Letters

The Gatling Gun

To the Editors,

The November 2009 issue containing the forum on military history and the interview with Julia Keller about the Gatling gun was of particular interest to me, both as a military historian (of sorts) and as the author of American Rifle: A Biography, a book examining the cultural, technological, economic, and military history of that weapon since the colonial era.

I’d like to make two comments, if I may, about Ms. Keller’s interview. I was intrigued by her contention that before the advent of the Gatling, “killing in battle was a one-on-one affair. If you wanted to kill your enemy, you had to look him in the eye.” This would surely come as unwelcome news to artillerymen of centuries past, who stood many hundreds, even thousands, of yards from the enemy they wanted to kill en masse. Indeed, killing some unfortunate fellow in one-on-one combat, presumably using a bayonet, was something of a rarity in warfare, or more precisely, it was rumored to happen much more often than it actually did. Bayonets, being more feared than lethal—unless they happened to be inside one—generally impelled the foe to scarper long before friendly troops came close to look-him-in-the-eye distance.

More seriously, Keller also falls victim to a common scholarly and popular misconception that “soldiers and generals are, by and large, quite conservative,” and therefore inherently hostile to new technology. Thus, to explain why Gatlings were only slowly adopted by the military, Ms. Keller claims that “a newfangled weapon—and one that depended on brass and steel—was not an especially welcome development.”

In this belief Keller follows the fine popular historian Barbara Tuchman. Of the British Ferguson rifle, an advanced breechloading weapon conceived during the War of Independence, Tuchman amusingly remarked in The First Salute that “as more efficient than anything else the British Army possessed, it was, of course, not adopted.” Instead, because thuddingly stupid British commanders could not recognize the Ferguson’s genius they stuck with the “obsolete” smoothbore, muzzle-loading musket for decades to come.

This shared conviction is flawed on several grounds. Intellectually, it is a modern conceit, possibly stemming from liberal disillusionment after the First World War, to believe that generals are reactionary old duffers. On the contrary, for the most part commanders want to win their battles as swiftly and as safely as possible, by any technological means necessary. My own theory is that for the first couple of years of a war, one often finds conventional but capable generals in charge but that, because the nature of the war changes and understanding of the enemy deepens, they are replaced by outsiders and up-and-comers who make the old guard look, well, like the old guard. Examples might include General George McClellan’s replacement by Ulysses Grant, and George Casey’s by David Petraeus.

An illustration from Horace Greeley, et al., The Great Industries of the United States (Hartford, 1874).

Be that as it may, and everyone is free to dispute the above, Ms. Keller’s statement also mistakenly conflates soldiers’ political views with practical ones. It is well known that soldiers tend to be quite conservative in their voting habits, but this is an issue entirely separate from their willingness to introduce new technology. The Pentagon is not awash with Marxists, yet the U.S. armed forces are worlds ahead—some might say, too many worlds—of anyone else in their deployment of advanced weaponry. Similarly, and I am, it goes without saying, not likening American soldiers to terrorists, the various miscreants belonging to al Qaeda are, judging by their zeal to reinstate the modest glories and quaint customs of the 9th-century caliphate, as reactionary as they come, but they joyfully employ the most modern means to effect destruction.

We should therefore look elsewhere for reasons why new technology, such as the Gatling or the Ferguson, is sometimes not adopted at the drop of a hat—despite it being seemingly obvious in hindsight that the machine gun and breechloader represented the future.

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