Modernising War, 17561914

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Modernising War, 1756-1914

• Making of the Modern World
• Rob Johnson

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Historiography
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Military HistoryNew Military History
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New Debates
Modern War?
Paradigmatic Concepts
Western-centric focus
Modalities of War
Ferguson and the hundred years war of the
twentieth century.
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Changing Fronts

• Technology
• Finance
• Tactics
• Ethics

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Technology
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Finance

• The Military Revolution
• Geoffrey Parker
• Jeremy Black

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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
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The Storming of St Privat, August 1870
(Franco-Prussian War, 1870-71)
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Persistence of Established Techniques
Sudanese assault, c.1885
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Tactics

• Principles of war unchanged
• Trenches dispersal for protection
• Continuing faith in the offensive

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Changing Scale of Battle Western Front, 1914
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Firepower Range Accuracy

• Napoleonic cannon required direct line of sight
  max range half a mile
• Whitworths 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
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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

Prussian needle gun percussion cap, 1835
Krupps cast-iron, breech-loader, 1860s
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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
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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
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US Marines on the Marianas during the Island
Hopping Campaign, 1943-45
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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
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Telephonist, South African War
Heliograph, Mesopotamia
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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
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• 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

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Samori Touré
Zulu
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Chinese Imperial Army
Ottoman Troops
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The North West Frontier of India
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Nationalism War
British poster, 1915

• 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
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The Indian Army in the Second World War
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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

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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? .

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Home Front

• Industrialisation of warfare
• 1914-18 reserved occupations categories
  recognised
• 1916 Hindenburg Programme to mobilise all
  domestic resources
• Recategorisation of civilians as combatants?

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Shermans March Through Georgia 1864
1939-45 area bombing of civilian areas Berlin
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