A Knife Doubles Firepower: The Bayonet

^{An assortment of bayonets. From top, left to right, bayonets fit U.S. M 1 rifle; U.S. M 1917 rifle, U.S. M 1 or M 2 carbine; U.S. Springfield rifle, model 1873; British bayonet for rifle number 4; German dress bayonet for Mauser 1898 carbine.}

^{Directly below the bayonet for the British rifle number 4 is another bayonet, the so‑called spike bayonet for the same rifle.}

^{At bottom is a Russian bayonet that can be fitted to its scabbard to make a wire cutter.}

The flintlock, which eliminated the need to worry about a burning match, greatly speeded up the infantry’s rate of fire, but the musketeer was still practically defenseless for too long a time between shots. Musketeers carried swords, but having a sword is not much comfort when faced with a phalanx of pikes or a swarm of charging horsemen. At times, musketeers arranged themselves in successive lines. The first line would fire and move to the rear, reloading as they went, while the second line would fire and do the same. This system allowed quickly repeated volleys, and, at times, it was quite successful.

At the battle of Bunker Hill, John Stark’s New Hampshire militiamen were holding the flank of the American position that terminated at the Mystic River.

Stark hid his men behind a stone‑and‑rail fence and arranged them in three lines. British General William Howe had planned to make a demonstration in front of the American lines while the elite light infantry companies of his force would run along the river bank, hidden from the sight of both those in the American fort and the members of the main British force. They would sweep around the apparently unguarded left flank of the Americans and hit them from the rear as the main body advanced on the rebel front.

The light companies double‑timed along the river in columns of four, one company behind the other. When the lead company, the light company of the Welch Fusiliers, got to about 80 feet of the fence, there was an ear‑splitting blast, and the company ceased to exist. The light troops of the King’s Own Regiment dashed forward, knowing that, however fast the rebels could reload, they couldn’t resist a bayonet charge now. There was another blast and another cloud of smoke and another company annihilated. The third light company hesitated, then they leveled their muskets and charged. For the third time, a British light infantry company was blown away. It would not happen again. The rest of the light infantrymen turned around and dashed to the rear. If they had continued on, the Battle of Bunker Hill would have been all over. Stark’s first line had not had time to reload.

The trouble with firing in successive lines was that it was only practical on a narrow front. In open country, the musketeers could easily be flanked, especially by cavalry. In most battles, the musketeers relied on pikemen to protect them while reloading. Infantry practiced various formations and drills that allowed musketeers to hide behind the pikes while reloading and to take up firing positions as soon as their weapons were ready to use. This system worked pretty well, but it obviously cut down the army’s firepower – sometimes by more than half.

The solution to the problem was to turn the musket into a spear. According to some sources, this was the idea of Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban, the great French military engineer in the armies of Louis XIV. It was a solution at least for soldiers. Hunters in France and Spain had for some time been jamming knives into the muzzles of their muskets for protection against dangerous game. It seems that Bayonne, a French city noted for its cutlery, made a type of hunting knife that was favored for this use. When the French army adopted this weapon, it was called a “bayonet.” The earliest reference to the use of the bayonet is in the memoirs of a French officer who wrote that on one campaign, his men did not carry swords, but knives with handles one foot long and blades of the same length. When needed, the knives could be placed in the muzzles of the guns to turn them into spears. The bayonet proved to be a much more effective defense against cavalry than the sword.

There were some drawbacks to these “plug bayonets.” If someone put a plug bayonet in the muzzle of a loaded musket and then fired it, the gun might blow up. This sort of accident seems to have been much more prevalent among civilians who, unlike soldiers, did not load and fire on command. It was so prevalent that in 1660, Louis XIV had to issue a proclamation forbidding the placing of daggers in the muzzles of hunting guns. The trouble with plug bayonets in military guns was that, when the bayonet was in place, the gun could not be loaded or fired, although there were situations when it would be most helpful to be able to do either with the bayonet in place.

The first attempt to remedy this condition was to fit the handle of the bayonet with a pair of rings that could be slipped over the barrel of the musket. The blade hung below the barrel so there was nothing to stop bullet from either entering or leaving the muzzle. The person who first invented the ring bayonet is uncertain. Hugh Mackay, a Scot in the service of William of Orange who campaigned for the Netherlands‑born English king in Scotland in the late 1680s and early 1690s, wrote that his men had no time to place or remove their plug bayonets when the Highland clansmen charged them firing their pistols and brandishing their swords. He had rings put on the bayonets so his men could fire while their bayonets were in place.

The ring bayonet was a major improvement, but it could easily fall off a musket barrel – or be pulled off by an enemy. That led to the invention of the socket bayonet, a type that was universally used from the mid‑18th to the mid‑19th century and was revived in the late 20th century by the British Army.

Basically, the socket bayonet is a blade set at an angle to a tube that fits over the barrel of a gun. Its advantage over the ring bayonet is that the socket includes a way to lock it on to the gun.

The socket bayonet was an extremely efficient weapon when mounted on a musket or rifle. It was much less satisfactory when used without the gun, as the socket was awkward to hold. As time went on, the bayonet became increasingly less important as a weapon. The universal use of rifles in the late 19th century, as in the American Civil War, made it unlikely that enemy soldiers would get close enough to use bayonets. In World War I, repeating rifles and machine guns made bayonets almost useless. American authorities in that war estimated that no more than.024 percent of their casualties were caused by bayonets.

But although the rifle was seldom used as a spear, bayonets were far from useless. Every infantryman has a need for a good knife. The old socket bayonet was not a very good knife, but it began to be replaced by the bayonet that was.

This type was a knife or a short sword that typically had a catch in the pommel that attached to a stud on the gunstock and had a ring in the guard that slipped over the muzzle of the rifle. The German bayonet of the two world wars did away with the muzzle ring and attached the handle of the bayonet to a long bar below the rifle barrel. At first, most of these bayonets were quite long, one early British type had a blade more than 30 inches long. The idea was to make a bayonet long enough to keep cavalry at a safe distance when attached to a rifle. When it dawned on military authorities that cavalry was no longer a major combat arm, the bayonet started to shrink. Still, the M1917 bayonet the United States used in World War I had a blade 17 inches long. That made a handy short sword, but swords were even less likely to be used as serious weapons than bayonets. What the soldier needed was a knife – something that could open cans and other types of packaging, cut rope, carve wood or meat, cut the throat of an enemy sentry, or be used in very close quarters combat. In World War II, the bayonet for the M1

Garand rifle at first had a blade 10 inches long. In a later version, the blade was only 6.7 inches long, the same length as the bayonet for the M1 carbine.

When armies dropped the socket bayonet, they began issuing bayonets that could double for other types of tools. Both the British and the Germans once issued bayonets with saw teeth on the back. This was not, as some charged, to make a more frightful wound, but so that the bayonet could also be used as a saw. The United States issued a number of these specialized bayonets. One was trowel bayonet, which was designed to be either a weapon or an entrenching tool but was good for neither use. Another was a Bowie bayonet, a very peculiar device that bore little but superficial resemblance to the traditional Bowie knife.

There was also the bolo bayonet, an excellent bush knife for use in the Philippine jungles but that, when mounted on a rifle, seriously unbalanced the weapon.

Today, most bayonets are short knives with a special scabbard that allows them to be used as wire cutters.

In the 17th century, the bayonet changed warfare by making the pike obsolete and making all infantry gunners – in effect, doubling the firepower of the infantry. Since then, its importance as a serious weapon has greatly diminished, although it is still useful for crowd control. And in the Korean War, a bayonet charge by Company E of the Twenty‑seventh Infantry Regiment routed the entrenched North Koreans opposed to them.

It should be noted, though, that this charge by a single infantry company was later hailed as “the greatest American bayonet charge since the battle of Cold Harbor” in the Civil War.