Modernising War, 1756-1914

1. Modernising War, 1756-1914 Making of the Modern World Rob Johnson

2. Historiography

3. Military HistoryNew Military History

4. New Debates ‘Modern’ War? Paradigmatic Concepts Western-centric focus Modalities of War Ferguson and the ‘hundred years’ war’ of the twentieth century.

5. Changing Fronts • Technology • Finance • Tactics • Ethics

6. Technology

8. Finance The Military Revolution Geoffrey Parker Jeremy Black

9. 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

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

11. Persistence of Established Techniques Sudanese assault, c.1885

14. Tactics • Principles of war unchanged • Trenches & dispersal for protection • Continuing faith in the ‘offensive’

15. Changing Scale of Battle: Western Front, 1914

16. 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

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

18. Firepower: Machine-guns Gatling gun, 1865, required hand-cranking • 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 Maxim gun, 1885, used recoil to load next cartridge, effectively becoming self-firing

19. 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

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

22. 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

23. Telephonist, South African War Heliograph, Mesopotamia

24. 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

25. 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

26. Samori Touré Zulu

27. Chinese Imperial Army Ottoman Troops

28. The North West Frontier of India

29. 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

30. The Indian Army in the Second World War

31. 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

32. 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? .

33. Home Front • Industrialisation of warfare • 1914-18: ‘reserved occupations’ categories recognised • 1916 Hindenburg Programme to mobilise all domestic resources • Recategorisation of civilians as ‘combatants’?

34. Sherman’s ‘March Through Georgia’ 1864 1939-45 area bombing of civilian areas: Berlin