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The history of military logistics goes back to Neolithic times. The most basic requirements of an army are food and water. Early armies were equipped with weapons used for hunting like spears, knives, axes and bows and arrows, and were small due to the practical difficulty of supplying a large number of soldiers. Large armies began to appear in the Iron Age. Animals such as horses, oxen, camels and even elephants were used to carry supplies. Food, water and fodder for the animals could usually be found or purchased in the field. The Roman Empire and Maurya Empire in India built networks of roads, but it was far less expensive to transport by sea than by road. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century there was the shift in Western Europe away from a centrally organised army.
Starting in the late sixteenth century, armies in Europe increased in size, to 100,000 or more in some cases. When operating in enemy territory an army was forced to plunder the local countryside for supplies, which allowed war to be conducted at the enemy's expense. However, with the increase in army sizes this reliance on pillage and plunder became problematic, as decisions regarding where and when an army could move or fight became based not on strategic objectives but on whether a given area was capable of supporting the soldiers' needs. Sieges in particular were affected by this, both for an army attempting to lay siege to a town and one coming to its relief. Unless a commander was able to arrange a form of regular resupply, a fortress or town with a devastated countryside could become immune to either operation. Napoleon made logistics a major part of his strategy. He dispersed his corps along a broad front to maximise the area from which supplies could be drawn. Each day forage parties brought in supplies. This differed from earlier operations living off the land in the size of the forces involved, and because the primary motivation was the emperor's desire for mobility. Ammunition could not as a rule be obtained locally, but it was still possible to carry sufficient ammunition for an entire campaign.
The nineteenth century saw technological developments that facilitated immense improvements to the storage, handling and transportation of supplies which made it easier to support an army from the rear. Canning simplified storage and distribution of foods, and reduced waste and the incidence of food-related illness. Refrigeration allowed frozen meat and fresh produce to be stored and shipped. Steamships made water transports faster and more reliable. Railways were a more economical form of transport than animal-drawn carts and wagons, although they were limited to tracks, and therefore could not support an advancing army unless its advance was along existing railway lines. At the same time, the advent of industrial warfare in the form of bolt-action rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery sent ammunition consumption soaring during the First World War.
In the twentieth century the advent of motor vehicles powered by internal combustion engines offered an alternative to animal transport for moving supplies forward of the railhead, although many armies still used animals. Air transport provided an alternative to land and sea transport, but with limited tonnage and at high cost. An airlift over "the Hump" helped supply the Chinese war effort during the Second World War, and the 1948 Berlin Air Lift was successful in supplying half of the city. With the subsequent development of large jets, aircraft became the preferred method of moving personnel over long distances, although it was still more economical to move cargo by sea and rail. In forward areas, the helicopter was well-suited to moving troops and supplies, especially over rugged terrain. The increasing complexity of weapons and equipment saw the proportion of personnel devoted to logistics rise. The diversity of equipment and consequent large number of spare parts saw attempts at standardisation but the adoption of foreign weapons also meant the adoption of foreign tactics, and giving up the advantages of bespoke systems tailored to a nation's own, often unique, strategic environment.
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The most basic requirements of an army are food and water.[1] Neolithic armies were equipped with weapons used for hunting — spears, knives, axes and bows and arrows.[2][3] By 1150 BCE the Olmecs of Mesoamerica were producing obsidian weapons that were neither hunting weapons nor agricultural tools.[4] Early armies were small due to the practical difficulty of supplying large numbers of people, and their radius of action was likewise limited to 80 to 90 kilometres or so. A ruler or warlord might use an army to extract tax or tribute, but it required a formidable logistical exercise to employ it.[5]
Re-enactment of Roman legionary with back pack
front view
from luggage side
By 700 BCE, Assyria had developed a standing army, with iron replacing bronze in weapons and armour, and cavalry replacing chariots.[6] The Assyrian army may have been able to field as many as 50,000 men, which alone would have required a high degree of logistical acumen,[7] but could operate up to 500 kilometres from its bases.[3] The defences and fortifications of cities had improved to the point where siege warfare had become a complicated technological task, involving scaling ladders, battering rams, siege towers and tunnelling, and could take months.[8] Supply of a besieging force therefore required the transport or construction of special equipment as well as the provision of food and water.[9][10]
Alexander the Great's father, Philip II of Macedon banned the use of carts on the grounds that they restricted the army's speed and mobility. Alexander continued this practice, with his army relying on horses and mules. He also used camels, many of which were captured along with Darius III's baggage train after the Battle of Issus. Although a cart drawn by a pair of oxen could carry up to 540 kilograms (1,200 lb), compared with about 110 kilograms (250 lb) for pack horses, mules and camels, they could only travel at 3.2 kilometres per hour (2 mph) and be worked for 5 hours per day, whereas pack horses could travel at 6.4 kilometres per hour (4 mph) and be worked for 8 hours per day. Carts were also liable to break down, especially in rough country. Some were necessary, however, for the carriage of heavy siege machinery.[11]
In the imperial Roman army, each eight-man contuberium (squad) had a mule to carry the leather or goatskin tent large enough to accommodate the squad and a handmill to grind grain – as that part of the ration was issued unground – tools and cooking implements. Together with five days' rations, this weighed about 200 kilograms (440 lb), which was easily within the carrying capacity of eight men and a mule. Adding a second mule would allow the contuberium to carry an additional 11 to 13 days' rations.[12] The Roman army ration included bread or biscuit, beef and veal, pork and sucking-pig, mutton and lamb, poutry, lentils, cheese, olive oil, wine or vinegar, and salt.[13][14] This gave them about 3,400 calories (14,000 kJ) per day, which was similar to that of Alexander's men.[15] An army of 60,000 required 95,000 litres (21,000 imp gal) of water for the men and 720,000 litres (158,000 imp gal) for the animals each day.[16] Each contuberium had their own fire to cook their meals, so firewood had to be collected; Julius Caesar regarded a shortage of firewood to be as dangerous as one of water or fodder.[17] The Olmecs used camales to prepare tortillas that could be retoasted and consumed en route,[18] whereas the Maya lacked a good, transportable food, which made long-distance forays difficult.[19]
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The Romans constructed a network of roads to permit the rapid movement of wheeled vehicles. A road network was in existence in Italy as early as the third century BCE, and by the time of Diocletian the Roman Empire had 90,000 kilometres (56,000 mi) of roads. The Roman army had no specialised engineering units, and roads were normally built by local communities, but the army could and did construct roads, especially near the frontiers. Roads were not necessary for the movement of troops, since the soldiers and their pack animals could travel along unimproved dirt tracks, but roads were used by supply trains and a military mail system.[20] The Chinese also built a road network, as did the Maurya Empire in India,[21] the Persians in Asia Minor,[22] and the Moche in South America.[23]
However, it was less expensive to ship a tonne of grain from Egypt to Rome by sea than to move it 80 kilometres (50 mi) by road.[21] The Romans preferred to use sea travel when they could, but it was risky as ships could be lost in storms. In his treatise on The Art of Commanding Armies, Polybius recommended that a commander have a thorough knowledge of how far ships could travel by day and night, and the optimal time and seasons for sea travel. Most ships were small. Six months' supply of grain for an army of 40,000 would have weighed 6,320 tonnes, and could have been carried in 200 ships.[24]
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One of the most significant changes in military organisation in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century was the shift from a centrally organised army to a combination of military forces made up of local troops who often worked within the household during peace time and were provided food and drink from the high officials in the house. The magnates drew upon their own resources for their men, and during Charlemagne's reign and the reign of the Ottonian dynasty in Germany, some heads of house built permanent storages and dwellings to house men or supplies.[25] Feudalism, under which a warrior nobility owed military obligations to their overlords, was a form of distributed military logistics system made necessary by poor communications and inadequate monetisation.[26] In Anglo-Saxon England, King Ine of Wessex established a form of tax in kind known as the feorm, which allowed troops to be supported without cash purchases.[27]
While on campaign, soldiers in the medieval period (the fifth to fifteenth centuries) in Europe were often responsible for supplying themselves, either through foraging, looting (more common during sieges), or purchases from markets along the campaign route. Even so, military commanders often provided their troops with food and supplies. This might be in lieu of wages if they worked within the king's household, but soldiers would be expected to pay for it from their wages if they did not, at cost or even with a profit.[28]
Some early governments, such as the Carolingians in eighth century, required soldiers to supply their own food for three months, but would feed soldiers thereafter for free if the campaign or siege was ongoing. Later, during the Saxon revolt of 1077–1088, Saxon soldiers were required to bring supplies enough for the entire campaign.[29] Some individual feats of logistics were formidable; after a seven-week campaign English archers shot up to half a million arrows during the battle of Crécy in 1346.[30][31]
Soldiers were often required to come equipped for campaign with their own armour, shields and weapons. They could often obtain the needed supplies from local craftsmen: smiths, carpenters, and leather workers often supplied the local militia troops with cooking utensils, bows and arrows, and horseshoes and saddles. Archaeologists have found evidence of goods production in excavations of royal houses, suggesting that the Roman infrastructure of central arms and equipment factories was inherited, even if such factories were more decentralised. Estates during Charlemagne's reign were required to have carpenters staffed to produce weapons and armour.[32][33][34]
The Vikings focused on seizing sites like monasteries that had large stores of supplies such as grain, cheese, livestock, beer and wine. They were also often located in the heart of agricultural areas with large surpluses stored in warehouses and granaries. This simplified pillaging and foraging. They were also filled with valuable objects, and housed wealthy persons who could be ransomed for substantial sums. However, they still had to take some supplies with them, and their longships were not suited to this, so they also brought merchant ships (knerrir) to carry supplies with them (and to take plunder back).[35] They established bases where supplies could be stored, which allowed them to occasionally field substantial forces and carry out large-scale operations, such as in the Siege of Paris in 885–886.[36]
The Mongols drank horses' blood and milk,[37] and took with them other livestock such as sheep, goats, cattle and sometimes camels. Sheep were the most important of the herd animals, and butter and cheese was produced from their milk, although horse meat was a particular favourite. Livestock could be spared for slaughter only occasionally, but when it was, all parts of the animal were eaten, and the bones were saved to make broth. They supplemented their diet with wild game, and collected various wild vegetables, fruits, berries, fungi and edible seeds. They had collapsible tents that could be quickly erected and struck. They were capable of operating in winter, but depended on their horses, so they needed grasslands where the horses could graze.[38][39]
Beasts of burden were used as vehicular transport for the food and supplies, either by carrying the supplies directly on their backs—the average medieval horse and mule could carry roughly 100 kilograms—or by pulling carts or wagons, depending on the weather conditions. A force with 1,000 pack and draft animals required roughly 9,000 kilograms of food for the animals, of which 4,000 kilograms was grain. Other animals had similar needs; donkeys each required about five kilograms of food each day, of which one kilogram had to be grain, while camels required approximately twelve kilograms of food each day, of which five kilograms needed to be grain.[40] Horses were not usually used as draft animals in China or India. In India, oxen were used to carry supplies purchased from the banjaras, mobile merchants who often accompanied armies.[41] Oxen required no grain, but need 20 kilograms of fodder per day, which could be found by grazing, should time and conditions permit.[40] In the Middle East and Central Asia, camels were often used, and in South and South East Asia elephants were used where roads and navigable rivers were uncommon, but there was plentiful water and foliage. This was more difficult in sub-Saharan Africa, where the elephants were less amenable.[41] A herd of 1,000 cattle could feed 14,000 or so men for roughly ten days.[40]
Commanders also made use of water transport throughout the medieval period as it was more efficient than ground transport. Ships made transporting supplies, and often soldiers, easier and more reliable, but the ability to use water transport was limited by location, weather, and the availability of ships. Cargo ships were also used, and were most commonly of the Nordic-type, the Utrecht-type, or the proto-cog craft. River boats resembling simple log-boats were also used.[42] In Sub-Saharan Africa, where there were many lakes, canoes were used.[41] Supply by sea was more economical, but not necessarily simpler than supply by land, due to complicating factors like loading and unloading, stowage, and moving supplies to an army that may not be on the coast.[43]
In Mesoamerica, there were no wheeled vehicles or draft animals that could be used as beasts of burden. The army of the Aztec Empire consisted of units of 8,000 men called xiquipilli. The army was accompanied by porters who carried about 23 kilograms each. It moved slowly, at about 2.4 kilometres per hour or 19 kilometres per day. Since the Aztecs did not build roads outside the major cities, the army moved along tracks used for local trade. Due to the limitations of the tracks, each xiquipilli departed on a different day, and used a different route if possible. Since the army could carry food for no more than eight days, this gave it a combat radius of about 58 kilometres (36 mi) in hostile territory; moving through its own territory the army drew on supplies from tributary towns along the way.[44]
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Sixteenth century
Between 1530 and 1710, the size of the armed forces deployed by European states increased by an order of magnitude, to 100,000 or more in some cases, resulting in a corresponding increase in the numbers involved in major battles.[45][46] There were technical and tactical components to this, like the shift from expensive armoured knights to cheaper pikemen, who could be mobilised in vast numbers, but the major factor was the growth of the European state. Increases in population and wealth generated more revenue through taxation, which could be utilised more effectively due to a series of administrative reforms in the sixteenth century. States now had the means to fund the upkeep and development of roads, which aided the logistical support of forces.[47]
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This increase in size came not just in the number of actual soldiers but also camp followers, or tross, — anywhere from half to one and a half times the size of the army itself — and the size of the baggage train — averaging one wagon for every fifteen men.[46] However, little state support was provided to these massive armies, the vast majority of which consisted of mercenaries. Beyond being paid for their service by the state (an act which bankrupted even the Spanish Empire on several occasions), these soldiers and their commanders were forced to provide everything for themselves. If permanently assigned to a town or city with a working marketplace, or travelling along a well-established military route, supplies could be bought locally with intendants overseeing the exchanges. In other cases an army travelling in friendly territory could expect to be followed by sutlers, whose stocks were small and subject to price gouging, or a commissioner could be sent ahead to a town to make arrangements, including billetting if necessary.[48]
Many armies were further restricted to following waterways as supplies they were forced to carry could be more easily transported by water. The Russians made use of the Volga River to support the conquest of Kazan in the Russo-Kazan Wars.[49] Artillery in particular was reliant on this method of transport, since even a modest number of cannons of the period required hundreds of horses to move them and their ammunition, and they travelled at half the speed of the rest of the army.[50] Troops moving down the Spanish Road between 1567 and 1620 were able to travel from Milan and Brussels, a distance of about 1,100 kilometres (700 mi), in five to seven weeks.[51] If an army marched at a leisurely pace of 10 to 13 kilometres (6 to 8 mi) per day, the heavy guns could keep up with little difficulty.[52] Improvements in metal casting techniques and the use of copper-based alloys like bronze and brass made cannons lighter and more durable, and therefore more mobile, but their production and maintenance required skilled craftsmen.[53]
The Ottoman Empire developed a formidable logistical system. The network of Roman and Byzantine roads radiating from Constantinople provided good lines of communication, as did the Danube River, via the Black Sea and the port of Varna. Ottoman troops could march 970 kilometres (600 mi) from Constantinople to Buda via Adrianople and Belgrade in six weeks, drawing provision en route from forty depots. They were fed biscuit, which did not require grinding like grain, and was less likely to spoil in wet weather than flour. This was supplemented by regular issues of mutton. During the siege of Vienna in 1529, heavy rains caused flooding and rendered the roads impassable to the Turks' heavy cannons, and in the Long Turkish War of 1593 to 1606 the Turkish forces in Transylvania were hampered by attacks on their supply ships on the Danube and Tisza Rivers.[54]
Seventeenth century
By the mid-seventeenth century, the French under Secretary of State for War Michel Le Tellier began a series of military reforms to address some of the issues which had plagued armies. Besides ensuring that soldiers were more regularly paid and combating the corruption and inefficiencies of private contractors, he devised formulae to calculate the supplies required for a given campaign, created standardised contracts for dealing with commercial suppliers, and formed a permanent vehicle-park manned by specialists whose role was to carry a few days' supplies while accompanying the army during campaigns. With these arrangements there was a gradual increase in the use of magazines, which provided a more regular flow of supply via convoys. While the concepts of magazines and convoys was not new, prior to the increase in army sizes there had rarely been cause to implement them.[55]
Le Tellier's son, Louvois, continued the reforms after assuming his position. The most important of these reforms was to guarantee free daily rations for the soldiers, amounting to two pounds of bread or hardtack a day. These rations were supplemented as circumstances allowed by a source of protein such as meat or beans; soldiers were still responsible for purchasing these items out-of-pocket but they were often available at below-market prices or even free at the expense of the state. Louvois also made permanent a system of magazines that were overseen by local governors to ensure they were fully stocked. Some of these magazines were dedicated to providing frontier towns and fortresses several months' worth of supplies in the event of a siege, while the rest were supported French armies operating in the field.[56]
When operating in enemy territory an army was forced to plunder the local countryside for supplies, a historical tradition meant to allow war to be conducted at the enemy's expense. However, with the increase in army sizes this reliance on plunder became a major problem, as decisions regarding where and when an army could move or fight were made based not on strategic objectives but whether a given area was capable of supporting the soldiers' needs. Sieges in particular were affected by this, both for an army attempting to lay siege to a location and for one coming to its relief. Unless a commander was able to implement some sort of regular resupply, a fortress or town with a devastated countryside could be effectively immune to either operation.[48] Mons could not be besieged in 1684 because of a lack of forage in the area. For the later French siege of Mons in the Spanish Netherlands in 1691, during the Nine Years' War, Louvois purchased 900,000 rations of fodder the year before.[57]
Although living off the land theoretically granted armies freedom of movement, it required careful planning, and the need for plunder precluded any sort of sustained, purposeful advance.[50] Bread was a particular problem, as providing it locally was limited by the availability of mills, ovens and bakers. An army of 60,000 might require 90,000 rations once camp followers were included, and at 0.68 kilograms (1.5 lb) of bread per ration that would require 61 tonnes (135,000 lb) of bread per day.[58] Armies normally marched for three days and rested on the fourth. A supply of bread for 60,000 men for four days required at least sixty ovens operated by 240 bakers. To build an oven required 500 two-kilogram bricks, so sixty ovens required sixty cartloads of bricks. In addition, a month's supply of fuel for the sixty ovens needed 1,400 cartloads. Local mills were targets for enemy action, so handmills were often necessary.[59]
Recourse therefore had to be made to bringing up supplies from the bases.[58] Fortresses not only guarded lines of communication they served as supply bases. In 1675, a French army 80,000 strong was supported for two months by the grain stored at Maastricht and Liège.[60] The indecisiveness of campaigns of the period was largely the result of the difficulty involved in supplying large armies.[61] The larger armies of the seventeenth century also saw the advent of military uniforms, which were introduced in Britain with the New Model Army in the English Civil War. Clothing contracts became centralised but funds were disbursed through regiments, which developed distinctive dress. Government payments were often in arrears, sometimes by years, and stripping the dead for their clothing became a common practice.[62]
Eighteenth century
In 1704, the Duke of Marlborough marched his army from the Netherlands to the Danube, following the Rhine and Neckar rivers. He was able to do so because he was moving through rich country and his Quartermaster General, Colonel William Cadogan, paid for supplies in gold at fair prices, so that the local population were willing to sell, and brought supplies to collection points. This was arranged through a contract let to Sir Solomon de Medina to purchase supplies through local agents. The 400-kilometre (250 mi) march wore out boots but these too were provided. The result was that the army arrived in good condition and ready to fight the Battle of Blenheim.[63][64][65][66]
In contrast, Marlborough's opponent, Marshal Tallard, was placed at a logistical disadvantage, having to advance without prepositioned supplies. Usually a population regarded the presence of an army, whether friendly or not, as a disaster and hoped that it would go away as soon as possible.[63][64][65][66] Europe lacked a network of good roads, and rains or snow melt could turn unmade roads into quagmires. Bridges were infrequent, and wooden bridges were easy to destroy. Most were crossed only by ferry. Rivers could become unnavigable if the water level rose or fell too much.[67]
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The Chinese likewise were able to tap into the rich agricultural resources of eastern China to support campaigns against far-flung adversaries. The Kangxi Emperor drove the Russians from the Amur river region, and besieged the Russian fortress at Albazin. The Treaty of Nerchinsk allocated the region to China. In the Dzungar–Qing Wars, the emperor was able to mount an expedition across the Gobi Desert to defeat the Dzungar in the Battle of Jao Modo, but subsequent expeditions to Tibet in 1717 and 1718 were frustrated by logistical difficulties and ran out of food before a more successful expedition in 1720.[68]
In the American Revolutionary War, the Americans had a young population with large numbers of potential soldiers, and an agricultural economy with surplus foodstuffs and no vital centres. Clothing and footwear could be supplied by domestic production, there was widespread ownership of firearms, and a shipping industry experienced in smuggling that could supply other needs. What they lacked was land transportation infrastructure — roads, waterways, wagons, animals and skilled personnel — needed for the distribution of supplies. This hampered the creation and maintenance of forces sufficiently large to drive out the British.[69]
After the war the British created the infrastructure and gained the experience needed to manage an empire. They reorganised the management of the supply of military food and transport, which was completed in 1793–1794 when the naval Victualling and Transport Boards undertook those responsibilities. It built upon experience learned from the supply of the very-long-distance Falkland Islands garrison from 1767 to 1772 to systematise needed shipments to distant places such as Australia, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.[70]
This new infrastructure allowed Britain to launch large expeditions to the continent during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and to develop a global network of garrisons in the colonies.[70] They were not always successful; British setbacks in the Kandyan Wars in Sri Lanka were partly attributable to logistical difficulties, although disease and terrain were also factors, and the British were defeated by the Ashanti Empire in the Battle of Nsamankow in 1824 when they ran out of ammunition.[71]
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Napoleonic wars
Napoleon made logistical operations a major part of French strategy.[72] He dispersed his corps along a broad front to maximise the area from which supplies could be drawn. Each day forage parties brought in supplies. This differed from earlier operations living off the land in the size of the forces involved, and because the primary motivation was the emperor's desire for mobility. Crucially, the army did not degenerate into an armed mob.[73] Ammunition could not as a rule be obtained locally, so Napoleon allotted 2,500 of his 4,500 wagons to carrying artillery ammunition, with the rest hauling rations. Each man carried 60 to 80 rounds in his pack, and each division carried 97,000 rounds in reserve. Thus, like earlier armies, the Grande Armée took with it sufficient ammunition for the whole campaign.[74] Support troops accompanied each unit. A British Royal Horse Artillery troop in 1813 was authorised to have a farrier, a carriage smith, two shoeing smiths, two collar makers and a wheelwright.[75]
During the Ulm Campaign in 1805, the French army of 200,000 men had no need for time-consuming efforts to scour the countryside for supplies and live off the land, as it was well provided for by France's German allies.[72] France's ally, the Electorate of Bavaria, turned the city of Augsburg into a gigantic supply centre, allowing the Grande Armée, generously replenished with food, shoes and ammunition, to quickly invade Austria after the decisive French victory at Ulm.[76]
Napoleon left nothing to chance, requesting the Bavarians to prepare in advance a specified amount of food at certain cities such as Würzburg and Ulm, for which the French reimbursed them.[77] When French demands proved excessive for the German principalities, the French army used a system of vouchers to requisition supplies and keep the rapid advance going.[78] The agreements with allies permitted the French to obtain huge quantities of supplies within a few days' notice.[79] Napoleon built up a major supply magazine at Passau, with barges transporting supplies down the Danube to Vienna to maintain the French army prior to the Battle of Austerlitz in combat readiness.[76]
The French system fared poorly in the Peninsular War in the face of Spanish guerrilla warfare that targeted their supply lines and the British blockade of French-occupied ports on the Iberian Peninsula. The need to supply a besieged Barcelona made it impossible to control the province and ended French plans to incorporate Catalonia into Napoleon's Empire.[80] Wellington blocked the French advance into Portugal with a series of fortifications, the Lines of Torres Vedras, and devastated the area north of the lines to make it difficult for the French to mass forces there to assault or besiege the fortifications.[81]
A more spectacular logistical failure occurred in the Russian campaign in 1812.[82] Carl von Clausewitz noted:
The second crisis most commonly occurs at the end of a victorious campaign when the lines of communication have begun to be overstretched. This is especially true when the war is conducted in an impoverished, thinly populated and possibly hostile country. How vast a difference there is between a supply line stretching from Vilna to Moscow, where every wagon has to be procured by force, and a line from Cologne to Paris, via Liége, Louvain, Brussels, Mons, Valenciennes and Cambrai, where a commercial transaction, a bill of exchange, is enough to produce millions of rations![83]
Medical logistics
Disease had been the greatest enemy of the soldier. Invading armies sometimes introduced diseases. Wars often created conditions for diseases to flourish through crowding, social disruption and damage to infrastructure. Crowded army camps were always susceptible to diseases. In the eighteenth century, physicians like George Cleghorn, Richard Brocklesby and René-Nicolas Dufriche Desgenettes called for improvements in military hygiene,[84] as did John Pringle, who wrote a treatise on military medicine in 1752, Observations on the Diseases of the Army in Camp and Garrison, in which he argued that disease was caused by bad air and overcrowding.[85]
James Lind published a Treatise of the Scurvy in 1753 in which he advocated the consumption of fresh fruit and lemon juice to treat scurvy, a common illness among sailors on long voyages.[86] Of the 175,990 sailors recruited by the Royal Navy between 1774 and 1780, 18,545 died of disease, mainly scurvy, and 1,243 were killed. Between 1794 and 1813, with the adoption of a lemon juice ration, the navy's sick rate fell from 1 in 4 to 1 in 10.75 and the death rate from 1 in 86 to 1 in 143.[87] Lind also advocated the consumption of the bark of cinchona trees to prevent malaria, something that had previously been recommended by Thomas Sydenham in 1676.[88] The active ingredient was extracted and isolated in 1820 by Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, who named it "quinine".[89]
The British Walcheren Campaign of 1809 was particularly notable in that less than 800 men died in battle, but forty percent of the force of 40,000 contracted diseases, probably malaria, typhoid or typhus; 60 officers and 3,900 men died, and some 11,000 men were still ill six months later.[90][91][92] It is estimated that of the 240,000 British soldiers and sailors who died in all theatres in the Napoleonic wars, less than 30,000 died from wounds.[92]
Later nineteenth century
The nineteenth century saw technological developments that facilitated immense improvements to the storage, handling and transportation of supplies. Salting, drying and smoking had long been used to delay food spoilage,[93] but in 1809 Nicolas Appert invented a process of heat sterilisation and airtight bottling for food preservation on an industrial scale. Why it worked would not be explained until Louis Pasteur's ground breaking research in 1864, but the process was swiftly and widely adopted. Appert used glass because the quality of French tinplate was poor, but good quality tinplate was widely available in the UK. Philippe de Girard in France suggested its use to Peter Durand in England, who took out a patent on the process in 1810, which he sold to industrialist Bryan Donkin in 1812 for £1,000 (equivalent to £84,000 in 2023). The British Admiralty placed substantial orders for meat preserved in tin cans in 1814. Canning remained a manual process for many years until Max Ams invented the double seam for cans in 1896, making it possible to use an automated process to fill and close them.[94] The use of cans simplified storage and distribution of foods, and reduced waste and the incidence of food-related illness.[93]
A practical mechanical refrigeration process was developed in Australia by James Harrison and patented in the UK by him in 1856,[95] and by the 1880s reefer ships were plying the oceans.[96] Richard Trevithick developed the first high-pressure steam engine in 1801 and the first working railway steam locomotive in 1804.[97] Steam power had great advantages for vessels that plied rivers, where twists and turns meant changes of course but the narrow confines of the river made it difficult to tack. Wood and coal could be obtained along the river, whereas ocean-going vessels had no such opportunity, and therefore continued to carry sails even when they had engines.[98]
By reducing the dependence on the wind, the steam engine made shipping faster and more reliable. To allow their warships to operate around the world, the British built a global network of coaling stations. To reduce its dependence on British colliers, the United States Navy began to move to oil in 1913. For the British, this was a more painful process, as it produced coal but not oil domestically.[99]
The first to realise the potential of rail were the Russians, who moved a force of 14,500 men from Uherské Hradiště to Kraków by rail in 1846.[100] During the American Civil War, railways were used extensively for the transport of personnel, supplies, horses and mules, and artillery pieces.[101] While railways were a more economic form of transport than animal-drawn carts and wagons, they were limited to tracks, and therefore could not support an advancing army unless its advance was along existing railway lines.[98] The large armies of the American Civil also made great use of riverboats and coastal shipping, which were not so easy to damage or interdict.[102]
During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, railways enabled the swift mobilisation of the Prussian Army, but the problem of moving supplies from the end of rail lines to units at the front resulted in nearly 18,000 tons trapped on trains unable to be unloaded to ground transport.[103] During the Crimean War, the British built the first military railway, one specifically for supporting armies in the field, to support the siege of Sevastopol.[104] The Prussian use of railways during the Franco-Prussian War is often cited as an example of logistic modernisations, but the advantages of manoeuvre were often gained by abandoning supply lines that became hopelessly congested with rear-area traffic.[105] The Canadian government moved 4,000 troops and their supplies over the Canadian Pacific Railway to suppress the North-West Rebellion in 1885, and the Russians moved 370,000 troops along the incomplete Trans-Siberian Railway for the Russo-Japanese War in 1904.[106]
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Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.
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