Snippets on infantry minor tactics, 1919 to now

[John D Salt]

Some while ago, Mr. Picky threatened to bore you all with selected extracts from a 1919 infantry training document which my pal Phil Tomaselli dug out of the IWM while doing some research on Malaya in the 1930s. The document impressed me by the clear writing, clear thinking, and excellent tactics it contained. Some while ago the British Army Review referred to the British Army of 1918 as “The Once and Future Army”, and suggested that it had got a lot of minor tactics right in a way that would still hold up very well a century later. Reading this document confirmed that view for me. The system of tactics espoused emphasises junior leadership, fire and movement, the importance of automatic weapons, “soft-spot” tactics, and the importance of flanking and surprise. It seems a considerably better document than the 1950s version of “Infantry Platoon and Section Leading” that I partly learned my minor tactics from in the 1970s, although of course the supporting arms are rather less complicated.

The bits quoted below are verbatim extracts from the original. I hope they might help rules writers concentrate on the vital elements of infantry platoon and company minor tactics, and not just for WW1, as I think the same tactics would hold good today. Or you might like to print out the extracts and put them in fortune cookies, I don’t know. One thing that I would quite like to embody as a game mechanism is the way it suggests allocating tasks to sections and platoons by nominating them as “assault” (in the attack) or “piquet” (in the defence), “support”, or “reserve”. So a company (using the square organisation of the time) attacking two up might have two assault platoons, one support, and one reserve; and each assault platoon in turn perhaps two assault sections, one support, and one reserve.

Anyhow, deep breath, here goes:

Leadership

“The Platoon Commander came to his own in the Great War. On the vast battle-fronts in France and Belgium the leader of the small, self-contained fighting unit was proved to be the indispensable factor in victory.”

“A body of men becomes a fighting force when it works to the will and purpose of its commander. The number of men who can respond to the direct orders of one commander is limited.”

“The section consists of a leader and six men, which is, generally speaking, as large a number of men as can effectively handle their weapons under the direction of one commander in the fight.”

Winning

“The battle is only won when the enemy’s forces are destroyed, when his troops are killed or captured. The main task of every platoon is to kill or capture the enemy confronting it. This is the simple rule of war.”

“The virtue most to be cultivated in war is energy. Folded hands and fatalism bring certain failure. To do nothing is to do something definitely wrong.”

“(i) Infantry is the arm which, in the end, wins battles. Artillery, cavalry, aircraft, machine guns, tanks and mortars are valuable and necessary allies. Neither separately nor together can they by themselves defeat the enemy. Infantry alone can seize and hold a position.
(ii) The distinctive task of the infantry is the assault. Its whole ambition must be to close with the enemy’s infantry and to destroy it by killing or by capture.
(iii) The secret of victory is successful movement by the infantry. Infantry cannot move in face of unsubdued hostile fire.
(iv) While the infantry advances our fire must subdue the enemy’s fire by forcing him to take cover. Artillery, aircraft, machine guns and tanks are designed to help in this task. The fire of the infantry itself is the one form of covering fire which the infantry can never lack.”

Firepower

“The bullet will kill or drive the enemy to cover but cannot drive him from it. The bullet covers the advance of the bayonet and the bayonet completes the work of the bullet.”

“Frontal fire seldom pays; flanking fire pays well; surprise fire pays best.”

“The Lewis gun eats up ammunition. As long as it is in action the difficulty of ammunition supply will be its main limitation.”

“The bullet can be relied on to kill the enemy or to drive him to cover, but not to dislodge him from it. For this purpose the rifle bomb and the hand-bomb have added to the armoury of the platoon.”

“The hand-bomb plays but a small part in the battle until the assault has succeeded. It may then be required to complete success if parties of the enemy in the captured position still hold out in dug-outs, cellars, &c. Bombs should rarely be resorted to for any purpose other than this. A man can only throw a bomb a short distance. Bursting in the open it is as dangerous to our troops as to the enemy.”

“Intelligent use of ground is essential for the success of the infantry’s task, which is the destruction at close quarters of the enemy’s infantry with the minimum loss to itself.
Loss in crossing ground under hostile fire can be reduced in two ways:–
(i) By concealment of movement.
(ii) By rapidity of movement.”

“If artillery is giving covering fire in the shape of a barrage the platoon must follow the barrage as closely as possible. The shrapnel shells should be bursting above the heads of our advancing troops so that they may rush upon the enemy before he can recover from the effects of our shelling. It is better to risk a few casualties from our own fire than to suffer a large number from the enemy’s.”

Organization

“So long as one member of a section remains effective it will retain its identity. Only if less than three other ranks are available for duty, may it be attached temporarily to another section of the same platoon.”

“2. The tasks allotted to infantry in the attack are:–
(i) To destroy the enemy confronting it and capture a definite objective or succession of objectives.
(ii) To clear the enemy from the ground between the line of departure for the attack and the objective.
(iii) To dispose itself over the ground captured in such a way that it will be ready to beat off a counter-attack or to renew the advance if ordered.
Normally a battalion will be set all of the above tasks and its commander will distribute them to his companies. A company may be required to act:–
(i) In the assault itself.
(ii) In support of the assault.
(iii) In battalion reserve – that is to say, ready for the unexpected event which usually occurs.
Similarly within the company the commander will dispose his platoons as platoons in the assault, in close support or in company reserve. This involves disposition “in depth”. The object is to carry out the assault with the smallest number of units necessary to capture the objective while keeping in hand the largest number of units ready to confirm or follow up success or to counteract failure. In this way the commander of a company or a battalion is able to keep control of fresh troops, and of the sector of the battlefield which concerns him, until a late stage of the fight. Troops taking part in the assault can rarely be diverted to other than their allotted tasks. They are committed to their röle. The unexpected will arise in battle, and every commander should start with a unit or units retained under his control to deal with new situations.”

“When helping a platoon which is checked it is usually better not to reinforce it. Unless fresh measures are taken, hostile fire may stop two platoons as easily as one. Direct reinforcements may merely double the casualties. It is better to bring help from a flank. The surest method of helping a neighbour in battle is to push vigorously forward. In exposing its own flank by so doing, the platoon automatically exposes the flank of the enemy at the same time.”

All the best,

John.

[Whirlwind]

That is all very clear and very workable – great stuff, thanks very much for sharing. Did it say any more about how the rifle bomb should be employed?

Incidentally, do you know what the doctrinal chain of thought was which led to the adoption of the 2″ mortar?

[Guy Farrish]

Good stuff John, thanks for posting this.

Now someone needs to write a set of rules where ‘the unexpected event which usually occurs.’ can happen so that ‘every commander should start with a unit or units retained under his control to deal with new situations.’ and be suitably rewarded. Often harbouring a reserve simply means losing a chunk of firepower in a game where having everything in the shop window pays dividends.

Generating those situations is difficult without an umpire and hidden movement. Cards often produce friction but does the type of friction bear any relation to the situations you keep a reserve for, and can the reserve react to them? Too often card system friction seems to throw random embuggerance in – which may happen as well – but seldom rewards the maintenance of an uninvolved reserve to counter such situations.

[Hardly the stuff one might expect in the Blackadder school of infantry tactics. Lord Melchett would be spinning in his chateau! It’s almost as if the British Army might have won the Great War!]

 

[John D Salt]

Whirlwind wrote:

Did it say any more about how the rifle bomb should be employed?

“During the advance the rifle-bomb will be used to kill or turn the enemy out of cover (from trenches, shell-holes, behind walls, &c.), or to supply covering fire over the heads of advancing sections and force the enemy to ground. Generally, concentrations of rifle-bombs fired at targets of special importance, e.g., a hostile machine gun, will have the best results. Smoke rifle-bombs used in the same way will be useful for blinding hostile machine guns or points of resistance. The note in the preceding paragraph on the supply of ammunition applies even more forcefully in the case of the rifle-bomb.”

Whirlwind wrote:

Incidentally, do you know what the doctrinal chain of thought was which led to the adoption of the 2″ mortar?

You’d think I should know that, but I don’t. I’m not sure the British Army was enormously good at doctrinal chains of thought before the 1980s when FM Brammall decided that “doctrine” shouldn’t be something only foreign armies had. When the 2-in mortar was adopted, too, recall that we did not even have a School of Infantry.

The French, Poles, Germans, Belgians, Spanish, Italians and Russians all developed their own 50mm-ish light mortars during the 1930s, the Japanese having done so in the late 1920s. Unlike 81mm mortars, where the Stokes-Brandt pattern was the only game in town, there was little similarity in design. Most of these tiny mortars were intended to provide organic HE for the rifle platoon, replacing grenade launchers. The Russians put a bipod on theirs and made it a company weapon, so more like the French or American 60mm mortar in role. The Italians put a folding seat/chest pad/carrying pad on their 45mm that gave it the appearance of a small rowing machine, and assigned wads of them at battalion level in a way that suggests to me that their doctrine blokes had consumed just as many drunken lobster lunches as their weapon designers. From this variety the British managed by good luck or good judgement to select the most efficient design, the Esperanza Valera 50mm mortar of 1932, which, suitably adapted, went on to enjoy a successful career as the 2-in mortar, and lasted long enough for me to have carried one on exercise in the early 1980s.

But you already know all that if you’ve read “100 Years of Tiny Mortars”.

If anyone knows anything about the doctrinal thinking that went on at the time, please chip in. A squizz at the National Archive catalogue reveals nothing of interest.

All the best,

John.

[MartinR]

Great stuff John as ever. As Guy points out, most rules penalise the maintenance of a reserve, or even the concept of spreading out. The only rules I’ve ever come across which manage to model either effectively are Crossfire, and to a lesser extent, Squad Leader.

 

 

"Mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified" - Helmuth von Moltke

[Jim Webster]

fascinating stuff

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[Etranger]

“The section consists of a leader and six men, which is, generally speaking, as large a number of men as can effectively handle their weapons under the direction of one commander in the fight.”

Thinking back historically that ratio of ‘leaders’ to ‘men’ has been fairly constant. right back to antiquity – eg an 8 deep file of pikemen in a phalanx, a ‘lance’ of 4-6 men at arms, archers etc &  down to USMC fireteams.

John (and others), do you think that the advent of modern communications and monitoring (eg drones, personal radios, body cameras etc) has made any difference to this, or is C & C at small unit level always going to be dependent on a similar ratio?

[Guy Farrish]

British Sections/NATO and US squads have varied from around that 6+ leader to c16.

12 ish seems to be a number that works for the amount of close personal relationships in a group that is easy to maintain and produce useful interaction (many sports teams, focus groups, apostles as well as small military units).

I can’t see modern comms increasing this too much – much depends on bonds built up before combat as much as tactical interaction. Improved personal comms can tend towards micromanaging and information overload as well as increased situational awareness. So I suspect (lets do lots of experiments in field conditions) that there is a human cognitive limiting factor in there as well as tech capability for small unit leadership.

[Jim Webster]

I suspect that over history, the improvement in communications just allowed the same small group of men to spread over a larger area 🙂

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[John D Salt]

Etranger wrote:

John (and others), do you think that the advent of modern communications and monitoring (eg drones, personal radios, body cameras etc) has made any difference to this, or is C & C at small unit level always going to be dependent on a similar ratio?

I shall try not to say anything that will heighten by blood pressure unduly, or get me arrested for breaking laws about defamation or official secrets, but I have been involved, intermittently and peripherally, with the British defence procurement establishment’s efforts on “digitization” since the end of the last millenium. A sorry story it is, like so many in defence procurement. One of the numerous unfulfilled ambitions of digitization was to enable flatter command structures. A similar aspiration had been current in the civilian world of Management Information Systems (full of appropriately-named MIS-managers), also with no very clear explanation of why this was supposed to be a good thing. As an old-fashioned hippie and Discordian I am of course quite happy with the idea of non-hierarchical organisation, but I would like to see a clearly-explained benefits chain before deciding it’s a good way to fight a war. As often happens in a defence procurement system focused on The Equipment Programme, a lot of work was done poking about with various technological devices, which contractors were eager to sell, and there was not much thinking about the essentials of command and control. A lot of work purportedly studying command, control and communications quickly degringolated to just communications, because command is a human function and hard to characterise, control entails complex behaviour of dynamic systems, and communications is just shovelling bits from one place to another, so vastly easier to model. There were a few very knowledgeable and intelligent people dotted about various research establishments who knew better than this, but as it took a bit of hard thinking to keep up with them, they were largely ignored by management. It was was convenient to assume that information was a magical fluid that enchanted all it touched. Endless expensive consultant hours were wasted compiling shopping lists of imaginary things called “Information Exchange Requirements”, the more the merrier. The insight gained into how command works was about what one would expect from the exercise of compiling a shopping list.

This is not to say that technology can’t make a difference to the way sections and platoons are commanded. When I was in Exeter UOTC I witnessed the introduction of the Clansman radio system, and an infantry platoon went from having one (huge, unreliable) manpack rear link radio set to having a radio in each fireteam, plus the rear link for a total of nine. Having each official leader (officer or NCO) able to talk to all the others on a radio that actually worked made a massive difference once everybody got used to it. Instead of communicating between sections and fireteams by hand-signals and shouting, people could talk. On exercise platoon attacks went in faster, harder, and looser, as the teams could spread themselves out more to make better use of the terrain. A 1970s US Army study concluded that more than one radio per squad was too many, as leaders spent too long being signallers and not long enough being leaders, but I think the ease of use of Clansman meant that it wasn’t a problem in the 1980s. Of course nowadays a device will offer much richer opportunities for futzing, and a lance corporal will be able to play Angry Birds instead of leading their brick if they want to.

Guy Farrish wrote:

12 ish seems to be a number that works for the amount of close personal relationships in a group that is easy to maintain and produce useful interaction (many sports teams, focus groups, apostles as well as small military units).

…or the old guideline for the number of guests at a dinner-party, no fewer than the graces and no more than the muses.

Guy Farrish wrote:

I can’t see modern comms increasing this too much – much depends on bonds built up before combat as much as tactical interaction. Improved personal comms can tend towards micromanaging and information overload as well as increased situational awareness. So I suspect (lets do lots of experiments in field conditions) that there is a human cognitive limiting factor in there as well as tech capability for small unit leadership.

I don’t think we ever found much evidence for the much-bruited “increased situational awareness”, but on the last point, correctly correctington. Professor Robin Dunbar has shown that there is a cognitive limit on the number of social connections we can maintain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number The Dunbar Number corresponds to a company-sized subunit, but Dunbar also says that people give about 40 percent of their available social time to a group of about 5 people (fireteam) and 20 per cent to another 10 people (section).

As a Discordian, I was of course enchanted to discover from Peter Watson’s “War on the Mind” that 5 is the most psychologically stable group size. The section size is a good deal smaller in the 1919 pamphlet than became fashionable later; when I was in, 6 was regarded as a minimum section strength, rather than a maximum. I suspect that larger sections develop internal subdivision into teams/Trupps/bricks.

Another point I found interesting is that the pamphlet stresses the need to keep groups together, rather than switching people around like line-replaceable carbon units. The writers clearly understood the importance of those “bonds built up before combat”.

All the best,

John.

[Whirlwind]

Very interesting, John. Had to smile at the ‘defence digitization’ story… Also very interesting about five being the most stable group size, psychologically. Nothing I have ever seen leads me to believe that is wrong, especially the implication that groups larger than that tend to break up into smaller.

 

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