Washington, D.C. Mosby’s men always fought mounted, and, for them, the revolver was almost the only weapon. Many carried as many as four or six revolvers.
On April 1, 1863, Mosby and 69 of his troopers were surprised by 150 Union cavalrymen led by Captain Henry C. Flint of the First Vermont Cavalry. Mosby’s men barely had time to get on their horses.
“As Capt. Flint dashed forward at the head of his squadron, their sabers flashing in the rays of the morning sun, I felt like my final hour had come,”
Mosby later recalled. He and his men met the sabers with their revolvers. Flint was killed and his men routed. Mosby was promoted to major. Two weeks before that promotion, he had been promoted to captain.
The revolver had changed cavalry tactics, but the day of the horseman was rapidly fading, thanks to the rifle and the machine gun. And, as Childers pointed out in his two books, War and the Arme Blanche and The German Influence on British Cavalry, European cavalry officers had still not learned to take advantage of the revolver.
The revolver had a profound, but very short-lived effect on warfare. It and its successor, the semiautomatic pistol, are still important weapons. In the United States, until well into the 20th century, the prime criterion for selection of a handgun was its stopping power on horses. One American officer, evaluating the .38 caliber service revolver in 1900, complained of its lack of power: “Time after time I have seen it necessary to fire several shots in a horse’s head in order to bring him down, when the man was very close. The Cavalry Pistol should be of such caliber and power, that either horse or man hit will be out of the fight.”
In 1911, the United States adopted the .45 caliber Colt semiautomtic as the M1911 pistol, because the military authorities believed it had enough power to stop man or horse. The cavalry pistol was still to see some action, as in the mounted pistol charge at the Ojos Azules Ranch during the army’s pursuit of Pancho Villa, but, after that, the pistol’s main purpose was as a last-ditch self-defense weapon for officers and NCOs. One notable instance of that was in World War I when Corporal Alvin York used his M1911 to kill six Germans who charged him with bayonets during his celebrated skirmish in the Argonne Forest when he captured 132 Germans almost single- handed.
Chapter 26
David as a Tin Fish: The Modern Torpedo
Not all torpedoes in the American Civil War were like those Farragut had damned (see Chapter 23). They didn’t all lie in wait for a ship to hit them.
There were two kinds that went after their prey. One was the spar torpedo, an explosive charge on the end of a long pole. The pole was attached to the bow of a small, fast surface vessel or a submarine. The attacker either rammed the torpedo into its prey, setting off the explosive, or it poked the torpedo under the enemy hull, then detonated it by pulling a string that released a firing pin.
The second type was the towed torpedo. This was dragged through the water by a small fast boat that cut across the path of an enemy ship. The enemy ship hit the tow rope and dragged the torpedo against itself.
Some pirates in the South China Sea use a similar method. Two pirate boats connected by a cable straddle the path of a freighter during the night when most of the ship’s crew can be expected to be asleep. The ship hits the cable and drags the two pirate boats against itself. The pirates then climb aboard and take over the ship.
This scenario indicates one of the problems in the use of the towed torpedo: What happens to the boat that was towing the torpedo? If the enemy did not hit the rope at the right spot, the tow boat would be slammed against the side of the enemy ship before the torpedo. The problem with both types of torpedo was that ideally they should be used by crews with suicidal tendencies. When the C.S.S. Hunley, a Confederate submarine, sank the U.S.S. Housatonic in the Civil War (the first time a submarine ever sank another ship) with a spar torpedo, Hunley sank herself.
In 1866, in what is now Trieste, Italy, but was then part of Austria, an Austrian naval captain named Luppis considered these problems. How could he make a torpedo that did not require a crew of Kamakazes? He consulted a Scottish engineer named Robert Whitehead, who was living in that part of Austria. Together, they devised a miniature unmanned submarine that carried an explosive charge, or “warhead,” in its nose. Whitehead later made further improvements to the weapon and set up a company to manufacture “locomotive torpedoes,” as they were called. He finally sold the company to Vickers, the British armaments giant.
Whitehead and Vickers managed to sell quite a few torpedoes although the early Whitehead torpedoes were not all that impressive. They carried a mere 18 pounds of explosive, traveled at a speed of six knots and had a maximum range of 370 yards. Furthermore, they lacked reliable control of direction and depth-keeping. Progress was rapid, however. By 1876, Whitehead torpedoes had a range of 600 yards; by 1905, they had a range of 2,190 yards. The next year, 1906, the range had jumped to 6,560 yards. By 1913, the year before World War II, the torpedo could travel 18,590 yards. Speed and control improved at the same rate as range. By World War II, the Japanese “Long Lance” torpedo — by far the best torpedo in the war — had a range of 11 miles at a speed of 49 knots while carrying a 1,000 pound warhead.
Even the primitive torpedoes gave the world’s battleship admirals a fright.
Battleships in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the most expensive of all war machines. Compared to them, the cost of a torpedo was negligible, but one torpedo could sink the most expensive battleship. The battleship was Goliath — huge, powerful, and fearsome — but the torpedo was David. The short range and inaccuracy of the early torpedoes was no consolation to the naval powers-that-be. Small fast steam launches, whose cost was also negligible compared to battleships, could race up to battleships and release their torpedoes at ranges so short they couldn’t miss. The guns of most battleships, particularly those of Britain, the world’s premiere naval power, probably wouldn’t be able to stop the little boats. France, Britain’s ancient rival, decided to concentrate on building torpedo boats and commerce raiders to neutralize British control of the seas.
An ambitious and imaginative British naval officer, Captain John Arbuthnot
“Jacky” Fisher, began a campaign that radically changed the armaments of the Royal Navy and, consequently, that of all the world’s navies.
British battleships in 1880 were comparatively heavily armored and slow.
Their ponderous wrought-iron guns were muzzle-loaders — a few accidents with early breech-loaders having convinced the Royal Navy that muzzle-loading was safer. Muzzle-loading the huge guns now needed on battleships required a complicated arrangement of cranes and was slower than breech-loading.
The first attempt to cope with the torpedo boat threat was to add very heavy machine guns to the ships’ armament. Gatling and Nordenfelt mechanical machine guns in calibers of an inch or more appeared on ships. The Hotchkiss revolver cannon — a multi-barrel gun that threw a 37 mm explosive shell — became popular with the world’s navies. Then Maxim introduced its one-pounder automatic cannon, the famous “pom-pom,” but, as the range and speed of torpedoes increased, these light cannons were no longer adequate. The British began purchasing steel breech-loaders capable of firing a 6-pound shell 12 times a minute with a three-man crew. Steel artillery and breech-loading had been pioneered by continental firms like Krupp in Germany and Hotchkiss in France.
Breech-loading mechanisms were far safer than the early ones, and steel was far stronger than wrought iron. The new guns let more powerful ammunition be fired more quickly. Torpedoes, though, were improving at least as fast as guns.
Something more was needed.
In 1886, Jacky Fisher, now director of naval ordnance, was authorized to get guns from private corporations instead of the royal arsenal. Armstrong, with Vickers, the second British armaments giant, had just what he was looking for — steel breech-loaders that took a 6-inch shell and had a new, French-developed recoil mechanism that absorbed the recoil and returned the gun to its point of aim. (See Chapter 28 on quick-firing artillery.) About the only limitation on its speed of fire was the strength of the gun crew. The breech-loading and recoil systems could be applied to big guns, too, making possible smaller turrets and quicker, more accurate fire. The modern battleship was born, and all navies that didn’t have such ships began to copy the British.
