"THE AMERICAN Civil War is often regarded a key moment in the history of warfare — the first ‘modern’ war. European armies of the period are usually thought of as conservative in comparison, retaining obsolete traditions and tactics. The slaughter of August 1914 is attributed to a failure to see what the American war had foretold. Probably no army has been more criticized than the British, for retaining an aristocratic and incompetent officer corps, and an offensive doctrine based upon the bayonet and the cavalry charge, impossible against modern weapons.
These views can be traced back to British military writers of the 1930s, principally Basil Liddell Hart and JFC Fuller, who were both strong critics of the army’s performance in 1914-18 and, crucially, used the study of the American Civil War to illustrate their ideas. Their influence continues to this day and has resulted in many myths, both regarding the novelty of the Civil War, and the extent to which it was ignored in Britain. The Civil War did demonstrate new trends in warfare – but it was neither unique nor disregarded.
The Industrialized Battlefield
"The First World War saw casualties on an unprecedented scale, caused mostly by high explosive artillery and the machine gun, with the dead and wounded never seeing the men who killed them. This industrialization of warfare is often traced back to the American Civil War, which introduced mass-produced weapons such as the Springfield rifled musket. It was a concern noted at the time in Britain, where politician John Bright described warfare as becoming “a mere mechanical mode of slaughtering your fellow-men.”[i] But the war that triggered this comment was the Franco-Austrian War in Italy (1859), not the American war. The military were very aware that the latest “weapons of precision” as the rifled artillery and muskets were termed, had the power to kill from much greater distances than before, and theorized on how this would change tactics. One of the main reasons that the British sent observers to the Civil War was to see the new technology in action.
"The problem is that the Civil War did not offer any obvious lessons in this respect. Several British artillerymen visited America, but they saw little unusual in American practice; they found more value in looking at American production technology in munitions factories. The extended range of the rifled guns was not particularly useful in the heavily wooded American terrain, and observers found it difficult to assess their effectiveness."
"Many artillerists in the U.S. Army preferred the 12-pounder Napoleon smoothbore, which was deadlier at short range. Breech-loading artillery (usually European imports) were deemed too complex and unreliable in campaign conditions. The same was true of the prototype machine guns seen in the war, such as the Agar gun, which the U.S. Army abandoned in the York Peninsula in 1862.
"Whereas the evidence from supposedly modern America seemed to favour older and simpler technology, the supposedly conservative British nevertheless embraced the new. In 1863 the British decided to equip all field and horse artillery with rifled guns, the following year they did the same for siege artillery. They were also early adopters of the machine-gun – looking to America for both the Gatling in the 1870s and the Maxim in the 1880s. This was in contrast to Germany for example, which initially ignored the machine-gun because of the poor performance of the French Mitrailleuse in 1870." . . . Full article here.
