Like many of you I watch a lot of war movies. Can’t help it, I’ve been surrounded by the military since I was two years old, and am drawn to the drama, courage, heartbreak, and just humanity of these stories. And truth being stranger than fiction, Hollywood can’t hold a candle to the happenings of real life! Yet there are some common tropes that producers love and make their way into our stories. The use of fire on the battlefield and incredibly ripped abs, for starters, but also more subtle things such as exotic and intimidating weaponry.
I’ve always been particularly interested in the development and use of the bayonet as a weapon of war. Think about it, firing artillery at an unseen enemy is one thing, shooting at a distant target you can see, something else, but crossing a field full of deadly flying metal to close with and engage the enemy at the tip of a bayonet is … well … there’s a reason why it’s rarely done.
The bayonet was invented sometime in the 16th Century though its first documented use comes in a Chinese treatise published in 1606. Up until its invention, however, arquebusiers firing slow-loading and weather-sensitive matchlock weapons, had to be protected against enemy infantry and fast-moving cavalry. This led to several tactical innovations such as the Spanish tercio and, later, the smaller battalions of Maurice of Nassau, which combined the firepower of these nascent guns with the defensive capability of massed pikes. Both of these formations allowed gunners to reload in relative safety knowing that pikemen were close at hand to protect them from a sudden enemy charge.
The length of time required to load a firearm was seen as its greatest weakness. Something had to be done to render a gunner capable of defending himself once his chamber was empty or, worse, he’d run out of ammunition. As well, something so simple as a sudden rain shower caused burning matches to sputter and ruined gunpowder, at times rendering the early firearms virtually harmless.
Enter the bayonet, seen as making use of the length of the firearm itself to boost the range at which a soldier’s blade could be employed against the enemy. Early bayonets were all of the same design, securely fitting directly into the barrel. Called a plug-type bayonet, it certainly served its purpose, but rendered any weapon so modified incapable of firing until the blade could be extracted. This was hardly an ideal solution, but it did allow gunners to morph into pseudo-pikemen once per battle, offering a bit more tactical flexibility for the musketeers.
In the 17th Century, the plug type began to be superseded by the socket bayonet. In this version, the blade—often cast with a pyramid-shaped cross-section to increase durability—was connected to the firearm by means of a metal ring or socket that fit over the end of the barrel. This allowed the weapon to still be fired with the bayonet fixed, though the added weight played havoc with attempts to aim the already heavy musket. More to the point, when no longer needed it could be easily removed mid-battle.
Socket bayonets became the gold standard and spawned a whole range of shapes and sizes to include the simple spike bayonet and the aptly-named sword bayonet. The latter including a handle and being long enough to be useful as a short sword in addition to its functionality while attached to the muzzle of a firearm.
All the same, with the introduction of socket bayonets, the infantryman’s landscape changed drastically. No longer did the gunner require protection by pikemen, and the latter, slow-moving and difficult to maneuver, slowly disappeared from the battlefield. A formation of muzzle-loading musketeers, if properly trained, could now function as both ranged and close combat fighters, firing from a distance and, when necessary, defending or even charging at the point of a bayonet. This, in time, further affected infantry tactics and both the square formation and Napoleon’s Ordre Mixte were developed to take advantage of this newfound combination of fire and steel.
The Napoleonic Wars would make great use of the bayonet as well as these new formations, as massive armies tramped from Spain to Russia, loading, firing, and charging with their dual-purpose weapon systems. In time, the combination of massed fire and tightly-packed formations of bayonet-armed muskets, would all but run cavalry off the European military stage. Cavalry formations would continue to fulfill critical reconnaissance and screening missions, be cast against enemy horsemen, or otherwise held in reserve to pursue a fleeing foe. But no longer did cavalry successfully charge formed infantry.
The bayonet charge remained the finishing tool of every infantry commander until the coming of the U.S. Civil War. The slow rate of fire and relative inaccuracy of early firearms meant they could only really be employed firing en masse. By the 1860s, however, the invention of the French Minie Ball—really the first modern bullet—added accuracy and thus lethality to the infantryman’s primary weapon system, now featuring a rifled barrel. With that, massed bayonet charges against an enemy armed with such accurate weapons became pure suicide, despite the still slow reload times.
By the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, hand-to-hand combat had taken a backseat to firepower as the decisive tool of the infantryman. Still, leaders maintained enough respect for the combination of bullet and blade to ensure that soldiers continued being issued bayonets as standard equipment through both world wars. The Imperial Japanese Army, in particular, maintained great faith in the bayonet as a decisive weapon for units with superior morale. The so-called “banzai charge” derived from a belief that the bayonet offered a psychological advantage to the trained soldier which offset technological disadvantages.
Nonetheless, bayonet charges became increasingly rare heading into the U.S. involvement in Korea and Vietnam and, eventually, the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. The more technology seemed to remove shooter from target, the rarer it became to get into real close-in scraps with the enemy that required the bayonet’s singular function.
Engaging in modern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it seems history has a sick sense of humor. That very same march of technology drove America’s enemies into cities where it was felt they could shorten sightlines and thus limit the ranges at which more advanced nations could engage. This type of close-in fighting then, almost by definition, increased the instances wherein infantrymen might engage their foes in the type of hand-to-hand combat that their forebears at Waterloo, Fredericksburg, and Guadalcanal would have understood all too well.
You don’t hear much of the bayonet today, and when you do, the stories seem all the more sensational to us because of their rarity. In an age of remote-controlled aircraft launching surgical strikes from around the world, the lowly bayonet seems to have been all but forgotten. And yet at least twice in 21st Century Iraq, coalition troops resorted to the use of the bayonet when all other means of defending themselves were exhausted.
In one instance, a British Army unit assaulted their way across an L-shaped ambush, thoroughly shocking their opponents and decisively ending the deadly, otherwise one-sided, firefight. In another, an El Salvadoran Army unit, pinned down in a deadly crossfire and running out of ammunition, charged the enemy with bayonets, forcing their stunned foes to withdraw and buying the Central American soldiers time for help to arrive. In both cases, the charge was successful at least in part to the shock at seeing such an ancient tactic carried out in modern times. But also, no doubt, to an intense and enduring human aversion to being run through.
Brutal as it may seem, the bayonet has been the infantryman’s companion now for nearly four hundred years. Envisioned as a means for musketeers to protect themselves on the battlefield, it evolved into a weapon offering a wide range of applications. And it remains a useful tool—if one of last resort—for the soldier today.
M. G. Haynes