50 Weapons That Changed Warfare Read online

  Although the airplane in World War II proved itself the master weapon in both land and sea fighting, much of the strategic bombing looks like wasted effort.

  Technical progress in air forces continued after the war. All combat planes now have jet engines. They drop smart bombs and smart rockets that home in on their targets with uncanny accuracy. It is now possible to avoid the mass slaughter caused by World War II’s carpet bombing. Some planes have no pilots (a cruise missile is a form of jet plane, so is a drone). The space shuttle is both a plane and a rocket. (The Germans had a rocket plane in World War II, the Me 163 Komet. Its range was extremely short, it could not land, and its engine was liable to explode.)

  Some have suggested that missiles might replace planes altogether. This is not likely for quite a while. At present, missiles are programmed to fly one route. It is possible to program them to take an alternate route if so signaled.

  But a missile cannot sense danger in flight, as a human pilot could, nor can it make a split-second decision about choosing alternative actions. Airplanes apparently will be the master weapon of warfare for the foreseeable future.

  Chapter 33

  Sticky Situations: Barbed Wire

  Barbed wire. Designed for fencing cattle, it became an indispensable military tool.

  In the long, confused, and bloody affair called the Mexican Revolution, Venustiano Carranza had seized the presidency over the objections of two other rebel leaders, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Carranza, a wealthy planter, was no military man, while his two rivals were experienced commanders.

  Carranza’s army was commanded by Álvaro ObregÓn, a keen student of the war raging in Europe at this time (1915), who also picked up some German military advisors. From what he knew of the Western Front, Obregon calculated that launching an offensive would be the wrong move. Instead, he fortified the village of Celaya and defied Villa to do anything about it.

  Pancho Villa, known as “the Centaur of the North,” was a bandit turned revolutionist. He had charisma. In 1913, he returned from exile in the United States with eight friends. They rode through towns and ranches shouting “Viva Villa!” and every man with a horse and rifle joined the legendary bandit and guerrilla. Within 30 days, Villa was leading an army of 3,000 cavalrymen. Villa was shrewd, too. He once sneaked an army into Ciudad Juarez in a train that federal troops thought contained part of their own army. And he was colorful.

  Villa’s army attracted scores of reporters, and newspapers were filled with stories about his brilliance, his daring, and his humanity. By 1915, he had come to believe the stories. He thought he was invincible.

  So when ObregÓn, a middle-class pipsqueak from the state of Sonora, fortified Celayo, Villa decided to put him in his place. He got 25,000 of his best cavalrymen, Los Dorados (the Golden Ones) and launched them at OrbregÓn’s fortifications. Singing La Cucuracha, the Dorados galloped at the Carrancista trenches. They never got there. The horses were caught in the miles of barbed wire, which formed entanglements in front of Celaya’s trenches, while ObregÓn’s machine guns and quick-firing field pieces mowed them down. The Dorados fell back, then charged again. And again…and again. At the end of the day, when the remnants of the Golden Ones and their horses could barely stand, ObregÓn brought his own cavalry out from behind the wire and swept them from the field.

  Barbed wire, an American invention of the late 19th century, was intended for nothing more warlike than keeping cattle on their own pastures. It was quickly adopted by armies all over the world for non-peaceful purposes. In Cuba, during the Spanish-American War, the Spanish surrounded their forts with barbed wire fences. In South Africa, during the Boer War, the British had criss-crossed the veldt with barbed wire to limit the movements of mounted Afrikaner guerrillas. The wire was strung between bulletproof block houses, each block house within a long rifle shot of others. In the Russo-Japanese War, both sides used great tangles of barbed wire, which, as we saw in Chapter 27, could not be cleared by artillery fire.

  Barbed wire, trenches, masses of artillery, and machine guns were what created the Western Front of World War I, the longest and bloodiest siege in history. It is still being used, although sometimes in a modified form, razor wire. Razor wire was invented by the Germans in World War I, because it could be produced more cheaply than standard barbed wire. Razor wire isn’t wire at all but long, thin strips of metal with sharp, jagged edges. It is cut from sheet metal, is harder to sever with standard wire cutters and deters as effectively as the original barbed wire. One recent improvement to razor wire is adding a fiber-optic core to the wire. Anyone tampering with the wire would break the core, thus indicating exactly where he was and providing a target for defenders’ fire.

  Barbed wire can be used in several ways besides as a simple fence or fence top. One is in an ankle-high entanglement, which may be hidden in high grass.

  It can be laid as “concertina wire,” in which troops place it in coils resembling the body of a concertina. Several rolls of concertina, some of the coils overlapping, may be used to make a particularly difficult barrier. Perhaps the most common way in carefully prepared field fortifications is in a wide entanglement with wire running in all directions and securely staked to the ground. In World War II, movies of troop training often showed soldiers falling on the wire while other soldiers crossed the wire on their backs. In real life, that seldom happened, if ever. The attackers’ object is to cross the wire without getting shot.

  Anyone prancing over the top of an entanglement on the bodies of his comrades makes an excellent target. The prescribed method of crossing wire is to go under it, if possible on your back so you can see what to avoid or what to cut.

  Of course, there is always the possibility that the enemy has planted land mines under the wire to make your crawl more interesting.

  It is a testimony to the importance and prevalence of barbed wire that most modern bayonets are designed so that they can be used as wire cutters.

  Chapter 34

  Trouble in the Air: Poison Gas

  National Archives from War Dept.

  French troops launch a gas attack during World War I.

  April 22, 1915 had been a delightful day, warm and sunny — not all that common a spring day in Flanders. The war-ravaged village of Neuve-Chapelle was being held by French Algerian and Canadian troops. About 5 p.m. a gray-ish-green fog seemed to rise from the German trenches across no-man’s-land from the Allied line and drift toward the Algerians. The fog covered the Algerian trenches and flowed into them like water. Then the Canadians saw the North African riflemen running to the rear, coughing and choking. Their de-parture left a gap in the line 8,000 yards wide. A few minutes later, a bit of the fog drifted into the Canadian lines. The Canadians got a small taste of what the Algerians had been through, but fortunately, it was only a taste. They were able to hold their line and beat back the German infantry, who pushed forward as the green fog began dissipating.

  This was the first use in modern times of deadly gas in war. A few months earlier, on January 3, 1915, the Germans had used tear gas on the Russian front, but it had had no effect on the Russians. The weather was so cold that the chemical in the gas shells had frozen instead of vaporizing. This may have been the reason the Germans made their second gas attack by opening cylinders when the wind was right: they could see whether the gas was vaporizing.

  The gas this time was chlorine, a common chemical used in scores of compounds. Second-year high school students produce small quantities of chlorine gas in school labs. Engineers at I.G. Farben, the German chemical giant, worked out a way to produce vast amounts of chlorine gas, pack the liquid gas in cylinders, and release it from the trenches. It was the second scientific triumph for Farben and Germany’s leading industrial chemist, Fritz Haber of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Earlier, Farben and Haber had invented a way to draw nitro-gen from the air, a development essential for Germany’s war effort, because the British Navy had cut off Germany’s usual source of nitrates, impo
rts from Chile. Haber reportedly said the gas would “settle the hash of the wicked English.”

  The Algerians took the rap for the British in the first gas attack. Two days later, the Canadians were the target of the second attack. On the 23rd, though, Canadian officers had identified the mysterious cloud as chlorine. Chlorine is soluble in water, so the Canadians tied wet cloths over their faces. That helped to mitigate the effects of the gas, and the Allies had moved more reinforcements up behind the Canadians. The line held, and Canadians, British, and French counterattacked. On May 1st, Haber’s invention was finally used against “the wicked English,” the First Battalion of the Dorset Regiment. Somehow, the Dorsets seemed not to have heard about the wet rag counter. When the men began to choke, many of them fled. A second lieutenant named Kestell-Cornish picked up a rifle one of the men of his platoon dropped and fired into the green cloud rolling toward him. The four men remaining from his platoon of 40 men joined him. Other British soldiers joined them. Once again, the Germans were beaten back, but the price the British paid was high. Ninety men died in the trenches. Some 207 were evacuated to the aid station. Of them, 46 died immediately; 12 others after long suffering.

  Chlorine causes the lungs to fill with fluid, and the victim drowns. It was not the only gas in the German arsenal. The next one used was phosgene, a colorless gas that smells like new-mown hay and chokes its victim much more quickly than chlorine. Then there was mustard gas, a blistering agent. Mustard gas burns and blisters any tissue it touches — any exposed skin and also the lungs. It is extremely lethal, and many of the men it didn’t kill were crippled for life. Basil H. Liddell Hart, the British military commentator, was invalidated out of the army as a result of injuries from mustard gas. The Allies quickly countered the German gas offensive with gases of their own. The United States entered the race late but produced Lewisite, a byproduct of a search for synthetic rubber that out-blistered the blistering mustard gas.

  One product all these gases had in common was that they were heavier than air. Instead of billowing into the upper atmosphere, they flowed to the lowest points on the ground. A veteran of World War I once told the author that he was more afraid of gas than any other weapon. He was in the Signal Corps, and his job was to help operate a telephone switchboard deep underground. His dugout was so deep, he explained, that he might not hear the gas alarm. Even if he did, the alarm might be too late. He wouldn’t have time to take off his head-phone and put on his gas mask before phosgene laid him low.

  Gas was a true terror weapon — one that can cause fear out of proportion to its effectiveness. Actually, of the deaths on the Western Front, only about 1.1 percent were caused by gas, but fear of gas terrified whole nations on the eve of World War II. Governments tried to issue gas masks to their civilian populations, but there were far too few gas masks. Fortunately, no belligerent tried to gas an enemy’s civilians. Even if there were enough masks, they wouldn’t solve the problem. Mustard gas and Lewisite burn on contact with the skin, and the new nerve gases can quickly kill without being inhaled. Of the three most common nerve gases, Tabun will cause death if 1,000 milligrams touches the victim’s skin; Sarin takes 1,700 milligrams, but VX requires only 15 milligrams on the skin to kill, less than half a fatal dose if inhaled. A person attacked by any of these gases is a grave threat to would-be rescuers. Good Samaritans may get a fatal dose just touching the victim’s clothing.

  Gas masks, covering the face and allowing a potential victim breath through a filter, usually composed of activated charcoal, were issued to all soldiers, and those in especially hazardous areas got protective overalls as well. Poison gas was hazardous to everyone near it, especially when used as it was on April 22, 1915, being released into the wind from cylinders. The wind could always shift.

  As a result, all belligerents went back to using gas primarily in shells.

  In World War II, the Allies, it has been said, were waiting for the Germans to use gas first. Then they would retaliate. The Germans, in spite of all their preparations for war, were not able to deal with poison gas. One reason, according to some experts, was that they had been unable to devise a gas mask for horses.

  Although when the war began, the German Army was believed to be the ultimate in mechanization, it still relied heavily on horses for towing artillery and general transport. It continued to do so until the end of the war. German officers complained during the Russian campaign that their “modern” horse-drawn wagons broke down on the awful Russian roads and they had to comandeer Russian peasant carts to carry supplies.

  Poison gas did not entirely disappear in spite of its general non-use. The Japanese used mustard gas and other chemical agents against the Chinese in World War II, before the United States and other Western nations became involved, because the Chinese could not retaliate. Iran used poison gas in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988. The Iranians, fanatical followers of the Shi’a Aya-tollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were willing to use anything available in what they considered a holy war. The Iraqis, under the pragmatic and self-centered Saddam Hussein, retaliated with their own gas. That war ended in a stalemate, but Hussein then turned on the Iraqi Kurds, a minority that wanted independence, and slaughtered thousands of them with gas. The Kurds, of course, had no way to retaliate.

  Poison gas was one of the “weapons of mass destruction” Iraq was supposed to be hoarding before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002. The only gas found was one artillery shell filled with nerve gas that an Iraqi guerrilla tried to turn into a roadside bomb, apparently believing that it was filled with high explosive. The shell apparently had been scheduled to be disposed of with the rest of Saddam’s gas but got lost among the hundreds of thousands of high explosive shells that seem to be buried every couple of square miles in Iraq.

  The future use of gas is uncertain. As time goes on, the chemists are inventing ever more deadly gases — gases that kill quicker, that penetrate filters and protective gear, that kill with the merest touch. It is becoming as horrible as the other components of what the military calls CBR — chemical, biological, and radiological — warfare. Whether or not it is ever used again, it will influence the thinking and action of governments for years to come.

  Chapter 35

  Artillery Up Close and Personal: The Trench Mortar

  National Archives from Army

  U.S. troops use mortar to help establish a beachhead on the right bank of the Rhine in 1945.

  Of all the war-changing weapons, this has to be one of the most unim-pressive. It looks like a piece of plain pipe propped up on a couple of legs. And, to a large extent, that’s what it is.

  When trench warfare developed on a large scale, all armies felt a need for something that would lob explosives down into their enemy’s trenches. That was not a brand-new need, of course. Mortars, which throw shells on a high trajectory, had been among the earliest of firearms. Small mortars for close-range work had been around since the 17th century, but nobody had ever used high-trajectory weapons on the scale they were wanted in World War I. All kinds of contrivances, such as catapults, were tried. The Russians had a catapult that consisted of a pivoted wooden arm that threw hand grenades. Instead of a skein of rope, it was powered by a modern steel coil spring attached to the short lower portion of the arm.

  The Germans observed the use of small mortars during the Russo-Japanese War and began to build up their stock in preparation for the next war, which everyone in Europe assumed would happen sooner or later. By 1914, they had 2,000 Minenwerfers (mine throwers), as they called these small mortars. They came in a variety of calibers, from 3 to 9.8 inches. One type of shell had a tube at one end containing powder and a percussion cap. The tube was inserted in the short barrel of the small mortar and fired. This system allowed a small, portable gun to fire a comparatively heavy shell. Unfortunately, the shell, gy-rating end over end, wasn’t very accurate. In the 1948 Israeli war for independence, the Israelis built a similar mortar from odds and ends and called it “Little David.” Little David w
as hailed as a masterpiece of ingenuity by people who had never heard of its German prototype. Most German Minenwerfers were more complicated than Little David’s ancestor, and heavier, too. All were muzzle-loaders, but they had recoil mechanisms like the field guns. Many were rifled, with driving bands engraved to fit the rifling. Because the shells now flew point-first, they could be fitted with ordinary percussion fuses. Previously, they had time fuses or a gadget called an “all ways” fuse — a rather dangerous device that would explode the shell no matter what part struck a solid object.

  As it turned out, the 2,000 Minenwerfers were but a drop in a bucket of what was needed.

  The British came up with a much simpler gun after gas was introduced. Called a Livens projector, it was merely an unrifled steel tube with a diameter of eight inches welded to a steel base plate. Groups of 25 projectors were dug into the ground, placed at a pre-determined angle facing the German trenches. Each gun was loaded with a powder charge wired for electrical ignition and a drum of poison gas 8 inches wide and 25 inches long. All 25 guns were then fired simultaneously. The gas drums burst and the gas vaporized as soon as they landed.

  It was just a short step from the Livens projector to the next British design, the Stokes or Newton-Stokes trench mortar. Versions of the Stokes mortar were adopted by every country in the world soon after its introduction because it was light, accurate, and versatile. And above all, it was cheap and easy to make in great quantities.

  The new trench mortar was a smoothbore steel tube that rested on a separate steel base plate. The barrel was propped up on two legs, making the whole weapon a kind of tripod. On top of the legs was an elevating gear, making possible fine adjustments. Although it was a smoothbore, the mortar’s projectiles flew point-first and accurately, because they were stabilized by fins on their tails. The firing mechanism was simply a fixed firing pin at the bottom of the tube. To fire the mortar, the gunner merely dropped a shell down the muzzle and snatched his hand out of the way immediately. The shell slid down the barrel, and a powder charge, contained in what looked like a shotgun shell, struck the firing pin. The pin ignited the percussion cap on the end of the “shotgun shell” and the mortar round went sailing off to the enemy. Later, it became possible to vary the power of the propelling charge by adding increments in the form of rings of smokeless powder to the tail of the mortar shell. That gave the gunners two ways to vary the range — changing the elevation or adding increments to the propelling charge.