Forward into Battle Page 2
The breadth and depth of the battlefield, on the other hand, have both certainly increased a very great deal. In Napoleonic times an army could occupy a space no more than a few kilometres wide by two or three kilometres deep, and troops knew they would be safe from enemy fire as soon as they moved behind the nearest hill. In the twentieth century, by contrast, armies have spread sideways until they fill literally any breadth of front available. Their depth has increased to tens of kilometres in many cases, and may be made up of successive belts of mines, clusters of strongpoints, and finally a line of reserve positions. Modern armies also require extensive supporting organisations behind them, and these in turn can be brought under long range enemy fire or air attack. It has become a feature of modern war that an interdiction battle will be fought behind the front line with almost as much ferocity as the front line battle itself. This is a form of tip-and-run or standoff fighting, in which raids and bombardments take place without the permanent occupation of ground.
In this book we shall not be looking closely at these interdiction battles behind the lines, important though they have undoubtedly become. Instead, we will be concentrating our attention on what goes on further forward, where troops move under direct fire to take ground from the enemy. This necessity is what gives no-man’s-land its special quality. It is the arena of personal confrontation between the two sides, where the abstract logic of higher commanders and staff officers suddenly takes on a very much more concrete form.
In order to identify what actually happened across no-man’s-land during the past two centuries, we must look at the evidence which has come down to us. This is largely written evidence in one form or another1; and it often turns out to be in disappointingly short supply. Minor tactics seem to be less well covered in the documents than are many other military activities. This is hardly surprising, perhaps, since tactics do not routinely generate paperwork in the same way as do such tasks as intelligence gathering, logistic stock-keeping or staff planning. It does not come naturally, after all, to record the minutes of a firefight when you are sprawled across a muddy field being shot at.
Most of the written sources which discuss tactics do so at second hand. There are more commentators in this subject than there are direct observers. Nor do either of these classes of writer tend to be particularly helpful. Whereas the commentators suffer from an inordinate measure of political or romantic bias, the survivors of battle tend to give us only the undigested and fragmentary scraps of information which they have been able to collect from their own personal foxholes. There is often but scant agreement between different authorities, and precious little solid scholarship. Only rarely do we find a piece of tactical analysis which is convincing and clear.
It is for these reasons that the history of tactics has too often been misrepresented. In the pages which follow we shall therefore attempt to correct the record over certain important issues which seem to have been garbled rather than clarified by the benefit of hindsight. We shall be taking up the cudgels against those who have given us a false picture of what really happened. In particular we shall concern ourselves with three specific groups of authors, each of which transmits a different type of evidence about tactics. These three groups may roughly be classified as ‘journalists’, ‘analysts’ and ‘survivors’.
In the category of ‘journalists’ we include war correspondents, official propagandists, and subsequent historians who are writing for a non-specialist general readership. These people will not normally be concerned with the details of minor tactics, and will usually allow them to be overshadowed by higher and weightier matters. They will know, for example, that the general reader is more interested in Napoleon’s strategic decisions at Waterloo – or even in what he ate for breakfast – than in the precise method by which his Old Guard was routed. If they have a choice between truth and legend, furthermore, writers of this type will often prefer to print the legend: it makes a better story and sells more copies.
It perhaps goes without saying, and even without reading Clausewitz, that wars are usually reported in a heavily political manner. Extreme political passions are always aroused by hostilities, and every casualty increases the emotional level still further. In these circumstances objectivity tends to fly out of the window. In 1915, for example, Rudyard Kipling wrote in the Morning Post that ‘There are only two divisions in the world today: human beings and Germans.’2 This sort of attitude scarcely makes for careful reporting of minor tactics, and we find that wishful thinking frequently creeps into battle descriptions.
The most obvious example of the process comes in the reporting of relative losses. It is almost a standard practice to estimate that the enemy has suffered at least double his true casualties, while at the same time halving your own. This tendency was already very prominent in Napoleon’s battlefield bulletins. It appeared again in the official histories of the First World War, while in Vietnam the MACV ‘body-count’ became notorious for its margins of error. It is perfectly true that losses are very difficult to gauge exactly in the heat of battle: but that does not often seem to have prevented confident official statements from being made. Once they have been reported in print they tend to be repeated rather uncritically by subsequent generations of writers. They are very hard to correct later on.
What is true of combat losses is also true of tactical methods themselves. Once the public has got it into their heads that Wellington’s infantry fought primarily by musketry fire, for example, or that Asian infantry fought primarily by ‘human wave attacks’, then it becomes extremely difficult to change the history books. It is much easier for historians to repeat the popular image of how these battles were fought, and pass on quickly to the apparently ‘more important’ or ‘more interesting’ questions of strategy and military biography.
When we turn from the ‘journalists’ to the ‘analysts’ of minor tactics, we find a rather more serious type of commentator.3 These men are looking at past battles in order to draw operational lessons for the future. We will expect them to be more objective and less influenced by political propaganda or public tastes. They have an obligation to use accurate facts so that they can devise truly effective fighting methods for their nation’s soldiers in the next war. It is their job to create sound tactical theories upon which training manuals can be written and tactical leaders indoctrinated.
It is true that the standard of such commentaries is usually higher than that of the writers for the general public; but analysts also suffer from certain occupational diseases of their own. In the case of purely academic tactical historians, there has been a distinct tendency to concentrate excessively upon the items of ‘hardware’ that can be quantified. Such things as weapon specifications, theoretical drill formations or marching speeds have been scrutinised in great detail, as potential keys to what happened in battle. In the process, however, historians have often missed the ways in which actual battlefield practice differed from theoretical performance. Imponderables such as the level of training, fear and morale, for example, often exercised a quite disproportionate effect on the ultimate outcome – and the failure to understand these factors is frequently a major source of distortion in the historical record.4
Most official analysts, on the other hand, do not enjoy the relative independence of a detached academic environment, but work as members of an army. They are subject to the many institutional pressures peculiar to armies, and in particular they will find themselves within a rigid hierarchy of ranks, where it is often rather difficult to question the decisions of superior officers. Their findings will also tend to be discussed and re-worked in endless committees, with the injection of many political considerations extraneous to the subject-matter itself. In particular there will be pressure groups from different arms of the service to put forward conflicting departmental views, and there will be strong budgetary influences not far from the surface. All this may finally conspire to distort the objectivity of analytical findings.
Institutional pressure
s within armies often lead to the formation of tactical ‘schools’, each of which is fiercely committed to one particular battlefield technique. In the late eighteenth century French Army, for example, there was a bitter and rather sterile debate about whether infantry should attack in columns for shock action, or in lines to develop their firepower.5 Each side in the debate wanted the kudos which would come from official sponsorship of their particular tactics, and so the arguments tended to become more and more extreme. They often lost touch with the hard realities of the battlefield, and drifted off into wonderous theoretical constructions which would have been quite impractical in war. In the end the quarrel was deemed to have been resolved by Napoleon himself, who produced an equally unrealistic compromise solution known as the ‘ordre mixte’. He often recommended it to his generals; but they regarded it with suspicion and did not often use it in battle. They felt, perhaps, that as a former artillery officer Napoleon was making an altogether too bookish and academic approach to infantry tactics.
This particular debate makes an interesting illustration of how tactical analysts can become side-tracked into unrealistic and doctrinaire systems. It is by no means unique. Another example comes in the nineteenth century, where the tactical debate became polarised between the believers in the improved firepower of the age, and those who felt that the bayonet attack was still both practicable and profitable. The former invoked the supposed powers of an unproved technology, while the latter pointed to the real outcome of a thousand actual battles. The believers in the bayonet have nevertheless been unjustly vilified as dreamers and ‘military spiritualists’ whereas the champions of firepower have recently been accepted as profound and original thinkers who had the general welfare of mankind as their prime concern. In fact, of course, both sides of the debate found themselves being pushed to extremes by the pressure of the opposition. Institutional factors once again blew the analysts off course.
In the present century we can find plenty of other ‘schools’ of tactical doctrine. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, the prophets of mechanised mobility found themselves resorting to shrill extremism in their vain attempts to gain official acceptance. Their basic case was a good one; but they overdid its presentation and once again came to abuse their historical raw material. Another example might be found in the American forces of the 1960s, where a veritable parliament of opposed tactical schools sprang up. There was a Marine Corps school, which made no less than sixty amphibious beach assaults in Vietnam, in the hope that the enemy would oblige by opposing them. There was an army helicopter lobby, which saw the airmobile division as the answer to all ills. There was an electronic battlefield establishment and an armoured warfare establishment. There were riverine forces, special forces and, of course, air forces. Each of these groups analysed the tactical problem in different terms from the others. They drew upon different data and extrapolated different trends into the future.
The tactical analyst is necessarily working at a considerable distance from the battlefield he hopes to influence, and he is usually forced to simplify his case in order to ‘sell’ it. This tends to focus the debate around somewhat extreme or over-theoretical propositions or phrases, in which one individual abstract quality such as ‘morale’, ‘mobility’ or ‘firepower’ generally comes to be seen as predominant over the others. Tactical history can then be re-written by the proponents of that particular quality in order to support their case. Not until a system has been discredited on the battlefield will some new wave of analysts arrive to demonstrate the vital importance of a different abstract quality altogether.
If historians follow the expectations of their public, and analysts follow the abstract logic of their ‘schools’, what can we make of the more direct evidence of battle survivors? These are people who have actually lived through the fighting they describe, and they will bring vivid memories to their writing. It is true that in some cases these memories may be garishly embellished, and in others they may be unduly reticent; but by and large we ought to be able to accept them at more or less face value.
The difficulty with the reports of survivors is rather that they are fragmentary. No one man in a battle can see very much of what is going on, nor will he have leisure to weigh the significance of what he does see. As Sir Ian Hamilton put it: ‘The worst of writing on a battlefield is the necessity which it entails of constant contradictions.’6 If a coherent and balanced narrative of the action is to be written, a considerable effort of comparison and analysis will be required between the reports of many different witnesses. This task is undertaken only too rarely, and it is followed through to completion more rarely still. Thus Captain Siborne collected a splendid wealth of eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Waterloo; but he failed to resolve all the contradictions between them, and arrived at a final picture which appears to contain a number of important inaccuracies.7 It is only with the work of General S. L. A. Marshall during and since the Second World War that the technique of combat history has been put on a sound basis. His descriptions of the combats in Vietnam, for example, are models of the genre.8
The vast majority of battles leave us but few useful eyewitness accounts, and it is rare for any two observers to describe exactly the same event. Nor do they always tell us the sort of details which we would most dearly like to hear about. A participant in a battle may find some things so obvious that he will not bother to record them; and yet these are often precisely the aspects which remain obscure to the distant historian. For all that, however, it is from eyewitness accounts that we can gain our best and most direct impression of what really happened. Provided that we approach them with due caution, we can glean a lot more details from this type of writing than we can from the work of the ‘journalists’ or the ‘analysts’.
Throughout what follows we will be constantly on the lookout for the traps and pitfalls into which the written evidence may lead us. We will try to see what political or romantic slants may be concealed behind ‘generally accepted’ views; and we will try not to accept the generalisations of historians until they have been supported by some solid eyewitness reports. We will also watch for the institutional pressures at work upon analysts in the tactical debate which may corrupt or distort their vision. Finally, we will try to piece together and make a coherent story out of a few of the fragmentary memories of battle which have come down to us from those who were actually present.
All this amounts to rather an ambitious task; but it will be worthwhile if it can help us towards a better understanding of what actually went on in combat. There is at present too much which remains obscure in this subject, and any new light which can be brought to bear will be long overdue.
A particularly thick pall of obscurity seems to hang around the role of technology and ‘firepower’ in battle; and these two factors have attracted a disproportionately high degree of misunderstanding from commentators. It has been claimed, for example, that as early as 1808 Wellington’s infantry was habitually winning battles purely by its musketry fire. We are invited to believe that ‘solid’ British infantrymen could already, one hundred years before Mons, lay down such an impenetrable hail of shot along their frontage that enemy attacks would be simply blown to pieces. This curiously anachronistic image is doubtless a source of great comfort and pride to many patriotic Britons, and it has found its way into most of the history books. As we shall see, however, it is totally misleading.
We are also often told that the rigid and brainless military hierarchies of the nineteenth-century failed to realise what important technical changes were being made under their very noses. When a devastating new generation of weapons was unleashed in 1914 it is supposed to have come as a traumatic surprise to everyone concerned. Awareness of the so-called ‘empty-battlefield’, in which soldiers are forced to disperse and dig for shelter, is considered to have been an early twentieth-century, or at best a late nineteenth-century phenomenon. In these pages, however, we shall attempt to demonstrate that it was really an early nineteenth-,
or just possibly a late eighteenth-century event. The debate about the empty battlefield was of very long standing indeed, and the doctrinal answer to it had already been formulated, in quite specific ways, at least a hundred years earlier.
Although ‘the empty battlefield’ had long existed, it was never to be much more than one among several different forms of combat. In the American Civil War it was assumed to be predominant from the start – and that expectation has deeply coloured the subsequent historiography – yet it was seen in practice far less frequently than has been assumed, at least until the year of exhaustion, 1864. Far from being unaware of improved firepower in 1914, therefore, the general staffs were heartily sick of being told about it. They had heard the cry of ‘Wolf!’ only too often before.
Continuing our story into the twentieth century, we find that improved firepower did eventually outrun the tactical counter-measures that were thought to be available. While the true solution should have been the creation of a ‘new infantry’ and a more flexible artillery, the armies remained fixed in a deadlock which could supposedly be broken only by new technology, in the form of the tank.