Artillery in the Boer War (Part II)
Edwardian Armies
The battle of Colenso (December 15th, 1899) provides an excellent illustration, not merely of the problems posed by the Boer artillery, but also of the failure of the Boers to exploit this advantage. In this engagement, the fighting strength of the Boers - five 75mm field guns, one 120mm howitzer, and a little more than four thousand rifles - was spread among the hills overlooking the point where the railroad crossed the Tugela River. The forces of the British Empire, numbering close to eighteen thousand men, with thirty 15-pounder field guns and fourteen long range naval guns mounted on improvised carriages approached the Tugela River along the railroad line. The mission of the British column was to force a passage of the watercourse. The task of the Boers was to stop them.
The action commenced with the long range shelling of the Boer positions by six of the naval guns. Firing lyddite shells at 4,000 meters, these guns had little trouble hitting the hills where the Boers were hiding. From the point of view of the British officers observing the scene through their field glasses, the bombardment was devastatingly effective. It was so effective, in fact, that no Boer could be seen on the hills where they had been observed the day before.
Fearing that the Boers might have evacuated their positions and mindful of his mission to cover the advance of the infantry, the commander of the British field artillery moved forward alone with two field gun batteries. These were stopped a thousand meters in front of the Boer trenches by rifle bullets and shrapnel shells that poured in from three of the four points of the compass. The long range bombardment, it turned out, had done little to disturb the Boers. It was not even sufficient to tempt them to break their fire discipline.
The British crews fought bravely for an hour, cooly working their guns despite the steady rain of small projectiles that struck one of their number every minute and a half. When their field guns ran out of ammunition, the crews retreated to the shelter of nearby depressions. In the meantime, the bombardment of the naval guns continued. High explosive shells fired behind the Boer positions were effective in denying the latter the benefit of “interior lines.” This embryonic “interdiction fire” was, however, a two edged sword, preventing the British from attempting any sort of attack into the Boer rear area.
If the officers commanding the naval guns had been able to distinguish friend from foe this would not have been a problem. At 4,000 meters, however, it was hard to determine who was wearing Imperial khaki and who was clothed in the home- made corderoy of the Boers. Thus, when British infantry managed to drive a party of Boers from their trenches, the naval guns were not able to exploit the opportunity presented by an enemy unit moving slowly in the open. From their vantage point, the long range artillerists could see that somebody was moving in their field of fire. Because they could not tell the nationality of this lucrative target, they declined to fire.
Their victory notwithstanding, the Boers also missed opportunities at Colenso. Just as the British batteries had gone into action with little sense of the need to cooperate either with each other or the infantry, the Boer pieces produced purely local effects. The dispersal of the guns that denied the British artillery a single target upon which to concentrate it efforts also deprived the Boers of the decisive effects that could have been obtained by the simultaneous fire of their five field guns and one howitzer on a single, exposed target. The problem was not one of range - the battlefield at Colenso was about 5,000 meters wide and the Boer weapons could easily reach out to 6,000 or 7,000 meters - but of habits and arrangements for command.
The Boers were fighting a defensive war for the preservation of their independent way of life. The defensive attitude that they took led them to be generally satisfied with holding the British at arms length and prevented the development of the idea that they should press advantages to the point of annihilating large British units. The habits of thought developed in the course of small scale, close range battles against poorly armed Zulus and Matabeles did not require them to think of a battle as having any reality apart from the man in their sights. Once that man was gone, the battle was over.
As a result of this, the Boer guns were rarely used as a means of influencing the battle as a whole. Rather, they were employed a larger versions of the main Boer weapon - the magazine rifle. Despite the fact that the Boer gunners were formed in batteries with a separate chain of command, each gun, once distributed, came under the effective command of the elected leader of the Boer riflemen occupying the immediate area. Indeed, the only gun that remained at the disposition of the overall Boer commander at Colenso, was the one next to his command post that he used to signal his command to open fire.
For Further Exploration: The battle of Colenso is the subject of a board wargame, a podcast, and several fine books.