The Infantry Company over a Century. Part 1. The Old Army becomes the Great War Army.

A note about this entry.  Like most of the items posted on this blog that pertain to the 1890-1920 time frame, this information was gathered and posted here as part of a research project for a novel.  As such, it's a post that invites comment.  I.e., the comments are research in and of themselves and its more than a little possible that there's material here that might be in need of correction.

Company C, Wyoming National Guard (Powell Wyoming), 1916.  Note that seemingly nearly everyone in this photograph is a rifleman.  Also of note is that these Wyoming National Guardsmen, all of whom would have come from the Park County area (and therefore were probably of a fairly uniform background and ethnicity) are using bedrolls like Frontier infantrymen, rather than the M1910 haversack that was official issue at the time.

Infantry, we’re often told, is the most basic of all Army roles.  Every soldiers starts off, to some extent, as a rifleman.  But save for those who have been in the infantry, which granted is a fair number of people over time, we may very well have an wholly inaccurate concept of how an infantry company, the basic maneuver element, is made up, and what individual infantrymen do today. 

And if that's true, we certainly don't have very good idea of how that came to be.

And we’re also unlikely to appreciate how it’s changed, and changed substantially, over time.

So, we’re going to go back to our period of focus and come forward to take a look at that in a series of posts that are relevant to military history, as well as the specific focus of this blog.

Prior to the Great War, the Old Army.

U.S. Infantry in Texas early in the 20th Century.  I'm not sure of the date, but its a 20th Century photograph dating after 1903 as all of the infantrymen are carrying M1903 rifles.  It's prior to 1915, however, in that they're all wearing late 19th Century pattern campaign hats of the type that came into service in the 1880s and remained until 1911.

Much of this blog has focused on the Punitive Expedition/Border War which ran up to and continued on into World War One.  As we've noted before, that event, the Punitive Expedition, was one in which the Army began to see the introduction of a lot of new weaponry.  While that expanded the Army's capabilities, it also, at the same time, presented problems on how exactly to handle the new equipment and how its use should be organized.

Historians are fond of saying that the Punitive Expedition served the purpose of mobilizing and organizing an Army that was in now way ready to engage in a giant European war, and that is certainly true.  But the fact of the matter remains the infantry that served along the Mexican border in 1916 (the troops who went into Mexico were largely cavalry) did not serve in an Army that was organizationally similar at all to the one that went to France in 1917.

American infantrymen became riflemen with the introduction of M1855 Rifle Musket.  Prior to that, the normal long arm for a U.S. infantryman was a musket, that being a smoothbore, and accordingly short range, weapon.  Rifles had been issued before but they were normally the weapon of specialists.  Starting in 1841, however, the Army began to make use of rifle muskets which had large bores and shallow rifling, combining the best features of the rifle and the musket and addressing the shortcomings of both.  The advantages were clear and the rifle musket rapidly supplanted the musket

Civil War era drawling showing a rifleman in a pose familiar to generations of combat riflemen up to the present day.

For a long time, prior to the Great War, infantry companies were comprised entirely or nearly entirely of riflemen, with their officers and NCO's often being issued sidearms rather than longarms, depending upon their position in the company. As with the period following 1917, companies were made up of platoons, and platoons were made up of squads, so that part of it is completely familiar.  Much of the rest of it would strike a modern soldier, indeed any soldier after 1917 as odd, although it wouldn't a civilian, given as civilians have been schooled by movies to continue to think of infantry this way.  Even in movies showing modern combat, most infantrymen are shown to be riflemen.

Squads at the time, that is prior to 1917, were formed by lining men in a company up and counting them out into groups of eight men per squad.  Each squad would have a corporal in charge of it and consist of eight men, including the commanding corporal.  The corporal, in terms of authority, and in reality, was equivalent to a sergeant in the Army post 1921.  I.e., the corporal was equivalent to a modern sergeant in the Army.  He was, we'd note, a true Non Commissioned Officer.

There were usually six squads per platoon.  The squads were organized into two sections, with each section being commanded by a sergeant.  The sergeant, in that instance, held a rank that would be equivalent to the modern Staff Sergeant, although his authority may be more comparable to that of a Sergeant First Class.

The platoon was commanded by a lieutenant. One of the company's two platoons was commanded by a 1st lieutenant, who was second in command of the company, and the other by a 2nd lieutenant.  The company was commanded by a Captain, who was aided by the company Field Sergeant, who was like a First Sergeant in terms of duties and authority.  The company staff consisted of the Field Sergeant, a Staff Sergeant and a private.  The Staff Sergeant's rank is only semi comparable to that of the current Staff Sergeant, but he did outrank "buck" Sergeants.

Sergeants were, rather obviously, a really big deal.

Spanish American War volunteers carrying .45-70 trapdoor Springfield single shot rifles and wearing blue wool uniforms.

While this structure would more or less exist going far back into the 19th Century, the Army had undergone a reorganization following the Spanish American War which brought to an end some of the remnants of of the Frontier Army in some ways and which pointed to the future, while at the same time much of the Army in 1910 would have remained perfectly recognizable to an old soldier, on the verge of retirement, who had entered it thirty years earlier in 1880.*  This was reflected by an overhaul of enlisted ranks in 1902 which brought in new classifications and which did away with old ones, and as part of that insignia which we can recognize today, for enlisted troops, over 100 years later.  Gone were the huge inverted stripes of the Frontier era and, replacing them, were much smaller insignia whose stripes pointed skyward. The new insignia, reflecting the arrival of smokeless powder which had caused the Army to start to emphasize concealment in uniforms for the first time, were not only much smaller, but they blended in. . .somewhat, with the uniform itself.

New York National Guardsmen boarding trains for border service during the Punitive Expedition.  They are still carrying their equipment in bed rolls rather than the M1910 Haversack.

The basic enlisted pattern of ranks that came into existence in 1902 continued on through 1921, when thing were much reorganized.  But the basic structure of the Rifle Company itself was about to change dramatically, in part due to advancements in small arms which were impacting the nearly universal identify of the infantryman as a rifleman.

Colorado National Guardsman with M1895 machinegun in 1914, at Ludlow Colorado.

Automatic weapons were coming into service, but how to use and issue them wasn't clear at first.  The U.S. Army first encountered them in the Spanish American War, which coincidentally overlapped with the Boer War which is where the British Army first encountered and used them.  The US adopted its first machinegun in 1895.  The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, which fought as dismounted cavalry in Cuba during the Spanish American War, used them in support of their assault of Kettle Hill, although theirs were privately purchased by unit supporters who had donated them to the unit.   The Spanish American and and Boer Wars proved their utility however and various models came after that.  They were, however, not assigned out at the squad level, but were retained in a separate company and assigned out by higher headquarters as needed.  There was, in other words, no organic automatic weapon at the company level, and certainly not at the squad level.

African American infantryman in 1898, carrying the then new Krag M1986 rifle.  This soldiers is wearing the blue service uniform which, at that time, was being phased out in favor of a khaki service uniform.  Most of the Army had not received the new uniform at this time and, in combat in  Cuba, most wore cotton duck stable clothing that was purchased for the war.  Some soldiers did deploy, however, with blue wool uniforms.  In the field, this soldier would have worn leggings, which he is not in this photograph.

There also weren't a lot of them.  Running up to World War One the Army issued new tables of organization for National Guard units, anticipating large formations such as divisions.  Even at that point, however, there were no automatic weapons at the company level at all.  The infantry regiment table provided for a Machine Gun Company which had a grand total of four automatic rifles. 

M1909 "Machine Rifle".  It was a variant of the Hotchkiss machinegun of the period and was acquired by the Army in very low quantities.

Just four.

Most men in a Rifle Company were just that, riflemen.  Automatic weapons were issued to special sections as noted.  Rifle grenadiers didn't exist.  Most of the infantry, therefore that served along the border with Mexico was leg infantry, carrying M1903 Springfield rifles, and of generally low rank.**

New York National Guardsmen in Texas during the Punitive Expedition.

That was about to change.

Well, some of it was about to change.  Some of it, not so much.

So, in 1916, anyhow, where we we at.  A company had about 100 men, commanded by a captain who had a very small staff.  The entire company, for that matter, had an economy of staff.  Most of the men were privates, almost all of which were riflemen, and most of who's direct authority figure, if you will, was a corporal. There were few sergeants in the company, and those who were there were pretty powerful men, in context.  There were some men around with special skills as well, such as buglers, farriers, and cooks.  Cooks were a specialty and the cook was an NCO himself, showing how important he was.  Even infantry had a small number of horses for officers and potentially for messengers, which is why there were farriers.  And automatic weapons had started to show up, but not as weapons assigned to the company itself, and not in large numbers.

A career soldier could expect himself, irrespective of the accuracy of the expectation, to spend his entire career in this sort of organization, and many men in fact had.  Some men spent entire careers as privates. Sergeants were men who had really advanced in the Army, even if they retired with only three stripes.  Corporals had achieved a measure of success.  Most of the men lived in common with each other in barracks.  Only NCO's might expect a measure of privacy.  Only sergeants might hope to marry.

Machine gun troops of the Punitive Expedition equipped with M1904 Maxim machinegun and carrying M1911 sidearms.

That, of course, was the Regular Army.  The National Guard was organized in the same fashion, but there was more variance in it.  Guardsmen volunteered for their own reasons and had no hope of retirement, as it wasn't available to them.  Some were well heeled, some were not, but they were largely armed and equipped in the same manner, although they received new material only after the Army had received a full measure of it first. Their uniforms and weapons could lag behind those of the Regular Army's.  And some units who had sponsors could be surprisingly well equipped, some having automatic weapons that were privately purchased for the unit and which did not fit into any sort of regular TO&E.

And then came the Great War.

Footnotes:

*Thirty years was the Army retirement period at the time.

**We've dealt with the weapons of the period separately, but in the 1900 to 1916 time frame, the Army adopted a new rifle to replace a nearly new rifle, with the M1903 replacing the M1896 Krag-Jorgensen, which was only seven years old at the time.  While M1896 rifles remained in service inventories up into World War Two, to some degree, is field replacement was amazingly rapid and by World War One there were no Regular Army or National Guard units carrying them.  

In terms of handguns, of which the US used a lot, in 1916 the Army was acquiring a newly adopted automatic pistol, the M1911.  Sizable quantities had been acquired but stocks of M1909 double action .45 revolvers remained in use. The M1909, for that matter, had been pushed into service due to the inadequacies of the M1892, which was chambered in .38.  The M1892 had proven so inadequate in combat that old stocks of .45 M1873 revolvers were issued for field use until M1909s were adopted and fielded.  Given this confusion, and rapid replacement of one revolver by another in 1916, there weren't enough M1911s around, and some soldiers went into Mexico with M1909s.

Related threads:

The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition.