Infantry

Foot soldier, dogface, grunt: These appellations, along with many others in many languages, have been used to label the infantryman, that ubiquitous soldier who has provided the backbone of armies through the ages and who has shed more than his share of blood on the battlefield, much of it in hand-to-hand combat. Not so dashing nor romantic perhaps as some of the other military arms, infantry from the beginning has performed the task of taking and holding ground. Though weapons and tactics may have evolved dramatically, that task is still primary to infantry today, should the war in question be total or low intensity.

Phalanxes and Legions

The Greeks and the Romans were among the first to bring unity, coherence, and maneuverability to their armies. About 650 b.c.e., the Greeks developed the phalanx, a formation of infantry massed shoulder to shoulder that moved into battle with a formidable shield in the left hand, a spear in the right, and a sword at the side. When phalanxes of respective Greek city-states clashed, as they often did, the result was a tremendous struggle of pushing and shoving that lasted until one side gave way and retreated. While these were bloody enough affairs, the primary goal was not so much to destroy the enemy as to drive him from the field. The phalanx reached its peak with Philip II, the leader of the Macedonians. Introducing larger intervals between soldiers, he reduced the pushing and shoving and allowed for greater maneuverability, particularly in running charges. Philip II also made use of cavalry in coordination with the phalanx.

Rome, with the legion as its basic organization and training and discipline as its guidelines, developed one of the great armies of the world. Numbering approximately 5,000, a legion was made up primarily of infantry. Much like those of the Greek phalanx, the infantry of the legion were armed with a large shield, a javelin-like weapon seven feet long, and a short sword. The javelin was designed so that when it was thrown, it would break off in an enemy’s shield, making the shield virtually useless. Using a checkerboard formation that allowed troops to move both up and back through twenty-yard intervals, the legion could withdraw or advance forces between lines as necessary. Such legions enabled Rome to conquer nearly all the known Western world and to maintain an empire yet to be matched.

The Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, the centers of power were no longer great cities such as Athens, Rome, or Constantinople. Power was dispersed among kings and nobles who owned most of the land and who defended themselves in their castles, leaving little room for the freeman in society and for the infantry in the military. The Battle of Hastings in 1066 spelled the doom of infantry when Duke William’s Norman army led by cavalry defeated King Harold’s Saxon army of infantry. Castle and cavalry dominated the kind of war carried out in the feudal period, with feudalistic knights in shining armor echoing the warfare of Homer’s Iliad (c. 800 b.c.e.; English translation, 1616). However, history soon took another turn with the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).

Although the Battle of Crécy (1346) marked a comeback of infantry, as dismounted English soldiers formed solid phalanxes that the French cavalry could not penetrate, the Swiss were the most instrumental in the revival of infantry. Relying on the same kind of patriotism, discipline, and training that made the Roman legions so formidable a foe, the Swiss, armed with their incomparable twenty-one foot pikes, ignored line formations and went directly from columns into battle to become the most feared and respected infantry in Europe by the middle of the fifteenth century.

The advent of gunpowder provided infantry with a powerful new weapon, but it also demanded new kinds of training and formations to protect soldiers in the open as they stopped to reload their weapons. The Spanish developed a solid formation of several ranks in which the front rank would fire and then step back to reload while the second rank moved up to fire. This formation dominated throughout Western Europe during the sixteenth century until Gustavus II Adolphus developed linear formations that increased both firepower and rate of fire. He also used cavalry and artillery scattered through these infantry lines, thus setting the stage for tactics to be used in World War I (1914–1918).

The Prussian System

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) necessitated larger, more expensive armies. Because of improvements in firearms and artillery, it also provided a significant incentive to change how warfare was carried out. The Prussians were the first to react by instituting standard cadence drills for their infantry in 1714. Locking ranks and marching in step at a prescribed number of paces per minute made maneuvering easier, while a manual of arms that reduced motions necessary for loading, pointing, and firing greatly increased the rate of fire.

The basic infantry formation of the period, attacking or defending, was an advance guard, whose function was to hold the enemy as necessary, followed by the main body and a reserve. The numerical distribution of troops and the intervals between the three groups depended upon terrain and specific battle plans. Because of fatigue and supply problems, war on land was still of relatively short duration and distance. Infantrymen had to walk to battle and, like all soldiers, had to eat at least once a day. Given the other things they were burdened with, they could not carry much more than a week’s supply of food. Thus, twenty miles per day was about the maximum distance an army could cover—the same distance as in Roman times.

Napoleonic Wars

The armies of Napoleon I’s time (1769–1821) were made up primarily of infantry. Napoleon himself stressed the importance of infantry, cavalry, and artillery working together in battle. His basic strategy was simple enough: Keep the corps close so that they can be concentrated quickly, do not divide forces in the presence of the enemy, and maneuver to achieve greater numbers on the battlefield than the enemy. A typical battle plan began with an artillery bombardment, after which the infantry would deploy quickly from columns to battle lines and set up rapid volley firing from smooth-bore muskets.

Napoleon’s infantry battalions went into battle with eight companies in a closed column, two companies wide and four deep, with a ninth company in reserve. After the first volley and the following rapid fire, the battlefield became permeated with smoke that exacerbated the already poor accuracy of the smooth-bore muskets. As the battle progressed and the smoke increased, both troops and their leaders had little, if any, idea of where they or the enemy were. Still, the infantry usually decided the battle—also usually suffering the most casualties. Although the muskets of the period were fitted with bayonets, and although the infantrymen were trained in the use of the bayonet, in actuality bayonet battles were few. Not so much the gleam of steel but the gleam in the enemy’s eye was usually enough to make one side retreat, not only in this period, but in all subsequent periods.

The Latter Nineteenth Century

A number of technical advances in firearms in the last half of the nineteenth century had a great impact on all military arms, but on infantry most of all. In earlier times, the fire of muskets went over the heads of many infantrymen because of the necessity of having to aim upward in order to achieve a greater range. The advent of the conoidal bullet and rifled barrels increased the range of small arms to more than 1,200 yards. Even more important, the conoidal bullet could strike anything in its path for 600 yards, thus greatly increasing the danger zone for all but the shortest infantrymen. This kind of effectiveness also helped fire from infantry to reach artillery positions that in the past were relatively safe from small-arms fire.

Smokeless powder was another advance that changed the way infantry operated. It was no longer possible to locate the source of fire by smoke, and no longer was smoke an obstacle for the marksman in volley firing. A more insidious advance in firearms was Richard Jordan Gatling’s machine gun in 1862. Used in only a limited scale in the American Civil War (1861–1865) , it was to lead to the deadly machine gun play of the wars of the twentieth century.

Three wars of the latter nineteenth century illustrated graphically the effects on infantry of the above technological advances in warfare: the American Civil War, the Crimean War (1853–1856), and the Boer War (1880–1901). Military leaders were slow to realize that the patterns of warfare of their experience were, like old soldiers, fading away. One person who did realize what was happening was Jan Bloch, a Polish-Russian business man who wrote a multivolume work Budushchaia voina (1898; The Future of War in Its Technical, Economic, and Political Relations: Is War Now Possible?, 1899), in which he predicted that war would become impossible because of the tremendous cost in money and lives that would result from technological advances such as those mentioned above. Defenders, he theorized, would have an overwhelming advantage over attackers, and wars of static and draining entrenchments would be the norm, wars that would finally end in stalemate. Others who may have had some inkling of Bloch’s theory, but had no forum in which to expound it, were the thousands of infantrymen who were firsthand witnesses to the horrific possibilities that were rapidly becoming probabilities in warfare.

World Wars I and II

World War I was the kind of war predicted by Bloch, a stalemate of trench warfare with neither side able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion until the economic and military power of the United States was brought into the conflict on the Allied side. Truly a war of attrition, for the infantry it was hell indeed, with little glory and a great deal of slaughter. Tactics were simple enough: Send infantry “over the top” with a rifle and a few grenades day after day into an inhuman meat grinder of fire from machine guns, rifles, and artillery, hoping to gain a few square yards of ground of a literal no-man’s-land.

World War II (1939–1945) was not an “over the top” war, and if there was a no-man’s-land, it was one of square miles rather than square yards. Much more dispersed than ever before, the infantry played a major role, from the German Blitzkrieg to the massive battles on the eastern front to the amphibious landings at Normandy and in the Pacific. Mechanization and the necessary close coordination among various arms changed that role to a more flexible one of movement and maneuver. The order of attack in most land battles was generally bombers, artillery, tanks, infantry, though infantry did, on occasion, move into battle behind enemy lines from gliders or by parachutes. Weapons used by infantry in World War II included rifles, light machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars, flame throwers, and land mines, all of which added up to an increased degree of lethality.

The Twenty-first Century

Warfare in general has changed in many ways during the past few decades and will continue to change, affecting all military arms in the process. The state of infantry at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not all that different from the past. More sophisticated and powerful weapons allow smaller groups of infantry to carry out some missions that once required whole divisions. The electronic revolution may require and permit more dispersive and rapid ground tactics—and may require a higher level of education and training. Still, infantry’s role remains constant: the taking and holding of ground, even if that ground be covered by the rubble of nuclear destruction.

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