Artillery development lagged behind small arms development by several decades, for reasons we will soon see, and so the American Civil War was dominated by the rifled musket. This new weapon changed the tactics that were required for victory on the field of battle: no longer could massed ranks of infantry advance in formation over open ground. Civil War commanders were slow to realize that the new technology was changing the face of war, and so casualties were high. This factor—that tactical developments lagged technological ones—would culminate in the slaughter of World War I, fought at a time when artillery (but not military thinking) had absorbed the new developments.
Just a few years separated the American Civil War from the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). This war was also dominated by small arms and was also very bloody. The small arms, however, were no longer rifled muskets but were instead breech-loading rifles. Better manufacturing techniques (in which quality-controlled factory production replaced older craft traditions) and new rotating bolt action breechblocks produced an effective seal that eliminated the old problem of propellant gas leaking from breeches.
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Two “fields”—the Springfield and the Enfield—are the subject of this section. In particular, we will see why they changed the nature of war by looking at how they influenced tactics during the American Civil War.
These two weapons had more similarities than differences even though they originated in different parts of the world. Their similarity is a technological example of what biologists call “convergent evolution,” in which species adapt to best suit their environments. For example, sharks and porpoises resemble one another because they share the same oceanic environment, though they evolved from very different ancestors. The arms needs of the Americans and the British in the mid-nineteenth century were different, their armies and soldiers were different, and their arms production facilities were quite independent of one another—yet, when both were presented with the Minié ball and had to produce a rifle to fire it, they came up with very similar weapons.
The Springfield Armory, in Massachusetts, made over 1.5 million rifled muskets of all types—about the same as the number of Enfields made. The most common weapon of the Civil War was the Springfield Model 1861 (about 700,000), followed by the Pattern 1853 Enfield (about 500,000). ...the two weapons were quite similar, and they were also comparable in field performance, though some officers were biased against the Enfield. Each had an effective range of 200–300 yards; this range was determined more by the limited training of Civil War soldiers than by the weapons’ inherent capabilities. The rate of fire in both cases was about three shots per minute, and they could fix the same bayonet. The primer systems were a little different (varieties of caplock); the Enfield’s rear sight was more finely adjustable; the Springfield may have been a little more robust.
The first true self-actuated machine gun was the 1883 weapon of Hiram Maxim. Using recoil energy to reload, the Maxim gun could fire 600 rounds per minute, with the trigger held down. Its single barrel was cooled using a novel water-filled jacket (the water would boil unless replaced frequently). Machine guns developed rapidly between the 1880s and World War I, setting the stage for the carnage of that epochal event. Once again, weapons technology advanced faster than military thinking. The French, who quickly took up the Mitrailleuse for their war against Prussia in 1870–71, were slow to understand its potential and so did not benefit from their advantage. (The Prussians had no such weapon.) By World War I both sides appreciated the machine gun’s potential but were slow to develop tactics to counter these automatic weapons.
By the 1890s, all the key components of true automatic firing were understood. The new technology allowed European powers and America to expand the territory under their control, against preindustrialized peoples. As the Anglo-French writer Hilaire Belloc wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, “Whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not.”
So-called semiautomatic pistols were invented by Hugo Schmeisser in Germany in 1916. The trigger was pulled for each round fired, but the hammer did not need to be cocked each time. Thus, semiautomatic pistols were functionally similar to double-action revolvers, with the big difference that the action was powered by recoil and gas pressure instead of by the trigger finger. The mechanism adopted—called blowback—was suitable for rapid firing of short-range weapons with pistol ammunition. Similar mechanisms were used for later machine pistols, such as the German MP38 and MP40 (iconic machine pistols of World War II), the Thompson (Tommy) gun, the Russian PPSH41 with its round magazine, and the mass-produced British Sten gun.
World War II saw the introduction of the StG machine gun, a fully automatic hand-held firearm notable as the ancestor of the modern assault rifle. Assault rifles have selective fire capability: the shooter can choose to fire a single shot or a burst. Sacrificing the range of a traditional rifle for the rapid fire of a machine gun, the early versions fired pistol rounds. The most famous assault rifle is the AK-47—the Automatic Kalashnikov first introduced in 1947. This is the world’s most popular firearm: somewhere between 30 million and 100 million have been produced. Another iconic assault rifle is Colt’s M16; perhaps always in the AK-47’s shadow, this American weapon has lasted over 40 years and exists in many versions. The most recent assault rifles, dating from the mid-1980s, adopt the bullpup configuration, with magazine and firing mechanism behind the trigger. Because bullpups have the same barrel lengths as ordinary assault rifles, they have the same accuracy (in principle), yet they are much shorter weapons and therefore easier to carry and use. This trick is achieved by pushing part of the barrel back into the stock.
~~Their Arrows Will Darken The Sun: The Evolution and Science of Ballistics -by- Mark Denny
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