35.2 Theme 2 - Changes in weaponry and the role of the people

The Breadth Frame

The specification has two halves, but they should not be learned separately. Changing
weaponry increased the demands placed on the population, and the mobilisation of the
population made more complex weapons possible.

Keep three questions together:

The long chronological pattern looks like this:

The strongest breadth judgement is that technology changed warfare most when it was
absorbed into organisation. Rockets were frightening but often inaccurate. Armstrong
guns were advanced but initially difficult to sustain. Early tanks were dramatic but
unreliable. The Vickers machine gun was deadly not just because of its mechanism, but
because crews, ammunition supply, training and tactics made sustained fire possible.
Technology mattered, but technology alone did not win wars.

Naval and Rocket Innovation

In the 1790s, Britain was fighting Revolutionary France in a war where sea power was
central. The Royal Navy had to blockade, escort, convoy, fight fleet actions and protect
trade. In that setting, the carronade was useful because it changed the weight of
fire a ship could deliver at close range.

The carronade had been introduced into the navy before 1790, in 1779, but its importance
belonged strongly to the French Wars. It was a short, relatively light naval gun that
fired a heavy shot over a shorter distance. Sailors called it "the smasher" because at
close range it could do terrible damage to hulls, crews and rigging. Its advantage was
not long-range accuracy. It was compact force. It could be mounted where a long gun was
too heavy, and it needed a smaller crew than a traditional long gun.

This tells us something important about early change in weaponry. The carronade was not a
scientific revolution in the modern sense. It was an example of practical industrial
design matched to naval tactics. It made sense in close actions, especially where British
ships expected disciplined crews to close with an enemy and use rapid, heavy broadsides.
It was less useful at long range. If a ship could be kept outside carronade range, the
weapon's value fell sharply.

Congreve's rockets, first used in 1806, show a different kind of innovation. The
British had encountered Indian rocket warfare in the wars against Mysore. William
Congreve then developed a British rocket system at Woolwich. Rockets had some obvious
advantages: they did not need a heavy gun carriage, they produced no recoil like a cannon,
and they could be fired from boats or simple frames. They were especially useful for
bombardment, fire-raising and psychological shock.

Their most famous early use came in attacks such as Boulogne in 1806 and Copenhagen in
1807. The rockets' fire effect could be dramatic, and later British use in the War of
1812 helped create the American phrase "the rockets' red glare". Yet they were also
limited. They were inaccurate, hard to control and much less dependable in field battle
than ordinary artillery. They frightened and disrupted more reliably than they destroyed
precisely.

Carronades and rockets therefore show two early themes:

The people mattered in this early phase mostly through finance, manpower and patriotic
support. Britain could keep fleets at sea because the state could raise taxes, borrow
money and sustain naval administration. Sailors, dockyard workers, contractors, merchants
and taxpayers all supported sea power, even if the battlefield still looked separate from
civilian life. The link between weapons and the people was real, but it was still mostly
indirect.

Industrial Artillery

The next major named development is William Armstrong's new artillery in 1859-60.
This belongs to a different technological world from the carronade. By the mid-nineteenth
century, Britain's weapons were increasingly shaped by industrial precision, metallurgy,
machine tools, engineering firms and scientific testing.

Armstrong was an engineer and industrialist based at Elswick, Newcastle. During and after
the Crimean War, he turned his attention to artillery. His guns combined several features
that pointed towards modern artillery:

In 1859 Armstrong was knighted and effectively became gun-maker in chief to the British
Army. That shows how closely the state now depended on specialised inventors and firms.
It also shows that "science and technology" did not mean isolated geniuses working alone.
It meant a relationship between government, testing committees, patents, factories,
materials and military needs.

The Armstrong gun was a turning point because it made older smoothbore artillery look
increasingly outdated. Better range and accuracy changed what artillery could do. If a
gun could hit more accurately from further away, tactics, fortifications and training all
had to adjust. This mattered in a century when European armies were also adopting rifled
small arms, railways, telegraphy and steam-powered transport.

The limitation is just as important. Early Armstrong breech-loaders did not simply solve
all artillery problems. Breech mechanisms raised concerns about safety, gas escape,
maintenance, cost and the skill demanded of gunners. In the 1860s Britain moved back
towards rifled muzzle-loading heavy guns for a time. That is a useful warning for exam
answers: a weapon can be technologically advanced and still awkward to absorb into
service.

Armstrong's significance was therefore long-term. He did not create a neat instant
revolution. He made clear that future artillery would be a problem of industrial science:
rifling, steel, pressure, shells, recoil, accuracy and production. By 1914, that world
had expanded into the huge shell and gun demands of the First World War.

Civilian roles were also changing in this middle period. In earlier wars, some civilians
had physically accompanied armies as cooks, laundresses, nurses, sutlers or wives. During
the nineteenth century, the army became more professional and more suspicious of informal
followers. Civilians did not disappear from warfare; their role moved into other forms:
factories, taxation, war reporting, charitable support, nursing, supply contracts and
public opinion. The people were less likely to trail directly behind the regiment and
more likely to support war through industrial and social systems.

Machine Guns and Tanks

The First World War took the trend towards industrial weapons much further. The key
point is not that every weapon was invented between 1914 and 1918. Some had earlier
origins. The change was that industrial war made them central, numerous and tactically
organised.

The Vickers machine gun had been adopted by the British Army before the war, in 1912.
It was a heavy, water-cooled, belt-fed automatic weapon firing .303 ammunition. Its
reliability made it one of Britain's most important weapons. But it was not a simple
handheld solution. It needed a tripod, water, ammunition belts, spare parts, trained crew
members and careful positioning. A Vickers gun was therefore both a weapon and a small
logistical system.

Machine guns changed warfare because they made exposed infantry attacks extremely costly.
They could defend trenches, sweep no man's land, protect strongpoints and break up
advances. Yet it is too simple to say that machine guns alone caused stalemate. Barbed
wire, artillery, trenches, rifles, mud, poor communications and defensive depth all
mattered. The Vickers was most significant when Britain learned how to organise machine
gun fire, especially after the Machine Gun Corps was created in 1915. By 1917-18, heavy
machine guns could be used more like artillery, firing sustained and sometimes indirect
fire to support operations.