"ACW artillery - was it really that useless?" Topic

This might have been talked about to death, but there is a feeling that artillery of the civil war, was at best bad at worst almost useless.

Is this true, or is it simply an overstatment because artillery lost some of it potency compeard to the Napoleonic wars?

I think artillery could be quite effective, but it was just that the napoleonic wars, artillery was so effective that any drop in the effect makes artillery seem bad.

During the Napoleoinc wars, artillery did 60-80% of the casualties, but then during the napoleoinc wars, you could see time and time agian massed batteries of 40 or more cannon, Eylau had like 3 40 gun battires on the russian side alone, Borodino had over 1300 cannon on the field, Leipzig had like a dozen 40 gun battiers around the battlefield, with over 2500 guns total.

So ofcourse compeard to that ACW artillery is gonig to seem much worse, but that dosn't mean artillery did not casue casualties, I have seen nothing or read nothing that says artillery did not kill scores of people, even with the bad fuses of the confederates.

So for me this "myth" is based on sevral factors

1. Terrain, much more woods making it harder to spot and shoot at the enemy
2. Compeard to the Napoleonic wars, with massed batteries, and massed colums to shoot at, it makes artillery of the ACW seem much less effecient, with it's single batteries working alone.
3. Rifled muskets made infantry weapons more effeicant, there by taking away parts of the battle winning status of the artillry.
4. Less agresive use of guns

But that does not mean, that once the guns have zeroed in, they did little of no castualties.

I'm not sure what the consensus elsewhere is, but playing RF&F here the artillery is far from useless! The firepower of even one battery is enough to make a big difference, and a pair of batteries together can (and do) make infantry scatter out of the open into cover. We've actually wondered if they were *too* powerful.

Ask D.H. Hill or John Breckinridge

Kim

No…..in my opinion, it all depended on the crews training and effectiveness and the size of the bang (morale factor)as perceived by the enemy.

I for one am not keen on being shelled……a missile at sea, well ok, but standing around while your being pounded in ANY period is not good.

There is a case of a union battery (Gettysburg I think) where the battery commander was so effective in his directing the shooting that CS Commander order his artillery to concentrate on him!!!

It a judgement call…..

Martin

Look up the battle of Malvern Hill, or read some detailed accounts of how Pickett's Charge was defeated.

Like CATenWolde says, if you play Fire & Fury much, you'll learn to love your cannon.

I believe artillery in the Civil War is underrated by us in modern times! I have heard people state that wounds or deaths caused by artillery was a very small amount from historical accounts. Really! So, at every battle, some guy went around with his checklist, writing down what the wound or death was caused by! I don't think so! And let's not eliminate the morale factor involved in attacking or not attacking a position lined with artillery!
You may be able to debate the effectiveness of cannister fire against rifle fire and of course an aimed rifle is most likely going to win out. But that depends on what you compare it to. How many guns guns do you compare to how many infantry rifles?
I'm sure someone else can elaborate more. These are just thoughts I've always had!

And don't forget the line of Union artillery at the end of the 1st day at Shiloh, supported by the gunboats. They really made a difference in preserving the Union Army and slowing down the Confederate advance.

Jim

You are sadly misinformed about artillery in the CW. It was a potent arm and on defense it was a tremendous asset. You should do more reading on this topic. If you need recommendations don't hesitate to ask. All of your points are wildly off base.

"but there is a feeling that artillery of the civil war, was at best bad at worst almost useless"

Sorry but really? please don't take it personal but that is the most lame brain thing I have read in years..

The blast alone from a 8 lb gut can kill you out to 25yards… even a 1/4 charged gun is deadly if your to close to the wrong end.

and both sides spent a lot of lives on trying to shift or over run the other sides guns.(because they were useless it seems) :)

What Zippy said. And ColCampbell. And then there's Gettysburg, too.

Eric

Why do I get the feeling he got his info from wikipedia?

"Sorry but really? please don't take it personal but that is the most lame brain thing I have read in years"

It wasn't my opinion, I was just parrotting what other people said, I tried to make it clear that I disagreed with it.

I've never had that opinion and never heard it from anyone else. I thought it was well established that Artillery inflictedore casualties than any other arm.

The OP's question:

Is this true, or is it simply an overstatment because artillery lost some of it potency compeard to the Napoleonic wars?

That hardly merits "lame brain" and the like.

I recall reading somewhere that the estimates on casualties during the Napoleonic Wars was something like 60% artillery and 40% musketry (with maybe 1% for swords & bayonets). In the Civil War it was reversed to 40% artillery and 60% musketry. This change was mostly due to the increased range of the rifle-musket. While the RM was not vastly superior, it did make it just too dangerous for artllery to move up close to the enemy lines and blast away with cannister and grape from 200 yards as often happened during the Napoleonic Wars. Add in the less-dense formations of the ACW (2-rank lines and few columns) and you can see why the artillery casualties would be less. But 40% is still nothing to sneeze at! ACW artillery was still pretty effective.

So I would say that the big difference for CW artillery was that it was much more a defensive weapon than an offensive one as it had been in the Napoleonic Wars.

Scott wrote:

While the RM was not vastly superior, it did make it just too dangerous for artllery to move up close to the enemy lines and blast away with cannister and grape from 200 yards as often happened during the Napoleonic Wars.

I've been reading Cunningham's Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 and it sounds like, at least in the early battles, folks were still trying to deploy batteries in a close assault role suitable to breaking Napoleonic squares. The result, of course, was lots of dead horses and crew. Hard lessons to unlearn, I'm sure.

I prefer to look at it not as in ACW artillery was no good, rather that it was not as good as it potentially could have been.

Mainly due to less dense formations and not so huge an advantage gained from increased ranges, due to line of sight restrictions.

May be an extreme example but the artillerymen of the Grande Armee never had to ply their trade in The Wilderness!

From what I have read, artillery in the ACW was effective in a defensive role but for a variety of reasons was significantly less effective in the offensive role. Terrain, troop density, training and organization probably limted the use of mass batteries and the moving of batteries up close to the enemy prior to infantry assaults. Reading various accounts, masked batteries and artillery in defensive positions broke up many assaults.

Never heard that before. Its patent nonsense.

Jaz
6sided.net

I was not posting about the OPer but the idea itself were ever it came from.. and yes he made it clear that he disagreed with it.

I have never considered Civil War artillery useless. There are too many examples of it destroying formations and the will to fight. Pickett's Charge, Malvern Hill, Franklin, Pelham and Longstreet at Fredericksburg. Von Clausewitz [sic} said "Artillery lends respect to what otherwise have been an unseemly brawl."

Just before the Federal attack at Fredricksburg Lee asked Longstreet if he had enough guns on Marye's Heights. He was concerned. Longstreet told him not to worry. He said a chicken couldn't cross that open plain alive.

Don

certainly under rated in johnny reb3(my prefered acw game). is almost a why bother thing. with the exception of cannister, that is…

One thing that hasn't been mentioned – it almost doesn't matter how many are actually KILLED by artillery. What matters is how men FEEL about enemy artillery.

Men just don't like big explosions around them, and they certainly don't like walking into big explosions.

Man's nature didn't change between the Napoleonic Wars and the ACW.

If the casualty rates are determined by what the surgeons saw at the hospitals, then one might be led to believe that artillery wasn't doing much damage. However, that overlooks the fact that being goob-smacked by a 12lb round is more likely to splatter you into instant fertilizer than being hit by a mini-ball. During the ACW folks just didn't go around trying to determine who was killed by which weapon. They buried the dead as quickly as possible w/o regard to the cause of death. The personal accounts of Pickett's charge (both sides) often remark about the gaping holes in the rebel attacking lines made by cannon projectiles.

The result, of course, was lots of dead horses and crew. Hard lessons to unlearn, I'm sure.

Particularly if the ones who learned the lesson are dead.

DJCoaltrain,

You are dead on here. No pun intended. :)

You get a regiment charging a battery and if the guns fire double canister there won't be much to even bury let alone visit a surgeon. Same thing with bayonet wounds. They were generally fatal and the triage station would just escort them to the side to await their death. Not much a surgeon could do for them so they might never be able to see how many bayonet wounds were caused during the war. I doubt anyone even bothered keep records of these sorts of things. I think most of it was purely anecdotal at best.

Stats are great but we need to know exactly HOW they were counted before using them as any sort of benchmark.

Don

actionfront.blogspot.com

"Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?"

It has been recently estimated, probably by scrutinizing the Medical and surgical History of the Civil War, that on the averege artillery contributed to 10% of the opponen'ts casualties. At Antietam, it rose to nearly 40%.

Who was it in Napoleon's army who said he heard the bones of his division shattering like glass.

I'm sure that part of the problem with artillery was the fact that sharpshooters with rifled-muskets (if not the dedicated rifles) could effectively shoot the artillery crew from ranges that the artillery couldn't easily reply.

As has been pointed out above, relying on the Medical & Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion is asking for trouble. The problem is that everything in there has to deal with wounds treated, not with wounds suffered. Burial details weren't interested in cause of death, and little beyond a few reminiscences remain from those.

I'm sure that part of the problem with artillery was the fact that sharpshooters with rifled-muskets (if not the dedicated rifles) could effectively shoot the artillery crew from ranges that the artillery couldn't easily reply.

This is probably another reason the relationship of artillery to other forces, especially infantry, was changing, and its implementation was altered from a sometimes close-in, sometimes distance weapon, to an almost exclusively at-distance weapon, presaging the time when it was to become an indirect fire weapon.

I think it's illustrative to look at the kind of ammunition carried during the ACW.
For example, a typical 12 pdr Napoleon would carry a maximum of 288 shot, 96 shell, 288 spherical case [shrapnel] and 96 canister rounds.
Effectively only 1 in 8 rounds was canister – clearly the emphasis was on distance fire, as opposed to close in work where canister would predominate.

The ratio of solid shot to canister during the Napoleonic era was much different.

npm

Ligniere: Not sure about all those rounds in a typical 12 pdr Napoleon. That sounds about right for an entire battery with all limbers full and same for the caisons. Seems to me that a limber carried about 32 rounds of an assortment of types.

cwbuff,
Absolutely correct, those numbers are for a typical battery strength, my bad – but, I believe, the ratio of shot/shell/case/canister are correct….. having said that the source was wiki……. which claims to come from Cole, Civil War Artillery at Gettysburg. New York: Da Capo Press, 2002

npm

Correct above, The 12lb limber chest carried 12 solid shot, 12 case, 4 shell and 4 canister each. At 4 chests/gun and a 6 gun battery, the figures match as stated above.

The logic behind only 4 canister was that shell and case could both be used as such by loading them without fuse, or with the fuze cut to burst at the muzzle, thus turning them into ersatz canister.

Only my opinion but rifled muskets caught infanty up to artillery a little bit or say 100 – 150 yds or so, its cavalry that lost on both accounts

This thread brings to mind a chilling quote that always stuck with me over the years. I cannot read or recall it without a shiver going down my spine. It comes from Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Sawyer of the 8th Ohio, remarking on what he saw as Pettigrew's confederate division advanced into the mouths of the Union batteries on Cemetery Ridge on July 3rd:

"They were at once enveloped in a dense cloud of smoke and dust…Arms, heads, blankets, guns, and knapsacks were thrown and tossed into the clear air…A moan went up from the field, distinctly to be heard amid the storm of battle."

Oh no, Civil War artilery wasn't useless. When it was concentrated properly and in sufficient numbers, it was a lethal killer of human beings in massed formations.

I would ask the confederates who charged at places like Gettysburg and Malvern Hill, or the Union troops who charged at places like Fredericksburg and Cold Harbor, what they felt about the effectiveness or "uselessness" of Civil War artillery!

Useless? I'm afraid not. While it did take second place to the rifle musket in terms of sheer numbers of men HIT in battles(musket balls felled about 90% of the casualties in the major clashes of the war, while artillery only felled about 5% to 7% of the casualties), nevertheless Civil War artillery had moments where its concentration caused massive casualties to opposing infantry.

You can't simply take those percentages and conclude that because artillery hit so few men compared to musket balls, that it must have been ineffective or useless.

Remember, a typical Civil War army was made up mostly of infantry. You might have an army of 80,000 men in which 72,000 were infantry, with the remaining 8,000 or so being artillery or cavalry personnel. So naturally, with most of the men in a Civil War army carrying muskets, you would expect that musket balls would be the dominant object flying through the air during a battle, as indeed it was.

For every artillery shell whizzing through the air, there were thousands of musket balls. And you would expect that overwhelmingly, most casualties of Civil War battles would be from musket balls, as indeed it was.

But this is misleading. Yes, artillery takes a distant 2nd place to the musket in terms of numbers of men hit. But it doesn't take into account those moments in large battles in which that average was skewed when artillery batteries were massed in huge numbers and caused ENORMOUS casualties in one, small, concentrated place on a battlefield in a violently short space of time.

The rifle musket ball was the first and supreme killer on the Civil War battlefield, no doubt of that.

But artillery could, and did play major roles during key moments of some of the biggest battles, and most certainly played a huge role in helping to turn back and defeat some of the war's largest infantry assaults.

Henry J. Hunt's deployment and supervision of the massed Union artillery batteries on the Cemetery Ridge line at Gettysburg on July 3rd pratically doomed Longstreet's assault before it even began.

The Army of the Potomac's use of an artillery reserve was very effective. Essentially they parked it right behind the Cemetery Ridge line on July 2nd and 3rd, and fed batteries into the main battle line as they were needed.

Both armies of course employed the typical and long-standing practice of artillery being attached to its various infantry corps or other formations. But with the AoP employing a seperate, mobile, and independent artillery reserve, it greatly enhanced their artillery's effectiveness and killing power.

Union artillery was a huge factor in stopping Longstreet's assault of July 3rd. Even if the confederate bombardment had driven off more Union guns than it did, Hunt would have simply fed more fresh batteries from the reserve into the line.

When one gets a mental picture of the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge on July 3rd, one must remember that it was almost literally one, continous, solid line of batteries and infantry mixed together, stretching from the upper end of the fishhook all the way down the shank.

Batteries were massed from Cemetery Hill all the way down to the base of Little Round Top. McGilvery commanded a solid line of about 24 cannons south of the Angle. There were at least four or five more batteries at the Angle and just above it, probably consisting of at least 20 or more cannons. And yet there were still more cannons lined up hub to hub along the southern slopes of Cemetery Hill, at least several more battery's worth. And yet there were still MORE batteries deployed along the western face of Little Round Top.

And all the while Hunt had his reserve tucked away in the rear, down near Meade's headquarters, from which he could draw batteries and literally plug them into the line wherever they were needed the most.

I'd say that the might of Union artillery pretty much doomed the confederates on July 3rd.

I misspoke a bit with my percentages of Civil War casualties.

Muskets caused about 90% of all battle casualties. Artillery caused between 8% and 9% of all battle casualties. The remaining 1% or fraction thereof was left for bayonet/sword wounds, with a still tinier fraction of that last percent reserved for "other" causes of combat deaths(heart attack/stroke/mental collapse/suicide/etc).

Musketry, or rather "small projectiles" caused 90% of survivable wounds. Note that "small projectiles" includes canister and shrapnel.

The .54/.577/.58 Minie ball was much *less* lethal than the large ball .69 Minie or .69 smoothbore. The simple reason is it simply had a lot less muzzle energy at combat ranges (see my blog post at link ). Hence in ACW battles the killed to wounded ratio is much lower than previous wars.

Also note the wound locations and types recorded in the Medical and Surgical Records. They are massively skewed towards limb injuries and flesh wounds.

67thtigers,

You wrote:

Also note the wound locations and types recorded in the Medical and Surgical Records. They are massively skewed towards limb injuries and flesh wounds.

I would again say, and this is not directed at you personally, that although I and many others use the post-war Medical & Surgical records, they must not be taken out of context. Those wounds you speak of are to be expected to be seen in hospital, because they are, overall, survivable wounds. Those fellows MADE it to the field dressing station to be stabilized, then to the Division hospital for further treatment before being sent to the General Hospitals in the cities.

The problem with those records is that they, of course, only deal with survivors. The dead are buried on the field, and the burial details rarely, if ever, take account or interest in the cause of death.

Artillery is the great killer on the battlefield. The rifle-musket is the great wounder.

The most lethal weapon used in the war is the bayonet, whose wounds are almost always fatal/mortal. Very few bayonet wounds are recorded in the hospitals, (fewer than 1000) because they were such a slight wound, usually in the extremity.

But in terms of lethality on the battlefield (not numbers, but killing effectiveness) I would rate the weapons in order from most lethal to least as Bayonet, Artillery, Infantry & cavalry small arms, then swords/sabers.

Campaigner1 is certainly on the mark with his comments. Remember, too, that one of the prime uses of artillery, besides killing, is to break up massed formations, and to cause the enemy to deploy his units at as great a distance as possible. This will bring them under fire for a longer period, and also allow you own forces to redeploy if needs be, or give you other options in the defense.

At Cold Harbor, Lee was visited by some civilian VIPs. When they opined that the artillery was particularly active that day Lee agreed, but gestured toward the infantry lines where the fire of thousands of rifles was blending together into a continuous roar. "It is that that kills men," he said.

The quote is from Freeman's "R. E. Lee" III:389.

Absolute agreement.

I posted a few things things on other lists over the years worth looking at:

""On the causes of injury, one of our best resources is the Medical and Surgical Histories. In Vol. 3 pt. 2 pg 696 is a table of the causes of all injuries admitted to Union hospitals. These figures are only for those seen by a surgeon, and are dominated by flesh wounds and shattered bones, more extreme injuries were not seen by a surgeon and are thus not recorded. Of those admitted for surgury roughly 1 in 7.5 died ( 13.6% ) , totalling 31,922, thus this dataset only covers roughly a third of the died in battle and is already selective.

Whilst a large number list the cause as "unknown" of those known only 1 in 10 are caused by artillery, almost all of these by shell fragments, and only 1 in 400 are caused by solid shot ( 359 cases in the entire war ) . However, in the discussion pgs 704-8 it notes that being hit by solid shot is invariably instantly fatal ( and so not counted ) . It also notes on pg 706 that "grape shot" ( i.e. canister ) was insistingishable from musketry. It seems that generally the nature of the projectile was usually ascertained by the surgical removal of the projectile, and that all the projectile exited ( as generally happened with the higher energy canister shot and musket balls compared with the lower energy Minie bullet ) then it was recorded with the 4 in 10 "unknown projectile".

"The Medical and Surgical History mainly distinguishes small ( which include smaller canister and shrapnel from case ) and large projectiles, and only those for 1864-5.

In the close fighting of the Wilderness large projectiles accounted for 1 in 12 wounds, however at the siege of Mobile this value was 1 in 3.

Of the 141,961 treated injured where the projectile was identified ( usually by recovery of the projectile ) 90.1% were identified as small arms injuries. Solid shot accounted for only 359 injuries ( 0.25% ) . 103,829 shot wounds were not identified by cause.

By far the largest category of wounds are flesh wounds, accounting for 162,131 ( 66% ) , 72,420 broke bones ( 29% ) whilst 11,959 penetrated into the chest or abdominal cavity ( 5% ) ( link ) .

It is fairly obvious from the figures that battlefield triage prevented those with the most lethal wounds ever reaching a hospital to be included on the returns."

Given the fact that Minie bullets rarely exited, it is reasonable to assert ( but unprovable ) that the vast majority of the "unknowns" are non-Minie projectiles, and thus the Minie bullet accounted for roughly half of all operable injuries. The .58 Minie bullet has a muzzle energy of only 1,250 j and a poor sectional density…. "

So, generally complete agreement, small arms probably hit more, but artillery killed more – and I believe SLA Marshall's work explains a lot of this ( quite from myself ) :

"So we have the question of how did attacker behave faced with this problem, on both the physical and psychological level.

On the physical level, if we had an army of robots then we could simply have them charge forward, taking some fire and some casualties, then they could get onto the enemy position quickly and will the minimum of casualties. In a volley of rifle fire in the ACW far less than 1% of the balls found a mark. A brigade of 1,000 men***, faced with another brigade of 1,000 men would typically suffer 3-8 casualties in each volley.

It is worthwhile to step back and examine why the rifle was so ineffective, and who was doing the killing. In his book On Killing, Grossman ( expanding on Marshall's Men Against Fire has shown that in battle only a small fraction of the combatants actually employ their weapons systems effectively ( "shoot to kill" ) . In unconditioned troops this may be as low as 2% ( the percentage of society who are "killers", of whom half are sociopaths ) , but is typically ( WW2 figures from Marshall ) in the 10-15% range.

Thus, in that 1,000 man brigade, perhaps 100-150 men are actually trying to kill the enemy. This would also fit with hitting rates amongst well conditioned troops of the era ( the British regular, who had accidently been through a dehumanising process much like that devised by Marshall, hit with about 5% of shots during the Crimean War ) . The remainder of the troops stand in the firing line, load and fire, but do not properly apply their fire and it is ineffective. However, this may explain the sudden jump in lethality of fire observed in the ACW at around 30-40m; at this range even unaimed fire will become partially effective, supplementing the "core group" of shooters. Even without this, their numbers offer psychological support to the core group, and intimidate the approaching enemy.

Considering the psychologically of an attacker, especially the perception of risk by those exposed to fire. Faced with any deadly event it is human nature to overestimate ( usually by several orders of magnitude ) just how deadly it is. Crossing 100m of ground would usually expose the attacker to 2 volleys of rifle fire, hitting maybe 1-2% of the attackers. Even adding in the unaimed fire which is likely to be partially effective in the final volley, casualties by rifle fire are likely to not be decisive.

Of course, we need to also consider the effect of the artillery. Guns are very lethal for several reasons, one of which goes back to Grossman and Marshall; the gun is a crew-served weapon, the gun team assumes corporate responsibility for the weapons system and bypasses inhibitions against killing as a result. Gun teams always shoot to kill, especially at longer range*. The guns also exert a psychological effect by their sheer nature, the boom of a 12 pounder blasting out more than 2lbs of gunpowder is a far more acute psychological trigger than the cracks of a battalion of 250 riflemen expending the same quantity of powder.

Within 100m, 12pdr canister will be fully effective. Each canister shot contained 27 balls. A 6 gun battery thus puts out about 100-162 effective balls ( depending on divergence angles, drift etc. ) into this area. Note the similarity to the volume of effective infantry fire and compare to the quote:

"A battery of field artillery is worth a thousand muskets." – Sherman

Paddy Griffith ( amongst others ) has estimated that a well handled gun firing canister at close range will usually fell ( when fired against close order infantry ) 7 men. Given the more open order troops of the ACW tended to fight in, this must be considered to be the upper limit and that 2-3 per blast of canister is more likely. However, even 2-3 per blast makes a battery of 6 guns worth 2-3,000 muskets in this situation ( if the 7 hits per blast were applied, then the 6 guns would be doing the killing of over 6,000 men; the infantry component of a small Corps! ) ."

Looking at that last paragraph, if you have a 6-gun battery with each firing 5 rounds and causing to an enemy Regiment what Griffith estimates for casualties (2-3 or 2.5) per shot, that would equal 75 casualties. For a 3-400 man unit, assuming they had taken other casualties from infantry fire, that would probably be the about all they could take before either retreating or hunkering down and doing not much of anything.

At Antietam in the Cornfield a single gun loaded with double canister at 45 feet tore the 1st Texas to shreds. The 15year old artillerist, John Cook remembered seeing a sheet of red in front of his piece and then finding shoes on the ground where the 1st Texas had been.

The best example of canister firing I ever saw was in Unsolved History: Pickett's Charge.

Mr. Priest,

That's a great example of the effectiveness and horror of canister. Nothing left but shoes and bits of clothing and flesh.

I can't remember where I read it or who the quote is attributed to, but I remember another one in which a soldier recalled that he was in a position where he could see his own batteries firing on opposing infantry. He made the chilling observation the the canister blasts were creating "wagon-wide swaths" in the enemy battlelines.

I think what I have always found so chilling about canister is that there was no explosion, it wasn't a shell going off, there was no burst amidst the target per say… there was only the eerily scything and hissing noise of those large iron balls cutting through the air, and passing through and erasing human beings from the face of the earth.

I remember seeing a documentary once about Civil War ordinance, I can't remember what it was called or what channel broadcast it. But during the show they had actually set up a group of artillery reenactors at a park or firing range somewhere. They did a field test where the battery fired live canister at a group of wooden soldier dummies in battleline formation, so they could observe and record the spread of the balls at different rangs, and see how many human targets were struck by the balls and at what distance.

After the test was conducted, the reenactors looked at their work up close, and saw in vivid detail how many of the wooden men had been hit. There was not a single man in a span of 15 or 20 files of the line that wasn't hit by a ball. Practically half a company would have been wiped out by that one blast.

One of the things that made the test firing so eerie and so unsettling, was that the canister balls themselves were much QUIETER than I expected them to be. After the initial blast from the muzzle, the balls themselves made surprisingly little noise, almost like a rush of gentle wind through the air, before they struck their target.

Canister did indeed tear wagon-wide swaths through infantry, literally.

The reenactors were visibly shaken after the test firings, one of them was reduced to tears when he realized what they were recreating and realizing what they were demonstrating.

The documantary you are referring to is Unsolved History: Pickett's Charge, Discovery Channel and Military Channel

67thtigers wrote:

["It is worthwhile to step back and examine why the rifle was so ineffective, and who was doing the killing. In his book On Killing, Grossman (expanding on Marshall's Men Against Fire has shown that in battle only a small fraction of the combatants actually employ their weapons systems effectively ("shoot to kill"). In unconditioned troops this may be as low as 2% (the percentage of society who are "killers", of whom half are sociopaths), but is typically (WW2 figures from Marshall) in the 10-15% range.

Thus, in that 1,000 man brigade, perhaps 100-150 men are actually trying to kill the enemy. This would also fit with hitting rates amongst well conditioned troops of the era (the British regular, who had accidently been through a dehumanising process much like that devised by Marshall, hit with about 5% of shots during the Crimean War). The remainder of the troops stand in the firing line, load and fire, but do not properly apply their fire and it is ineffective. However, this may explain the sudden jump in lethality of fire observed in the ACW at around 30-40m; at this range even unaimed fire will become partially effective, supplementing the "core group" of shooters. Even without this, their numbers offer psychological support to the core group, and intimidate the approaching enemy.

Considering the psychologically of an attacker, especially the perception of risk by those exposed to fire. Faced with any deadly event it is human nature to overestimate (usually by several orders of magnitude) just how deadly it is. Crossing 100m of ground would usually expose the attacker to 2 volleys of rifle fire, hitting maybe 1-2% of the attackers. Even adding in the unaimed fire which is likely to be partially effective in the final volley, casualties by rifle fire are likely to not be decisive."]

__________________________________________________________

I don't mean to deviate from the artillery discussion, but EVERYONE needs to read 67thtigers quote. This topic has come up many times, and I feel it is vitally important, perhaps one of the most important topics ever discussed on these boards. 67thtigers sums up PERFECTLY what so many recent authors have been trying get across, and what I have been trying to get across on this board for so long. Namely laying to rest the myth of the rifle-musket's supposed revolution of the battlefield and the supposed cause of increased casualties due to the greater accuracy and range of the rifle-musket.

The rifle-musket in the hands of Civil War soldiers, and how that weapon was used, reveals that not only didn't the new weapon revolutionize anything on the battlefield, but that is also wasn't used much differently from the older technology. In the vast majority of battles, the rifle-musket in fact wasn't any deadlier or used any differently than its smoothbore cousins of earlier years. The new technology of adjustable sights and rifling was made largely moot because the weapons were not USED to their intended potential. In battles soldiers fired in volleys or independent fire in the batteline, without regard for the rear sight or for adjustments for distance. There was no training or drilling in use of the rear sights. The drilling focused on fast loading and putting lead in the air as a group, as quickly as possible.

In fact in 1861, training for a Civil War company firing in a battleline formation was for all intents and purposes, the SAME as it had been in the Napoleonic Wars and American Revolution, and that goes for both the Americans and British. There were no new innovations brought to training to make use of the new rifled technology or the rear sights. In fact, those two important technological elements of the rifle-musket were in essence ignored by both military establishments during the War.

The military doctrine of the Civil War, as in previous wars, focused on massed fire with APPROXIMATING ranges with the FRONT sight. In battleline, Civil War soldiers fired together in volleys, but even when the order was given for independent fire, the firing was still done based on the mass fire principal: Level your musket in the direction of the enemy and blaze away as fast as you can.

This is shown again and again in the war record. Thousands of mini-balls flying harmlessly overhead, ten, fifteen feet over the heads of opposing battlelines. Whole volleys only striking a few men. Trees, houses, being riddled with bullets, with bullet marks twenty feet up in the air. Firing too high was so common in the Civil War that soldiers often described a "bumble bee" sound overhead during large battles, the humming of so many bullets flying overhead during the course of a battle.

If the rifle-musket were really as deadly as so many have claimed,and it was used by infantry in massed formation at longer ranges than previous wars, and if it really was used to its potential, then we would have had casualty rates MUCH higher than the record bears out. Whole armies would have been virtually wiped out it would seem. You would have had whole regiments and brigades struck down by single volleys at 300 or 400 yards. But again, we do not find this in the record. In fact, we find the exact opposite.

Yes, we do know that there were snipers in the Civil War. And yes, we do know that there were invididual soldiers with a talent for sniping. But we are not talking about a few select men who put themselves into static posts, who were taking the time to aim at a specific individual, and who were also taking the time to utilize a rear sight, adjust for distance, wind, ect.. Soldiers who were snipers were engaging in static shooting, taking the time to use their weapon to its maximum potential. Indeed, Civil War snipers even employed telescopic sights at times.

But this was not the norm of Civil War combat. Snipers could and DID use rifle-muskets to the potential of their technology. But the remaining 99.9% of Civil War soldiers did NOT. Not on the battlefield. Not in massed infantry formations. Not under the conditions that Civil War combat took placed under.

67thtigers NAILED the human aspect, and the military doctrine aspect of Civil War combat, which are the key elements in the argument about the rifle-musket's supposed "casualty revolution" it caused on the battlefield.

The best way to put the rifle-musket into its proper context of the Civil War is to understand that it was rather like putting a formula 1 car in the hands of the average driver.

COULD a Springfield rife-musket hit a target sighted out to 500 yards? YES. COULD an Enfield rifle-musket hit a target sighted out to 750 yards or beyond? YES. In the hands of the right person, taking time, without stress, without smoke, without the constraints of company commands, without the restrictions of controlled volley fire or battleline fire…then YES, a man could use these weapons to their full effect.

HOWEVER, and this is the big however – is how were these weapons actually used on the battlefield by Civil War armies, and how did the men utilize these weapons vs. what was the maximum potential these weapons could have been used to?

The answer is this: The rifle-musket was used largely according to the old doctrine of massing your fire in close to achieve maximum possible hits on the enemy.

To be blunt, for the vast majority of Civil War battles, they simply didn't open fire at the "new, further, deadlier" rifle-musket ranges. Infantry formations were commanded and operated under the doctrine of getting into the SMOOTHBORE ranges, before opening fire. I.E., Civil War armies typically got into "Napoleonic ranges" and even "Revolutionary War ranges" before engaging in fire-fights. We see it again and again. Yes, there are instances of infantry formations opening fire at longer ranges, but they are not the norm. Most pitched battles of the Civil War were quite literally fought between armies who were armed with rifle-musket technology but fought with a smoothbore mindset and military doctrine.

Again, rifle-musket techology….with smoothbore combat ranges. That sums up Civil War combat. Weapons that were accurate enough to hit things at 750 yards, but in reality were rarely employed by infantry in mass at ranges beyond 100-250 yards.

This is why recent research is discovering that the average combat distance between opposing Civil War battlelines was actually much closer to the old smoothbore distances of previous wars. In other words, while the rifle-musket could shoot further and straighter than its previous generation of smoothbore weapons, it was still employed by infantry formations and those who commanded them at largely SMOOTHBORE ranges and in essence the new technology was STILL USED as if it was a smoothbore. In other words, the potential of the new technology was never actually realized in the Civil War.

Armies still came into ranges of 100-150 yards of eachother, and delivered their fire at these typical ranges. We find examples of this distance again and again in the Civil War military record.

Remember, as historians, we must be aware of seperating what a weapon technology had THE POTENTIAL to do vs. the WAY IT WAS ACTUALLY USED in combat.

The rifle-musket is a classic case of a weapon that has fallen victim to myth, which has in turn perpetuated into fact by many reputable authors and publications. You ask almost any student of the Civil War, and they will tell you the same thing: The rifle-musket caused more casualties in the Civil War because it was more accurate and more men were hit at longer distances.

But the record doesn't bear this out. Instead we find what 67tigers alluded to. A hit ratio along the paltry lines of only 1% or 2% in the Civil War.

And what's astonishing about this is that we STILL have this low hit ratio, even with combat ranges of only 100-250 yards with soldiers armed with rifled weapons!

Now wait a minute! How on earth could the Civil War hit ratio be as bad as only 1 or 2 bullets out of a hundred even hitting anything, if all those soldiers were armed with this amazingly new and more accurate and deadly weapon which "changed the face of battlefield combat"?

2 bullets out of a hundred? It took 100 minie balls fired to produce TWO Civil War casualites? Indeed it did. Even at 150 yards with Springfields and Enfields, the finest rifled technology available, it took that many bullets to produce a hit.

You had two major factors that largely mitigated the rifle-musket's mythical effect on the battlefied. As I said, the way they were employed by the armies involved, and the individual, the flawed human element.

Here is an excellent article which gets into the human psychology of killing, which provides more insight into why the rifle-musket's effect on the Civil War battlefield was a myth. Paddy Griffith is cited here. I know he's not the most popular man on these boards, because he dares to challenge the long-held notions of the rifle-musket that so many cling to. But the man really makes alot of sense when you get down to it. Great read:

link

Here is a really poignant excerpt from the article I linked. I think these two paragraphs really enforce the reasons as to why the Civil War rifle-musket was not the "new, deadlier killer" that it has been portrayed as:

["Repetition played heavily in attempting to condition firing as seen in Prussian and Napoleonic drills in the loading and firing of muskets. Through thousands of repetitions it was hoped that under the stress of battle, men would simply fall back on the learned skill to continue firing at the enemy. While this may have accounted for some increase in the firing of muskets in the general direction of the enemy, statistics from the Napoleonic era do not bear out the hit ratios that would indicate success in the method, success being determined by increased kill ratios.

In tests during this era it was repeatedly demonstrated that an average of regiment of 250 men, each firing a musket at a rate of four shots per minute, could hypothetically put close to 1000 holes in a 6-foot-high by 100-foot-wide sheet of paper at a range of 25 yards. But Paddy Griffith has documented in his studies of actual Napoleonic and American Civil War battles that in many cases the actual hit ratios were as low as zero hits, with an average being approximately one or two hits, per minute, per regiment, which is less than 1% of their theoretical killing potential. While these soldiers may have been trained to fire their weapons, they had not been conditioned to kill their enemy."]

The way I have always summed up the effectiveness of the weapons used in the Civil War are as follows.

The artillery and musket technology of the day was good at wounding many men, while at the same time killing a lesser amount. Artillery and musketry could and did produce large casualties, but not very quickly and not very efficiently. It took the massing of both technologies to produce a decisive effect. Even then, Civil War armies could almost never completely knock the other one out. The biggest battles of the war almost never produced a complete descruction of the opposing army. They bloodied eachother to a draw, but could not complete their enemy's total destruction. Even after two or three days of slugging battle, with thousands of volleys fired, with millions of minie balls spent, the two armies would walk away from eachother having lost no more than 20 or 30% of their number, which is astonishingly low given the level of violence and the sheer amount of bullets and ordinance that were expended in that short span of time.

No major pitched battle of the Civil War produced an effect in which the opposing army was completely destroyed and rendered permanently disabled to a point from which it could not regroup and recover soley because its casualties were so high due to an increase in weapon ranges. Not purely because of taking too many casualties because of new technology. NO major battle. Not even battles as violent as Gettysburg or Antietam. Even those giant slug-fests failed to achieve the physical destruction of the other army.

Generally what produced the wholesale surrender of entire armies such as at Pemberton at Vicksburg, was not physical destruction on the battlefield. Those large surrenders were brought about because of being cut off from supplies in protracted sieges, not from combat destruction. Weapon technology could not force armies into submission in the Civil War, but the good old standy's of starvation and lack of water could.

Civil War weaponry was deadly to be sure. But in the end it was no deadlier or more efficient than the weapons of the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, the technology had improved in the years between 1815 and 1861. But it had produced no new siginificant change in the tactics employed, nor in the way that human beings behave under battlefield conditions.

Human beings don't suddenly become more efficient killers because new technology is handed to them. That was true for the rifle-musket as much as it was for handing an M16 to a 19 year old kid in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Human beings are human beings. Even in Vietnam, the average combat range was 100 yards or LESS. One hundred years after the Civil War! Infantry combat ranges were STILL at around 100 yards, even with machine guns, grenade launchers, and modern automatic combat rifles.

The 16th Connecticut entered the fray at Antietam with only a few weeks of drill under its belt. It had never seen combat before. Many of its men had never even fired their weapons in drill or in battle. It was a fresh regiment with a full compliment of men and armed with rifle-muskets. It was equipped with the new, "deadlier" technology. They proceeded into the battle, and ran into A.P. Hill's veterans just south of town. The 16th Connecticut didn't have a chance. For every volley they got off, A.P. Hill's veterans were getting off three. They got shot to shreds. The rifle-musket's new, "deadlier combat range" was of no use to the 16th Connecticut, not only because of their inexperience – but because the firefight that took place between them and A.P. Hill's men was about 100-200 yards. Rifling and accuracy had little or no bearing on the outcome of that firefight. There were still alot of misses for every hit on both sides. It came down to nothing more than "who could fire faster and for how long", and who had more nerve.

The veterans will win that fight every time, no matter what they're shooting with.

The hit ratios did not improve, the killing efficiency did not improve. And the combat ranges did NOT lengthen because of the new technology. They remained largely close to the same as of previous wars.

Technology doesn't exist in a vaccum. That technology still has to be employed and utilized by human beings. In the case of the Civil War, that technology was used much the same way as the old technology, with no new innovation. The record bears this out.

Anything that can perform better than previous technology, be it rifled artillery, rifled infantry weaspons, etc….doesn't automatically mean that the new technology WILL be used in a way to accomodate its new potential.

The rifle musket is a classic case of this.