(^232) Chapter Seven
who ever since 1840 had been secretly building up stocks of a
breech-loading rifle, took the precaution of converting their old mus
kets to the Minié system between 1854 and 1856;^12 and across the
Atlantic the United States Army went over to the Minié bullet and
rifling in 1855.
From the mid-fifties onward, therefore, patterns of both naval and
land armament that had remained almost stable since the seventeenth
century began to crumble away, exposing admirals, generals, and
statesmen to the acute discomfort of having to face the possibility of
war under conditions and with weapons of which they had no direct
experience. This put a premium on imagination and intelligence
among naval and military leaders and drastically penalized the old
bluff disregard for anything that smacked of thinking. The conse
quences were greatest on land. Troops that had attained the highest
levels of drill and mindlessness, i.e., the best armies of Europe, were
the most vulnerable to the strains that new technology imposed. Con
versely, from the 1860s the weakest army among the great powers,
the Prussian, found itself in a position to capitalize on what had
hitherto seemed crushing disadvantages.
Before exploring how Prussia achieved military primacy on land,
two other by-products of the Crimean War experience with new
weaponry deserve attention. The first of these was the application of
mass production techniques to the gun trade. It all started because the
artisanal organization of manufacture in Birmingham and London
proved notably inelastic when war with Russia suddenly created a new
demand. Making handguns had long been a craft, subdivided among
numerous specialists. Each artisan worked as a subcontractor for en
trepreneurs who in turn contracted with the government for a stated
number of finished guns. Government inspectors checked along the
way to make sure that each part met specifications; and sometimes the
arsenal at Woolwich made the final assembly on its own account. The
system had borne the strain of the Napoleonic Wars successfully
enough, even though it took two decades for British (and French)
gunmakers to reach peak rates of production in response to the war
time demand.
In 1854–56 no one was willing to wait for decades while thousands
of artisans adjusted to a new level of demand. The problem was
exacerbated in England by the fact that manufacture was already in the
throes of adjustment to the new Minié design. Old habits and methods
- Dennis Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology and the Unification of
Germany (Hamden, Conn., 1975), pp. 81, 96–98.