BotR and British Muzzleloaders discussion: Boer War Lessons Learned

what are you doing fight it get down there we have Spears no thanks no machine guns oh this isn't a pseudo no no Belgium 1914 [Applause] [Music] hello welcome to bloke on the British muzzleloaders range I'm here with a Rob of the British balls loads channel in rural Western Canada and we thought we would have a chat today about how we got from here to here sorry thanks for hosting me you're more than welcome pleasure to have you thank you very much pleasure to be here great honour to be able to work with the man himself right back at you thank you anyway right so basically Rob is equipped as of the late 19th century so we're talking Sudan Boer War I'm equipped as of 1914 first world war and we're having a discussion and we thought that'd be interesting to sort of see how the lessons discussed how the lessons learnt from the particularly the Boer War got us from here to here so take us through certainly where you are so let's start with the hardware first shall we hmm so I'm armed with a in this case it's a mark one lee-metford that viewers of my channel will be quite familiar with but it's indicative of the type of rifle it was carried in a in the Sudan campaign of 1898 it fires the 303 cartridge in this case it's the early marks of the cartridge which had a velocity for around 2,000 feet per second using a round nosed 215 grain bullet it is magazine-fed this particular model has an eight round magazine and it has a feature known as a mag cutoff which I personally on my channel have discussed in depth as well as on yours as I understand so I doctrine of the day regarding the weapon is single loading with a magazine reserved for critical moments as it were the enemy gets too close the enemy surprises you you have a immediately available reserve with a minimal amount of reconfiguration of the weapon that is it at hand and can be delivered very quickly now there are some many accounts as a matter of fact of the effectiveness in the right circumstances of this system in the late 19th century as I mentioned the caliber is 303 so anybody who shoots any manner of Lee rifle will be intimately familiar with the cartridge as I mentioned it shoots in service it shot a 215 grain bullet at 2,000 feet per second not quite as fast as the ammunition that your rifle was intended to shoot but we'll talk more about that in a bit yeah the equipment that I'm wearing is known as the Slade Wallis equipment or a pattern 1888 Veliz equipment it was the last generation of equipment made for the infantry in white buff leather as you can see the color at its most basic level it carried 100 rounds 50 in each of these pouches which are of a later mark in each pouch there was 20 rounds loose already in for immediate availability plus three packets of ten rounds in each punch these approach was identical that way for it's designed purpose I think these pouches particularly came about as a result of the previous pattern poaches opening from the front and up and this led to spillage of ammunition and the loss of it these pouches open forward and especially when in the prone position or in any kind of less than kneeling or standing shall we say this helps prevent spillage and loss of ammunition with that lid automatically wanting to close back on top because it's quite it's quite cupped yeah Lee part of the design feature was a slit cut in the side of the the top or the lid here which then formed a somewhat of a rounded shape over the top of the pouch the designs not perfect but in an era when ammunition was carried loaded and used singly mm-hm this had a balance of loose rounds ready for availability immediately as well as the packets for later and at a pause or a low those packets will be then produced and unwrapped and then placed in the loop since I can coach to replenish those that were fired as far as the rest of the equipment goes a pretty standard is a water bottle this most soldiers will carry as well as a haversack for food and other small and sundry items things like this were obviously climactic or in terms of theater oriented in a hot dusty desert in climate lists such as the Sudan then foreign service helmets protect this head from the Sun and that kind of stuff and a relatively lightweight khaki drill tunic or frock as the terminology of the day would indicate and the usual rest of the gamut of a typical Highland soldier mm-hmm so where did this go wrong in the Boer War I mean that the three that sort of popular view was that the campaign was dominated or that wasn't really quite the case by long-range bomber marksmanship with seven millimeter model 1895 Mauser rifles long rifles in a sort of guerrilla war situation with a culture of marksmanship behind it so there is a degree of truth to this that there were lots of long range engagements some British infantry doctrine of the era was rather more sort of typical colonial warfare set up for that and yeah it what you were telling me earlier it the myth of sort of Redcoats lining up a Napoleonic style of marching towards a high peak with bow marksman well hidden behind rocks that's not really the reality is it no and if you look at some of the the the accounts of battle and anecdotes but the tactics of the late 19th century were in the in a formal sense in terms of manuals and and doctrine geared specifically and had been since the 1870s mmm towards operations in extended order mm-hmm and what this means is instead of being lined up shoulder to shoulder mm-hmm and being packed close together men are spread out and by this time in this in fact in a single rank mm at anywhere up to five paces between four paces between men mm-hm but could then shrink down to being quite close to one or two reasons that said extension was a fundamental part army business mm-hmm it's important to caveat though that the interpretation of the manual in terms of what was actually practice especially in home service so in Great Britain in the UK sometimes did not reflect the spirit of the regulation so that it's said to do things a certain way and in practice they were exercised generally similarly however extension and the space between individuals and sometimes was relegated to the textbook and what you find and the fact there's there's pictures taken of troops on maneuvers in the 1890s and you can see them although they aren't extended they're in a single rank and maybe even in the kneeling position in the face of the enemy they are in fact about as close as we are here together mmm-hmm so that to the modern eye of course is horribly bunched yeah so despite the fact that extension multiple layers of troops lined up but at intervals of 200-300 yards between these lines was prescribed in the manual but what we see in the Boer War is perhaps instances where those drills would have been known to all generals all field officers and all junior officers but decisions at times were made where those those drills those evolutions had been intended to be adopted but later in say the advance one particular example of that is the Battle of Madras Fontaine a knight advance was prescribed and the orders stipulated that the battalions that were to engage in that advance were to stay in close column mmm-hmm for control purposes so that instead of extending in the middle of the night and don't forget this is the late nineteenth century there was no such thing as you know luminous comp compass dials and this kind of thing so maintaining control cohesion direction was crucial to maintaining or bringing those troops onto the enemy together in a coordinated and the decision was made then to advance in these close formations to relatively close to the enemy mm-hmm and what happened at Madras Fontaine is the fact that first of all the reconnaissance was poor and they didn't realize that the Boers instead of being on the top of the hill where they thought and they saw the dummy trenches they were in fact at the bottom of the hill mm-hmm and so when dawn broke the board was were much closer mm-hmm and this led to the tragedy that was the Battle of magazine with the battalions of the Highland Brigade in particular being caught very close to the poor's we're then shooting from a similar elevation with modern not gonna say specifically Mauser rifles because at the ranges engaged it wouldn't really matter what riflemen shooting but in particular instead of shooting down on them they were shooting across at them mm-hmm their fire was low and it would have in modern parlance it would have been grazing fire it carried on so that somebody at the front would still be obviously in danger and those that the rear would be in the same amount of danger by the same bullet you know if it missed the guy in the front it would have hit the person in the back because that bullet wasn't raising above the level of a man at those ranges and you see a brigade of infantry put to ground in daylight in close proximity to the enemy they can't move they can't deploy hmm so despite the fact that the tactics of extension and the multiple layers the firing line supports and reserve that kind of tactical innovation was well known it perhaps wasn't trained to the spirit of the manual and as a result bad decisions that tactical decisions were made by generals and senior officers and with the resulting tragedies mm-hmm but it I mean let's just put it in context people talk about the flat flying boar mauser cartridge we're still in the round-nose era it's still a heavy bullet even though it's seven millimeter it's doing twenty three hundred feet per second versus the 2,000 of the yeah Metford Lian wheel it's not a massive difference now and compared to modern ballistics and when we get onto this that's good that that's their modern ballistics modern ideas of flatness of trajectory but even an open order you can imagine advancing over open felt with ball map Bora marksman dug in the to a large degree provided the the range judgment was good they must have been absolute sitting ducks absolutely that nobody operated in that era on the battlefield alone mm-hmm and despite the fact that you may have been extended from your file mate to two or three or four paces and as a side note these lessons although perhaps not realized or remembered at the beginning of the war after those first serious defeats at the beginning of the war there were some tactical navel-gazing as it were yeah and there were immediate and ultimately successful modifications and re emphasis on some of these principles so you see then towards the close of the formal campaign before the guerrilla campaign truly starts massive extensions ten paces between individually you know something that is very modern to the modern eye and sensibility and they found that this in fact were massive extensions and they could outflank the war positions but also the danger to the individual and the group was reduced significantly by those extensions it took a lot longer to get to where you want it to go because of course with more extension your firepower is limited mm-hmm and in order to increase that firepower we have to adopt a bit more of a gradual dominance of whatever enemy position in coordination with the artillery and whatnot so despite these setbacks at the beginning of the war the tactics of the Spirit as I alluded to earlier seems to have being grasped and combined with other tactical innovations and those formal campaigns those set-piece battles against the Boers when they were standing as an army mm-hmm ultimately successful I mean another thing with the with the the length of ranges of of engagement it was discovered out there that a lot of the magazine lee-enfield so the ones intended for cordite were extremely poorly sited they were this is a problem peculiar to the magazine lee-enfield versus the magazine lee-metford this the rifle is essentially of the same except for the pattern of rifling and when they adopted the Enfield rifling because of the problems with the cordite wearing out the Metford barrels unbeknownst to anybody until they actually put it in practice and it's important to realize that as a side note that we're talking many thousands of rounds here yeah just to wear out a Medford barrel and the annual qualification of a soldier would put a number of rounds you know under a hundred yeah so how many years of annual shooting in peacetime yeah would it take to wear out a Medford barrel yeah I think the popular conception is you put you know a few rounds so maybe 100 or 200 rounds through a metric ban it's worn out it's useless so what we see is in fact Medford's in use until the through the entire Boer War hmm well and in training in the First World War absolutely well which is also why a lot of them are pretty shot out today if you can find them because they were shot with cordite during what during the Boer War between the wars and they were obviously phased out progressively but they've been relegated to training during during World War one even now once we get up to here people accuse our channels of being Lee Enfield fanboys well some more than others yes anyway let's just say that the magazine lee-metford and the magazine lee-enfield were in no way shape or form the best rifles on the battlefield they're the the 1895 Mauser beats the pants off them because charger loading absolutely that more than velocity and yep you know sharp shooting that in itself is the crux the ability to reload five rounds in one go and not not have to stuff them in one at a time this really is the crux of the matter and if I was parachuted back in there and you put one or other in front of me and I could choose I would take the Mauser even though it's got a sticky out bolt handle I will be able to take in a position and deliver much more sustained accurate fire with that than with that a better sighted beater beat though they're both practical practical grouping size doesn't really make a lot of difference because the weak link in the chain is normally the shooter certainly under combat conditions but just charger loading you just keep it up here once you make a Deans out you're down to single loading until you've got time to stuff round after round in there and you know that in some experience that I've conducted is that it is faster to continue with single loading yeah perhaps if you're in a static position withdrawing a packet of ammunition and laying it beside you knowing you're going to be there for a while and using it that way it's much faster than rebonding the magazine you know firing the magazine free bombing it so once you it'll exhausted that initial reserve yeah you have to just maintain the magazine comes completely out of the picture now this there's a sort of chicken and egg question as to work because the the doctrine was based around the the non charge a loaded magazine timing-wise the lemur predates any any adoption of charger loading so I mean the first off top of my head the first actual charger loaded rather Mannlicher on block clip low knees come in in about 1889 as the the Belgian Mauser and then the Schmidt Ruben 1889 comes in a couple of years later and that's really it's a game changer but they're committed to the to the concept it's it's not really so much of an issue in the sort of colonial warfare that was that was it was dominating which to be fair is as you say dominating that is especially the army of the era that is its primary function is policing the Empire mm-hmm and do they need charger loading everything up to that date including the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 shows that the current doctor the current weapons are eminently effective yep I mean we're talking poorly armed poorly equipped massed armies advancing typically over in this period it's typically an open in open country in in in Africa I mean the the northwest frontier of India is there's not it was always dodgy always things going on but really the colonial warfare of the era was the Sudan and so on was that open one notwithstanding and the the the lessons that were learned but not necessarily recognized at an army level from the Pathan revolt of 1897 on the northwest frontier and that really was the watershed of the development of improved tactics and as a result weaponry it wasn't something happened overnight but when you look at the because the 1897 revolt was the first true test of the small-bore in this case 303 magazine rifle and there were some things that were found to be somewhat lacking wouldn't a lot of that pertained to the the tactics that were used in terms of the delivery of the musketry in general however the rifle performed well what they did have to face were tribesmen that were not just the sword and spear armed masses that they were relatively well armed and that is really the first time that a colonial power with the exception of the Boers in the days that a colonial or sorry a native power if you will it has not corporal weaponry but enough to make a sting felt yeah and for individuals and people and organizations to I can't even say wake up but certainly it's recognized at some levels and especially by the Army in India mm-hmm that something's changing here so I mean coming out of the Boer War the the the main lessons in terms of the rifle were charger loading it was just like absolute must there's no question anymore it has any influence on the doctrine as well individual siting of the rifles both at the factory and to the soldier if to the individual soldier if needed if you could shoot one off to be to be permitted to zero his own rifle if it was if it was off and the short rifle the universal short rifle what you also see in the in the Boer War is mounted infantry carrying Lumley's on horseback yes riding to battle dismounting and fighting dismounted so when we put these three together we get the the I mean this is this is the sort of main smle model the final one charge a bridge on here we didn't get there in one step there's all sorts of other contraptions with a sliding charge a guide on the on the mark one the cut off comes in and out of doctrine comes in and out of the models but they liked it I've done a video explaining what the purpose of this was but maybe to sum that up on on this rifle the cutoff is a gives you a modicum of control of the fire yep whereas a cut-off fitted to an smle is what kind of feature simply a luxury feature sure perhaps perhaps we a safety feature yeah as opposed to something that governs the tactics and the operation of the right yeah this does not have one this is a mark 3 star simplified one this particular one is 1916 so an early mark 3 star the Brits have this concept still do of loaded but not made ready so without that I did it I did a whole video on this I'll put a link in there but it's a way particularly for retired soldier to have easy drill movement to put his rifle in a an intermediate state where the chamber is not loaded but the magazine is and and that was how it's used and last seen as late as the number for trials rifles in the early 30s as ISO came back and in and in and out of fashion but and the universal short rifle at the same time the US did the same thing with a 1903 Springfield 93 in fact smle mark one is 1903 parallel development similar reasons the cavalry the Lea Philomena for cavalry carbines are really quite short and light and not very accurate and puts you at a massive disadvantage you've got the lessons learned from mounted infantry so give everyone this train everyone to shoot to the same standard and and and crack on now in terms of the equipment as soon as you get to charges you need a way to carry them here we end up with pouches for 150 rounds although doctrinally a full ammo load was 120 not quite worked out why and that's of course notwithstanding the the use of greatly excessive numbers of rounds carried by individuals for certain operations yeah yeah I mean once once you get in for use if you look at first of all war-era photos you'll see people with 150 rounds and then one or two 50 round bandoliers as well big from here in the Boer War there was a lot of ammunition being dropped not only from these pouches which do have holes in them but there were lightweight cloth bandoliers that were worn they weren't and it was a question of whether they were actually intended to be worn like that but the boss could just go along behind British columns and pick up tons and tons and tons of 303 ammunition and what's interesting is that this is canvas webbing but the experience with the lightweight disposable canvas bandoliers biased the the army structure against the use of webbing this we didn't get from there to there immediately there's an intermediate set of equipment the 1903 bandolier equipment which also held 100 rounds but sort of characterized by four infantry a 50 round bandolier and then another 50 rounds in in ten and fifteen round pouches on the belt made of leather and you've got some experience with with it I've never seen a full set of it in my life the Bandol is quite cool and they're seen as late as the Second World War for drivers and things like that but the entire equipment really isn't once it was adopted I think it was that immediate post Boer War navel-gazing at the end of the war saw the massive use of bandoliers of many patterns and it was thought that this was the way forward this the Boers carried their ammunition bandoliers and the the Imperial forces British and empire forces that fought in South Africa also ended up carrying their ammunition and bandoliers of course those would have been set up for single rounds so in this post-war era they thought well bandolier is the way to go hmm but single rounds aren't so this results of course in that very iconic five pouch bandolier and not a nine pouch for the cavalry yet but those are designed to hold chargers the individual wide poaches across the chest and on the belt of course as you've discussed it but it's very found very quickly that it's a very ill balanced and not a very functional set of equipment it doesn't have much in the way utility there's no apart from the haversack which is a separate piece in that particular set of equipment there is no utility pouch as it were there's no release there's no small pack this is seen as something that becomes increasingly important that despite the fact of lightening the load of energy there's physically no other way to carry all the things that you might carry with the 1903 pattern equipment they see it is deficient in that way and so what we see is the army's reassessment of its adoption or shall we say read option of the canvas cotton webbing which results in the iconic world war one set of equipment known as the 1908 pattern web equipment and this has as mentioned [ __ ] your capacity for 150 although perhaps less was carried as far as regulations go but it has features of it that the nitrogen no three and earlier patterns simply do not and that the biggest feature is apart from the ability to carry chargers is the fact that it is one piece of equipment when assembled that there's nothing crossing the chest as you can see here water bottle haversack and which is separate pieces unto the set of equipment here those individual pieces of equipment are attached to the and suspended from the belt there is a release or large pack carried on the rear and a hammer sack for the same purposes of as haversacks in the past but to carry food and other small items like that so it is by far the most advanced set of equipment used and fielded by the armies going into World War one hmm and it lasted until the eve of World War two before it's replaced but we'll get onto that another time now just we've been blathering on quite a long it's been fascinating it's love talking to people who also enthusiast about that's kind of thing in particular when they know more than I do about the in particular period we're talking about it's always a good learning experience but doctrinally we went away from sort of volley firing firing on command to still relatively tightly controlled certainly compared to other armies but independent firing independent reloading it was the after the load of the load command was given and the fire orders would be for instance a target indication and a range indication five rounds fire at the standard rate or five rounds rapid fire or just fire so just to keep firing until told to stop and and so on and there's no point in going to massive detail here because we're done a fantastic presentation of every aspect of this in as much geeky detail as is humanly possible and again without going into too much detail it wasn't that immediately there's a there's a sequence of sort of intermediate steps that get us up there just as the rifle advanced in increments over the various models from there to here the doctrine did as well and then the eve of World War World War one we've got the frontline army equipped mostly with mark 3s Emily's which was introduced in 1907 cited for three or three marks seven ammunition a spitzer so pointed flat-faced bullet hundreds only four grains at two thousand two hundred and forty feet per second after out of this shorter barrel and occasionally you get it's a very silly pointless argument my my country's vastly overpowered cartridges is more vastly over power than your country's vastly over powered cartridge oh wait I think we're getting a little they go political here I may have to step back I I'm in solidarity with ya it's like they're all overpowered I mean yeah that that really is sums it all up yeah that especially with hindsight yes yes they are all massively overpowered but we were thinking what were you cited to on the dial site on this twenty eight hundred yards I mean it this I doubt these doll sites were ever actually used in anger but they had the ballistic so they thought why don't we cite the rifle saw for it but I mean that was retained it was on the the the the early p4 teens as late as it was retained and there there are there the Brits weren't the only ones to have this kind of long-range sight but their actual practical utility was probably zero little one more weaponry aside the the patent thirteen the seven millimeter rifle that was converted into into the P 14 in Row three during World War one as an emergency emergency reserve arm that came out of this long-range thinking and if you think these are massively overpowered we were talking a hundred and sixty-five seven millimeter bullet at 2,800 feet per second and the the metallurgy and the powder technology of the era couldn't hack that now this is actually a 280 Remington I think if I'm wrong I'll correct myself a standard hunting load out of a case that's basically a 3006 case more or less next to seven millimeter not a problem now you can easily do those kinds of ballistics but in the pre-world War one era it was it was out but that came out of that bull war experience thinking that the the empire forces had been on the receiving end of Boer fire you know that it was effective and it was effective at very long ring but don't forget we are talking about groups of people mm-hmm sometimes large groups of people and then hundreds and whatnot and it's not a single individual necessarily finding and locating somebody at 1,500 yards but they know that the enemy is at about 1,500 yards sites are set to 1,500 yards mm-hmm and you can aim at features that are nearby or at the actual mass or in the case of an extension of troops but you can see where they are and very much in the same sense of the role of machine guns later on mm-hmm even from the bore side yeah that their rifle fire is effective at these long ranges due to these factors mm-hmm of course the longer the range the higher the trajectory I'm sorry the higher the velocity the lower the trajectory the easier it is to hit a target even if you're not necessarily aiming specifically at that little tiny black dot at these extended ranges the effect of the massed rifle fire hmm puts a beatin zone you know on top of your enemy and it makes it a very dangerous place to be whether you're lying down or standing up mm-hm and as a result of this how do we counter that you know we need something that shoots even flatter that shoots even faster mm-hmm but as you mentioned how do we do that we just make something bigger in beefier but the rifle can't handle it now the metal can't handle that increased velocity friction so hmm yeah and then First World War intervened I my view on that whole thing is it was never going anywhere because once you've once you've wound the ballistics back down to a dull roar say twenty twenty six hundred feet per second you're getting a hundred and sixty feet per second more than this and but we've just adopted in 1910 this new cartridge and the rim jamb issue is not a non-issue anymore and so we fixed all of that it's a it's all thing what what do you mean we want to retool for this for this entirely new thing and but we've got forces all over the place and now and then war were declared and forget about it I think I've heard that somewhere possibly I might be repetitive sometimes anyway if you survived this far thank you so much for watching thank you so much Robert so we know fascinating discussion I've enjoyed every minute of and there are many minutes of its to enjoy by this stage you must be about 40 or something anyway apologies for that please if you haven't already liked and subscribed to both of our channels British muzzle loaders and Blanc on the range please do so we're both on patreon so please consider supporting us and see you again sometime right you

Channel: Bloke on the Range

Views: 132,155

Rating: 4.9472718 out of 5

Keywords: weapons (interest), shooting (sport), milsurp, 1908, 08 pattern, boer war, rifle, smle, lee enfield, slade, wallace

Id: 6qv0AgGhq58

Length: 35min 33sec (2133 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2018