PART 5 - RAILROADS & TRANSPORT

By Michael Collie

After changes in weaponry and the so-called tactical revolution, advances in transportation and communication are next in importance in the modern/total war thesis. In fact, numerous technological firsts really pre-dated the Civil War. The earliest known military rail movement occurred in 1846 when the Russians moved a corps of 14,500 men with horses and transport 200 miles from Hradisch to Cracow, Poland, in two days by rail.¹ In 1848 the Austrians were able to move a corps of 12,000 men with horses, guns etc. 156 miles to Cracow.² In 1850, the Austrians moved by rail some 75,000 men from Hungary and Vienna to Bohemia, which helped to bring a Prussian capitulation at Olmutz.³ In the Crimea the British laid down a railroad line between Balaklava and the heights of Sevastopol which could be used to bring up siege equipment and remove the wounded.⁴ In the spring of 1855, the Turks brought workman from the ends of the Ottoman Empire to construct a railway from Balaklava to the plain before Sevastopol.⁵ When the Russians completed the line from Balaklava to Kadikoi, steam-powered trains were then used for ferrying supplies and carrying out the wounded. Paris was connected directly to Marseilles by rail to enable the rapid transit of troops to the Crimea.⁶

Count Cavcour launched the Italian program of railway construction for Piedmont long before the 1859 campaign against the Austrians. In Europe as a whole the pattern of military railway development was well underway before 1860.⁷ In June 1859, the first extensive rail troop movements brought French and Austrian troops to the battlefield of Solferino.⁸ The Italian campaign of 1859 saw the French and Hapsburg Empires, using railways, move troops into Italy within a fortnight, while it would have taken sixty days to march over the same distance.⁹ Operations in Italy in 1859 saw the French move 227,649 men and 36,357 horses from deep in France into the theater of Peidmont.10 Railways further had a decisive effect when France’s ability to muster 200,000 troops on the Rhine within a few days, versus the Prussian time of a few weeks, kept the Prussians out of the 1859 Italian war.¹¹

Other civil war “firsts” are shown by Royle to have been used in the Crimea. Theses include field hospitals, the electric telegraph, and improved semaphore signaling. The Crimean War set Americans the example of how railroads could be used to transfer wounded and move supplies.¹²

van Creveld’s analysis is that the Prussian logistics and ammunition supply movements in the campaign of 1870 can not be regarded as modern.¹³ These early developments in military railroads were overshadowed by the scale of 20th century movements. By 1914, the scale of military rail operations became enormous. As described by Tuchman, “one army corps alone – out of the total of 40 in the German forces – required a total of 170 railway cars for officers, 965 for infantry, 2,960 for cavalry, 1,915 for artillery and supply wagons, 6,010 in all, grouped in 140 trains and an equal number again for their supplies.”¹⁴

The first extensive photographic coverage of war was by Roger Fenton, one of the founders of the Photographic Society of London. He was commissioned to take photographs of the Crimean War. He fitted out his own photo-darkroom wagon that housed his equipment, plates, chemicals, and rations. He arrived at Balaklava in March 1855. Many of his photos were taken under fire. He made some 300 negatives during his five months covering the war. Many of his images were exhibited in London and Paris and printed in The Illustrated London News. Although several of his frames are reveling, many were sanitized because he believed the public would not tolerate the grim images of war. Another Englishman, James Robertson, photographed the fall of Sevastopol in 1855. Later he accompanied the British force sent to put down the Bengal-Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. In 1858, he photographed the ruins of the siege of Lucknow. Felice Beato photographed the fall of Tientsin, China, in August 1860 at the end of the Opium Wars. His photos were made just hours after the fighting had ended and showed corpses and wreckage in the aftermath of the siege.¹⁵

NOTES PART 5
PART 2 - TACTICS
PART 3 - ENTRENCHMENTS
PART 4 - BOER TACTICS
PART 5 - RAILROADS
PART 6 - CIVILIAN VIOLENCE
PART 7 - DRAFT
List of figures and tables
WORKS CITED
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