1864.. you be the tactician

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Kaylee

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Well, after three days of touring Harper's Ferry, Bull Run, Antietam (ouch!)... I had to wonder...

Folks kept telling me that the weapons had outpaced the tactics -- folks were used to long advances across open country, which was bad enough facing muskets and cannon but starting to approach downright suicidal against minnie balls and rifle-muskets.

So... to those familiar with the technology of 1864 or so.. what WOULD be a good way of taking an objective? I can see the purpose of all the drumming and ranks and such to co-ordinate actions, thus keeping feller A's aim from getting knocked off by feller B trying to ram a charge home, but is there a better way?

Anyone care to put their 21st century perspective to use with 19th century tech?

And oh yeah.. somehow I can't imagine much more terrifying than holding a just-emptied single-shot muzzleloader and needing to make a shot. :eek:

-K


PS... looking down on Burnside's bridge from the opposing heights.. somehow the words "turkey shoot" came to mind. Felt kinda sorry for them Yankees. :(
 
Watch the movie "The Patriot" I think it shows common sense. I do not understand the mentality of standing muzzle to muzzle across an open field with enemy soldiers in combat. But we live in a different world than it was then.
 
The problem is, tactics of that day were driven by things that hadn't changed, communications, training, and organization. Imagine trying to keep a coordinated operation going across a whole battlefeild, with tens of thousands of troops, by voice and runner. Imagine doing it with a relatively low level of training, and a distrust of the letting individual troops exercise initative inherited from europe. Wasn't one of the main drill manuals of the day a translation of a French work? How do you keep your units together and moving under their officer's control those circumstances, when one of your biggest fears is that poorly trained troops will go to ground and fail to advance? Close proximity and formations were the answer that they chose, and casualties didn't out weigh the obsessive need for control until WWI presented an obvious point of diminishing returns, and survivors.
 
Close formations of troops were necessary to mass fire from weapons with a 3 round a minute ROF. Also, in that sort of drill, any given man in the line only had to keep track if one other man. I have been blinded by smoke while in a Civil War battle re-enactment and was able to keep going by maintaining elbow contact with the man next to me. And while we're talking about smoke, there are times when an M14 would be reduced to a 25 yard weapon because of lack of visibility. At that point, it's just volume of fire, and a smooth bore musket loaded with buck and ball would actually have the advantage over a rifle musket firing a single ball. The war started with open field manuver battles and ended with trench warfare that was a pretty good preview of what would come in the first world war.
 
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The problem is, tactics of that day were driven by things that hadn't changed, communications, training, and organization.
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Absolutely correct. The revolution in training in tactics had to wait for the German Hutier Tactics of WWI. Even then, they were limited in application and difficult to train.

The problem there was communications -- a "portable" radio in WWI would have taken a wagon to carry it. Units did use telephones, but in the attack, the wire had to be laid on top of the ground, and was soon cut by shellfire.

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Close formations of troops were necessary to mass fire from weapons with a 3 round a minute ROF. Also, in that sort of drill, any given man in the line only had to keep track if one other man.
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It wasn't the rate of fire that dictated mass formations, it was lack of communications and training. The second sentence quoted above is close to the truth -- how WOULD you control 10,000 men in battle, if they were dispersed so none of them could see any of their friends?
 
i think that the quote "you always fight your last war" sums it up. both sides in the civil war were fighting with tactics that were in use since before the revolution, when in fact they should have been using tactics from WWI. during WWI trench warfare was the norm, but there were also mass charges across open ground. the reason that a stalemate ensured and trench warfare began had a lot to do with the fact that commanders didn't know how to deal with machine guns. they were a relatively new invention and no one quite knew how their strengths, weaknesses, how to attack their positions, etc. but to keep from going too off topic, i believe that the war might have played out a little differently had it turned to WWI style fighting. not necessarily saying that the south would've won, or the north would've just sat back and waited for the south to starve, but i think that it might have taken longer and the war might have stayed almost completely in northern virginia.
 
The stalemate in WWI was broken by first German Hutier Tactics, and later by American and British adaptations of the same tactics.

The fundamental problem was command and control. Huge masses of men could not be controlled by the tactics and technology of the day. That's why mass attacks were made.

Politically, the attacks HAD to be made -- After the initial failure of the Scheliffen Plan, the German strategy was to knock out the Russians, and turn their entire force on the Western Allies (something they actually accomplished in 1917.) Had the Western Allies stood entirely on the defensive, the Russians would have seen it as a betrayal -- the West wasn't "putting out" enough to help Russia.

Attacks were therefore necessary, and had to be in mass for two reasons -- small attacks would obviously accomplish nothing tactically, and the Russians would see them as mere sops.
 
Before calling WWI tactics superior, there are two things to address. First, there were places where the Civil War devolved into trench warfare, and it happened for exactly the same reasons as WWI. When the mass formations failed to sucessfully bull through, they dug in. Second, there is not a single set of "WWI tactics", they changed during the course of the war, as the cost of maintaining close order became apparent. So while I would not argue with the superiority of the tactics of 1918, I don't think the tactics of 1914 would have changed anything.

As to the novel effect of the machine gun, there were plenty of people speculating about its effects prior to WWI. The French General Morand was writing about how effective they would be in repelling attacks from dug in positions in 1829. Of course he though they would be steam powered, but his analysis of their potential effects was pretty sharp. The thing is that machine guns (and magazine rifles) were evolving technologies. Prior to WWI, machine guns bulk and unreliablity were such that maintaining control, and the politics that Vern covered, were still more important to the armies involved. They saw strengths, weaknesses, and dangers. They just couldn't step outside their own experiances and see that the technology had reached a cascade point.

Finally, to get back to the original question, there was am alternative set of tactics available at the time. It just wasn't veiwed as practical. The French Chasseur movement of the 1840's advocated better trained troops, operating in open order, armed with rifles, using individual initiative. The French military argued about it, and the need for control won the day. So if Chasseurs had won out the drill manual that we used might have been dramatically differant. the Unforunately, the great mass of troops involved in the Civil War weren't, and by necessity couldn't, be trained as much as anybody thought that the tactics required. So even it the tactics and been popularized, the sheer size, limited training and organizations of the mass armies of the Civil War would have probably caused them to end up using the exact same tactics that they did.

Like the man said "no matter where you go, there you are".
 
My guess is that a few things would have improved matters:

1. Better, more deliberate attention to field sanitation and medical service. Apply the lessons of the Crimean War.

2. Different squad organization. Treat field cannon the way Germans treated GPMGs in WW2: make cannon the basis of any medium unit so that they'd always outrange any purely infantry or cavalry opposition.

3. For the South: pay of supplies instead of relying on Commissaries to pilfer your own side. Much of the inadequate clothing and victualizing was more likely a consequence of the distortion of the economic incentives than of outright shortages.

4. By-pass strong points and starve them out. Taking fortifications by storm is too expensive.
 
The American Civil War was the first truly modern war in a number of respects. A key respect is that of technology vs tactics. I had an instructor make the claim that virtually (official weasel word) every technology that makes modern war modern war was introduced either 5 years before or during the Civil War.

Combine the rate of technology change with the lack of skilled military leadership by both sides (with the exception of a few leaders) and you have the stage set for slaughter that is proportionately beyond what the Europeans did to each other.

So during the Civil War you faced the tactics of massed fire (similar to the Revolutionalry War) against entrenched troops (similar to the Sommes Battle) fielding shoulder weapons not much different than what was used by US forces in Europe.

BTW, I've done the same tour. Sunken Road, Antietam Battlefield is sobering beyond reason. No wonder it scared both sides. No wonder the Europeans marveled at the gusto with which Americans killed each other.
 
The stalemate in WWI was broken by first German Hutier Tactics, and later by American and British adaptations of the same tactics.

The fundamental problem was command and control. Huge masses of men could not be controlled by the tactics and technology of the day. That's why mass attacks were made.
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That pretty much sums it up. Note that tactics DID evolve during the Civil War, and weren't simply a catalog of suicidal frontal assaults against entrenched Infantry backed by cannons. More dispersed infantry formations were adopted as the war went on, and many units fought in 1864 in a completely different manner than they did in 1861. George Thomas showed how you could score offensive victory against entrenched enemy forces at acceptable cost at the Battle of Nashville in 1864 by thoughtful use of combined arms, and Sherman and Joe Johnston both were notable for not simply throwing densely packed infantry into kill zones willy-nilly.

Bear in mind that the generals of 1861 were often the captains and majors of 1860, and inexperience played a huge role in how the war was initially waged.
 
You're absolutely right. Early in the war, for example, the standard tactic for a regimental attack was the line formation. This produced major problems -- a regimental commander couldn't control such a wide formation.

Later, most regimental attacks were made in column (one battalion behind another) but with the battalions on line (to get proper dispersion.) This gave better command and control, and if the front battalion was held up, the next following came right up, and so on, concentrating more force on the point of attack.
 
Just my $.02, but in comparison to today's level of warfare:

I'd take 2 or 3 very tight highly trained units (seals, rangers, etc.) from today against entire regiments of that day. The tactics are understood, and their faults were numerous. Propaganda and fear would probably be the best weapons available. They have worked many times in the past.

And like others have said already... bypass strongholds, cut their legs out from under them. Guerilla warfare: pillage, plunder....

I live 10 minutes from Columbia, PA, where you can see the remains of a bridge that once crossed the Susquehanna River. It was burned to keep raiders from the South from getting east and north to Harrisburg and further past the Mason-Dixon. It worked better than was hoped. I'm sure people died for doing it, but it wasn't like having to hold that point with soldiers and bullets.
 
There is no question that today's military are far ahead of Civil War-era troops and leaders in terms of training and fundamental understaning of combat. This is not a slur on the men of that era -- as a wise man once said, "If we see farther than previous generations, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants."
 
possible morale question

just thought Id throw this out there not really saying that its the answer but curious as to what some of you might say. As we expanded westward some people called native americans cowardly for there ambush/hit and run tactics. Of course there is nothing wrong with this and it was the best corse of option given the situation. But during the civil war time large formations and flanking manuvers of well displend soilders comanded by brilliant educated generals was considered the typical method of fighting a war. Since we were fighting our own countryman is it possible that some people didnt want to try new or different tactics becouse it would be ungentelman like and wrong against our own countryman. Consider this from the Generals and comanders point of view and not the typical foot soilder doing most of the dying. Being in the millitary I hate the envolvment of politics espically when it gets all the way to the battlefield but it does happen. Just a thought I reall dont think to many people could stand by and watch thousands under there comand die just becouse it was the prober way to fight.
 
Oleg pretty much summed up my position; however, I would add one more thing...

5. Use guerilla warfare to its best advantage: Robert E. Lee was dead set against the practice, and it ended up costing him the war. Smaller groups (i.e. Frank & Jesse James, John Wilkes Booth) showed how well guerilla tactics worked, but their efforts were too little & too late. If the South had used guerilla tactics against the Union troops (esp. in Union-occupied areas) such as raiding supply convoys, assasinating military & political leaders, and ambushing Union patrols & garrisons, the Union would have soon exhausted much of their mainline troops by having to "put out a thousand brushfires." Eventually the Union would have gotten tired of the "quagmire" & let the Confederacy go.

In a Turtledove-esque way, I always wondered what would have happened if a time traveler had left information about the Vietnam War (including the tactics & effect of VC tactics) in the hands of the 1860's Confederacy...:uhoh:
 
When Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, not the confederate army. One of the reasons Grant agreed (heck, he offered) benevolent terms of surrender was he and his generals (and his boss, Lincoln) were terrified of the thought of a guerilla war. One word from Lee and thousands of southerners would have fled to the woods to organize a guerilla war. Fortunate, neither side thought the idea to be valid. Both side were bled dry and both sides were tired. So it ended.
 
Forrest had the right ideas. Hit hard and fast, over and over again. Always keep moving and keep your enemy from resting. So it could be done with the right commander and the right men. Many of the great battles of the Civil War were lost because the generals were still thinking in terms of set-piece engagements. They repeatedly allowed Lee's forces to retreat with honor, when they should have hounded them without mercy.

Combine Forrest with Sherman and you'd have the perfect general for the job. But where to find the men? They were brave, but generally not trained at all. To pull off a modern approach with a large army they'd all need to be sent back and trained for an additional year or more. We did that in WWII, but the notion would have seemed absurd during the 1860's.
 
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They repeatedly allowed Lee's forces to retreat with honor, when they should have hounded them without mercy.
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They simply weren't up to it -- the coordination, command and control of large forces in the pursuit was beyond their capability. You might say the same about the Confederate forces in many of their victories. A well-handled force might have captured Washington after First Bull Run, for example.
 
The thing about all these better tactics, is that starting before the war, trying to train an army that could execute these tactics, would have probably started the war earlier. Would either side have sat back and watched quietly while the other commenced a massive buildup and training program?

The idea that just utilizing guerilla warfare could have won the war for the south has a major problem. It presumes that the Union would not forcibly depopulate areas, and burn homes and crops wholesale. How did the Union deal with guerilla tactics in some parts of western Missouri? If the South had tried a pure guerilla stratagem, then historians might be arguing about whether Lincoln's famines really measured up to Stalin's. now there's an ugly alternate history scenario for you...
 
How about the cavalry back in 1864? They had rifled breechloaders, right? I once read about some squad of soldiers in the CW (I think they were Union) that would snipe at the Confederate officers (or maybe it was the other way around). I'd get as many of those guns as possible, put them in the hands of the best shots, and start killing off the command and control. Without leaders, regiments and brigades would quickly turn into mobs.
 
The rifled breechloaders of the Civil War era were not as accurate as muzzle loaders, and most of them lacked the power of standard muzzle loaders.

For sniping, the Whitworth from Britian was probably the best (it was a Confederate Whitworth that killed General Sedgewick.)

Most troops in the Civil War were poor shots, and few units had an effective marksmanship training program. In fact, few officers understook the capabilities of the standard rifled musket, or how to use it.

There were exceptions -- Hiram Berdan on the Union side, and Patrick Cleburne on the Confederate. But your average North-South Skirmisher is a better shot and knows more about the capabilities of his weapon than 99% of those engaged in the Civil War.
 
Tactics were changing by 1864.

For one thing, breakthoughs were possible as proven at Spotsylvania Courthouse by Col. Upton and later Hancock. The first initially succeeded but then failed for want of reinforcement. The latter initially succeeded (and captured around 3k Confederates including two generals) but ultimately failed for lost of command and control.

Hutier style infiltration tactics were practiced during the Civil War by some Confederate Sharpshooter Battalions in 1864. They would penetrate the Federal picket line, sweep left and right and roll up the entire picket.

It was tried on a massive scale during the attack on Fort Steadman (March 25, 1865). Intelligence failed them and they failed to find the forts that were beyond Steadman. Reinforcements failed to arrive too so instead of breaking out, the Confederates found themselves in a death trap.

BTW, I would have "Samuel Clemens" (French leave) and excused myself like he did.
 
For sniping, the Whitworth from Britian was probably the best (it was a Confederate Whitworth that killed General Sedgewick.)
Click to expand...

Except the Whitworth is a field artillery piece. I've got a picture of me standing behind one at Gettysburg.
 
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