Between Flesh and Steel (8 page)

1
. See Robert Laffont,
The Ancient Art of Warfare
(London: Crescent Press, 1966), vol. 1, chapter 13, for an analysis of feudal armies as they related to the changing sociopolitical order.

2
. R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy,
The Encyclopedia of Military History
(New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 168.

3
. Richard A. Gabriel,
Philip II of Macedonia: Greater than Alexander
(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2010), 62–69, for an analysis of the Macedonian phalanx; and C. W. Oman,
The Art of War in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982),
chapter 5
, for an examination of the Swiss infantry's innovations to defeat cavalry.

4
. See Richard A. Gabriel,
Empires at War: A Chronological Encyclopedia
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 3:957–63, for a detailed account of the Battle of Crécy.

5
. T. N. Dupuy,
The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), 101.

6
. Seigneur de Tavannes, writing in the sixteenth century, noted the impact of the pistol on cavalry when he wrote, “A cavalry battle which, in the past, would have lasted three or four hours and not killed ten men out of five hundred, has now become a murderous affair and the outcome of the battle is now decided in less than an hour.” Quoted in Laffont,
The Ancient Art of Warfare
, 443.

7
. The innovation of horse artillery as opposed to horse-drawn artillery is generally credited to the Prussian king Frederick the Great.

8
. Dupuy and Dupuy,
Encyclopedia of Military History
, 295.

9
. Richard A. Gabriel, “The History of Armaments,”
Italian Encyclopedia of Social Sciences
(Rome: Marchesi Grafiche Editoriali, 1990), 352. This work traces the development of military technology from Rome to the modern era.

10
. Ibid.

11
. Dupuy,
Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
, 131.

12
. The fluted bayonet had a channel depression running down the side called the “gutrunner” that made the bayonet easier to extract from the victim's body. The English seem to have been the first army to use this device in the battle at Culloden Moor, but the innovation's origins are obscure.

13
. Although the standard iron ramrod could pack the powder down with fewer strokes without breaking, as often happened with the wooden version, much of the increased rate of
fire that resulted from the Prussian troops who first used this device was probably owed to their excellent discipline and training.

14
. A good account of the development of artillery through the ages can be found in Albert Manucy,
Artillery through the Ages
(Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1985).

15
. Gabriel, “History of Armaments,” 8.

16
. Ibid.

17
. Before the increased mobility provided by horse artillery, it was common for one side or the other to overrun the opponent's gun positions. During battle, the forces ebbed and flowed over the same position several times. Special squads of “spikers” rendered the guns useless by driving a large iron spike into the touchhole of the cannon.

18
. The idea that tanks are derivative from cavalry and to be used as such is an American and Western concept. In Russia, where artillery caused great casualties during World War I, tank design and tactics were derived from artillery doctrine, not cavalry. The Russians always mounted larger, longer-range guns on their tanks and used them in large numbers to bring the enemy under fire before the enemy's guns could engage the Russian and Soviet tanks. Right from the beginning, Russian and Soviet tanks mounted 85mm, then 120mm, and now 122mm guns, which are much larger and longer ranged than the common 105mm tank cannon used in the West.

19
. A good work on the relationship of national economies to war in this period is Paul Kennedy's
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
(New York: Random House, 1987).

20
. Gabriel, “History of Armaments,” 8.

21
. Dupuy,
Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
, 191.

22
. The world's armies were quick to realize the potential of the railway. In the Italian War of 1859, the French moved 604,000 men and 129,000 horses by rail in three months. Dupuy,
Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
, 202.

23
. Condensed milk was developed as a military ration that would not spoil in warm climates.

24
. Gabriel, “History of Armaments,” 12.

25
. The process of massing artillery guns on target is called “sheaving,” after the agricultural process of gathering individual stalks of wheat together in a single bundle. Modern firing computers now make what was once an important skill a common capability.

26
. Gabriel, “History of Armaments,” 13.

27
. The aileron was not, however, an immediate success. In World War I, the famous German ace, Max Immelman, flew a Fokker Eindecker, a fighter aircraft that did not have ailerons. Immelman invented the complex maneuver that bears his name to this day, the Immelman turn.

28
. Germany was the exception among the great powers and did not pursue colonial ambitions with any vigor. Setting German policy thirty years before, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck noted that colonies “were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”

29
. Gabriel, “History of Armaments,” 15.

30
. These area saturation weapons inflicted most of the psychiatric casualties, as is the norm when troops in the defense are barraged with indirect fire. The Russian and German models had holes in the stabilizing fins of the rocket so that the round made an eerie, high-pitched sound as it flew toward its target.

31
. Richard A. Gabriel,
No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 42.

32
. Ibid., 22.

33
. Ibid., 35.

34
. Ibid., 27–29.

35
. Ibid., 31–32.

36
. Ibid.

37
. Ibid., 42.

38
. Dupuy,
Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
, 309–12. See also T. N. Dupuy,
Numbers, Predictions, and War
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1979).

39
. Dupuy,
Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
, 310.

40
. Ibid., 170.

41
. The time and expense involved in training a huge army of citizen soldiers in the sophisticated maneuver drills common to the professional soldiers of other armies largely led to Napoleon's use of the marching column as his primary tactical formation. Like Philip of Macedonia's early Macedonian phalanx, Napoleon's marching column formation made it possible to use large numbers of soldiers in combat with only minimal military training.

42
. Dupuy,
Evolution of Weapons and Warfare
, 170.

43
. The exception to this trend is the rate of psychological casualties, which have increased enormously as the tempo and lethality of war have increased. See Gabriel,
No More Heroes
,
chapter 3
.

44
. P. B. Adamson, “A Comparison of Ancient and Modern Weapons in the Effectiveness of Producing Battle Casualties,”
Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps
123 (1977): 93–103.

45
. F. A. E. Crew,
History of the Second World War: The Army Medical Services
, vol. 2,
Campaigns
(London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1957), 31–34,
table 4
.

46
. J. D. Hardy and E. F. Du Bois, “The Technique of Measuring Radiation and Convection,”
Journal of Nutrition
15 (1938): 466.

47
. G. H. B. Macleod,
Notes on the Surgery of the War in the Crimea, with Remarks on the Treatment of Gunshot Wounds
(London: J. Churchill, 1858), 46,
table 1
.

48
. W. C. Moffat, “British Forces Casualties in Northern Ireland,”
Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps
112 (1976): 3–8,
table 6
.

49
. P. Meid and J. M. Yinling,
U.S. Marine Operations in Korea, 1950–1953
, vol. 5,
Operations in West Korea
(Washington, DC: Historical Division of the HQ US Marine Corps, 1958), 140.

50
. Richard A. Gabriel,
Operation Peace for Galilee: The Israeli-PLO War in Lebanon
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 179.

51
. Atul Gawande, “Casualties of War: Military Care for the Wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan,”
New England Journal of Medicine
, December 9, 2004, 2471–75.

52
. Gabriel,
No More Heroes
,
chapter 2
. Psychiatric casualties are evident in every war for which we have a record from the earliest times.

From a military perspective, the Renaissance can be conveniently dated from 1453— the year in which Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, destroying forever the last major cultural center of the ancient world—to 1618, the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, when the use of contract armies, or the condottieri, and mercenary forces on a large scale was coming to an end as the emerging nation states became more organized and able to raise genuine national armies.
¹
By 1618, European states were deploying national armies supported by regular taxation, stationed in permanent garrisons, sustained by regular pay, and directed by articulated administrative structures under the command of national sovereigns.

European culture underwent a genuine “revival of learning” during the Renaissance, a period when new methods of scientific inquiry arose. To attempt these new methods, especially with their emphasis on observation and incipient empiricism in science and medicine, and to explore new subjects, particularly those in medicine that the church and governmental edict had long forbidden or ignored as already answered by the scholastic methods of the Middle Ages, the old clerico-secular social order had to be weakened and its power to punish and censor diminished. As a prelude to change, the old alliance between secular and religious authority that for eight hundred years had sustained the feudal order and religious control of knowledge and inquiry had to be reduced.

A number of events came together to attenuate the old establishment's traditional hold on intellectual life. A major factor was the outbreak of the bubonic plague, which first occurred in 1348 and flared again several times in the same century.
²
The devastation it wrought was enormous. An estimated one in every three people
in Europe died from the disease, a rate of death that sapped the physical and intellectual life of European culture. Within a century, a devastating outbreak of syphilis followed and became endemic to the European population for the next two centuries. In its wake a population already debilitated by the plague suffered an inevitable physical and mental deformation. The birth rate fell, and the population declined to where it had been a century earlier. Whole regions of Europe were almost completely depopulated. The weakened population became more susceptible to other diseases, and smallpox, influenza, measles, typhus, yellow fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, lead poisoning, and ergotism also became epidemics. Surviving records reveal that all these diseases reached pandemic proportions for the first time in European history.
³

The effect of these conditions was to call into question the very basis of the clerico-secular society that had long been regarded as legitimate and ordained by god. The disease epidemics demonstrated the powerlessness of medical knowledge, and the medical profession lost status as society bristled with charlatans and quacks offering miraculous cures and amulets. The clerical elements of society were also revealed as powerless. The old doctrine that god visited death and disease as punishments for sin was hardly credible in an age when disease seemed to strike at random, when saint and sinner alike perished, and when large numbers of priests, monks, and even popes died.

The wave of epidemics also critically weakened the family's ability to socialize its young to the ideas and values of the old order. As diseases carried off parents, older brothers and sisters, aunts, and uncles—all vital mechanisms for transmitting and enforcing traditional social norms and values—new generations grew to adulthood removed from the familial and societal strictures that were enforced in the past. The randomness of death and the shortened life spans produced in these generations an attention to the present to a degree not seen in Europe for a thousand years. Concern for one's health provoked an emphasis on the physical body and material goods rather than on the spiritualism and eschatological views that underpinned the old clerico-secular order. The situation was not unlike those following social and military disasters in modern times. The defeats that Russia and Germany suffered in World War I produced a “lost generation” of youth that was no longer socialized to the beliefs and habits of the older Europeans who had suffered the defeats. The result in both cases was a revolution of new ideas, values, and behaviors that utterly destroyed the old orders.
⁴
The plagues and epidemics of the early Renaissance produced similar conditions and bred generations of unsocialized, rebellious, and materially concerned youth freed from the conventional intellectual, moral, and social strictures.

The declining size and quality of the general population made recruiting talent committed to traditional institutions very difficult. The Catholic Church could no longer sustain its monasteries without lowering its admission standards and reducing the harsher aspects of monastic life. Beginning in 1517, the Protestant Reformation produced the ultimate challenge to the old order's ability to control events. The idea of a single church exercising universal control was broken forever as Europe fragmented into scores of religious sects competing for the loyalty of a population frightened to death by death itself and desperately seeking answers to worldly concerns. The emergence of nation states encouraged secular authorities to take advantage of the religious strife by superimposing upon it an attempt to increase the scope of secular power. Religious issues became central to the dynastic wars of the period as the newly emergent national political authorities attempted to free themselves from the religious and secular power of the church. The resulting century of religious war and massacres further reduced the population and created yet more uncertainty in the world of the average citizen.