Between Flesh and Steel (4 page)

The armed forces of Europe began to expand their standing armies to record size. They also created larger reserve forces that could be mobilized in one large-scale and almost irreversible deployment maneuver on short notice and transported along military rail nets to augment the standing forces. The railway officer, who could plan and implement deployment schedules, became the most valuable officer on the newly created and professionalized military staffs. In Germany, retired army sergeants, still under military obligation as reserve forces, staffed almost the entire civilian railway service.

As one innovation after another developed during the Industrial Revolution, military forces found more and more applications for them. The armies of the early twentieth century had at their disposal a killing and destructive capacity greater than anything the world had ever seen. The fatal flaw was that they did not know it.

In the half century between the end of the Civil War and the advent of World War I, no fewer than six military conflicts involving one or more of the major powers took place. Almost a score of smaller colonial wars were fought in the same period.
These frequent, if short, wars provided laboratories to test the new implements of destruction.

Among the more important developments of this period was the replacement of muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon with rifled breechloaders. By 1890, every major army in the West was equipped with this new type of cannon. Time fuses were developed in France around 1877 and served to make overhead burst artillery more lethal than ever. The French also developed the first smokeless powder, more stable and potent than black powder, in 1884, and in 1891 the British synthesized cordite, a new shell explosive that became the standard artillery explosive by 1914. In 1888, long-recoil hydraulic cylinders were introduced to stabilize artillery, an improvement that tripled the rate of fire and accuracy of artillery guns. The rifled breech-loading artillery gun now operated with “fixed ammunition,” or brass and steel shells in which powder, fuse, and projectile were one piece. The introduction of shrapnel shells added even more destructive power to artillery. In 1896, wire-wound heavy guns were introduced, making gun barrels much stronger than cast barrels. A short time later, frettage—a method of manufacture in which hot steel tubes were shrunk one into another to make gun barrels—made its appearance, resulting in more durable and much higher-caliber guns. Improved breeches and gas-sealing systems completed the development of artillery in this period. In 1897, the French introduced the 75mm field gun, which incorporated all of these improvements. This new French gun's maximum rate of fire was twenty-five rounds per minute. In the 1880s, massive siege cannon, often mounted on railway cars, began to make their appearance. The Krupp “Big Bertha” howitzer could raise an eighteen-hundred-pound shell three miles into the air and hit a target ten thousand yards away.
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The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 was the first war in which infantry was universally equipped with modern repeating rifles and artillery with breech-loading rifled cannon. By the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the use of indirect heavy artillery fire was standard practice. The invention of improved panoramic sights, goniometers for measuring angles, the observation balloon for directing fire, and the field telephone allowed forward artillery observers to direct artillery fire on targets that gunners could not see. Advances in fire control enabled an entire artillery corps to mass its fire upon a single target for the first time.
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Measured against these advances, the development of naval weapons between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries was hardly perceptible. Ships remained mostly platforms for transporting infantry and, later, for serving as basic gun platforms.
Sail and wood construction limited the ship's role and sharply reduced the number and caliber of guns that could be placed aboard them. In the early 1800s, the steam engine began to change the ship's military role. The first steam-powered naval ships were produced in the 1820s, but the need for side paddlewheels and huge engines still limited the ship's role as gun platforms. By 1850, the first screw propeller made the side-wheeler obsolete and freed up the necessary deck space to carry sufficient guns. The modern artillery shell had already made the wooden-hulled vessel obsolete, but in 1855 the French introduced iron plating along the wooden hull for increased protection. The weight of heavy guns and large steam engines placed too much strain on wooden-hulled ships, and in 1860 the British launched HMS
Warrior
, the world's first iron-hulled warship.

The armored turret was first used on major ships in 1868, and gradually the advances in artillery weapons were applied to naval guns. Ships began to mount multiple turrets, first with one gun per turret and, by 1900, a standard four guns per turret. The caliber of these guns grew from twelve inches in1908 to a standard fifteen inches by 1914. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of steel construction for naval vessels. By 1913, naval vessels were powered by oil instead of coal boilers, greatly increasing their propulsive power while reducing space. In less than a hundred years, these advances culminated in the production of the first modern battleship, the HMS
Dreadnought
. Launched in 1906, this battleship was 527 feet long, 82 feet at the beam, and displaced 17,900 tons. It carried ten 12-inch guns, twenty-seven 12-pounders, and five 18-inch torpedo tubes. Powered by engines generating 23,000 horsepower, the ship could make twenty-one knots. In less than a decade, however, it was already obsolete.

The invention and improvements in mines and, later, the guided torpedo made even the largest ships vulnerable. The Americans in 1843 developed the controlled mine, which was detonated by electric current from wires leading to the shore. Chemically triggered contact mines were in use as early as 1862, and by World War I the mine had become a potent defensive weapon capable of sinking the largest ships. The torpedo—called the “locomotive torpedo” because it proceeded under its own power and did not have to be towed as earlier models did—made its first appearance in 1866. Developed by the Austrians, the first models had a range of 370 yards at six knots and carried an eighteen-pound explosive warhead. By 1877, the contra-rotating propeller was fitted to a torpedo, an innovation that kept the missile steady on course. Soon the torpedo was fitted with a horizontal rudder to keep it at
a constant depth as it ran to its target. In 1895, the invention of the gyroscope improved the torpedo's accuracy, and by the turn of the century a torpedo could carry a three-hundred-pound warhead to a thousand-yard range at thirty knots.
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These developments called into existence a new class of cheap, fast, and destructive naval vessels, the torpedo boat.

The most revolutionary naval advance of the period, however, was the submarine. By 1900, the use of steel hulls, a safe method of propulsion in the internal combustion engine, the accumulator battery, the gyroscope, and the gyrocompass combined to make the submarine possible. At the same time the development of the reliable torpedo provided the submarine with an excellent weapon of attack. In 1900, the six major navies of the world had only ten submarines among them. In 1905, the American submarine
USS Holland
became the prototype for other navies to copy. Displacing 105 tons, the
Holland
had three separate watertight compartments housing its engine, control, and torpedo rooms. Its second lower deck housed the tanks and battery engines. The
Holland
could make almost nine knots while submerged. A few years later, the British introduced the conning tower and the periscope, and the Germans in 1906 contributed the development of double hulls and twin screws for propulsion and stability. By 1914, the six major naval powers of the world put 249 submarines to sea.

In 1903, Orville Wright (1871–1948) made the first sustained—twelve seconds— flight in a heavier-than-air flying machine powered by the internal combustion engine. In only two years, Orville and his brother Wilbur (1867–1912) had improved the Wright Flyer so that it could stay airborne for forty minutes at a speed of forty miles per hour. In 1907 the pusher biplane flew, and by 1908 the Wright airplane was staying in the air for two and a half hours. The invention of the aileron to control an aircraft around its roll axis greatly increased the plane's maneuverability.
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For the most part, however, military men of the time saw the airplane as performing only the limited functions of the old balloon—namely, observation and reconnaissance.

Others, however, had more important uses in mind. In November 1910 an American, Eugene Ely (1886–1911), took off in an airplane from a platform erected on the deck of a naval cruiser. Two months later it was proven possible to land the aircraft back on the flight deck. In 1911 another American, Glenn Curtiss (1878–1930), became the first man to conduct a practice bombing run against a naval ship, touching off a fierce debate about the vulnerability of ships to air attack. That same
year, two-way radio communication from an airplane to the ground was accomplished, making possible aerial artillery observation and fire direction; Curtiss manufactured the first seaplane, foreseeing its use as a weapon against the submarine; the U.S. Army dropped the first bombs from an airplane; and the first machine gun was mounted on an aircraft, the French Nieuport fighter. A year later, monocoque construction was introduced, a method of arranging stress points in aircraft construction that allowed greater loads on airplane structures. In that same year an airplane flew at speeds more than a hundred miles per hour. And in April 1912, the British Royal Flying Corps became the first official air force. Later that year, the first parachute descent from an airplane was made.

In 1913, people set speed (127 mph), distance (635 miles), and altitude (20,079 feet) records as they began to prove the airplane's capability as a weapon of war. The Russians introduced the world's first heavy bomber, the Sikorsky Bolshoi, with a wingspan of more than ninety feet. During the Turco-Italian War (1911–1912) in Libya, the world witnessed the first use of the airplane in war when the Italians employed the airplane for artillery observation, for aerial photography, and for dropping bombs against an enemy force in combat. The age of the modern strike and bomber airplane as major implements of war was under way.

By the early 1900s, the social, political, and economic context in which armies were raised and wars fought had changed considerably since the American Civil War. The political structures of the European nation states were under attack from new ideologies of the left and center that greatly weakened the power of the national executives while increasing the influence of the legislatures. The ruling nobility was replaced or had to share power with elected leaders, while the monarchies, though retained in form, lost most of their substantive power. Needing to sustain their new electoral bases, leaders cast national conflicts in moral and ideological terms. Wars became crusades, which made them easier to start and more difficult to resolve, short of total victory.

The search for national economic self-sufficiency led the major powers to engage in competition for colonial possessions that could provide stable sources of raw materials and secure markets for manufactured goods.
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The competition for economic advantage threatened the relative security of all states. These conditions, coupled with the rapid development of military technology, led to a continuous armaments race that provoked a spate of alliances between the major powers with the fragmented
states of eastern Europe. The stage was set to draw the larger states into direct conflict when these smaller states challenged one another. Inevitably, clashes in peripheral colonial areas also embroiled the major powers in collisions on the rim of Europe itself until, finally, they engulfed the entire European heartland in a world war.

The standing armies of the day grew enormously to take advantage of the new military technologies. The destructiveness of modern weapons required that large numbers of fighting men be readily available for war in anticipation of huge casualties. Propelled by the contemporary strategic doctrine that the side mobilizing the quickest would have the opportunity of striking a lethal blow, nations established large reserve forces that could be mobilized and deployed within days. Once mobilization plans were set in motion, however, they could not be easily stopped without conceding a significant advantage to one's opponent. Once war broke out, the nation's entire economy and productive capacity had to be marshaled for war. While Napoleon had created the new reality of a nation in arms, World War I, following the model of the American Civil War, gave birth to the idea of a nation at war.

On the eve of World War I, Europe was a tinderbox waiting for a spark. National economies were pre-positioned for war, with large standing armies facing one another across disputed boundaries and civilian populations able to be put into uniform within days of mobilization. The major powers were caught in a series of entangling alliances with small, unstable states whose local conflicts could quickly escalate into war, and while an arms race fed the growing fear, the strategic doctrine of the day required that one strike first. Superimposed upon it all was a political process that produced weak political leadership that was forced to sustain itself by appearing uncompromising on national security issues driven by ideological and moral perspectives that, in turn, made compromise almost impossible. When pistol shots were fired in the narrow streets of Sarajevo in June 1914, they produced a world war.

World War I became known as the “machine gun war,” with the machine gun causing an estimated 80 percent of all British casualties.
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In a war of fixed positions, artillery guns grew larger, firing ever bigger shells in concentrated barrages for days at a time. The siege mortar reached almost forty-two inches in diameter, and railway guns fired 210mm rounds eighty-two miles. Trench mortars reached 170mm caliber and could fire mustard and chlorine gas shells. Poison gas released from canisters made its appearance in 1915, and as the combatants used it throughout the war, the gas mask became standard military equipment. The pack howitzer for the mountain infantry's use made its battlefield debut, as did the first antiaircraft guns.