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This is a spin-off from the "What the Regular Army Officers Knew" thread in the Sinks. I got in trouble for posting that there, so I'll try the Authenticity Discussions this time.:)
Kevin O'Beirne wrote:
"Probably eight or ten years ago "North and South" magazine had a great couple of articles titled, "The Rifled-musket Revolution?" that seriously questioned--with a lot of evidence--the widely held opinion that Civil War battles were so bloody due to the increased range and accuracy of the rifled-musket. The articles convinced me that there was little real use of the range and accuracy of these weapons until the final year of the war."
This is a topic that has been around for years, but I can't resist putting my two cents in. In no particular order:
1. The effective combat range of rifle muskets wasn't very great. It took me two years to tune my original M-1861 up to getting 4 inch groups at 100 yards. I had to figure out the best charge (43 grains of XXX, in case anyone cares) for the ball I was using (505 grain Rapine) and I had to size the ball 2 mils less that land-to-land distance of the bore. I also found I had to wire brush the bore every 8 shots or the ball wouldn't load. These are tolerances that can not be maintained in military situations. The US Ordnance Department continually reduced the size of the balls it issued throughout the war because of loading problems with fouled guns. They were issuing .565" balls by the end of the war. The worst possible thing that can happen for the accuracy of an elongated ball is that it fails to take the rifling and tumbles. A tumbling elongated ball will be less accurate and have less range than a round ball. (It makes a god-awful hole if it hits you, though.) To get an idea of how hard it was to get a properly served muzzle-loading rifle to shoot accurately, read the Ordnance reports on the seige of Charlestown, SC. The artillery recorded the flight of every shot from the seige guns and noted whether the shot tumbled or not. Even with careful swabbing between every round, 1/5 of the shells tumbled and did not reach their targets. There is no way that combat infantrymen were getting better results than that with their shoulder arms. Deliberately hitting a man-sized target at 300 yards with a rifle musket is hard.
2. Range estimation is critical with low-velocity weapons. The muzzle velocity of a rifle musket is around 800 ft/sec. That means that a shot fired at the belt of a man standing 350 yards away will go clean over the head of a man sitting on horseback at 125 yards. For comparison, the trajectory of a round from an M-1 Garrand fired at a man 350 yards will only rise 11 inches at the highest point. US infantry snipers in Europe in WWII were taught to set their sights at 300 yards and leave them alone. That's right, snipers were taught not to adjust their sights for range while in combat. You can't get away with doing that with a rifle musket. Most of what you are getting in the Civil War is area fire, not aimed fire because a 25 yard error in range estimation for anything beyond 100 yards means a miss. Which leads me to my next point.
3. In area fire, volume is what counts. Volume is created by the combination of number of firing weapons, and rate of fire. Muzzle-loading weapons are inherently slow firing. There are nine steps in successfully loading a rifle musket. On my best day I could never get off more than seven aimed shots in 2.5 minutes, and that was starting with the rifle loaded. With your rate of fire fixed at 3 rounds per minute, your only option for increasing the volume of fire is to increase the number of weapons firing. In a battalion with 300 men in two ranks, you have 150 files occupying a front of 250 feet. That gives you 1.2 rifles per linear foot. If you take the same number of men and spread them out on a skirmish line at five pace intervals, you have a front of 3,500 feet or 1,167 yards, or 7/10 of a mile with .086 rifles per foot. If that skirmish line fires on a target at 600 yards range (the range that the British used in their test of skirmishers firing on an artillery battery at Hythe) the men on the ends of the line are firing at a range of 836 yards. If the target is not opposite the center of the skirmish line, it will be out of extreme range of the ends of the skirmish line. The tactical problem is to choose the correct density of fire for the particular situation. In the modern military they talk about this under the principles of Mass and Economy of Force.
4. Command and control is as important in a firefight as weapons accuracy. Tactical C&C in the Civil War is line-of-sight and range-of-my-voice. The solution to defensive fire is to either supress the fire or to maneuver around it. Modern critics of Civil War commanders say that they should have understood that rifled weapons made attacks too dangerous, but they don't say what the correct method to solve that problem was. How was a tactical commander supposed to have brought suppressive fire on a defensive position? He can't radio a fire support base. He can't call in tactical air. How is he supposed to control elements maneuvering around the defending force? Where you see attacks break down during the Civil War is in the exploitation phase. Operational commanders can't get forces to critical points quickly enough. Basically you wind up an attack like a clockwork toy and then it either suceeds on its own inertia or it gets driven back with heavy losses. This is the identical problem that commanders on the Western Front faced in WWI. Machine guns didn't make No Mans Land impassible. Attacks made it across No Mans Land all the time. The problem was that command and control during WWI was by field phone. The phone lines didn't cross the deadly ground with the assault troops. The defender could call in reinforcements and indirect fire by phone, while the attacker found himself cut off from communication with his artillery and reserves. Tactically all the heavy, water-cooled machine gun did during WWI was fill in the role of cannister when field artillery became an indirect fire weapon. 80% of casualties during WWI were caused by artillery. That is distinctly different from the Civil War. If you look at weapons lethality, the Civil War is an aberation and WWI is a return to
the norm.
5. I have no idea where people get the idea that professional soldiers didn't appreciate the developments in weapons technology that were going on around them. They certainly published enough books about it before the war. Alfred Mordecai's report from the Crimean War contains a full translation of a Prussian report on rifled shoulder arms and Cadmus Wilcox's book "Rifle Practice" even includes the color illustrations from the British studies at Hythe that I mentioned above. All the Ordnance Department reports on the development of the 1855 rifle, 1855 rifle musket, and the Burton elongated ball were also available before the war.
In every single case that I've ever heard of where professional soldiers have been accused of not appreciating the changes in tactics that were occuring around them, close examination has shown that it was the author of the critique who was actually ignorant of what the professionals knew. It seems like ever since Epaminondas defeated the Spartans at Leuctra there has been some Monday Morning Quarterback saying that soldiers must be idiots because they didn't think of this tactics or that tactic sooner. Considering how good everyone else is at predicting the future, I'm not sure why soldiers are the ones who always get accused of being slow on the uptake. I heard a presentation recently where the speaker argued basically that linear tactics had been in use for hundreds of years before the Civil War, therefore they were being used in the Civil War because of tradition. Video-guided laproscopic surgery was first performed in Tokyo before the Second World War. Does that mean orthopedic surgeons who use it today are fossilized relics?
When you read up on what was considered the state of the art just before the war, you come away with an appreciation for how technical the field was and how difficult the job was.
Best Regards,
Paul Kenworthy
Kevin O'Beirne wrote:
"Probably eight or ten years ago "North and South" magazine had a great couple of articles titled, "The Rifled-musket Revolution?" that seriously questioned--with a lot of evidence--the widely held opinion that Civil War battles were so bloody due to the increased range and accuracy of the rifled-musket. The articles convinced me that there was little real use of the range and accuracy of these weapons until the final year of the war."
This is a topic that has been around for years, but I can't resist putting my two cents in. In no particular order:
1. The effective combat range of rifle muskets wasn't very great. It took me two years to tune my original M-1861 up to getting 4 inch groups at 100 yards. I had to figure out the best charge (43 grains of XXX, in case anyone cares) for the ball I was using (505 grain Rapine) and I had to size the ball 2 mils less that land-to-land distance of the bore. I also found I had to wire brush the bore every 8 shots or the ball wouldn't load. These are tolerances that can not be maintained in military situations. The US Ordnance Department continually reduced the size of the balls it issued throughout the war because of loading problems with fouled guns. They were issuing .565" balls by the end of the war. The worst possible thing that can happen for the accuracy of an elongated ball is that it fails to take the rifling and tumbles. A tumbling elongated ball will be less accurate and have less range than a round ball. (It makes a god-awful hole if it hits you, though.) To get an idea of how hard it was to get a properly served muzzle-loading rifle to shoot accurately, read the Ordnance reports on the seige of Charlestown, SC. The artillery recorded the flight of every shot from the seige guns and noted whether the shot tumbled or not. Even with careful swabbing between every round, 1/5 of the shells tumbled and did not reach their targets. There is no way that combat infantrymen were getting better results than that with their shoulder arms. Deliberately hitting a man-sized target at 300 yards with a rifle musket is hard.
2. Range estimation is critical with low-velocity weapons. The muzzle velocity of a rifle musket is around 800 ft/sec. That means that a shot fired at the belt of a man standing 350 yards away will go clean over the head of a man sitting on horseback at 125 yards. For comparison, the trajectory of a round from an M-1 Garrand fired at a man 350 yards will only rise 11 inches at the highest point. US infantry snipers in Europe in WWII were taught to set their sights at 300 yards and leave them alone. That's right, snipers were taught not to adjust their sights for range while in combat. You can't get away with doing that with a rifle musket. Most of what you are getting in the Civil War is area fire, not aimed fire because a 25 yard error in range estimation for anything beyond 100 yards means a miss. Which leads me to my next point.
3. In area fire, volume is what counts. Volume is created by the combination of number of firing weapons, and rate of fire. Muzzle-loading weapons are inherently slow firing. There are nine steps in successfully loading a rifle musket. On my best day I could never get off more than seven aimed shots in 2.5 minutes, and that was starting with the rifle loaded. With your rate of fire fixed at 3 rounds per minute, your only option for increasing the volume of fire is to increase the number of weapons firing. In a battalion with 300 men in two ranks, you have 150 files occupying a front of 250 feet. That gives you 1.2 rifles per linear foot. If you take the same number of men and spread them out on a skirmish line at five pace intervals, you have a front of 3,500 feet or 1,167 yards, or 7/10 of a mile with .086 rifles per foot. If that skirmish line fires on a target at 600 yards range (the range that the British used in their test of skirmishers firing on an artillery battery at Hythe) the men on the ends of the line are firing at a range of 836 yards. If the target is not opposite the center of the skirmish line, it will be out of extreme range of the ends of the skirmish line. The tactical problem is to choose the correct density of fire for the particular situation. In the modern military they talk about this under the principles of Mass and Economy of Force.
4. Command and control is as important in a firefight as weapons accuracy. Tactical C&C in the Civil War is line-of-sight and range-of-my-voice. The solution to defensive fire is to either supress the fire or to maneuver around it. Modern critics of Civil War commanders say that they should have understood that rifled weapons made attacks too dangerous, but they don't say what the correct method to solve that problem was. How was a tactical commander supposed to have brought suppressive fire on a defensive position? He can't radio a fire support base. He can't call in tactical air. How is he supposed to control elements maneuvering around the defending force? Where you see attacks break down during the Civil War is in the exploitation phase. Operational commanders can't get forces to critical points quickly enough. Basically you wind up an attack like a clockwork toy and then it either suceeds on its own inertia or it gets driven back with heavy losses. This is the identical problem that commanders on the Western Front faced in WWI. Machine guns didn't make No Mans Land impassible. Attacks made it across No Mans Land all the time. The problem was that command and control during WWI was by field phone. The phone lines didn't cross the deadly ground with the assault troops. The defender could call in reinforcements and indirect fire by phone, while the attacker found himself cut off from communication with his artillery and reserves. Tactically all the heavy, water-cooled machine gun did during WWI was fill in the role of cannister when field artillery became an indirect fire weapon. 80% of casualties during WWI were caused by artillery. That is distinctly different from the Civil War. If you look at weapons lethality, the Civil War is an aberation and WWI is a return to
the norm.
5. I have no idea where people get the idea that professional soldiers didn't appreciate the developments in weapons technology that were going on around them. They certainly published enough books about it before the war. Alfred Mordecai's report from the Crimean War contains a full translation of a Prussian report on rifled shoulder arms and Cadmus Wilcox's book "Rifle Practice" even includes the color illustrations from the British studies at Hythe that I mentioned above. All the Ordnance Department reports on the development of the 1855 rifle, 1855 rifle musket, and the Burton elongated ball were also available before the war.
In every single case that I've ever heard of where professional soldiers have been accused of not appreciating the changes in tactics that were occuring around them, close examination has shown that it was the author of the critique who was actually ignorant of what the professionals knew. It seems like ever since Epaminondas defeated the Spartans at Leuctra there has been some Monday Morning Quarterback saying that soldiers must be idiots because they didn't think of this tactics or that tactic sooner. Considering how good everyone else is at predicting the future, I'm not sure why soldiers are the ones who always get accused of being slow on the uptake. I heard a presentation recently where the speaker argued basically that linear tactics had been in use for hundreds of years before the Civil War, therefore they were being used in the Civil War because of tradition. Video-guided laproscopic surgery was first performed in Tokyo before the Second World War. Does that mean orthopedic surgeons who use it today are fossilized relics?
When you read up on what was considered the state of the art just before the war, you come away with an appreciation for how technical the field was and how difficult the job was.
Best Regards,
Paul Kenworthy
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