Engines of War E-Book

Christian Wolmar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 634

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Engines of War tells the dramatic story of how the railways revolutionized the nature of warfare, ushering in an age of industrialized conflict in which wars were fought on a previously unimaginable scale. From the moment of its first appearance, the 'iron road' not only rendered armies more mobile, but also massively increased the power and the deadliness of the weaponry available to them. Christian Wolmar's epic account of how an invention that brought prosperity in peace-time metamorphosed in time of war into a weapon of death, is counterpointed by a wealth of human stories of personal endeavour and private tragedy. Embracing every major conflict in which railways have played a part - the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the First and Second Boer Wars, the two World Wars, the Korean War and the Cold War, Engines of War is awe-inspiring tale of industrial might and the transformative power of machinery.

Leseprobe

ENGINESOF WAR

Also by Christian Wolmar

The Great Railway Revolution

Blood, Iron & Gold

Fire & Steam

The Subterranean Railway

On the Wrong Line

Down the Tube

Broken Rails

Forgotten Children

Stagecoach

The Great Railway Disaster

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published by Atlantic Books in 2012

Copyright © Christian Wolmar 2010

The moral right of Christian Wolmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 173 1ePub ISBN: 978 0 85789 139 6Mobi ISBN 978 0 85789 139 6

Text design by www.carrdesignstudio.com

Picture research by Sarah Norman and Charlotte Lippmann

Maps courtesy of Jeff Edwards

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Dedicated to my daughter Misha MccGwire, to help her history studies, and in memory of Terry Brooks, the grandfather of my daughter Molly Brooks, who suffered on the Burma–Siam Railway.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Maps

1

War Before Railways

2

The Railways Called into Action

3

Slavery Loses Out to the Iron Road

4

Lessons Not Learnt

5

The New Weapon of War

6

The War the World Anticipated

7

The Great Railway War on the Western Front

8

Eastern Contrasts

9

Here We Go Again

10

Blood on the Tracks

Select Bibliography

Notes

Index

List of Maps and Illustrations

PREFACE

While writing my previous book, Blood, Iron & Gold: How Railways Transformed the World, I stumbled upon the role of railways in war and saw that this had been greatly underplayed by historians, even those interested in railways. Researching this book, I realized that even my initial thoughts on the subject fell far short of the mark. The railways, I discovered, were as integral to the development of methods of warfare as they were to the numerous aspects of modern life that I had catalogued in Blood, Iron & Gold.

Most writers on the subject of railways and war – of which there have been remarkably few, as can be gleaned from my bibliography – have focussed mainly on how the railways coped with the extra demands placed on them, particularly during the two world wars. In this book, however, I have concentrated on what I felt was a far more interesting subject: how the creation of the railways led to a tremendous escalation of the scale of warfare and how increasingly they were used in a strategic way to conduct military operations. Over the course of the nineteenth century, it gradually dawned on military leaders that railways were a crucial weapon in their armoury, and as they exploited this great improvement in their logistics, their ability to amass ever larger and well-equipped armies increased exponentially. A recurring theme, which resulted from the growing military use of the railways during this century, was the constant tension between railway managers and military leaders who were often unable to understand that the iron road could not just be subjected to their whims. Railways, right from their beginnings, were used by governments to transport troops quickly in order to quell internal riots or uprisings and consequently the railway companies, unwittingly or not, became agents of the state at a very early stage in the history of the railways.

There was another, indirect, way in which the railways contributed to the escalation in the scale of warfare. As the tracks expanded across countries, they became a unifying force for nations, which in turn made conflict between them more likely since unification helped foment nationalistic feelings. The strong economic stimulus resulting from the creation of the railways also encouraged expansion and consequently aggressive intent towards neighbouring countries. Moreover, richer societies were able to devote more resources to waging war and building up their defensive and offensive capacities. Railways also enabled colonial powers to establish greater dominance over the countries in their possession, sometimes, as we shall see, with the result that the eventual rebellions were ultimately stronger. All these themes are explored in the book.

I have tried to make Engines of War as international as possible, examining a wide variety of conflicts, but inevitably I have had to ignore several wars in which railways played a role, such as, for example, the Mexican revolution and civil war of the 1910s in which the railways were a frequent target. Inevitably, too, the easy accessibility of sources ensures there is a strong focus on Britain and something of a bias towards the British side of conflicts. I have, too, concentrated on the strategic aspects of railways, rather than their use – and overuse – by passengers at times of war, although this is sometimes referred to. I have also largely focussed on railways in the theatres of war, leaving out much detail about the exploitation of British railways by the government in the wars, partly because this has been better covered in previous books. Since the subject has been little covered by previous authors, there were a lot of potential avenues – or rather tracks – to explore, but I have tried to home in on facets of the story which best reveal how the role of railways in war has been consistently understated.

This book is set out broadly chronologically, with chapters that for the most part encompass a single war. I start by setting out a very brief assessment of war before the railway age in Chapter One, and the following two chapters cover, respectively, the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The latter is undoubtedly the first genuine railway war, fought by troops delivered to the front by railway and on battlegrounds frequently determined by the location of the train. Chapter Four mainly looks at the Franco-Prussian War, where interestingly the side with the best railways lost, but also examines the wars waged by Prussia in the run-up to that conflict.

In Chapter Five, I look at a motley collection of conflicts which occurred between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, including various British colonial wars, such as its victory over Sudan rebels facilitated by the construction of a long railway across the desert, and the Boer War, fought over a single railway line. This chapter also covers the most important and bloodiest war of this period, the Russo-Japanese War, triggered by the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In Chapter Six, I set out the build-up to the First World War, which involved massive investment in the railways across Europe, and assess A. J. P. Taylor's famous assertion that the rigidity of railway timetables triggered off the whole war. I devote two chapters to the First World War, in which railways played a significant part in virtually every theatre of that conflict. I analyse in depth the initial phases of the war, in which the railways played a crucial role and effectively determined the location of the front line. I consider the paradox that it was the increased mobility afforded by the railways which led to the stalemate lasting three and a half years on the Western Front, while the relative lack of railways in the east resulted in a less static war. I examine all aspects of the use of the railways, ranging from the often underestimated role of the light railways in delivering material to the front line as well as the far more famous attacks by Arab forces led by T. E. Lawrence on the Hejaz Railway on the Arabian peninsula.

While it might have been expected that railways would have played a lesser role in the Second World War given the technological changes in the intervening quarter of a century, this turned out not to be the case. I examine the reasons for this, and focus particularly on the German invasion of Russia, where the logistics were fundamental to the outcome. Finally, in Chapter Ten, I set out a few surprising and more recent aspects of railway warfare, notably the difficulties the Americans found in destroying the North Koreans’ railway supply lines and the remarkable story of the Russian missile trains which carried weapons capable of blowing up American cities. And I finish by trying to draw out a few of the recurring themes of the book.

While I have made no attempt to give a comprehensive account of each war, I have attempted to set out the basic facts of each conflict to facilitate discussion of the role of the railways. Obviously, given the need to keep this book to a manageable length, it has been impossible to include great detail but I have tried, at least, to outline the cause of each war, the key battles and the outcome.

I suspect that even the least railway-minded reader of this book would agree that the way the military role of railways has been ignored in the past is quite remarkable and possibly can only be explained by the modern obsession with the motor car, at the expense of all other modes of transport. This example from a website featuring the Red Ball Express motor transport in the Second World War mentioned in Chapter Nine may be extreme but it is in no way unique in its ignorance: ‘Since the time of Alexander the Great large armies have crossed the world's military landscape with ponderous difficulty, their seemingly endless lines of animal-drawn carts and wagons trailing far behind. How different this is from the pace and dimension of modern warfare. The highly mechanized U.S. Army of WWII had the ability to cover vast distances at speeds unimagined by even the greatest of the Great Captains of old.’1 No mention here of the previous century, during which rail transport had been the crucial line of communication, and how, for example, the railways delivered 23,000 Northern troops across half the breadth of America in just two weeks during the American Civil War, almost a hundred years before the Second World War. The same website goes on to quote an ‘observer’ suggesting that the Second World War was ‘a 100 percent internal combustion engine war’. That is just 100 per cent wrong, as is made patently clear in Chapter Nine, which shows that nearly 100 per cent of US troops travelled to their ships by rail.

Even in cases where I thought, on preliminary reading, that the role of the railways may have been minimal in a particular conflict, it emerged quite often that it was crucial. The Second World War, covered in Chapter Nine, is a case in point. Just like the generals who made such heavy use of the railways, historians have tended to relegate their role to that of backroom boy and only seemed to notice them when they went wrong. In fact, the railways were at times far more important in deciding outcomes than the HQs where those same generals spent their days. Hitler is simply the most glaring example of a military leader who dismissed the importance of logistics, but even a cursory examination of the Second World War demonstrates clearly that he made a grave error in ignoring this key aspect of warfare.

There are countless military histories where the role of the railways has been ignored or greatly underplayed. Indeed, at times railways have been written out of the histories, as, too often, have the wider problems of logistics, which, it is no exaggeration to say, were often a decisive factor in the outcome of a conflict. There is, therefore, quite an imbalance to redress, which is why readers may feel that I have gone too far the other way and overemphasized the role of railways in this account. I do not feel that this is the case, but I leave the reader to judge. Of course, I have tended to highlight features of those battles in which railways played a key part, and also stressed their role, but where necessary I have mentioned the relative roles played by other means of transportation, including road vehicles.

I am not a military historian and therefore am unfamiliar with many of the terms used in military histories. Indeed, I have always been bemused by them, not understanding the difference, say, between a division and a company, and with no idea of which is bigger. In a way my ignorance has been useful because so many books assume that readers know the difference when, in fact, I suspect a majority do not understand the precise meanings of these terms. Therefore every time I came across them, I interpreted them according to this list provided to me by the ever helpful librarians at the Imperial War Museum:

A section led by a lance corporal: 15

A platoon under a subaltern: 60

A company under a captain: 250

A battalion under a major: 1,000

A regiment under a colonel: 2,000

A brigade under a brigadier: 4,000

A division under a major general: 12,000

A corps under a lieutenant general: 50,000

An army under a general: 200,000

These figures are, of course, approximate and have varied over time and between nations, but I am assured that they are a good general guide.

I can make no claim to expertise on military matters, but one thing struck me consistently during the writing of this book. Virtually all the wars covered had very little clear purpose and, notably, resulted in a worse – or certainly no better – situation than before the conflict had taken place. There are of course exceptions, such as the American Civil War and the Second World War, but overall the readiness to go to war seems all too easily to overrule the caution that should be born of studying the history of warfare, a mistake which has been repeated several times during my lifetime. Writing this book has been a salutary experience and I hope that reading it will strengthen the view that war is an evil that is necessary only very rarely. With Iraq still suffering and the Afghan War still raging as I write these words, all I can say is: Plus ça change.

As with all my books, I have been greatly dependent on the availability of source material. Since the importance of railways in war has, as I mentioned, been largely shunned by military historians, and railway writers tend to focus on the technology and the mechanics rather than the effect of the railways, there are great gaps in our knowledge of this element of warfare. I have tried to fill a few through combing the library at the Imperial War Museum, but mostly I have relied on secondary sources, which at times are sparse and, inevitably, occasionally contradictory. There is, therefore, plenty of scope for lots of PhDs to be written on this hidden factor in conflict.

If there was any doubt that the use of railways in war is a neglected subject, I leave the last word of this introduction to Lloyd George. He noted that the histories of the First World War tended to ignore this aspect of warfare and in 1932 commented on the coverage in John Buchan's History of the War: ‘The Battle of the Somme has about 60 pages, and yet it did not make that much difference in the war; but the shells and the guns that enabled the army to fight it, all the organisation of transport behind the lines, do you know how much is given to this? 17 lines.’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has stretched my resources to the full and I have been particularly dependent on advice and help from a variety of people. Thanks to the stalwarts who read and commented on the text: Jim Ballantyne, John Fowler and Tony Telford, who all contributed ideas and corrections that have greatly enhanced the book. I am especially grateful to Adrian Lyons, the former director of the Railway Forum, who contributed both his railway and his military expertise to ensure that the book remained on the right lines. Thanks are also due to the fantastic librarians at the Imperial War Museum, where I hope the roof is now fixed, and to various people who gave me advice or contributed stories, including Chris Austin, Michael Binyon, Liam Browne, David Drake, Nick Faith, Dr Guy Finch, Bernard Gambrill, John Harris, Phil Kelly, John Magala, Gordon Pettitt, Richard Phillips, Fritz Plous, Anthony Smith, Robert Summerling, Clyde Williams, Kim Winter and any others whom I may have forgotten. I am also grateful to my editor, Sarah Norman, and Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books, and all the other great people there who have been extremely helpful in bringing about the success of previous books, and to my agent, Andrew Lownie, who steers me through the nightmare complications of the modern publishing world. Thanks, too, to the University of Aberdeen, which has recently made me a research fellow. Finally, special thanks are due to my partner, Deborah Maby, who edited the draft and keeps me laughing. As ever, any errors are entirely my responsibility and please do contribute any thoughts and corrections to me via my website, www.christianwolmar.co.uk, which also has almost all my articles published since 2000.

ONE

WAR BEFORE RAILWAYS

We are used to thinking of railways as a benign invention which brought untold benefits to the world. For the first time ever, people were able to travel long distances cheaply and in relative comfort. The railways opened up vast new markets for the products of the factories springing up in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and were the catalyst for the far-reaching changes that created our modern way of life. They brought in their wake all kinds of positive developments which might not seem immediately obvious. The health of urban citizens improved greatly as fresh food became far more widely available and the railways, which during the second part of the nineteenth century were by far the world's largest businesses, were instrumental in improving education to ensure there was a supply of skilled labour to operate and maintain them.1 While today trains have been to a great extent superseded by the car and the aeroplane, they still play a vital role in many countries’ transport systems, offering a particularly pleasant and relaxing way to travel, and, remarkably, the burgeoning network of high-speed lines is now attracting people back onto the railways.

Yet, there is another side to their history, one which has rarely been told and which shows that technology developed for one purpose can so easily be harnessed for another, one which might surprise or even appal its creators. Railways were first conceived as a way of transporting goods. Early ‘railways’, such as the Stockton & Darlington completed in 1825, were primarily mineral lines with the principal task of taking coal from a mine to the nearest waterway. However, railway companies soon found it profitable to carry passengers, and it was the Liverpool & Manchester, a far more sophisticated enterprise, which truly inaugurated the railway age. Opened in 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester was the first railway in the modern sense of the word as it was a double-track line operated by locomotive haulage and linked two major towns with traffic, passenger and freight, flowing in both directions. The concept of hauling freight wagons and passenger carriages on permanent metal tracks using locomotives soon spread around the world, reaching the United States, France, Belgium and Bavaria by 1835, and a dozen other countries, including the far-flung Spanish colony of Cuba, by the end of the decade.

Most of these early lines were experimental but were developed with the knowledge that they would be the start of a network. Already, ambitious schemes to create country-wide and transcontinental systems were being put forward and, while no one quite realized just how fast this new invention would spread, the railways’ early sponsors soon became aware of their potential. So did governments and, notably, their military leaders. Almost as soon as the Liverpool & Manchester was opened, troops despatched to quell unrest in Ireland were being carried on its trains. While in Britain the development of the railway system was a haphazard process in which the government did not play an active role, elsewhere there was an immediate awareness of the railways’ potential for military use. In Belgium, the construction of the railways was seen as a key means of protecting the country against invaders, while in Prussia, as early as the 1830s, there was already discussion of their military value. According to a history of the role of railways in French–German relations, ‘the potential of railroads to alter the nature of warfare was quickly recognized… The first reflex in the 1830s was to assume that railways would bring a decisive edge for the defense; interior connections would enable a national army to concentrate its forces swiftly against any offensive thrust by an invading foe.’2 Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the railways were an invention for which the military had been waiting for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They would become a key development in the technology of warfare because of their ability to shift unprecedented amounts of matériel and huge numbers of people. It was, therefore, not so much that they could be used as a weapon, though armoured trains would play a significant role in several conflicts, but that they allowed a step change in the scale of warfare. Once railways became involved, the very nature of warfare changed, and wars increased in length, intensity, and destructiveness. However, as with other innovations, it took a long time for the military to understand their importance and exploit them fully.

Wars have been waged by human beings ever since they formed themselves into tribes or other groups and the history of warfare is one of growth in the scale of conflict nourished by technological progress, not just in weaponry but in the means of logistical support. To understand how railways affected the ways in which wars were pursued, it is essential briefly to examine how they were conducted before the dawning of the railway age. The earliest people developed weapons in order to kill animals both to protect themselves from predators and to obtain food, and, as they formed into tribes, to use in battles with neighbouring groups. Spears and arrows were initially made by sharpening wood and later became stone-tipped. When first soft and then harder metals were discovered, these were quickly used to improve the effectiveness of weapons. Otzi, the iceman shepherd who lived 5,300 years ago, was discovered in the Alps in 1991 with a copper axe, a flint knife and flint-tipped arrows and a bow, suggesting that weaponry was already well developed. It was around then that societies were becoming more economically advanced and thus increasingly militarized as they sought to protect themselves. Weapons were important but large-scale wars were only made possible by the establishment of settled societies that fed themselves through agriculture and were able to produce a surplus of food; as Jeremy Black, author of War: A Short History, explains, once certain groups became more affluent, they invariably had to protect themselves against those who were less well-off: ‘Social change helped alter the nature of war. This change was linked to economic transformation with the move from hunter-gatherer societies to those focussing on specialized agriculture, both pastoral and arable.’3

Thanks to the surplus of food that could be used to supply warriors, settled societies were able to raise armies to fight in battles where mobility and speed became crucial assets. Horses were first domesticated as early as 4000 bc but it took another couple of thousand years before someone got the idea of using them in conflicts by hitching them to chariots carrying armed men into battle. Around 1700 bc, the Hittites, using chariots with spoked rather than solid wheels, which made them far lighter than previous versions, were able to dominate Anatolia and establish a kingdom in a large swathe of modern-day Turkey and Syria. Thanks to their efficient and manoeuvrable vehicles, these charioteers became the elite and the decisive force in battles. This is just one early example of the way that the progress of the techniques of war was to prove decisive in many conflicts. The three great empires of Classical times – Han China, Persia and Imperial Rome – all created standing armies but eventually found themselves vulnerable to tribal groups or invaders adept at waging mobile warfare using the horse with the minimum of support. Harnessing the speed and size of horses changed the nature of warfare. While initially they were unprotected and vulnerable, at some point between the fifth and tenth centuries – the precise date is difficult to determine because of the absence of contemporary sources in the Dark Ages – the horses began to wear light armour, which by the thirteenth century had become heavier and thicker. Massed charges of such heavy cavalry were the blitzkrieg of the early years of the second millennium. There were also developments in the technology of archery, notably the longbow, which was decisive in several battles of what became known as the Hundred Years War (which actually lasted very intermittently from 1337 to 1453), and later the use of gunpowder and cannons became vital in enabling sieges to be broken far more easily.

Technology, therefore, determined the success of warfare with improvements first to bows, and later guns, often proving crucial to the outcome. As ever, it always took time for soldiers and their leaders to understand how to use these new weapons and the decisive factor would frequently prove to be organization rather than technology. Well-disciplined and drilled infantry, for example, could see off cavalry even before the development of the machine gun. Black suggests the equation between weaponry and equine forces half a millennium ago was in balance: ‘In Europe, it was unclear that enhanced firepower would change the nature of war. Instead, there was an emphasis on horse armies, while Swiss pikemen acquired a formidable reputation in the late fifteenth century, routing Charles the Bold of Burgundy at Granson, Murten and Nancy in 1476–7.’4 In what has become known as the ‘military revolution’ between 1560 and 1660, the increasing sophistication of weapons required, in turn, the training of the soldiers using them and their incorporation into permanent armies. And once a country establishes such an army, transport requirements come to the fore. Whereas previously armies had consisted of perhaps a few thousand men, their numbers now increased exponentially. Louis XIV of France, for example, raised an army of 120,000 in 1673 to see off the Dutch and even in peacetime he had a standing force of 150,000 men, though only a proportion were actually permanently in garrisons.

This is where a hitherto neglected aspect of war, logistics – the science of managing the movement of men and matériel – begins to enter the equation to a much greater extent. Larger armies needed more skill and planning to move around. The very word ‘logistics’, derived from the French logistique, initially referred only to military transport since, in pre-capitalist days, there was little movement of goods on anything like a military scale5 and the ability to develop expertise in logistics was as important as introducing new types of weapons. Compared to the fleet forces of previous generations, armies in the second half of the sixteenth century became massive lumbering enterprises that kept growing in size as they increased in complexity. According to Martin van Creveld, who has chronicled the logistics of battles between the Thirty Years War in the early seventeenth century and the Second World War, ‘a force numbering, say, 30,000 men, might be followed by a crowd of women, children, servants and sutlers [suppliers] of anywhere between 50 and 150 per cent of its own size and it had to drag this huge “tail” behind it wherever it went’.6 Armies largely consisted of uprooted men who had no other home and consequently their baggage, especially that of officers, assumed monumental proportions. Van Creveld suggests that an army in the early seventeenth century might have one wagon, hauled by two or four horses, for every fifteen men and the proportion could, at times, be double that. However, even such a large fleet of wagons was not sufficient to keep an army, and especially the horses, provided with food. There was no question of supplying armies from a base, given the slowness of any method of transport and the huge volume of fodder required. This did not present a particularly great problem when moving through friendly territory since the army would establish a supply system using local markets to buy produce (although armies could be notoriously bad payers and undisciplined even in friendly territory). For the most part, soldiers were expected to buy their own food, and while there was plenty of scope for this system to break down or be subject to corruption, for the most part it worked reasonably well.

The difficulties really started when an army began moving through hostile territory. As van Creveld puts it, ‘from time immemorial the problem had been solved simply by having the troops take whatever they required. More or less well organized plunder was the rule rather than the exception.’7 Consequently, armies ‘were forced to keep on the move in order to stay alive’.8 The choice of which town to besiege, therefore, was made not necessarily as a result of a particular location's strategic importance, but rather the availability of local supplies of food. The best defence against being besieged was to have been the victim of a previous assault in which the attackers had eaten up everything in the immediate vicinity!

Once armies expanded in the early seventeenth century, relying on plunder or living off the land no longer became feasible for any length of time since the number of men was too great to allow them to obtain sufficient supplies. Either the armies had to be on the move the whole time or a reliable supply system to provide men with the basic requirements of food and shelter had to be created. Rivers initially proved to be the vital line of communication and the most successful armies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tended to be those that made best use of navigable waterways or, like the British, Dutch and Swedes, of the seas.

These wars in pre-capitalist times were of a completely different nature to those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examined in detail in this book, which would be prolonged and involve large numbers of players on both sides. Such lengthy conflicts would only be made possible, as we shall see, by the use of the railways. That the heyday of the railway age would also become the era of total war was no coincidence. The railways would give rise to a new style of war, with particularly long, bloody and damaging conflicts between countries lasting several years and involving much of the population of whole nations. In contrast, these wars of the pre-industrial age were really a series of short battles, invariably conducted in the spring and summer months to ensure the armies could live off the land and interspersed with lengthy peaceful periods. Even though they were, in hindsight, given names like the Hundred Years War or Thirty Years War, the actual fighting in each battle would normally be over in a matter of a day or even just a couple of hours, followed by a lengthy respite before the next one. Sometimes sieges lasted much longer but the limiting factor was not only, as one would assume, the supplies available to those being besieged, but also those available to the attackers. Even where there were prolonged sieges, there were no lengthy fronts of the type established in later wars to separate the combatants, as the attackers largely ignored the areas between the towns which they were besieging.

Improvisation was crucial to these mobile armies. For example, much ammunition could be produced in the field. There was ribaldry among soldiers who were required to urinate in designated areas so that the urea could be used for gunpowder production, while cannonballs were made from any old scrap melted down in field forges. However, the moving of artillery, especially siege ‘trains’ – which, of course, were simply strings of heavily laden carts and carriages – was a massive enterprise requiring large numbers of oxen, which are even slower than horses, and consequently covering even five miles in a day was a great achievement. Bigger artillery needed very specialized facilities, such as huge carriages and special teams of horses, to move it around.

Armies, according to conventional wisdom, march on their stomachs, but actually, far more importantly, horses do and the availability of fodder was for a long time the limiting factor in the ability of armies to stay in one place. Feeding an army on the move was far easier than preventing a static one from starving. Armies were like those irritating flies buzzing tirelessly around in the summer, never able to rest or stay in one place for very long through fear of running out of food and forage.

Gradually, the more innovative military commanders began establishing networks of magazines, essentially supply depots of mostly ammunition but also some other provisions such as uniforms and blankets, to the rear of their battle lines. There was, though, no question that whole armies could be supplied for long periods from these magazines since the sheer scale of an army's requirements and the inadequacy of preindustrial transport systems made this impossible. Van Creveld provides a precise calculation which shows the scale of the task. The biggest army brought together before the advent of the railways was the one raised by Louis XIV to fight the Dutch. Say it was divided into two for strategic reasons and each army (the expression ‘army’ is actually used by the military to describe a force led by a general which could number anything from 50,000, in the seventeenth century, to 200,000 or more in the First World War) consisting of 60,000 men would have 40,000 horses and need a combined total of around one million pounds (nearly 450 tons) of food per day. Effectively, very little – van Creveld estimates just over 10 per cent – could be supplied from magazines some distance away. He finds no examples of seventeenth-century armies being supplied solely from distant bases and suggests that it would have been impossible to do so even for a modest-sized army. The transport of ammunition, interestingly, was never a crucial issue until the development of far bigger guns in the late nineteenth century. Van Creveld asserts: ‘So small were the quantities [of ammunition] required that armies normally took along a single supply for the entire campaign, resupply from base being effected only on comparatively rare occasions – most frequently, of course, during sieges.’9 Food though was the limiting factor: ‘From beginning to end [of the wars of Louis XIV], the most difficult logistic problem facing Louvois [Louis's Secretary of State for War], his contemporaries and his successors was much less to feed an army on the move than to prevent one that was stationary from starving.’10

During the eighteenth century armies grew bigger and bigger and by its end Napoleon's Grande Armée peaked at a remarkable 2.5 million. But because these enormous groups of men lived largely off the local land, ‘taking the bulk of their needs away from the country’,11 they were unable to stay in one place for any length of time. Van Creveld's back-of-the-envelope calculation demonstrates this unequivocally: ‘Had an army of, say, 100,000 men, wanted to bring up all its supplies for the duration of the campaign – usually calculated as 180 days [spring and summer] – from base, the resulting burden on the transportation system would have been so great as to make all warfare utterly impossible.’ Consequently war before the nineteenth century was to be waged as cheaply and quickly as possible and armies were expected to live at the expense of their enemies by exploiting their territories.

Napoleon's surge through Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries marked a different kind of warfare, with an even greater emphasis on mobility and an end to the notion of sieges. Napoleon recognized the importance of logistics. His armies did suffer supply problems whenever they got bogged down, such as in Mantua in 1796 and before the battle of Austerlitz, his greatest triumph, in 1805, but his true military genius was in ensuring that he never stayed anywhere long enough to get into trouble. According to the historian David A. Bell, Napoleon personally took ‘charge of matters ranging from the number of carts needed to carry a regiment's paperwork to the amount of munitions carried by soldiers’.12 He had an almost photographic memory and was able to work out the logistical needs of his army down to the minutest detail, yet that did not negate the simple fact that his huge armies could never be fed through supply lines but still relied on living off the land.

Napoleon's belief in the importance of mobility was the key to his success. As van Creveld puts it, ‘the French armies [were able to do] what their predecessors had normally failed to do, namely to march from one end of Europe to the other, destroying everything in their way’.13 There were several factors that allowed him to do this. Under the corps d'armée system, his armies were dispersed, making it easier to feed themselves from the countryside. He lightened the loads of his armies, dispensing with the large amounts of baggage and the vast numbers of hangers-on that had hampered the movement of troops in the past and he was helped by various external factors, such as the higher density of the population, which ensured there were more farms to plunder. He was, too, as van Creveld emphasizes, a unique military genius whose abilities were a key component of his success. It was only when he became bogged down in long-running campaigns such as in Spain or in the Tyrol, or reached out beyond the relative richness of the European heartland into Egypt and Russia, that his system collapsed and the troops began to starve.

While Napoleon may have revolutionized the manner of waging war, his troops were still dependent on living off the land. Although he did at times try to create massive magazines behind the front from which supplies were despatched, invariably the inadequate roads and lack of sufficient transport meant that they were never sufficient to supply his army. In a way, Napoleon straddles two types of war, pre- and post-railways. He made use of more sophisticated supply chains than had any previous military commander but he was still constrained by the inadequacy of transport facilities, which forced his troops to live off the land, limiting his ability to manoeuvre. Napoleon made mobility the key to success and, with simple tactics and brilliant strategies, he moved armies faster than anyone had before and punched harder than his enemies. At times, the Napoleonic Wars were railway wars without the railways. He even called his supply wagons ‘trains’, which consisted of dedicated lines of wagons bringing up supplies behind the army. However, this supply system was still only sustainable for short periods of time and over relatively modest distances.

Napoleon's foolhardy incursion into Russia in 1812 demonstrates this perfectly. At first, Napoleon's brilliant organizational skills enabled the ‘trains’ to supply his army of 650,000 men efficiently, but he was reliant on a quick victory because beyond a couple of hundred miles it was impossible to sustain the advance through supplies from the rear. His ‘trains’ were not expected to keep up with the front-line soldiers on their rapid 600-mile march through central Europe. This suggests that, from a purely logistical point of view, the invasion was never sustainable because there was not enough food and forage for the soldiers to live off the land. Napoleon relied on the richer farming country nearer Moscow to sustain his troops, but inevitably the advance foundered as the men suffered from heat exhaustion on the march eastwards and hunger as the local peasantry fled taking their supplies with them (and burning what they left behind, a scorched-earth policy later revived by Stalin in 1941). He had hoped for a campaign of just three weeks and once it was extended there was no hope of victory. Moscow was always an overambitious target; once the retreat was sounded, starvation in the arctic conditions was inevitable and about half of Napoleon's army perished. The rapid retreat from the burnt-out Moscow illustrated the point that such a huge army had to be permanently on the move. The French army had been far better organized than its opposition, but the Russians triumphed partly because they had a shorter supply line which kept more of them alive, but also because they were used to the conditions and more motivated as they were on home territory fighting off an invader. The Russian tactics were to resist briefly then retreat, hoping the French would follow and overstretch themselves in the process, a strategy the Russians would repeat when repelling the German invasion in 1941.

The ability of armies to move – and, ironically, to stay put – changed in the nineteenth century as the advent of the industrial age not only revolutionized weaponry but also the transport system. The railways would change the equation between mobility and ability to access supplies, but it would take time for the military to understand how. Wars are not won or lost solely by weaponry or even the numbers of combatants on each side. It is the mundane aspects of military operations that are crucial, such as food, supplies and lines of communication.

There were some counter-intuitive effects of the introduction of the railways, particularly in respect of the military's dependence on horses. The bulkiness of fodder meant that it had previously never been possible to transport it over any great distance because the animals would need to eat more than they could carry. Interestingly the arrival of the railways gave a new lease of life to the cavalry as large numbers of horses could be maintained by rail supply and the railways enabled production to be globalized, resulting in the production of massive quantities of cheap feedstuffs. Moreover, the cavalry could be transported to nearer the battlefield, keeping both men and animals fresh.

Napoleon's wars were the last significant conflict before the advent of the railways. How he would have loved to have had them at his disposal, transforming the logistics at which he was so adept. His less gifted successors, the military leaders of the middle of the nineteenth century, would find it harder to adapt to their arrival than he would have done. The railways would require a complete change of tactics and the ability – or indeed failure – to exploit their potential to the full was to be a decisive factor in several conflicts. As with all innovations, the military, ever conservative and often fighting a previous war, were rarely, as we shall see in the forthcoming chapters, able to appreciate immediately the advantage they offered.

TWO

THE RAILWAYS CALLED INTO ACTION

After Napoleon's defeat and exile, the absence of significant European wars in the first half of the nineteenth century coincided with the creation of the early railways and the beginning of their spread around the world. The construction of the first railways was stimulated by peaceful purposes for the carriage of both passengers and freight rather than for either defensive or offensive strategic objectives, but it was not long before some army commanders realized the railways’ military potential for the simplest task, moving troops around the country. And in the early days of the railways, more often than not the troops were deployed against their own people, rather than a distant enemy.

Indeed, the railways had shown their usefulness in that respect right from the start. Soon after its opening in 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway carried a regiment of troops from Manchester to the docks in Liverpool on their way to quell a rebellion in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom. The thirty-one-mile journey took just over two hours, rather than the two days required to march that distance, and had the added advantage that the troops arrived in a far fresher condition. The railway's owners were canny enough to negotiate a cheap rate for the carriage of troops on active service, the world's first such agreement.

Britain's railway system built up relatively slowly in the 1830s, but nevertheless by 1839 there was a line1 between Manchester and London which General Sir Charles Napier used to reach the capital after being called from his northern headquarters by the leader of the ruling Whigs, Lord John Russell. Sir Charles impressed Russell by arriving within twenty-four hours of the summons and was exultant about this new service, writing in his diary: ‘Well done steam! Smoke, thou art wonderful, and a reformer.’2 He had even more cause to be grateful to the railways a few weeks later when he needed the 10th Regiment of Foot stationed in Ireland to return rapidly to Manchester to quell yet another riot. Not only did the troops arrive speedily, but they were full of vigour and, according to Sir Charles, their numbers appeared to have grown on the journey: ‘One wing of the 10th came by morning train yesterday; the other by an evening train, which made everybody suppose two regiments had arrived.’3

Sir Charles, though, was something of an exception in his enthusiasm for the railways among British military men of the age. As an island nation with no enemies that could be reached without a journey by sea, the British did not really understand the railways’ potential for military use and there was little interest in the subject during the early days of the railway era. The usefulness of this new means of transport did not entirely escape the attention of the state, however, as legislation passed in 1842, one of the first laws affecting the railways, gave the military priority access to them. Two years later, a further Act imposed a duty on the railway companies to provide any trains required by the government for military purposes at a set fare that was well below the standard rate. Again, however, the thinking seems to have been around the railways’ usefulness in helping to quell internal dissent rather than to transport soldiers to war in foreign lands.

In Europe, however, there was more understanding of the railways’ military potential in conflicts between nations. In the early 1830s, even before any countries on the Continent had built significant lines, there were strategists who were aware that the railways could be used for military purposes. In the Austrian empire and the states that would eventually form Germany, countries with lengthy and easily crossed land borders, it was these arguments which were deployed to stimulate the early development of railways. Indeed, several early supporters of the railways in continental Europe emphasized their military value over all else. In 1833, Friedrich Harkort, a Westphalian entrepreneur and railway pioneer, wrote a pamphlet advocating a railway between Minden and Cologne which, while stressing its value for the economy, also underlined its military potential by calculating how much quicker Prussian soldiers could reach various key towns by rail rather than on foot. Such connections were vital for Prussia, since the settlement at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after Napoleon's defeat had not given Prussia the Kingdom of Saxony that it wanted but rather a mountainous and woody tract of land in western Germany that became the Ruhr industrial heartland of the nation. It was separated from the main part of Prussia by a collection of small powerless states, which made good communications vital, especially as the local population were none too happy at being part of Prussia.

Harkort also promoted the idea of a much more overtly military railway, a line on the Prussian side of the Rhine which, he said, with some justification, would prevent the French ever reaching across the river since the railway would allow Prussian troops to be rushed to any spot under attack. Harkort, though, was before his time. As John Westwood asserts in his history of railways at war, ‘neither the Prussian military nor the Prussian press accepted Harkort's ideas, preferring to make fun of him whenever they could not ignore him’.4 Writing nearly a decade after Harkort, Karl Pönitz found a more receptive audience with his 1842 treatise Railways and Their Utility from the Viewpoint of Lines of Military Operations, which elicited considerable interest in military quarters. The issue for Prussia, and later Germany, was always that it faced possible attack from two sides, Russia to the east and France to the west. Pönitz looked admiringly at Belgium: ‘The network of Belgian railways will be of as much advantage in advancing the industries of that country as it will be in facilitating the defence of the land against attack by France.’5

Pönitz had good reason to view Belgium as an example to follow. Right from its creation, Belgium had seen the railways and the military as having a symbiotic relationship. It was a new nation created by the split from the Netherlands in 1830 and the railways were seen not just as a way of establishing its national identity, but also as the means of maintaining its economic independence by providing an alternative transport system to the waterways dominated by its northern neighbour, which had, in the past, at times blocked off access to Antwerp. Belgium, where work began on the first railway in 1834, is not generally known for many world firsts but it was undoubtedly the unlikely pioneer in the understanding of the railways’ military value.

Pönitz therefore put forward the notion of a series of six east–west railways across Germany built for military rather than commercial reasons. These would be linked by a series of radial lines that would ensure communication could be maintained even if some sections of the web were destroyed. Pönitz even went as far as to calculate how many troops each line would be able to carry and how long it would take them to get to the frontier, elementary arithmetic which subsequent military commanders frequently failed to work out. However, while his ideas were met with approval from some military leaders, Germany was not in a position to undertake such a massive enterprise. At the time it was a loose Confederation of thirty-nine independent states which, like rival neighbouring football teams refusing to share a ground, were wary of joining together despite the obvious advantages. In particular, they were suspicious of anything suggested by Prussia, the most powerful state of the Confederation. Moreover, most of their railway systems were in private hands and since a network designed primarily to suit military purposes could never be expected to pay for itself, a strong government involvement and considerable subsidy would be needed.

It would, therefore, take several decades and the Franco-Prussian War for Pönitz's ideas to bear fruit. In the meantime, the railways themselves were instrumental in bringing the states closer together economically – and therefore politically – by encouraging cross-border trade and making customs duties irrelevant, although the final union of the German empire did not take place until 1871.

The French, for their part, were even slower to recognize the military value of the railways. Indeed, according to the historian Armand Mattelart, the very notion of allowing armies onto trains was ‘suspected of making soldiers effeminate’.6 Certainly, there were debates in French government circles as early as in the 1840s about the strategic value of railways but there was little consensus. Moreover, while the planned lines radiating out of Paris would have enabled troops to be despatched to France's various frontiers – the Spanish, unlike the Germans and the Italians, had carefully chosen an alternative gauge for their railways so that they could resist any such invasion – the system was not designed with such aggressive intent in mind. After the initial rush following the opening of France's first railway in 1832, the French had been rather sluggish in establishing anything like a railway network because of doubts among the intelligentsia about its value, prompting Helmuth von Moltke (the elder Moltke), later the long-serving Prussian Army leader but then only an ambitious staff officer, to remark sarcastically in 1844 that ‘while the French chamber debates railways, Germany builds them’.7

During most of the subsequent century, when railways were an essential component of warfare, the French military would have to make do for the most part with the tracks that happened to have been laid down for civilian needs. In the 1840s, it eventually started dawning on the French military hierarchy that the German railways might increase the potential for an invasion by their eastern neighbour, but they were never entirely convinced by the threat. The refusal to spot the obvious was well illustrated by the comments of the French consul in Mainz, in the Rhineland, who reported in 1849 that he felt ‘nothing indicates an offensive attitude, nothing that is hostile to France’.8 He was to be proved wrong three times within the next century.

All in all, given that the various elements among government and military leaders on both sides had begun, albeit slowly, to acknowledge the value of railways in a potential conflict and each one saw the other as its most dangerous military rival, both France and Germany were guilty of complacency in their strategic railway preparations. It was only in the run-up to the Franco-Prussian War, as we shall see in Chapter Four, that both sides belatedly began to examine how best to make use of the iron road in the event of war.

Any doubts about the value of the railways in a military context were to be dispelled by the terrifying events of the late 1840s. The ruling elites of Europe were, in the main, still absolute monarchs who had made scant concession to democracy; suddenly a wave of revolutionary and nationalist fervour swept the Continent and on numerous occasions troops were mobilized to crush these uprisings. Indeed, the most repressive regime of the age, the government of the Russian Tsar, was so fearful of people being able to travel more easily that it imposed regulations which required passengers to have a passport9 before being able to take the train linking Moscow with St Petersburg, ensuring that only the politically sound could move without hindrance around the country.

Of course, it worked both ways. The railways helped spread revolutionary ideas and were widely perceived as a democratizing force, opening up countries to people who had never been able to travel around them before. However, they also made it far easier for the strong arm of the state to impose itself on those who were perceived as a threat to the status quo. The ruling elites throughout Europe were soon routinely despatching troops by rail to maintain control and even began to build lines in the knowledge that a railway into a rebellious region was the key to nipping trouble in the bud. Therefore, while at first there had been an assumption that railways would be useful for governments in supporting an offensive or defending themselves against outside aggression, now they were beginning to understand that their value was equally great in countering the threat within. As John Westwood, author of Railways at War, concludes, ‘the use which governments might make of railways for the movement of troops against internal dissidents had probably a greater appeal than the more purely strategic arguments’.10

The first significant transport of troops by rail was the despatch of 14,500 Prussian soldiers, together with their horses and wagons, to smash the Krakow rebellion of Polish nationalists in 1846, taking just two days to cover the 200-mile journey from their garrison at Hradish in Bohemia. Then, in 1848, Tsar Nicholas I, the most reactionary of the nineteenth-century monarchs – quite an accolade given the competition – got in on the act. He had no compunction in despatching 30,000 troops on the newly established Warsaw–Vienna railway to help his ally, the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand, quell a rebellion in Hungary in a particularly ruthless and bloody way. A few months later, the Austrians, in turn, made use of the railways to send reinforcements to reimpose their rule over Italy following a partial takeover by nationalists. That movement of troops stimulated the first recorded instance of railway sabotage when Venetian rebels, led by Daniele Manin, blew up some of the arches of the long viaduct linking their city with the mainland to try to prevent the Austrians reaching their island. They were unsuccessful as their sabotage only managed to lengthen the siege of the city, which ultimately fell to the Austrians in August 1849.

There were several significant troop movements on railways in the 1850s which made governments throughout Europe aware of the military potential of these networks, even if they were still unable to comprehend how completely the iron road would change the nature of war. The first of these involved the despatch of a 75,000-strong Austrian army, along with 8,000 horses and a thousand carts, from Vienna to Bohemia early in the winter of 1850. As Edwin Pratt, the first historian of the role of railways in war and whose seminal work on the subject, The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest, was published in 1915, puts it wryly, ‘owing to the combined disadvantages of single-line railways, inadequate staff and rolling stock, unfavourable weather, lack of previous preparations and of transport regulations and delays from various unforeseen causes, no fewer than 26 days were occupied in the transport’11 for a journey of a mere 150 miles, in other words barely six miles per day.

It would ever be thus. The limitations of a rail line, together with the failure of the military to exploit it properly, would lead to many similar stories. Nevertheless, van Creveld describes this movement as ‘perhaps the first time when the railways played an important part in international power politics by helping to bring about the Prussian humiliation at Olmütz [the agreement under which the Prussians were forced to give up their claim to leadership of the German Confederation]’.12 The Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, was sufficiently impressed to draw up a scheme for a strategic rail network and to devise plans for future movements of troops which could be carried out without disruption to existing traffic on the rail network. Unfortunately, despite this, the Austrians, as we see below, never quite got to grips with railway logistics while the Prussians, in contrast, would learn the lessons of their humiliation.

In spite of the hesitations and the nonsense about ‘feminising’ soldiers, the French finally began to recognize the advantage of carrying soldiers by rail and, in fact, undertook two of the biggest early troop movements by rail, both times taking armies to the Mediterranean for