Empire’s Violent End; Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945–1962 by Thijs Brocades Zaalberg & Bart Luttikhuis

Author:Thijs Brocades Zaalberg & Bart Luttikhuis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Heavy Indirect Weapons” in a Historical Perspective

The historiography of the Netherlands-Indonesia War has tended toward studying Dutch military practices in isolation, and nowhere is this more apparent than the treatment of indirect weapons. But the Dutch forces were the inheritors of a firepower revolution that occurred between 1860 and 1945 and that witnessed massive changes in weapons technology, doctrine, and military organization.8 In barely eight decades ordnance evolved from the smoothbore cannon to the atomic bomb. The increased range, accuracy, and lethality of infantry rifles drove artillery from the front lines and into concealed or protected firing positions. Near simultaneous developments in steel construction, recoil systems, explosives, and optics greatly increased artillery’s range and destructive effect. Over time, armies developed sophisticated methods of “indirect fire” based on forward observers and directed by a centralized control system to identify and destroy targets far beyond human sight. Artillery was divided between guns fired directly at enemy positions and howitzers and mortars, which fired at an angle, their shells arcing over obstructions before exploding. A further division was between fortress artillery—some of forty-centimeter caliber firing a one-ton shell fifty kilometers—and mobile, light, or medium-caliber field artillery that accompanied armies on campaign. The destructive power of the latter was manifest in the Franco-Prussian War, when in a few hours the massed fire of some 540 field guns shattered French infantry, killing ten thousand and wounding twice that many. Ominously, the Germans later turned their artillery on Paris, a late addition to other efforts to end irregular resistance through food denial, property destruction, and extrajudicial killings.9

The cumulative effects of the firepower revolution were apparent in the First World War, when artillery repeatedly slaughtered attacking infantry and imposed the stasis of trench warfare. It became a military commonplace that artillery conquered and infantry occupied. For their March 1918 offensive the Germans concentrated some 6,500 artillery pieces and 3,500 trench mortars to overwhelm 2,686 British artillery.10 Firepower escalated not only upward to include larger and larger caliber guns, a multitude of shells (including gas), and tanks, but also downward as riflemen went into battle carrying mortars, machine guns, grenades, and flamethrowers. For frontline soldiers, distinctions between direct and indirect fire were often meaningless: they shot blindly to suppress enemy fire more than at individuals. To concentrate and control such copious firepower required the construction of a vast logistical infrastructure, hundreds of staff officers, a sophisticated observation and reporting system, and fire plans that extended into the thousands of pages. Aviation became an essential asset for artillery, first to identify enemy batteries and observe their own artillery’s fire, then to drive away the enemy’s observation aircraft, and finally as flying artillery to strafe and bomb.

The Second World War continued the trend toward greater and greater application of firepower, and further blurred differences between direct and indirect heavy weapons as well as the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. The fascist powers may have initiated “total war”—and gloried applying it on civilians from Warsaw to Nanking. And in many instances

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