Discussion Repeaters Versus Muzzleloaders

[Rhea Cole]

Indeed, which I think would be be more fun than talking about what rock is this at Gettysburg.

Regards

I am quite sure that we both more know nit picks about this stuff than is good for us.

 

[Rhea Cole]

That some of the trooper's Springfield trap door rifles jammed at the Little Big Horn is not denied but how much it happened and the effect on the battle is controversial and not to be taken for granted. Yes, there is evidence of jamming on some cases gleaned from the battlefield but there's no indication of many jams there were as nobody lived to tell about it. And some jammed on Reno Hill but were cleared easily enough and the defense of the hill wasn't threatened by it. Note too the trap door gave fine service at the Wagon Box and Hayfield fights. And when the cartridges were improved with better metal the extraction problem was pretty much fixed.

The British Martini-Henry was quite reliable in South African conditions and the defenders of Rorke's Drift, who fired their rifles so much they became to hot to hold, were well satisfied with the rifles, as 125 men who fired 20,000 rounds fighting off 5000 men might well be. At Isandlwana the British lost because they were poorly placed on the battlefield: the infantry companies were pushed too far out and were unable to support each other. The book "The Washing of the Spears" gave rise to the once popular notion that the Brits were overrun when their ready ammunition supply on the firing line ran out and more ammunition couldn't be run out to the lines because of logistical failures such as an inability to open the wooden cases in which the ammunition was stored. This notion is now not taken for granted and many consider it debunked. And as Pickett might have said: the Zulus had something to do with it.

Finally note that the Martini gave excellent service in subsequent battles of the Zulu War such as Ulundi and Ginginilovu (Sp?).

Martinis were prone to extraction problems in the sandy conditions of the Sudan. This was fixed when the rolled foil cartridge cases were replaced with improved drawn ones.

Don't forget the solar eclipse that masked the Zulu's advance.

 

[Mr.Beal]

Of course there were two massacres suffered by soldiers armed with breech loaders that jammed after a few rounds. Custer's men were found with the broken blades of their knives scattered around them. The knives were broken in frantic attempts to remove spent rounds jammed in the chamber of their Sharpes. The British in the South African Battle of Isandlwana lost an entire 1,300 man unit to an attack by Zulu warriors when their rifles jammed after as few as ten rounds. All of those men would have been far better off with Spencers that did not jam under battlefield conditions.

Custer's men had spencer carbines. Not sharps. Sure many sharps were sent to the plains wars. I have one of the 50/70 conversions. But Custer's men had the spencer repeaters. Didn't help him.
Some of the Indians would have had sharps. And famously Sgt Ryan, who buried Custer had one. Ryan is known for using his sharps to make longer shots than the Spencer's could. They only found a few 50/70 shells. Custer's personal Remington shot the 50/70 so the location of the 50s shell help show Archeologists his location.

https://books.google.com/books?id=i...wA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=ryan's sharps&f=false

 

[Irishtom29]

Delete.

 

[Irishtom29]

At the Little Big Horn Custer's troopers were armed with Springfield 1873 "trap door" carbines.

The 7th had been armed with Spencers earlier, in the late 1860s during Hancock's War as I recall. But by 1876 those were long gone.

 

[Mr.Beal]

At the Little Big Horn Custer's troopers were armed with Springfield 1873 "trap door" carbines.

The 7th had been armed with Spencers earlier, in the late 1860s during Hancock's War as I recall. But by 1876 those were long gone.

Excuse me you are right.

My knowledge is on Sharps. (New knowledge). They did have springfield, not spencer. My bad.

But they did not have the Sharps, that was my point. There were not broken knives to fix jammed sharps. I got to defend the reputation of my new lady friend. Lol

 

[CowCavalry]

There was no significant difference between muzzle loading rifles & Spencers.

Huh?

 

[7thWisconsin]

The drawback to repeating rifles is the massive ammunition expenditure. If a soldier has hundreds of rounds available, he will fire them all, so logistics is a new game. The repeater was the assault rifle of its day. It definitely had all the advantages previously noted: you can sustain a high rate of fire, reload lying down, etc. But they are more expensive than muzzleloaders, especially at a time when the whole of an obsolete European arsenal was thrown open to equip soldiers quickly and cheaply. Metallic cartridges have the added dilemma that now you have to allocate a resource, brass, to make cartridges that you didn't have to concern yourself with before.
From our vantage point it's easy to see the Civil War as a completed action rather than an evolution. American military development was behind in 1861. The armies were poorly trained. There wasn't a lot of money to work with. The officer corps remembers beating the Mexicans with a volly of rifle fire followed with the bayonet. It took a lot of OJT to change minds to find more advanced tactical solutions. Getting breechloading and repeating arms in the hands of the troops was part of that evolution.
@ Irishtom29: "gin gin I love you!"

 

[67th Tigers]

The major issue at Little Bighorn was a lack of proper fire control orders. At the beginning of the engagement a correct range was set (500 yards ISTR) but as the Indians came on it was never changed. Hence all the bullet were going over the heads of the attacking Indians and landing in their village. The Indians were able to run in under the ballistic arc of the cavalry.

 

[67th Tigers]

It is perhaps easy to overstate the effect of the Spencer.

Wilder's Chickamauga AAR stresses the impact of the enfilading fire from the flanking movement and the effect of the artillery. Bate's AAR makes no mention of the fire being particularly heavy, and he gives the reason for defeat as the superior Federal numbers were able to move round his flanks at will.

Wilder had 2,000 odd mounted infantry and 10 guns, Bate arrived with the 1st(37th) Georgia, 20th Tennessee, the brigade sharpshooters under Caswell and a 4 gun battery, 650 men all up. Even without the repeaters being a factor the Federals have a 3:1 advantage.

The casualties are slightly overstated. The organisations on the field lost 132 in the 3 days they occupied that ground, and probably lost ca. 120 in their assaults on Wilder after a small deductions for casualties on the 25th and 26th. The casualty ratio is thus about 3:1 in the Federal favour, and is consistent with Lanchesters Linear Law. Thus in all probability the outcome would have been identical had Wilder been armed with normal rifle-muskets.

Wilder himself seems to have changed his mind a considerable period after the battle, in 1907 he writes that it was due to the huge volume of fire the new rifles put out, but he is writing this after the effect of smokeless powder magazine rifles have altered warfare.

 

[Saphroneth]

If all else is equal (same ballistic properties, muzzle velocity and bullet weight and so on) then a repeater gives you the option for a burst of rapid fire but at the cost of absolutely needing proper ammunition management. A breechloader (say) can run through the seventy rounds ammunition carried by a typical infantryman in less than ten minutes, at which point your unit is incredibly vulnerable to attack.

A muzzle loading rifle doesn't have nearly as much need for proper ammunition management as the same ammunition load takes half an hour to burn through. In theory this isn't an advantage, but in practice it can be because of "schnellfeuer" (as the Prussians called it in 1870-1) where a unit would just fire off their entire ammunition load as fast as possible and then feel they'd "done their bit" and could be relieved.


However, it's often the case that period repeaters are inferior ballistically (in terms of e.g. bullet weight, muzzle velocity) to period rifles. This effectively makes them the sub-machine-guns of the 1860s and 1870s, where even under ideal conditions there's a tradeoff and the rifles are superior at long range and the repeaters can have an advantage close in.

 

[Rhea Cole]

Huh?

They had equilivant accuracy & range. I knew what I meant to say, but I certainly didn't do it well. Thanks for the edit.

 

[Saphroneth]

They had equilivant accuracy & range.

Perhaps as-used, but not as-designed. I'd love to see directly comparable firing range stats from the period, though...

 

[Rhea Cole]

The major issue at Little Bighorn was a lack of proper fire control orders. At the beginning of the engagement a correct range was set (500 yards ISTR) but as the Indians came on it was never changed. Hence all the bullet were going over the heads of the attacking Indians and landing in their village. The Indians were able to run in under the ballistic arc of the cavalry.

As the archeology found, many of the attackers were armed with repeating rifles & achieved fire superiority over the defenders.

 

[Saphroneth]

Interestingly the point about quickly burning through ammunition means that perhaps the best thing to do with repeaters is to give them to mounted infantry units and use the mounted infantry units as "paratroopers" - have them get in and occupy vital ground, use the burst fire of the repeaters to repulse any single powerful assault, and plan to have the position then taken over by line infantry. (This is the primary role cavalry played on the Western Front in WW1.)

 

[Rhea Cole]

Perhaps as-used, but not as-designed. I'd love to see directly comparable firing range stats from the period, though...

The Rifled Musket by Claud E. Fuller contains a reproduction of a test run at the Washington Arsenal in February 1860. 20 weapons ranging from .69 cal smoothbores to breech loading carbines were fired in controlled tests at ranges up to 500 yards. Shot patterns from a standard 10X10' target were carefully charted. It is a visual reference worth a thousand words. Various tests included firing at 100, 300 & 500 yards by a single man using a rest to squads of 10 soldiers firing as skirmishers. One very interesting series is ten men firing five shots from a smoothbore with buck & ball. At 200 yards not only did the number of balls hitting the target fall off dramatically, many of the buckshot that did hit did not penetrate the paper target. On the next page, a .58 caliber rifle "with a steel barrel" scored more hits at 300 yards than the smoothbore at 200. Eight to ten out of 25 rifle shots hit the target at 500 yards. It is visual evidence like that which has fueled my skepticism in the smoothbore vs rifle debate. The book is a treasure trove of contemporary information. Everybody should have a copy on their Civil War bookshelf. $37.75 is the online price these days.

 

[Rhea Cole]

At the Little Big Horn Custer's troopers were armed with Springfield 1873 "trap door" carbines.

The 7th had been armed with Spencers earlier, in the late 1860s during Hancock's War as I recall. But by 1876 those were long gone.

Thanks for correcting my misstatement.

 

[Rhea Cole]

Custer's men had spencer carbines. Not sharps. Sure many sharps were sent to the plains wars. I have one of the 50/70 conversions. But Custer's men had the spencer repeaters. Didn't help him.
Some of the Indians would have had sharps. And famously Sgt Ryan, who buried Custer had one. Ryan is known for using his sharps to make longer shots than the Spencer's could. They only found a few 50/70 shells. Custer's personal Remington shot the 50/70 so the location of the 50s shell help show Archeologists his location.

https://books.google.com/books?id=iSUA23jOi1sC&pg=PT137&lpg=PT137&dq=ryan's+sharps&source=bl&ots=cjTYFwAY1k&sig=ACfU3U31k0Pnh10wIYErawOIV_Bn6J6wJw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjsu8n-0Z3nAhXGi54KHZJfC4kQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=ryan's sharps&f=false

Thanks for correcting that error.

 

[ranger326]

Many thanks gentlemen for providing pleasant and educational reading.

I can't help but step back a bit and marvel at the changes through the 19th century of technology and tactics. From the Napoleonic era to the Spanish American War. From flintlock to repeaters, black powder paper cartridges to self contained smokeless cartridges, from stand up straight volleys to the beginnings of trench warfare. Gotta hoist one for the poor soldier on any side that helped "progress".

 

[Saphroneth]

The Rifled Musket by Claud E. Fuller contains a reproduction of a test run at the Washington Arsenal in February 1860. 20 weapons ranging from .69 cal smoothbores to breech loading carbines were fired in controlled tests at ranges up to 500 yards. Shot patterns from a standard 10X10' target were carefully charted. It is a visual reference worth a thousand words. Various tests included firing at 100, 300 & 500 yards by a single man using a rest to squads of 10 soldiers firing as skirmishers. One very interesting series is ten men firing five shots from a smoothbore with buck & ball. At 200 yards not only did the number of balls hitting the target fall off dramatically, many of the buckshot that did hit did not penetrate the paper target. On the next page, a .58 caliber rifle "with a steel barrel" scored more hits at 300 yards than the smoothbore at 200. Eight to ten out of 25 rifle shots hit the target at 500 yards. It is visual evidence like that which has fueled my skepticism in the smoothbore vs rifle debate. The book is a treasure trove of contemporary information. Everybody should have a copy on their Civil War bookshelf. $37.75 is the online price these days.

And what is the comparision between Spencer repeaters and muzzle loading rifles in those pages? That is, after all, the claim you made.


(Though I'll note that if you get 35-40% hits on a ten foot by ten foot target at 500 yards you'd probably be considered a "third class" shot by the British Army in the period - at best.)