Frank W. Sweet
EVOLUTION OF INFANTRY ASSAULT TACTICS 1850-1918
Thu Jul 26 14:04:25 2001


Hi. I am the fellow who wrote the paper on infantry assault tactics. Jim Martin sent me an email that he posted a link to my paper in this forum. I am glad that you guys enjoyed what started life as a college term paper. Since then, it has gradually metamorphosed into a booklet that is now available on Amazon.com. For your information, I also wrote a companion booklet, titled _The Evolution of Indirect Fire_, which covers how field artillery came to switch from direct to indirect fire as the norm. If you are interested, just do a search on Amazon.com for my name (Frank W. Sweet) as author.

Regarding infantry tactics, there was another example of embryonic fire-and-maneuver in the Civil War, not mentioned in my paper. At the 20 February 1864 battle of Olustee, Florida, a Union army of 5,000 under U.S.A. Gen. Truman Seymour was badly beaten by a same-sized Confederate army under C.S.A. Gen. Joe Finegan. Seymour then decided to sacrifice the 54th Massachusetts in order to save the rest of his army. He ordered the 400-man 54th (along with a support company of First New York Engineers) to delay the victorious rebels until the Union army could retreat to Jacksonville. The Massachusetts Blacks retreated by a form of bounding overwatch. Half held their ground and stopped the advancing enemy with withering rifle fire, while the rest ran to covered positions in the rear. Then, when the second group signaled that they were ready, the two groups would swap roles, leap-frogging back another hundred meters or so. Mile after mile. Instead of being sacrificed, the 54th marched into Jacksonville, heads held high, after inflicting paralyzing losses on ten times their number of Confederates, losing only thirteen men killed and eight captured. The captured died in Andersonville. I did not mention this in my paper because the documentary evidence for bounding overwatch at Olustee is not as unambiguous as, say, Morgan L. Smith's brigade at Fort Donelson on 15 February 1862.

Regarding the original question, I think the likelihood of adoption of modern tactics by officers of the time is remote. Fire and maneuver leapfrogging works only for small units controlled by junior officers or NCOs. The notion of delegating independent authority to small units would probably have been inconceivable to Americans back then. I suspect that the 54th pulled it off at Olustee because Blacks could not become officers until later. Hence, by February 1864, the 54th had temporarily accumulated some extremely talented NCOs.

Finally, two points make it seem unlikely that widespread adoption of modern tactics would have made a significant difference in overall deaths (even if the informal Grant-Sherman school for officers could have produced a cadre of leaders trained thus). First, as we all know, most deaths were from disease, not combat. Second, the Confederacy was not about to quit until it was utterly smashed. If battles had been less bloody, it seems likely that there would simply have been more of them, or they would have lasted longer with shorter respites, or the war itself might have dragged on. In other words, the price of surrender may have been three hundred thousand southern men’s lives, one way or another.

Regards,
Frank W. Sweet