Since this is the first Leonardo’s Bridge post, please click the menu item above to learn what this category is all about. This is the first of three posts.
Introduction
There is nothing glamorous or beautiful about war, whether it is in the application of the rifle, the grenade, or especially the bayonet. Indeed, the use of cold steel is one of the most physically difficult and emotionally traumatic ways to take a life. Like the machine gun, the bayonet is fear-inspiring. It is terribly personal to the killer and the killed. It is also very isolating, encounters typically occurring between just two combatants in a matter of seconds. For this reason, each successive era of warfare has attempted to rid the combatant of the need to be on the other end of a weapon that ends up inside of the enemy.
The first person in history to pick up a club added physical and emotional distance between himself and the person that he was attacking. As this distance increased, the leaders of each era came to believe that there would never again be a need for what was done before. Yet, without exception, even in the nuclear age, unarmed combat continues to be relevant.
Why A Bayonet?
What is the bayonet? It is a blade that attaches to a gun. The bayonet was the perfect answer to an era that saw the gun as a very useful but critically limited weapon on the same battlefields as swords, lances, and bows. The gun, even in the long term, had only a few real flaws. It was mechanical (and, therefore, could fail) and it required exhaustible resources to operate.
The bayonet was the solution. Archers of the period carried short swords for the same reason that riflemen carried bayonets: to defend themselves should the enemy close with them. The bayonet was used in its earliest days in coordination with other arms as a weapon of intimidation as well as defense. It was employed to exploit a weakened or de-motivated foe by charging into the enemy.
This technique harkened back to the era of pike and sword and was so successful that it continued to be widely used until the arrival of the machine gun. It allowed the very loud gun to have the demoralizing affect of killing with impunity but retained the old ability to keep horses and massed infantry from running down a steady formation.
The Bayonet Evolves and the World With It
As firearms improved and warfighters fought more in smaller groups and in less rigid formations, the bayonet, which had been quite long and issued to everyone with a rifle, shrank in size and in role.
In the Civil War, both sides fired volleys from rifle and cannon at the enemy, followed by fear-inspiring bayonet charges that often turned the weaker enemy who could be run down and killed in their retreat.
In World War I, the bayonet charge was laid to waste in the face of the new machine gun. The machine gun, in conjunction with more accurate artillery, led to the need for elaborate trenches. This, in turn, led to a new use for the bayonet and saw the use of improvised close combat weapons such as entrenching tools and knuckledusters which could be used in closer quarters.
By World War II, the bayonet had been cut literally in half. The same bayonets used in the First World War were being employed in the Second World War, evidenced by blood grooves that ran the full length of the blade. The new military machine worked in small groups. These groups used submachine guns, grenades, pistols, rifles and bayonets to create chaos, instill fear and win the last one hundred yards of the most important battles of the war. The bayonet is so integral to the theme of WWII that it is difficult to picture the war without it. It is nearly as ubiquitous as the B.A.R. and the pineapple grenade.
Stepping Back from the Fight
Then came the Korean War. Battered by the immobility of icy weather and bruised by overwhelming numbers of enemy, American fighting men began leaning away from the balance between killing at the maximum range and killing at arm’s reach. They moved toward a style of fighting that placed them as far from the threat as possible.
This practice continued into Vietnam. By the end of the conflict, American warfighters had all but wholeheartedly embraced the idea of maximum range – maximum firepower. An enemy bent on fighting at the closest possible range against a technologically superior but largely un-motivated military drove Americans to a system of keeping the enemy at the range of big guns. Like the mixed martial artist who loses a fight to a skilled grappler, America has been trying to kickbox ever since.
Unanswered
War, to use a crude metaphor, is the smashing together of two hammers, each attempting to shatter the other or drive it back. The farther a unit is from the point of impact, the more complex and rigid their technology and their methods can be. The closer a unit is to the point of impact, the less maintenance and oversight their technology and method must require. This is because the near infinite variables that exist at the point where the chaos is being created. All war, once it can be called war, comes to this point of impact. War must eventually, inevitably, come to one combatant within arm’s reach of another.
Skirmishes, battles, and wars are not won by hammering the enemy from afar. Iwo Jima was pounded mercilessly before Marines landed and yet the enemy survived, waiting. Battles are won by one motivated individual who has it in himself to kill another person. That person must go in where the bombs have fallen and the bullets have torn the earth to pieces and find the enemy still waiting to kill him.
Next read Part II – The Crossing