments.
The attack initially was a success but Upton had to retreat because of lack of proper supports. But General Grant recognized the initial breakthrough and tried it again on a larger scale that led to horrific casualties for his army.
For a much deeper reading of this battle go here
Everything above is pretty accurate but seems to focus mostly on maneuvering during a battle.
The other aspect of things is that post-Napoleonic warfare is very much all about logistics. Without GPS or portable communications it is quite difficult to move hundreds of thousands of men into the places they need to be (and feed them and try and keep most of them from dying of disease in the process). Without marching drills it would be easy for people to get separated (or desert).
Part of the reason that Lee is seen as a military genius is that at the time it was considered the height of folly to split ones forces (because it is so difficult to link back up) but Lee was famous for doing so. That he was able to do it successfully was mostly due to having stellar officers under him who could operate on their own. If the Union had tried the same tactics the results would probably have been disastrous.
Railroads helped mitigate things somewhat but there was still a lot of footslogging to do, marching 15-20 miles a day was not uncommon. Being from Bmore you know how the humidity can get in the summer but also consider that most uniforms were made out of wool. That's not the kind of thing you do without a healthy dose of peer pressure.
Pretty much everyone here summed it up better than I could . But I would like to add that I think that one reason for the drilling was that some generals simply thought that it looked good.
When you read books on world war one and even two they are full of ordinary soldiers bitching about practicing parade formations rather than something useful.
For the record I do not normally like military fiction .But an excellent series is the " Sharpe" series by Bernard Cornwell . It is about a soldier in the British army during the Napoleonic War named Richard Sharpe.And it discusses these tactics in great detail.MR Cornwell does tremendouse research [he disusses the facts of the story in the final chapter of every book].And many of his charachters were real life people including some of the privates and corporals.
MR Cornwell also wrote a few fictional books about the Civil War as well.But I have not read them.
I would highly recomend for anyone to read the "Sharpe" books by Bernard Cornwell.
That's kinda what I was trying to get at with the notion of "religious" attention being paid to drill; it was really important, but once impressed with that importance people have a tendency to cling to it beyond its rational value.
I understand that the Europeans were learning some of the same lessons in the previous decade, during the Crimean War. A comparison might be interesting.
All good stuff here. One more quick, basic thing to add: the reason the formation of choice on the battlefield was a long line was so the soldiers could fire in roughly the same direction without shooting each other.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned. Fighting often came down to hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets and rifle butts. For example, during Pickett's charge, Pickett's forces briefly managed to engage the Union forces on Cemetary Ridge in hand-to-hand fighting. Generally, HTH was the only way to push opposing infantrymen out of a position. Because if you shoot at them, they mostly want to dig in deeper, wouldn't you?
When you do a hand-to hand assault, you all want to hit the line at once. Or maybe four or eight deep, so you keep on coming.
This was classic in the Revolutionary War, and in Napoleonics. When you assaulted a position, you had to take one or two volleys from muskets and cannon, but then you were on top of them and stabbed and clubbed them until they ran, at which point you shot at them, or sent the cavalry after them.
During the Civil War, the weapons got better, we got rifles and carbines, and better cannon. So you could devastate an incoming unit, literally blow it apart at range. Advantage to defense. But the tactics didn't change right away, and we have debacles like Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, and yes, Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.
Wow, the coverage on this topic while I was stuck at work is--awesome as well as frustrating.
The importance of drill and line and column formations dates back to the dawn of civilization, for all the reasons mentioned above: efficiency of movement, massing of combat power on the battlefield, unit cohesion.
Before the age of gunpowder, actual combat formations tended to be blocks, rather than lines. As Keegan notes, massing in a solid phalanx not only concentrates your striking power and deters cavalry, it focuses the guys in front on fighting--what else are they going to go with a solid ranks of their own men standing behind them? He made the observation, in The Face of Battle, that when the French Old Guard broke and ran at Waterloo, it was the fellows in the rear ranks who turned and ran away first.
Gunpowder didn't turn block formations into line formations until the 30 Years War, c. 1630. Gustavas Adolphus of Sweden gets the credit for organizing his army into regiments, fighting in lines several ranks deep, instead of massive squares of pikes. Lines allowed you to make maximum use of firepower, blocks and squares make best use of pikes and halbards. Once that was established, the army that could march fast, change formation fast, and maximize power in front of its line could usually win battles.
You have to read in depth a bit to notice that this was important even at the level of small unit tactics. One of the important skills a regimental commander or brigadier had to learn was how to keep shifting his formation around as his men marched across fields, around buidlings, or through the woods, so he didn't expose a flank to a blast of enfilading fire or a quick charge with the bayonet. Officers showed their courage by staying in the open, in front of their men, reading the situation and giving fresh orders from minute by minute. Which is why some battles saw 30% plus casualties among officers ranked all the way up to major general.
The Crimean War and the other European Wars of the 1860s saw great slaughter on the battlefield by the newer, quicker-firing rifled muskets. Unfortunately, the solution the Europeans decided on to make their wars winnable was to draft millions of men instead of hundreds of thousands and infuse them with the spirit of patriotic sacrifice so they could keep fighting even as they were mowed down by rapid-fire rifle and cannon. It took a good three years of mass slaughter in World War I to burn that notion out of their heads. Too late for an entire generation of young men.
Ironic that there were so many European observers of the Civil War, which went through this same process small-scale at the end, and totally missed the lesson.
To put a finer point on the psychological aspects, good drill habits kept soldiers focused on their commanders and fellow soldiers rather than having possible imminent death paralyze them.
Logistics is well covered.
I'll echo the disagreement with the notion that weapons accuracy played a big role. Even the revolutionary war weapons were more accurate than they are given credit for above. The point of drill was to get the front rank into a straight line with their guns pointed parallel to the ground and at a 90 degree angle to the line so that fire was maximally effective.
Sebastian might be interested in the four Hussite crusades of the 15th century, wherein the tactics of massed lines of musketmen using armored wagons for cover and a kind a British Square use of artillery were pioneered.
Sebastian might be interested in the four Hussite crusades of the 15th century, wherein the tactics of massed lines of musketmen using armored wagons for cover and a kind a British Square use of artillery were pioneered.
Can anyone recommend a good book on the Hussite Wars? Something scholarly but not so academic as to be sleep-inducing?
There was a cost to the loose-order tactics adopted during the 20th century -- only a modest proportion of front-line soldiers fired their weapons in combat, and far fewer fired them effectively. (SLA Marshall's argument originally, but fundamentally intact despite challenges to Marshall's work overall).
David Grossman, On Killing, has a section examining the problem during the Civil War. Despite firing in unison and by the drill, a significant number of ramrods seem to have been lost (fired) with each volley. It was, evidently, not uncommon for soldiers to neglect the last step of removing the ramrod before aiming and firing.
One imagines European military observers finding these errant ramrods and deciding that the Civil War's lessons were not applicable to their professional armies.
One imagines European military observers finding these errant ramrods and deciding that the Civil War's lessons were not applicable to their professional armies.
I would be cautious about using the word "professional" to distinguish between American and European armies. European armies (with the exception of that of Great Britain) were based on mass conscription from the Napoleonic Wars onward. The American "regular" army was smaller than than those of the European powers--and horribly underfunded, since Americans considered themselves a peaceful nation--but no less "professional." The peacetime conscript armies of Europe had more time to train than the volunteer armies of the American Civil War, but that didn't make them any more "professional."
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.
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.
In general, and in some very specific ways, the Civil War question has been answered quite well. The larger question of the importance of marching together and staying ranks has been hinted, but not directly answered.
Somebody, a few comments up, used the term 'cogs in the machine'. This about sums it up. Today, most officers issue orders directly to another officer, usually face to face, but sometimes over a direct communication channel like a phone line or radio link. In this manner both the actual order, and the reasoning behind it, can be conveyed: the letter and the spirit, so to speak. So to, can nuance be conveyed and contingencies discussed. This is a relatively new development in the art of warfare. Prior to this most orders, particularly those dealing with tactics in the actual heat of battle, were broadcast. Nowadays, officers seek objectives and trust the subordinates, to an extraordinary degree when compared to past militaris, to carry out the details. In contrast to this, a Roman general, or Napoleon, or whomever, in past wars, sought to use the entire army, at once, as an object to enforce his will. Therefor, individual thinking was discouraged, and the lower down you got in the ranks, the more individuality and thinking were discouraged.
To a simple first approximation, prior to the invention of artillery war was a direct medium (face to face) but the orders were broadcast. If you were in an infantryman, you never talked to the general, but you looked your opponenent/enemy in the eye. Likewise, in the middle of battle, your were supposed to go where they told you and attack what was in front of you. You might not know if your side was winning or losing. You certainly weren't privy to the strategies and tactics of the general. You (mostly) only knew what direction to point at and who to attack (or defend against). The mindless drudgery of drilling, with its apparent lack of purpose inured the infantry to this state of unknowing: a state that might occur in the middle of battle. In this way the smaller units of the army could do what the General wanted without actually knowing what it was the General wanted.
Now the situation is (roughly speaking) reversed: battle happens at a distance and tactics/strategies/commmands are issued face to face. Most participants in modern combat know the objective and are fairly free to figure out how to achieve that objective. The army, such as it is, is no longer an extension of the General, or leader, but a tool he makes use of to achieve an objective.
Also, because of the broadcast nature of command and control in early infantry, commands were also cruder: on the order of "go here" or "don't let the enemy go there". They were broadcast by semaphore (flags) or sound (drums). Constant marching and drill practice made the implicit parts of those orders second nature: instead of saying "go over there in an orderly fashion and kill those blokes trying to stop you", drill practice whittled it down to "go over there". The rest you knew, because you had practiced it over and over and over again.
Of course, most of what I've written is horribly simplified so feel free to take offense at it. As has been noted, this kind of warfare was well into the breakdown stage at the time of the Civil War. I do hope it conveys some of the nature of infantry life, pre-artillery, and answers, at a simple level, the question of why drilling is so important to pre-artillery infantry.
Unless I missed it...so many good contributions...one point seems to have been overlooked: control.
Establishing and maintaining control of the troops is a basic requirement. This isn't easy when you're dealing with a bunch of teenagers even when they aren't terrified and scared shitless. And the officer is telling them to go out and get killed, which they all know will happen to many of them.
In addition to all the strategic reason suggested, there was the need to give orders that were simple enough to be obeyed despite fear and panic, and that put the soldiers where the officers wanted them to be, ready to do what the officers thought needed to be done. Get them in the rhythm of obeying orders, keep those orders simple, make sure they were trained to obey them so they wouldn't have to think at a moment when they were terrified and browning their pants.
And give them the security of doing it together with their buddies. That gave them comfort and, incidentally, made it harder for them to follow their instinct of self-preservation and run away.
Sometimes fiction tells the truth best of all. The Red Badge of Courage is the best soldier's-eye view of war I can imagine. A profound and disturbing and thoroughly human book. By Stephen Crane. And, by coicidence, about the Civil War.
The importance of marching and conducting combat in strict formation was more of a strategic than a tactical decision. One has to remember that this war was fought on U.S. soil. Many soldiers were aware that it would not be that difficult for them to return home if they deserted. By keeping soldiers in tight formation it was possible to spot anyone attempting to break rank and desert.
Furthermore, by marching in formation, commanders where able to keep their soldiers separated from other companies/battalions/regiments. This was important from a morale standpoint, because it kept information compartmentalized. It is much easier for a commander to send his troops into battle if his troops don't know that the last company that was sent in lost over 50% of their standing forces. Bad news can travel fast in an army, and it was important to keep morale up leading into a battle.
TNC, you have sure created an amazing resource here.
Establishing and maintaining control of the troops is a basic requirement. This isn't easy when you're dealing with a bunch of teenagers even when they aren't terrified and scared shitless. And the officer is telling them to go out and get killed, which they all know will happen to many of them.
One of the ways people tend to project our own military experience back in time is this idea of armies being stocked by adolescents. This is a characteristic primarily of the later years of World War I and World War II, and unfortunately also of some special situations of the modern era (Vietnam, for instance, with its rapid cycling of draftees). In the age of mass conscription, each yearly cadre was available for call-up for ten to twenty years. Consequently, only a small portion of a mass army would be "teenagers." True, older males would be more likely to get deferments for health, skills, family, etc., but the mobilization of a power's reserves would mostly bring in men ranging in age from 19 to 40.
As an example, Bill Mauldin joined the 45th Infantry division as a 19 year old National Guardsman, but served in Italy and France while in his early 20s. His cartoon characters, Willy and Joe, were based on other National Guardsmen he knew. One is single and in his mid-twenties, the other married and in his late 20s.
Of course, once war-time attrition starts eating away at the original cadre of reservists, they tend to be replaced by younger draftees, along with a selection of older men who've lost their deferments.
The American volunteer armies of 1860-1865 probably duplicated, to a great extent, the age pattern of the conscript armies of Europe. A volunteer regiment would include physically fit men from all walks of life and covering the age spectrum from 16 to 50 years.
One extreme example of age-sorted conscription: the Zulu impis organized under Shaka Zulu and his sucessors were recruited by birth year and stayed in the same regiment all their lives. The impis that resolutely attacked the British outpost at Roarke's Drift in 1879 for a day and a night consisted almost entirely of men in their mid-40s.
Further to the issue of control, there's an image in John Keegan's "The Face of Battle" of an NCO standing behind the ranks of musket men keeping them in line with his pike. They are all right where he can see them, and easily push them into place and keep them fighting in the noise of a battlefield. Not an easy thing to do when they're scattered behind rocks and ditches.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.