"post Napoleonic armies capabilities?" Topic

I suppose this is a daft question and it does obviously dip into the realms of "What if….?" history.

But I have often wondered how much armies really evolved and improved in the 50 years after Waterloo.

So, if we imagine Wellington on his ridge, not facing tanks and machine guns, or alien death rays, but maybe an army from the Crimean war era or even as late as the American Civil War, had weaponry and tactics improved so much as to make the result a walk over? Could the Allied line have stopped Pickett's Charge?

When did innovations finally make a Napoleonic Era army a hopeless prospect on the battlefield?

Really would be interested to hear what folk think.

When Hiram Maxim created and manufactured his design.

You see the beginnings of the modern warfare in the Wars of German Unification, and even slightly earlier. On the battlefield itself, you have the development of rapid firing breech-loading rifles for the individual infantryman adopted by the Prussians in the 1840s and used to great success in in 1866. The French adopted the Chassepot the same year and it proved to be a superior weapon in 1870, but by the next major innovation of rapid firing, accurate breech-loading artillery with impact fuzes was fielded as well.

So here, just a little over 50 years after Waterloo we see the beginnings of the technologies that would prove so devastating in the First World War. The Maxim gun mentioned by wrgmr1 is still another decade or two away from wide-spread adoption, but I would agree that it would certainly be the final nail in the coffin for a Napoleonic army.

These battlefield innovations discount some of the other major innovations that would ultimately doom a Napoleonic force. Mainly the improved command, control and logistical capabilities at an operational or strategic level provided by telegraphs and railroads. Commanders could coordinate and move more men and material faster and further than Wellington or Napoleon could have conceived.

I would also point to the speed and size of the mobilization achieved by Prussia in 1870. In a relatively short period of time, the Prussians mobilized nearly one million men and moved a large portion of them to the front. The detailed planning that this mobilization and later employing a multi-Army force required was certainly facilitated by the formalization of Prussian military education, which in many ways remains the model on which western militaries train and develop their officer corps.

Agreed

Actually if you look at the ACW many of the commanders initially drew their inspiration from the Napoleonic Wars – but rifle-muskets, railroads and telegraphs changed how things happened

I wonder if Wellington would have welcomed the telegraph? He strikes me as a man who was only too happy to have slow communication with his superiors at Horse Guards, if it increased his independence in decision-making.

Wellington set up very fast signalling systems across the Lines of Torres Vedras in Portugal. I think he would have welcomed anything which gave him an advantage, and field telegraphs, railways etc would have helped in that.

Rod

What others have said on the strategic and operational level. My specific date of change are two.One is the 1880s. Up to the 1880s the coexistence of bolt action breech-loader rifles and muzzle loading cannons of the La Hitte system (for example the Serbian army of 1885) created tactical situations that would still make sense to a Napoleonic Commander. Once all armies make the change to breech-loaders it is over. For example in the Serbo-Bulgarian war both sides hazily used basic filed works in the attack and the defense. By 1897 and the Greek-Ottoman war fire engagement distances are large, and the tactical offensive becomes harder (you have operational flanking maneuvers instead).

Second date is the invention and dissemination of Quick Firing guns. Once those got into action all Napoleonic tactical ideas were out of the window once they met practice.

The Neil Thomas 19th Century wargaming books has a good intro on the changes between 1815 and 1878.

What great responses.

Now I will admit that I have always totally overlooked the improvements in strategy. Industrialisation, the railways, the telegraph. That must get you there firstest with mostest.

But once you are there……

I guess I think of the many muzzle loading cannon at Gettysburg, which look little different to Boney's guns. I see muzzle loading rifles (OK much longer range and percussion caps, but still not too many more rounds per minute). I see guys on horses with the same swords, up until the mid 1860s

Pickett's charge may have been preceded by a furious artillery assault, but once those lads set out it was a bayonet attack like anything up that ridge in 1815. I thought 1870s changed everything as in F-P War especially. But up to then, given a reverse slope, I wonder if DoW's army could have held against an army from 50 years later….at least until the Prussians turn up anyway. K Travlos has it right, obviously, by the 1880s…….but if the threshold is that late…how extraordinary that things had not advanced more quickly!

Crimean War armies are not all that different than Napoleonic armies. The Russian army is basically the same. The British have a lot of rifled muskets so would have some firepower advantage over older armies, but nothing amazing. The French have some rifled muskets and have made their formation changes somewhat faster with Zouave and chasseur drill. Along the coast their steam ships would make quite a difference.

Biggest change is Prussians with needle guns would make short work of smooth bore musket troops.

Held on a reverse slope, perhaps. But a force still primarily armed with smoothbores would have to advance several hundred yards under fire from even muzzleloading rifles that were standard by the 1850s if they were attacking or on flat ground.

There were incremental improvements in the basic equipment and quality of weaponry over the period, there just weren't any that shifted the paradigm of warfare until arguably the Russo-Japanese or WWI.

The problem is that for technology to change warfare it has to be combined with the proper doctrine. The innate conservatism of social organisations (the army among them) makes the process of change longer.

Also for a about a decade the two important technological process on the tactical level, the widespread availability of breech-loading rifles, and the widespread availability of breech-loading guns, did not fully complement each other. Also even if they did, other parts of the revolution (the strategic, would be missing).

Thus in 1870-1, 1885 you have armies with a mix of the new and old (French and Serbs) facing armies with both new (Germans and Bulgarians). Consequently lessons learned are still mixed (i.e bayonet attacks work agaisnt a rifled armed enemy…but that is only if you ignore that they had La Hitte guns).

I 1879-1885 and 1897 you do have armies facing each other with both technological elements (Chile vs. Peru/Bolivia and Greece vs. Ottoman Empire). However they lack the strategic elements (General Staffs, large mobilisation, railways etc). So again lessons learned are mixed, or no lessons are learned.

Only in the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan Wars do you have these diverse revolutionary process come together. Even, then there are enough elements missing, that few lessons are learned.

That said we do have a great example of a Napoleonic Army vs. a Post-Napoleonic Army fighting. That is the War of the Triple Alliance 1864-1870.

One the one hand you have the Paraguayan army, a almost quintessential Napoleonic army, down to the central role of the commander. Very few rifled weapons either in the infantry or artillery. Against it you have the Allies, whose armies are Napoleonic in organisation, but who have many of the new weapons (rifled muskets, rifled cannons).

What you see is that a) the Napoleonic Army on attack is doomed to being cut to pieces (Tuyuti sees 35000 Paraguayans charge the Allied army. It makes Pickett's Charge look like a much nicer thing) b) the Post- Napoleonic Armies will butcher the Napoleonic in defense (Avay 18000 allies and 26 guns v.s 5000 Paraguayans and 18 guns) but will be butchered if the Napoleonic is heavily fortified (Curupayty 20000 allies vs. 5000 heavily fortified Paraguyans).

Thus still a bit of a balanced situation, but you can see how things increasingly become worse for the armies lacking rifled muskets and rifled artillery.

Brilliant.

The message is then that armies in defence (however you spell that) had a steadily increasing advantage throughout the 19th Century….

But, in attack, it was still a man, in a line of his mates, with a pointy thing on the end of his firearm….at least once his supporting artillery had been forced to pack up.

I guess that was even the lesson of WWI. It was still just waves of men with bayonets, facing automatic weapons, rapid fire rifles, entrenched enemy, HE artillery, not solid shot.

Plus ca change.

Must say I have found the responses very helpful. Thanks

Communications and artillery I would say.

What you do see change on the battlefield in the latter part of the C19 is the death – literally and metaphorically – of cavalry as a shock weapon, and they transform into mounted infantry.

The reason for this is improved firepower disturbing the nice Napoleonic trinity of Firepower-mobility-protection. As firepower increases, mobility disappears, and people pay a lot more attention to protection – breastworks, then trenches.

This is not the same as saying defence is king. Almost all the late C19 wars were won by attacking. (In fact it's hard to think of any exceptions. Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885, won by the defence of Slivnitsa. Any more?)

Chris

Bloody Big BATTLES!
link
bloodybigbattles.blogspot.co.uk

You have to factor in two things on that point Chris. First the ratio to troops to ground. Joseph Miranda points out that the main reason why the Balkan Wars saw maneuver compared to WW1 was that in an area about the same size as the western front, you had only a 3rd of the forces (a total of 600000 combatants vs. the 5 million +). Most of the attackers won because the troop to ground ratio was favorable to maneuver.

For example in the War of the Triple Alliance the Duke of Caxias simply started outflanking the Paraguyan fortified lines via river movements. That is largely the case with all 19th century wars. The lack of the dense transportation networks of the Western Front in 1914, and the lack of the massive mobilized armies gave space. True there are examples of armies subduing heavily fortified positions (Port Arthur, Dybbol), but in many of these cases those positions were invested by overwhelming superiority in numbers (Port Arhtur, and were cut off from mobile armies in support (Dybbol).

If the defender has a mobile army, fortified positions were harder to take or decide the war. So if you carefully read about the Crimean War what decided the war was not per se the fall of Sevastopol,as the fall of Bomarsund (that undermined the security of St. Petersburg) and the Austrian threat to intervene. I.e the Allies won once they focused on other centers of gravity.

And that a fort cut off from a mobile army is a siting duck is a very old principle of war.

I would thus say that the attack won most of the times in the 19th century because the size of theaters and armies still permitted broad flanking maneuvers. What the 19th century saw for a period was exactly that thanks to railroads etc. But once you enter the era of mass mobilization, and the mobilized men are more trained, the open ground gets soaked up.

The cavalry transformation is a good point that I forgot.

A point on the attack. A key thing in some 19th century conflicts seems to be the lack of fire discipline. Armies ran out of ammo (Serbs in Slivnitsa, I think Greeks in 1897) which quickly leads to a collapse of the war effort.

That said deadhead is right that the principles of attack remained largely the same (and are still the same). Use firepower to suppress the defender and then assault with the bayonet. But remember some principles of war ageless. Some change, the key of a good analysis of military history is to capture the first and recognize the second.

Wargamers tend to like their parallel line battles, but if you actually en-devour to recreate scenarios of 19th century battles and operations with more fidelity (like Chris does for BBB) you see that a lot of the battlefield is empty. There is a lot of room for maneuver. Command and control, Terrain, and army skill can restrict it. But to totally annihilate it you have to go to the kind of troop to ground ration of the Western Front in WW1.

August 1914 was the final nail in the coffin. No more linear tactics after Mons.

The message is then that armies in defence (however you spell that) had a steadily increasing advantage throughout the 19th Century

But, in attack, it was still a man, in a line of his mates, with a pointy thing on the end of his firearm….at least once his supporting artillery had been forced to pack up.

Not exactly. In the FPW, Prussians were able to offset French advantage in the defensive by using their artillery aggressively. Fast-firing Prussian 6pdrs were able to break French possitions magnifiques again and again, even though the Prussian infantry weapon was hopelessly outdated when compared to Chassepots.

What "defence is king" advocates sometimes seem to overlook is that improved firepower works in both directions. Yes, the defender gets the benefit of the "protection" part of the equation. But the attacker generally has the advantage of choosing where and when to attack, which means he can mass enough firepower to defeat even a well-protected defender.

This holds true in WWI as well. Mid-war it is the "mathematics of destruction": the generals knew exactly how many guns x trainloads of ammunition it took to obliterate a few miles of enemy defences, so that's how their attacks always began. So they would blow away the defenders' front lines, but then, well, bog down.

Chris

Bloody Big BATTLES!
link
bloodybigbattles.blogspot.co.uk

Definitely…logistics, communications improved markedly in the 50 years post Waterloo. So strategy surely…must have…had to….have done so….I think.

But I guess…badly phrased…my question was, once on the field itself. Tactically. Once you have both got there with a well supplied force, fed and rested and high morale. Even if it took longer to get there in Boney's time….. 1805-15?

Even if you are on a reverse slope, the "minor" but progressive advances in weaponry will still eventually mean a defending Napoleonic army will be slaughtered. But when did that happen? I now think the answer is about the 1860s.

I do accept that the question is actually increasingly daft, because getting there firstest with the mostest is what it is all about if you want to win a battle. I had ignored that. Slightly better firearms and artillery count less than having twice as many, because you have a railway……

Not a daft question at all, and sorry for nudging your thread slightly off the newly invented rails …

Here's a more direct answer (IMHO):
In the 1850s and 1860s we see rifled weaponry confront Napoleonic smoothbores, in the Crimea, and occasionally in the ACW. The rifled weaponry has an edge but it's not enough to be decisive in itself. Breechloading weapons make the real difference, and against them, a Napoleonic army really will be slaughtered.

Chris

Slaughtered is the word I was seeking…….yes. Omdurman or many an Imperial colonial war, it was the artillery that finally made the difference.

All very convincing and thanks to all. I have learnt from this;

Strategy, supply, communications, troop movement cannot be isolated from what happens on the battlefield itself. That was what changed over the 50 years.

1860s and artillery was what clinched it.

Mind you, an awful lot of those guns in Pennsylvania, on that ridge, looked like muzzle loaders to me.

Tactically, it was the Prussians who made the great leap forward, not because they were the first at using fast-firing breechloader guns, but because they used them in masse to punch through the enemy defensive line.

Actually, what they did with their artillery in 1870 was very similar to what they had done in 1866 with their infantry: to probe the enemy front until a weak spot was found and then concentrate as much firepower as possible in that point and punch through it. That was possible, of course, because of the relative high ratio of literacy between the Prussian recruits, which allowed the implementation of the Auftragstaktiks. Tactically I think that was the most revolutionary advance of all: to believe that a common soldier or a lowly NCO was clever enough to understand the general picture and act accordingly without constant supervision from his superiors. That gave the Prussian army a flexibility that other armies lacked. The technological advancements in rifles and breechloading artillery permited that auftragtaktik were exploited in full.

In my opinion, therefore, what made the difference and would have put any Napoleonic army in a definite disadvantage was the combination of breechloading artillery, breechloading rifles and universal literacy of the rank and file.

When Hiram Maxim created and manufactured his design.

An Art Deco restaurant in the centre of Paris?

There were incremental changes and logarithmic changes. The shift to percussion muskets and the Minie ball with rifling were incremental changes. Armies equipped with these weapons still stood up to fire and stood in ranks, though they thinned to two ranks for the most part and tended to dig in more. The shift to breech-loading rifles was logarithmic. Soldiers could lie down and shoot. Uniforms changed to earth tones, tactics changed drastically, cavalry became mobile infantry for the most part. Railroads were another logarithmic change.

I don't know.. Napoleon puts his whole army into skirmish order and issues them rifles. Would we put it past him? On the other hand he thought hot air balloons and steam engines were crazy talk.

On the other hand he thought hot air balloons and steam engines were crazy talk.

In his day he wasn't wrong.

Pickett's Charge resulted in immediate changes in warfare, IMO.

After that, the Civil War became a trench warfare game, where supply and logistics, communications and such were paramount.

I think Cold Harbor was one of the few "Pre Gettysburg" type battles post Gettysburg, and the Union was shot to pieces in minutes, and Grant admitted he screwed up.

Really, after Napoleon, the Crimean War was the only real European conflict until Solferino, 1866 and 1870. Everyone used old tactics because they were mainly fighting primitive colonial foes. The mass conscripted armies of late 19th Century Europe did fight in the Napoleonic style, and the results were even bigger bloodbaths. Took them a while to realize that technology, C3 and logistics were more important than how many massed conscripts you had.

There was a Civil War battle in the south, where a young West Point colonel moved his Regiment into square to repel a cavalry "attack" he assumed was coming. A Sergeant, if I recall the story, intervened, and convinced the youngster to disperse into open order, just before the Confederate's fired their artillery from the high ground.