“The slaughter of August 1914 is attributed to a failure to see what the American war had foretold.”

By Michael Somerville

THE AMERICAN Civil War is often regarded a key moment in the history of warfare — the first ‘modern’ war. European armies of the period are usually thought of as conservative in comparison, retaining obsolete traditions and tactics. The slaughter of August 1914 is attributed to a failure to see what the American war had foretold. Probably no army has been more criticized than the British, for retaining an aristocratic and incompetent officer corps, and an offensive doctrine based upon the bayonet and the cavalry charge, impossible against modern weapons.

These views can be traced back to British military writers of the 1930s, principally Basil Liddell Hart and JFC Fuller, who were both strong critics of the army’s performance in 1914-18 and, crucially, used the study of the American Civil War to illustrate their ideas. Their influence continues to this day and has resulted in many myths, both regarding the novelty of the Civil War, and the extent to which it was ignored in Britain. The Civil War did demonstrate new trends in warfare – but it was neither unique nor disregarded.

The Industrialized Battlefield

The First World War saw casualties on an unprecedented scale, caused mostly by high explosive artillery and the machine gun, with the dead and wounded never seeing the men who killed them. This industrialization of warfare is often traced back to the American Civil War, which introduced mass-produced weapons such as the Springfield rifled musket. It was a concern noted at the time in Britain, where politician John Bright described warfare as becoming “a mere mechanical mode of slaughtering your fellow-men.”[i] But the war that triggered this comment was the Franco-Austrian War in Italy (1859), not the American war. The military were very aware that the latest “weapons of precision” as the rifled artillery and muskets were termed, had the power to kill from much greater distances than before, and theorized on how this would change tactics. One of the main reasons that the British sent observers to the Civil War was to see the new technology in action.

The problem is that the Civil War did not offer any obvious lessons in this respect. Several British artillerymen visited America, but they saw little unusual in American practice; they found more value in looking at American production technology in munitions factories. The extended range of the rifled guns was not particularly useful in the heavily wooded American terrain, and observers found it difficult to assess their effectiveness.

Many artillerists in the U.S. Army preferred the 12-pounder Napoleon smoothbore, which was deadlier at short range. Breech-loading artillery (usually European imports) were deemed too complex and unreliable in campaign conditions. The same was true of the prototype machine guns seen in the war, such as the Agar gun, which the U.S. Army abandoned in the York Peninsula in 1862.

Whereas the evidence from supposedly modern America seemed to favour older and simpler technology, the supposedly conservative British nevertheless embraced the new. In 1863 the British decided to equip all field and horse artillery with rifled guns, the following year they did the same for siege artillery. They were also early adopters of the machine-gun – looking to America for both the Gatling in the 1870s and the Maxim in the 1880s. This was in contrast to Germany for example, which initially ignored the machine-gun because of the poor performance of the French Mitrailleuse in 1870.

The Empty Battlefield – Infantry Tactics

The popular image of the Victorian Army is either that of red-coated squares fighting off Zulus and “fuzzy-wuzzies,” or of lines of British infantry trying to beat entrenched Boers with bayonet charges. The myth is that the British were still trying to use tactics better suited to Waterloo than to the 20th century. If only they had looked at the American Civil War, runs the argument, they would have been better prepared for the Boers in 1899 and the Germans in 1914.

It’s perfectly true that both the 1861 and 1867 British infantry manuals look decidedly dated in their tactical recommendations. But the same is true of the manual with which the Union and Confederate Armies fought the Civil War – Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (1855), which was largely based upon French manuals. Civil War troops were normally armed either with the Enfield rifle that the British used or something very similar, much less effective than the magazine rifles of the 1890s. And the South African veldt, where visibility could be thousands of yards, was nothing like the woodlands of America where it was at best a few hundred.

British tactics for dealing with a European enemy changed substantially in the 30 years following the Civil War. This was in response to the new breach-loading rifle, which formed only a small percentage of infantry weapons in 1861-65, but were universal in European service by the time of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The key observation was that this meant that the more open formations, adopted instinctively by American troops in the Civil War, had to be adopted as standard. British infantry manuals of the 1880s recommended intervals of three paces when advancing against European opponents – which was the spacing used by Colonel (later General) Ian Hamilton at the successful Battle of Elandslaagte in 1899.

As well as open formations, it was seen that the spade would become almost as important as the rifle and bayonet. In 1871, the British infantry manual included for the first time a “shelter-trench” drill. This was at the insistence of the Commander-in-Chief HRH the Duke of Cambridge, often portrayed as a conservative opposed to army reform.

Articles of the period dealing with the subject of field entrenchments invariably noted American practices. While the trenches at Petersburg may superficially look like a prototype for the Western Front, the British Army had fought in similar trenches and bomb-proofs in front of Sebastopol in 1854-55. And there was an even better precedent, the lines of Torres Vedras built to defend Lisbon in 1810 by the great Duke of Wellington himself.

The main objection to these tactics was that a purely defensive stance could not bring about victory. At worst this produced arguments that sitting in trenches reduced the troops morale – arguments that were also prevalent amongst some Civil War leaders, notably John Bell Hood. At best it led to new ideas of how to win a battle. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Atlanta campaign of 1864 was a classic of the offensive use of trenches, and did not go unremarked by British writers. By holding part of the line in defensive trenches with less experienced troops, a mobile force comprised of the best men could be freed up to attack the enemy’s flanks. This was Grant’s approach at Petersburg. It was also the basis of British plans to defend the south-east of England against foreign invasion in the Victorian period, and of the so-called “Race to the Sea” in 1914.

The Extended Battlefield – The Cavalry

If the new weapons and large-scale entrenchments were a challenge to the infantry, they were life threatening to the cavalry not just as individuals but as an institution. The British cavalry has been harshly treated by popular historians, portrayed as obsessed with the mounted charge and incapable of change. Again, this is contrasted with the ‘modern’ cavalry of the American Civil War which, it is argued, abandoned the mounted charge in favour of dismounted tactics, while perfecting the art of the cavalry raid. Once again, this picture is incomplete and unfair.

The British cavalry recognized the tactical problem – the range and effectiveness of the new rifled weapons – as early as Lew Nolan’s History of Cavalry in 1853. Early responses tried to work out ways to increase the speed of the cavalry charge, reducing its vulnerability to firepower. This theme was continued by some writers, who thought speed, mobility, more open formations, and the use of cover and surprise, could still provide an opportunity for the charge. A second response accepted that the cavalry tactics seen in America demonstrated the need for it to have its own firepower. Some advocated the magazine carbine used in America, others the long rifle. Perhaps most surprisingly, some cavalrymen were early advocates of the machine gun, to replace traditional horse artillery. Far from being stuck in their ways, the cavalry was perhaps the most innovative arm in their diverse responses to the new weaponry.

British observers in the Civil War were generally dismissive of the American cavalry as horseman, and saw them not as ‘true cavalry’ but as ‘mounted infantry’ or ‘dragoons’ – meaning men trained to fight on foot, but using horses to give them mobility. This was a fairly accurate description of many American horse soldiers, but not always derogatory. Mounted infantry offered a means to literally get around the problem of static defensive warfare in the trenches – by using the mobility provided by the horse to ride round the flanks and attack their rear. The better educated and more thoughtful cavalry officers seized upon this as being the future for their arm. The scale of modern armies meant that the size of the battlefield had been greatly expanded. Cavalry’s role, they argued, was more important than ever – as an independent mobile force that would determine the enemy’s movements, deny him the same intelligence about their own army, seize critical positions, and threaten his vulnerable rear and supply lines. The models for these were drawn directly from the Civil War and the operations of commanders such as J.E.B. Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Phil Sheridan. The physical extent of the trenches on the Western Front made such operations impossible – but in Palestine in 1918 the British cavalry conducted a hugely successful campaign along similar lines to the later cavalry operations of the Civil War.

The Democratic Battlefield – Volunteer Armies

Another reason that both the American Civil War and the First World saw huge casualties compared to earlier wars was simply the scale on which they were fought. During the Civil War the once tiny U.S. Army grew to half a million strong, and in 1914 the armies mobilized millions of men – with the exception of Britain. The huge number of trained reserves available to European armies troubled the British. Like America, they did not have a standing conscript army. In all its forms the British Army was socially conservative. The regular army had aristocrat officers who bought their commissions, and rank and file usually forced into the army through poverty. The militia were officered by the landed gentry who commanded men from their estates. Colonial forces largely consisted of exclusively white officers in charge of black or brown local troops. These all looked back to older forms of warfare, and the British aristocracy was wary of American ‘democracy’ with its possible threat to their political power.

Some British writers did condemn the untrained, massed armies in America as ‘mobs.’ More perceptive observers found that although Union and Confederate armies fell short in expectations of discipline, the troops themselves were of high quality. In fact, some were envious of the Americans’ physical fitness and higher levels of education and literacy. They also recognized that the dispersed tactics imposed by the developments in weaponry meant that more responsibility and initiative had to be placed not only on junior officers but on the ordinary soldier. European armies had a solution to this by conscripting men from all ranks of society for short service.

Some British writers supported conscription, but most still favoured a volunteer army; it was cheaper and more politically acceptable. The ability of America to raise large numbers of men to fight in a democracy was the model for Colonel Henry Fletcher, who had visited both Union and Confederate armies in 1862, written the first British history of the Civil War, and went on to set up the Royal Military College of Canada. Fletcher wanted the urban middle classes and artisans for his volunteer soldiers, and even proposed using them as part of an overseas expeditionary force. This anticipated the thousands of volunteers who went to South Africa in the Boer War, the Territorial Force of 1908, and finally the huge volunteer army raised by Kitchener in 1914-6.

The Future of War – The View from 1896

Because the British Army never fought a war against a European opponent in the period 1855 to 1914, the tactical influence of the American Civil War is not immediately obvious in the battles of the period. But military writers of the era were well aware of its importance. The following is an extract from the second edition of Home’s Precis of Modern Tactics, (1896) a popular treatise.

The fact that decisive battles in the next great Continental war will probably last more than one day, that positions of great strength will have to be frontally attacked, that attacks will be slow in progress and last many hours, that ground once gained must be retained at all cost as in a siege, that attempts will be made to secure vantage ground under cover of darkness – all point to the conclusion that a judicious use of the spade will be one of the features of future warfare.[ii]

The author did not directly reference the American Civil War, but none of this is contrary to the lessons of that conflict. Nor is it such a bad prediction of the First World War eighteen years later.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Michael Somerville is the author of Bull Run to Boer War: How the American Civil War Changed the British Army, published in the UK by Helion and distributed in the U.S. by Casemate. He graduated with a first-class degree in History from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University. He is President of the American Civil War Round Table U.K., for which he has produced a number of presentations and articles. In August 2017 he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Buckingham for his thesis on the influence of the Civil War on the Victorian British Army, which forms the bases in his book. He lives in Wimbledon with his wife Gillian who fortunately shares his love of American history and war cemeteries.

[i] John Bright, House of Commons, 21 July 1859 (Hansard Vol. 155)

[ii] Lieutenant-Colonel Sisson C. Pratt, Home’s Precis of Infantry Tactics, 2nd Edition, 1896