On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman Read Free Book Online Page B

an average range of thirty yards, would usually result in hitting only one or two men per minute! Such firefights "dragged on until exhaustion set in or nightfall put an end to hostilities. Casualties mounted because the contest went on so long, not because the fire was particularly deadly."
    Thus we see that the fire of the Napoleonic- and Civil W a r - e r a soldier was incredibly ineffective. This does not represent a failure on the part of the weaponry. John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book Soldiers tell us of a Prussian experiment in the late 1700s in which an infantry battalion fired smoothbore muskets at a target one hundred feet long by six feet high, representing an enemy unit, which resulted in 25 percent hits at 225 yards, 40
    percent hits at 150 yards, and 60 percent hits at 75 yards. This represented the potential killing power of such a unit. T h e reality is demonstrated at the Battle of Belgrade in 1717, when "two F I G H T O R F L I G H T , P O S T U R E O R SUBMIT
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    Imperial battalions held their fire until their Turkish opponents were only thirty paces away, but hit only thirty-two Turks when they fired and were promptly overwhelmed."
    Sometimes the fire was completely harmless, as Benjamin McIntyre observed in his firsthand account of a totally bloodless nighttime firefight at Vicksburg in 1863. "It seems strange . . . ,"
    wrote McIntyre, "that a company of men can fire volley after volley at a like number of men at not over a distance of fifteen steps and not cause a single casualty. Yet such was the facts in this instance." The musketry of the black-powder era was not always so ineffective, but over and over again the average comes out to only one or two men hit per minute with musketry.
    (Cannon fire, like machine-gun fire in World War II, is an entirely different matter, sometimes accounting for more than 50
    percent of the casualties on the black-powder battlefield, and artillery fire has consistently accounted for the majority of combat casualties in this century. This is largely due to the group processes at work in a cannon, machine-gun, or other crew-served-weapons firing. This subject is addressed in detail later in this book in the section entitled "An Anatomy of Killing.") Muzzle-loading muskets could fire from one to five shots per minute, depending on the skill of the operator and the state of the weapon. With a potential hit rate of well over 50 percent at the average combat ranges of this era, the killing rate should have been hundreds per minute, instead of one or two. The weak link between the killing potential and the killing capability of these units was the soldier. The simple fact is that when faced with a living, breathing opponent instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy's heads.
    Richard Holmes, in his superb book Acts of War, examines the hit rates of soldiers in a variety of historical battles. At Rorkes Drift in 1897 a small group of British soldiers were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the Zulu. Firing volley after volley into the massed enemy ranks at point-blank range, it seems as if no round could have possibly missed, and even a 50 percent hit KILLING AND THE E X I S T E N C E OF R E S I S T A N C E
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    rate would seem to be low. But Holmes estimates that in actuality approximately thirteen rounds were fired for each hit.
    In the same way, General Crook's men fired 25,000 rounds at Rosebud Creek on June 16, 1876, causing 99 casualties among the Indians, or 252 rounds per hit. And in the French defense from fortified positions during the Battle of Wissembourg, in 1870, the French, shooting at German soldiers advancing across open fields, fired 48,000 rounds to hit 404 Germans, for a hit ratio of 1 hit per 119 rounds fired. (And some, or possibly even the majority, of the casualties had to have been from artillery fire, which makes the French killing rate even more remarkable.)