Of Rifles And Men


   It seemed to Lord Roberts that the fighting just outside of Belgrade was a case of an irresistible force meeting an unmovable object. Indeed, this seemed to be an apt description for the entire war. By the end of the second year of the conflict, some of the conditions that were responsible for the quagmire were slowly starting to change. Some of them for the better and others for the worse. There were all too many who did not recognize this basic fact and, unfortunately for the men in the trench’s, their military leaders were among that number.
What all too many generals, politicians, and war planners had failed to recognize from the very start of the conflict was the caliber of solider they were commanding and fighting. These men were too busy counting the caliber of their guns. It seems to have been an odd side effect of the prevailing thinking that dominated the prewar era. Science was the big game in town and applying this method of thinking to everything was the big sport of the day. The militaries of the world had gladly embraced this and it would take a new generation to temperate this completely mathematical approach to war.
This is not to say that math is wrong or useless. As the statisticians, of that day, correctly pointed out, numbers are numbers and they are inherently neutral. What they completely failed to grasp was that an equation will not adequately simulate reality if you lack some of the variables. In real world terms this means that how many rifle rounds a man can fire in a minute is irrelevant if he does not, or cannot, achieve that task. This was never more clear than in the case of the lever action battle rifles that were produced by the United States and Russia.
Lord Roberts had given up on frontal assaults on Belgrade after the first several attempts had failed to produce any positive gains. He then chose the tactic that is often favored my military men when they believe that a forward approach has failed, the flanking maneuver. More often than not, the attempt to go around enemy fire is an excuse for failure and an admission of not knowing what to do next. That is not to say that flanking is invaluable, it most certainly is as the Roman Legions first proved but, if done in an act of desperation it is anything but. This seems to be the case with Robert’s attempts to cut Belgrade off from it’s vital southern rail line that connected it to it’s Russian supply base.
General Fok had sent reinforcements to Belgrade as well as supplies but, politics got in the way of the Russian troops actively participating in the defense of the city. General Milan, who was not only running the war but, had now taken de facto control of the entire Serbian Government, was reluctant to allow the Russians to take an active part in the city’s defense. Milan had his own problems of an internal nature, in dealing with the radical patriots who were being directly financed by the Russians.
Milan was not stupid. He realized that having Russian troops in the city would make Serbia little more than a very poor province of the Russian Empire. If he let the Russians in then he would have to fight two wars. The first one against the allies, and then, a second war to get the Russians out after the bigger one was complete. This would effectively destroy Serbia, permanently, so the best way to handle the problem was to keep it from happening in the first place. In this struggle at least, time was on Milan’s side.
The Serbian General, and former King, seemed to have been one of the few military leaders who understood the human equation. The Black Hand, the Serbian radicals, were doing more than their fair share of fighting. As a result of this, they were also taking more than their fair share of casualties. Milan realized that by thinning out the heard, he was only strengthening his own hand in the post war world. Milan might have cooperated with these radicals. He might have even sympathized with their cause to a degree but, he was not one of them and well aware they could not afford to keep him around after the war.
This political situation created a new set of problems for Entente forces in the region. Milan was also slowly loosing his ability to defend the city. It might eventually come down to allowing Russians in the city proper. As Roberts moved to the south and west of Belgrade it was something of a breath of fresh air for Milan. It took direct pressure off his lines and forced the Russian reserve, camped well south of Belgrade, into action on a front that no one could deny was becoming critical.
We know a great deal about this action because of a particular individual involved. Winston Churchill had since left Kitchener’s army and had returned to England. He had the opportunity to take a seat in Parliament upon his return but, instead, he chose to stay with the army when he learned it was deploying to the continent. He was no longer acting in his official capacity as a reporter even if he did write a number of articles while serving. He also wrote extensively in his journals about this front and, this operation in particular. Churchill, at the tender young age of 25, found himself leading an entire battalion of infantry and, in particular, his unit was spearheading the flanking maneuver around the Serbian lines.
Initially, Churchill’s battalion met very little resistance. When the Russians finally showed up, in force, the British had the advantage of picking their own ground and Churchill’s men were dug in along a small series of ridge lines just south of the village of Sabac. They had plenty of warning about the advancing Russian infantry and were prepared for an assault. What happened in the initial engagements fully illustrates the monumental importance of the caliber of men over the caliber of guns. It also demonstrated the first serious crack in the national defense systems of the time and how critical this problem was going to get, despite the fact that no one at the time seemed to have noticed.
Men like Churchill, all along the front lines of the world, certainly did even though no one was listening to them. Churchill wrote that his men were on edge about facing the Russian infantry. At this point in the war the Russians were enjoying a reputation of near invincibility despite having never really earned this. To venture an opinion, I believe this had a great deal to do with the fact that they had been so seriously underestimated before the war and, when they fought with equal tenacity and skill, it was quite a shock to their opponents. Each view of the Russian fighting skill was unrealistic and, both views, seemed to be rooted in racist stereotypes of the time.
The truth of the matter was that the Russians had good, mediocre, and bad troops just like any other army. The sheer size of their army, the luck of the draw, and their national war plans had a lot to do with creating one myth after another. Their Generals seemed to be as prone to believing these myths as anyone else and, as is human nature, they picked and chose the ones they actually believed.
Fok most certainly was under some serious misconceptions about the abilities of the troops he now commanded in the west. Like many men who found themselves elevated in command, due to the war, he had been running a smaller formation, of elite troops, for years before the conflict and had failed to understand that the larger forces, that he now led, were not the same. Part of the problem was simple aesthetics. Just because a man puts on a uniform, and can be taught to stay in step with others, does not make him a professional soldier. Neither does the weapon he carries and, in the case of the Russians, this would prove to be a serious flaw.
If the Russian military had out performed it’s expectations, Russian industry did them one better. The Russians were turning out American battle rifles and French rapid fire, seventy-five millimeter, artillery pieces from their own factories. These factories had been set up by their allies but, by this time, they were being largely managed by Russians. They managed to turn out huge sums of weapons and the ammunition to go with them. They produced so much, in fact, that the Russians were equipping nearly every unit they had with these weapons which had proven to be so effective around Warsaw.
The problem was that the troops facing the Germans, in central Poland, were mostly pre-war regular soldiers. They had received more than adequate training on what were the most high tech weapons on the battlefield. As these men were slowly being killed off, their replacements were receiving less training and had almost no practical experience. Fok’s soldiers were in even worse shape in that many had been conscripted and had as little as a few weeks training before they were deployed. While working a lever that loaded bullets might seem simple to many of us today, that has a great deal to do with the fact that we have the benefit of war movies, books, magazines, and the fact that this technology is now over a century old.
The British troops that encountered the first waves of the Russian attack slaughtered entire regiments of troops that simply vanished in a hail of fire. Churchill’s comments about what his scouts found after the fighting was very telling. They recovered many Russian copies of the Winchester battle rifles. Nearly one in three had never been loaded while even the ones that had ammunition in their magazines, had not been fired. Churchill described enemy artillery fire as having been “weak and wildly inaccurate.”
The Winchester and the Colt Battle rifles had performed well enough in the hands of American, Boer, and the regular troops of the Russian Army. These weapons had initially been used in the fighting in Missouri some three decades before the war. The weapons of this war were some four generations removed from the prototypes and had many changes from the earlier weapons.  Despite the improvements, some of the serious flaws in the weapons had not been rooted out by 1900.
Most of these flaws were taken care of by adequate training and good sergeants. The rifles were made with a high degree of precision that would cause a German clock maker to be envious. While this might sound like a good thing and, from an engineering standpoint it does show true craftsmanship, it was not a desirable quality in field service. Taking the weapon apart to clean it in battlefield conditions was difficult. Putting it back together was even more so and, this rifle required that a soldier do that almost constantly and, particularly, in a muddy trench.
The other serious flaw was not so much in the weapon itself. The entire concept behind it was just simply too ahead of it’s time. Conventional thinking of the day was leaning towards the ability of the average foot soldier to shoot accurately at a much further range. Sights on more conventional bolt action rifles speak volumes to this. The flip up sights on most could be adjusted for targets out to 1100 meters. With the exception of a few specialty rifles, the American weapons had fixed sights and were generally only accurate out to 500 meters. These weapons were designed to produce large volumes of fire over accuracy.
Unfortunately, the US Army, the main advocate of their rather unique small arms, completely ignored their engineers and theoreticians who would later be proven correct. At the start of the war the US Army was still stressing exactly what everyone else was, long range accuracy over high volumes of fire. After a few firefights, American troops would learn to ignore their training and began spitting out as much lead as they could but, due to the deficiencies in their training, it would take them a while to develop tactics that complimented this ability. As of 1900 none had yet to appear.
These problems were only compounded by the problems faced in the Russian Army. The average American was at least somewhat familiar with the concepts that went into their battle rifles. Most Russians, particularly those from rural areas, were not. Many of their conscripts had never held a rifle in their life. A good number of them had never even seen one. Of those that had, the weapons they were familiar with ranged from muzzle loading weapons, still used for hunting in Russia, to simple target rifles that had to be loaded one round at a time. Neither of these looked, or functioned, anything like the American weapons that they were now being thrown into war with.
Many Russians would die because they had no idea that the box that was mounted underneath the chamber was a magazine for holding ammunition. Churchill’s men found weapons that had cigarettes stored there. Some weapons, that had been fired, were obviously manually fed because the packing cloth was still in the magazine well. This was despite the fact that the dead Russian soldiers were all fully loaded down with ammunition in their pouches and pockets. In fact, it seemed as if they had more ammunition than their British enemies. An obvious case where simple numbers did them no good at all.
Due to the inequality of the soldiers and the lack of attention paid to this fact by the Generals commanding them, the British were able to successfully threaten the supply lines that fed Belgrade. It was certainly not the only factor that Milan was facing but, it would soon become a critical one. He would slowly begin evacuating the city with plans to fall back on Skopje, in upper Macedonia. Milan delayed this for as long as he could because he understood the political consequences. From that location he would be completely sub servant to Fok and the Russians. It was a political nightmare but, militarily, the day when he had no choice in the matter was rapidly approaching.