trouble loading it, but that when the charge was fired, expanded into the rifling grooves and spun as it left the muzzle. Minie’s first bullet had an iron cup inserted into the hollow base of the conical lead bullet. When the powder charge exploded, it drove the cup into the bullet, which forced the sides of the bullet into the grooves. Later ordnance experts discovered that the iron cup was not necessary: the explosion alone was enough to expand the base of the bullet. Because the Minie bullet was longer than a round ball, it was also heavier. That meant it had greater “sectional density,” which resisted retardation by the atmosphere and gave it greater penetration.
The close fit of bullet to the bore greatly increased accuracy. The bullet of a smoothbore, being smaller than the bore, literally bounced around inside the barrel as it traveled through the gun. And, of course, the spin imparted gyroscopic stability and prevented unequal air resistance on the front of the bullet.
A British officer in the Revolutionary War, Major George Hanger, said, “A soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him.” Hanger also said that only if a musket were perfectly bored, as few of them were, would a soldier be likely to be hit at 80 yards.
The rifled musket would hit man-sized targets at 800 yards.
The American Civil War was a good — and gory — example of how generals fight the previous war and what happens when they do. Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg would have seemed quite familiar to his fellow Virginian, George Washington.
Pickett’s troops lined up, dressed ranks, shouldered their rifles, and marched up to the enemy. But where soldiers in the 18th century might wait to see the whites of the enemies’ eyes, the Yankees began picking off Pickett’s men almost as soon as they began to march.
In the 1860 census, the population of the United States was 31,443,321. In the Civil War, there were 364,512 Union deaths and 133,821 Confederate deaths — although Confedrate figures are almost certainly incomplete. Even with the grossly inadequate Confederate figures, that 498,333 death toll amounts to 1.6 percent of the entire population. In World War II, U.S. forces suffered 407, 316 deaths; the U.S. population was 132,164,569 in the 1940 census. The American Civil War remains in both proportionate and absolute term the bloodiest war in our history.
That was the result of the universal use of rifled weapons and smoothbore tactics.
Besides the slaughter of infantry, the Minie bullet — “minnie ball” to the troops — also meant the end of the traditional cavalry charge. A man on horseback makes a big target, and he can seldom lie down or take advantage of cover provided by the terrain. After a few bloody lessons, the generals adapted cavalry tactics to the new conditions more quickly than they changed infantry tactics. Most of the cavalry fighting in the Civil War was done by dismounted troopers. Cavalry were used mostly as mounted infantry and some mounted infantry outfits, like Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade,” were used as cavalry.
Towards the end of the Civil War, American infantry occasionally modified the traditional charge by increasing the use of skirmishers and advancing by rushes. On the defensive, they used trenches and other field fortifications to an extent unseen until World War I. It took a long time for the lessons to really sink in, though, especially in Europe. In South Africa, the British had to relearn the lessons in 1881 and in 1899 when faced with improved rifles (see Chapter 24). And in World War I, there were still cavalry units on the Western Front preparing to exploit the breakthroughs that never came.
Chapter 21
Sailing Into the Wind: The Steam Powered Warships
For thousands of years, most mariners had dreamed of being able to take a large cargo anywhere they wanted without worrying about wind and currents.
High-ranking British naval officers in the 19th century were the exception. We’ll come to that in a moment.
Ships propelled by oars could, of course, proceed into the wind (although progress was a lot slower than if there were no wind), but the large number of rowers precluded carrying much cargo and ensured that such ships as the Greek triremes (a galley with three banks of rowers) could not go far from land. Primitive sails like those of the classical galleys or the Arab dhows could take a vessel a long distance if the wind were favorable, but not if it were in the wrong direction. That’s why a dhow plying the Indian Ocean trade took a year to make a round trip. Half of the year the winds blew to the West; the other half, to the East. Scandinavian seamen learned to manipulate a square sail to allow some progress against the wind, as did Arab sailors using the lateen sail. But even after Europeans developed the full-rigged ship, progress could be slow unless the weather cooperated. If there was no wind, progress was nil.
The steam engine changed sailing radically, and that transformed warfare at sea. But the steam engine would not have been possible without a previous advance in the art of war. In the 18th century, a Swiss gunfounder named Jean Maritz, improved the rough, sometimes-crooked bores of cannons by inventing a machine for boring out the barrel after the gun was cast solid, instead of incorporating the bore in the casting. A few years later, in 1774, a British engineer named John Wilkinson improved the machine. Wilkinson’s device created an extremely smooth and precise hole. With a machine like that, the pioneers of steam power were able to build cylinders with tight-fitting, efficient pistons.
Such cylinder and piston arrangements are essential to early steam engines as well as modern internal combustion engines.
The first steam engines worked by filling a cylinder with steam, then con-densing it to water. The vacuum created drew the piston into the cylinder. These “atmospheric” engines were useful for pumping out mines and other tasks where their weight was not important. They were far too heavy and bulky to use aboard ships, however. James Watts’s improved steam engine drove the piston in the opposite direction — expanding steam, rather than atmospheric pressure on a vacuum was the driving force. Such engines could be made small enough to power a ship. Their earliest use was to turn a pair of huge side wheels.
Steam gave navies a great strategic advantage. Steam warships no longer depended on weather and could cross the oceans much faster than sailing ships.
“Seizing the weather gauge” (maneuvering into the best location to take advantage of the wind) had long been a favorite tactic of British seamen. It no longer gave any advantage. For that reason, Britain, although it was the home of the first steam engines and it utterly depended on its navy for its primacy in world affairs, tried to retard the development of steam-powered ships. British naval personnel were the most skilled in the world; British shipyards devoted to building sailing men-of-war were the biggest in the world; British technology in preserv-ing food for long journeys, manufacturing the heavy, short-range cannons, called carronades, and everything else needed for wooden, sail-driven warships, led the world. If the world’s navies went to steam, all of that would be worthless.
In 1828, the British admiralty expressed their views on steam-powered warships:
Their lordships feel it is their bounden duty to discourage to the utmost of their ability the employment of steam vessels, as they consider that the introduction of steam is calculated to strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire.
In spite of the size of the British Navy, this policy bore more than a little resemblance to the actions of an earlier British authority figure: King Canute, who tried to tell the tide to reverse itself. The American, Robert Fulton, had built a working steam ship as early as 1807. In 1837, the paddle wheel steamer Sirius crossed the Atlantic in 18 days — breathtaking speed in an era when Atlantic crossings were measured in months.
Although the new method of propulsion had manifest advantages, the world’s navies did not immediately board the steamship. The French started building steam warships in the 1840s, but they did so on a small scale. There were a number of reasons for this slow progress. There was the natural conservatism of sailors and military
