Modernising War, 1756-1914Making of the Modern World

Rob Johnson

Historiography

Military HistoryNew Military History

New Debates

‘Modern’ War?

Paradigmatic Concepts

Western-centric focus

Modalities of War

Ferguson and the ‘hundred years’ war’ of the twentieth century.

Changing Fronts

• Technology• Finance• Tactics• Ethics

Technology

Finance

The Military Revolution

Geoffrey Parker

Jeremy Black

Tactics

• Maximum army size c. 50,000 & frontage of a few miles

• Command & control: mounted courier, drums and bugles, shouting

• Linear tactics (massed volleys within 100 yards; muskets must be reloaded standing up)

• Smoke obscuration: bright uniforms and regimental ‘colours’

• Cavalry delivered shock and mobility in close order formations

• …European conventions… challenged in America…

Battle of Leuthen, 1757

Prussian Grenadiers: close order drill and battlefield manoeuvre

The Storming of St Privat, August 1870 (Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71)

Persistence of Established Techniques

Sudanese assault, c.1885

Tactics

• Principles of war unchanged

• Trenches & dispersal for protection

• Continuing faith in the ‘offensive’

Changing Scale of Battle: Western Front, 1914

Firepower: Range & Accuracy• Napoleonic cannon

required direct line of sight; max range half a mile

• Whitworth’s rifling in 1850s instead of smooth bore

• Spin increased range & accuracy

- up to half a mile for infantry rifles;

- by 1914 naval guns could fire 15 miles, railway guns 40 miles

Rifled cannon barrel from American Civil War era

Firepower: Increasing Rate of Fire• Breech-loading rifles

& artillery (1860s+)

• Dependent on precision-engineering

• Increased rate of fire (3-9 rounds per min)

• Allowed infantry to fire & reload lying down: …fieldcraft

Krupp’s cast-iron, breech-loader, 1860s

Prussian ‘needle gun’ + percussion cap, 1835

Firepower: Machine-guns• Introduced in 1860s• By late 19th century

machine-guns capable of 500 rounds per minute

• Used effectively in colonial wars, the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) & the First World War

• Created ‘beaten zones’; eventually used in the ‘indirect’ role

Gatling gun, 1865, required hand-cranking

Maxim gun, 1885, used recoil to load next cartridge, effectively becoming self-firing

Firepower and Changing Tactics• Loose, skirmish formations

imperative• Defensive tactics favour

depth: firepower demanded ‘dispersal’

• By 1914 wars of manoeuvre, in the open, were costly

• Fieldcraft, camouflage, entrenchment vital

• Breakthrough only possible with armoured warfare in 1917

Confederate trenches, Virginia, 1864

Trenches, western front, 1914-18

US Marines on the Marianas during the Island Hopping Campaign, 1943-45

Communications• Road network (vastly

improved in 18thC)• Cartography• Railways (1830s)• Screw propeller

(1850s)• Telegraph• Telephones• Radio (1901)…

• … Radar• … Satellites (1957)Railway marshalling yards at Atlanta,

Georgia, American Civil War

Heliograph, Mesopotamia

Telephonist, South African War

Conscription ‘From this moment until that in which the enemy shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the service of the armies. The young men shall go to battle; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothing and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old linen into lint; the aged shall betake themselves to the public places in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.’

Carnot, French Minister of War, 23 Aug. 1793

• 18thC multinational, professional armies

• European 19thC population increased … Increased taxation to pay for bigger armies … Growth in bureaucracy to register adult males

• 1793 levée en masse: by 1794 800,000 Frenchmen under arms

• Return to professional armies augmented by Reservists 1850s-1914

• 1914-1918 Mobilisation: armies numbered millions; 1916 Britain abandoned volunteering for conscription

Samori Touré

Zulu

Ottoman Troops

Chinese Imperial Army

The North West Frontier of India

Nationalism & War

• 18th-century multi-national armies; reliance on discipline rather than patriotism

• Rousseau: ‘citizen soldier’ with duty to defend republic

• French Revolution: ‘the ‘‘Patrie’’ in danger’

• Army as ‘school of the nation’ (Germany); ‘turning peasants into Frenchmen’ (Weber)

German poster, 1915

British poster, 1915

The Indian Army in the Second World War

Limited War to Total War?• 18th-century: war as diplomatic

leverage; armies less frequently committed to battle (?)

• Napoleonic maxim: decisive battle &impose a political settlement

• Clausewitz (1830s): distinction between ‘true’ (total) and ‘real’ (limited) war

Ethics

• 19th-century attempts to ‘humanise’ war (Red Cross; Geneva Convention; Hague Conventions)

• Attempts to ban certain weapons, & war itself (organisations, legal powers, pressure groups)

• Popular support?• Enemies demonised• Limits to war? .

Home Front

• Industrialisation of warfare

• 1914-18: ‘reserved occupations’ categories recognised

• 1916 Hindenburg Programme to mobilise all domestic resources

• Recategorisation of civilians as ‘combatants’?

1939-45 area bombing of civilian areas: Berlin

Sherman’s ‘March Through Georgia’1864