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Some Civil War Strategery
November 2nd, 2009
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It wasn’t much different Fifty years later in France. The British blew up a massive section of the German trenches during the Battle of the Somme, but the British Commandered ordered that his men march in full packs, not charge at the run, the German positions. They had time to regroup, fill the gap and kill or wound 20,000 or so Brits.
It took commanders forever to figure out that the rifle made all of their previous tactics obsolete when it came to infantry. They quickly identified that the days of using cavalry and artillery in an offensive manner were ended by long-range, lethal rifle fire, but it wasn’t until after WWI that infantry tactics caught up with the technology. And that was more driven by the advent of machine-gun fire.
But wasn’t the gunfire from the Civil War still coming from a variation of muzzle-loaded muskets? It seems like it was still rational during the civil war to pursue tactics of advancing on enemy lines in tight formation until you could engage them hand-to-hand. The tactic was still effective, it’s just that the casualties were higher. It wasn’t until WWI that this tactic became completely useless in making a dent in the enemy’s position.
They were muzzle-loaders, but they were rifled. It makes a huge differance. Smoothbore muskets weren’t accurate at anything but point-blank range and required massed fire to be effective. Civil War era rifles were accurate to a couple hundred yards, and still effective beyond that. The fact they were muzzle-loaded simply slowed their rate of fire.
It was “rational” at the beginning of the war because there wasn’t another school of thought on how to fight. During the war though it became apparent that their previous experiences simply weren’t as effective. As I’d mentioned before they learned and adapted the use of mounted cavalry and artillery to the new warfare, it just wasn’t passed on to the infantry. Some (a lot?) of that has to do with the viewed “expendability” of the infantry.
But wasn’t the gunfire from the Civil War still coming from a variation of muzzle-loaded muskets?
Abraham Lincoln witnessed tests of early forms of a machine gun:
You all do realize that that document was written by a college kid in the last month or two?
Yes, Frank. We’re pointing out that the joke was not as funny as the writer thinks it is. Besides, this has already been done many years ago by Rowan Atkinson: