The Bayonet - Cold Steel Decisive Weapons

OK, when I give you the command "En garde!", you scream the words back and adopt a natural fighting stance.

I want the enemy scared to death before you get there. ..EN GARDE!

EN GARDE!

-HIGH PORT!

-HIGH PORT!

-EN GARDE!

-EN GARDE!

The bayonet. For three centuries this crude weapon

has endured as the infantry soldier's most indispensable tool.

It's just a blade with a handle fitted to your rifle.

'It is very much a symbol of what you're doing.'

EN GARDE!

The bayonet is a very nasty instrument of war.

I mean, this is a Baker Rifle bayonet.

It is an exceedingly nasty thing.

The thought of that in your belly being twisted around would spoil your day!

With the bayonet, you're dealing with a weapon that does nothing... does nothing at all.

A rifle fires, grenades blow up.

This thing is totally reliant upon its user to close with the enemy,

look him in the eye and use it.

The bayonet takes its name from Bayonne in France, where it was invented in the 1640s.

Soldiers have been fixing bayonets ever since, especially in the British Army.

This most basic weapon has remained virtually unchanged -

a long steel blade attached to a rifle or musket,

turning the soldier's firearm into a lethal stabbing weapon.

The earliest bayonet is this -

the plug bayonet. It's shoved down the barrel.

Essentially, prior to the existence of the bayonet, soldiers were either equipped with a musket

or a pike, which was essentially a 16-foot-long spear.

These weapons weren't that accurate, so you couldn't rely on firepower to keep the enemy at bay

while reloading.

The pikeman did that job for a long time.

But something was needed to enable the musketeer to combine his firepower with defensive ability.

The crucial point about the bayonet

is it enables the same soldier to combine two weapons.

What therefore happens is you have the infantry able to stand up against cavalry,

you have infantry with firepower much, much greater.

Every infantry soldier is now carrying a weapon that is both an offensive and a defensive weapon,

a weapon with which you can fire and one with which you can stab, slash and defend yourself.

AARGH!

The British Army began using the bayonet against the Jacobite rebels in Scotland.

This was an enemy which didn't fight with muskets and cannon. They relied on the Highland Charge.

Basically, a Highland Charge works on momentum.

The men come thundering towards the enemy ranks. When they get close...

bang! They fire a volley from their firearms.

Then it's out with the broadsword, they drop their firearms, and the well-armed front-rank men,

they break through, and the less well-armed men are behind them.

So once they've shattered the line, the guys with a scythe from the farm...

there's such chaos, it's their chance to get stuck in.

Although regarded as primitive and savage, the Highlander was more than a match for a Redcoat soldier.

The Highland Charge dates back to the early 1600s.

The clansmen would rush forward,

push him off, stab him in the arm, then slash with a sword.

The only other documented technique was one to catch the bayonet drills.

They would get just in front of the Redcoats, then drop to one knee.

Then they would lunge forward, lifting the bayonet from the gun, and cut towards the body or legs.

It meant the Highlanders went through the raw levies of the Government like a dose of salts.

Men who are not very battle-trained, when they see Highlanders coming,

they're not going to stand around! They're going to be offski!

This is exactly what happened at the Battle of Killiekrankie in 1689.

Plug bayonets were fatally flawed.

The main problem with the plug bayonet is that having shoved it into the barrel of the musket,

you can't actually fire the weapon.

The British Army came unstuck at Killikrankie because of this,

where some of the troops fitted their plug bayonets, some didn't...

and the British Army was swept away by a Highland Charge.

Something better was needed.

And the answer was found with THIS, which was the socket bayonet.

The bayonet is now diverted away from the barrel, so the soldiers can fire while the bayonet is fixed.

But it's still only as good as the troops that are holding it.

It COULD be a devastating and intimidating weapon,

but if the troops using it are nervous or poorly-trained, it's useless.

So it proved. The socket bayonet alone was not enough to guarantee victory.

For 50 years, the Highlanders triumphed.

In 1745, another stunning victory at the Battle of Prestonpans marked the beginning of the rebellion

led by Charles Edward Stuart - Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The Duke of Cumberland led 10,000 men north to stop him,

but they, too, discovered the power of the Highland Charge at Clifton.

The same happened at Falkirk. Cumberland spent the winter of 1745 devising a strategy for success.

Cumberland had to think of a way to put down these clansmen.

He began to think of ways of using the bayonet, common at this time.

He began to drill his men in Aberdeen

and they practised the drill of going to the right. He hoped this would break the Highland Charge.

Each soldier would not bayonet the clansman attacking him directly,

but the one bearing down on his neighbour. He relied on the man to his left to do the same for him.

To succeed, iron nerve and strict discipline were required.

To strike to the side with a bayonet achieves a number of functions.

First of all, the Highlanders attacking you expect to be attacked from the front.

They can protect themselves against that with their shield.

If they deflect the bayonet, they're pushing the musket aside, too,

and they're protected against the bayonet AND the musket.

But if you attack to the side, they lose the benefit of their shield.

Instead, they have an UNDEFENDED side in which you can stab them.

So that a line of men, because they're working in a disciplined way,

can feel confident that the man next to them is covering them

and can turn THEIR weapon against the undefended side of the person attacking their neighbour.

Cumberland's army was ready to take on the rebels one final time.

The two armies met on Culloden Moor on April 16th, 1746.

The battle began with a barrage of fire from Government guns, but the Jacobites mounted a fierce charge.

Cumberland was about to have his bayonet drill brutally tested.

The attacking Jacobites reached the British line

and at that point the bayonet was decisive.

It enabled the British musketeers to put up a hand-to-hand fight against their assailants

with an effective weapon and an effective drill... and they both worked.

In a lot of the subsequent newspaper reports and correspondence by people who'd taken part in the battle,

they emphasised the bayonet, that the bayonet had helped them to win.

Having held the Highland Charge, the Redcoats poured in fire from both flanks.

It was over in less than an hour.

Cumberland gave full credit for the victory to the courage of his men and the effectiveness of his drill.

Some today remain less convinced.

I think Cumberland's bayonet drill

was TOTALLY unsuccessful.

In a modern European war, both armies would face up to one another.

They would exchange fire, one side would give and then be pursued off the field.

The Highland clans didn't fight like that. They charged in a mass, then fought as individuals.

In the bayonet drill, each man went for the man on the right.

It's fine if they come in the same wave, but these men came at broken intervals. It wasn't a solid line.

Common sense tells me that a front-rank man with a broadsword...

You think the man striking across will stop him, but by this time he's felled the guy in front of him.

-I don't think it's gonna stop one of these guys.

-I

-wouldn't have tried it.

The effectiveness of Cumberland's plan remains controversial,

but it proved that the bayonet's power lay as much in the minds of those using it as in any drill.

Whether the drill WORKED doesn't matter.

It gave the soldiers confidence.

It gave them enough confidence to stand, confidence in their weapon.

And it's the confidence which they gained with the bayonet there,

which let them think, "We've got a weapon which works defensively.

"Let's see if we can use it offensively."

The bayonet proved as formidable in defence as the clansmen in attack.

One British general came up with an extraordinary idea.

Why not combine the aggression of a Highland Charge with the discipline of a line of bayonets?

Somebody present at Culloden was a bit of a genius - James Wolfe.

When he saw the offensive capacity of the Highlanders, a light went on.

He said, "If we could recruit them, they'd make terrific fighters."

If you combined the bayonet with the Highland Charge, you got a good weapon for colonial wars.

The ironic thing is that the bayonet which was first used against Highland Charges

was combined with the ferocity of Highland regiments

to provide one of the main weapons of the British Army in the later part of the 1700s.

It was General Wolfe who secured Canada as a British colony.

Thanks to him, the bayonet, especially with Highland regiments,

became the linchpin of British Army tactics, the weapon of first choice in the expanding Empire.

The real impetus came from the colonies, particularly in India,

where the British forces were often outnumbered by the Indian armies.

They found that the only way they could survive, let alone win, was by acting very aggressively indeed.

The British Army gradually developed its unique technique

of advancing at speed, halting, firing a single volley,

then lowering the bayonet and charging through the smoke.

It became a well-honed technique.

One general really exploited the power of the bayonet.

The most spectacular of his victories was at Assaye in 1803,

when he drove off a 60,000 strong Indian army with just 5,000 men

"and was back before breakfast"!

He was Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington.

In 1808 he commanded the British Army in the Spanish Peninsula.

When Wellington took over in the Peninsula,

his years of experience in India had taught him to GO at the enemy.

There was no question of standing churning out volleys, in the hope of chewing up enough French.

It was one volley and then charging through the smoke with the bayonet,

hit them while they're still dazed and kick them off the premises.

A bayonet is most effective when it's not actually used physically.

The idea with a bayonet is to intimidate the enemy and make him run away.

Wellington was trying to drive the French away rather than kill them.

The wars against Napoleon gave the British their greatest victories.

These were years of triumph and swagger.

A line of men with fixed bayonets

came to represent the perfect marriage of regimental precision and personal courage.

The end of the 18th century saw some quite shameful reverses,

and the loss of the US colonies.

Then, at the beginning of the 19th century - a string of victories.

Fear is the enemy. Face him, front him, and kill him!

It's fast work. If we're slow, he'll come on us.

So keep going forward. And get them bayonets in!

Sharpe does reflect the general run of Peninsular officers.

If you read their memoirs, they were very fond of the bayonet.

The French point of view... The French are very noisy as they attack.

The British are waiting very quietly in a long, long line.

The French get more and more excited. The drums and the cheering...

As they got closer, the Redcoats didn't make a sound. They didn't move.

And this is beginning to worry them. It really did. We know that.

Their diaries tell us they didn't like that stillness.

They go up the hill, closer and closer, and still that damn volley doesn't come.

But they know when it DOES come that it is going to be very, very nasty indeed. And it IS.

Five or six hundred musket balls converging on the front of the column.

Suddenly, an organised column is turned into chaos. The front and sides are full of dead and dying.

The rest are trying to step over them...

They're losing the cohesion. Still the drums are going. Any surviving officers still push them forward...

And before them is a great rill of dense smoke.

Out of the smoke will come five or six hundred guys with 17-inch blades on their muskets.

It's bye-bye. It's turn round and run. It's..."Sauve qui peut".

Or the usual French battle cry - "We are betrayed!" as the Imperial Guard fled at Waterloo.

And it happened again and again.

You almost get the point where you think these people must be mad to go on doing this!

Even Wellington seemed disappointed.

They came on in the same old way and we saw them off in the same old way.

The second use of the bayonet is to see off horsemen.

We get squares against cavalry.

That's where the bayonet IS a decisive weapon, a war-winner.

If Ney had broken the British squares, they'd have won Waterloo.

Agreed, the musket-fire is keeping the French out of the squares.

But also keeping them out is these bristling bayonets.

No horse in the world will charge through a line of bayonets.

By the late 19th century, British cold steel was an imperial myth.

One of the most famous paintings depicting the bayonet -

The Thin Red Line, painted by Robert Gibb in 1881.

It's an episode in the Battle of Balaclava

when the 93rd Highlanders brought down a charge by Russian cavalry.

An image of the bayonet, but somewhat misleading.

It's really the rifles, whose flashes you see in the background,

that stopped the Russians at about 600 yards.

So in fact stopped them without any chance of physical contact.

But, interestingly, by emphasising the bayonet rather than the rifle,

it brings us right back to the idea of PERSONAL strength and valour - the quality of British heroism.

And this is fundamentally a painting about character.

But it is misleading

because it gives us no sense of the way in which battles, by this period, were being fought.

Relatively few died through bayonet wounds.

Most people died as a result of rifle power.

So what this does is show us a world that is passing.

If you look to the future, we are next to see, in terms of image, images that are still alive today -

the image of the bayonet in WWI.

Soldiers advancing slowly, carrying their rifles, the sun glinting on the bayonet...

..to be machine-gunned to pieces.

The horrors of the Somme destroyed the myth of the irresistible thin red line once and for all.

For massed ranks, the bayonet was useless. But still it refused to become obsolete.

Although the bayonet's use in battle is becoming ever more limited,

it has a function in training -

training a soldier to be aggressive with this sharp bit of steel.

When a soldier comes to bayonet training,

that is when he starts to learn about aggression.

And aggression is very much part of an infantry soldier's make-up.

Because he's called on to do jobs... and the bayonet comes into it a lot of times.

When it comes to bayonet training,

he'll hate it... but he'll HATE the enemy.

That's the sort of personality we want to build up. He'll hate it but he'll hate the enemy.

Even in peacetime, bayonet training refused to die, as ex-National Servicemen remember.

There would be some dummies stuffed with straw, on a wooden frame.

And you were taught that you made the initial thrust with your bayonet when you ran toward the enemy

into the stomach or the groin area.

You then placed your foot on the fallen "enemy"...

dispatched him with another thrust of your bayonet, and then moved on to the next. This is the theory.

To this day, nothing has changed.

ARGGGH! COME ON! LET'S GO!

It's like a surge of electricity.

You know, you feel stronger.

ARGGH! AND AGAIN! KEEP GOING!

They get you hyped so your aggression's built up.

And once you charge, you won't have any second thoughts.

If he's the enemy, he's taking it. End of story.

ARGGH! GET HIM!

It's frightening, isn't it? And it's tried and tested in all theatres of war. And it works.

It's the nearest thing to what you might call battle inoculation.

And it wasn't unknown...

to get from a butcher the gizzards and innards of an animal,

and put them inside these dummies.

Just to get a feel of... the real thing.

The real thing happened in 1982 when Argentina invaded the Falklands.

On the night of June the 13th,

Robert Lawrence and his platoon fixed bayonets

to attack an enemy stronghold high on Mt Tumbledown.

That was the first time that you could expect to start looking at the use of bayonets for real.

And it was only eventually when I led my platoon

against a machine-gun post at the end of Tumbledown,

that we really took on the classic bayonet charge

of the movies, as it were.

Obviously, there's a great deal of ammunition being used as well,

so the bayonet is more a symbol of your intention

than it is something you're actually using.

They WERE used. They were used when we closed with the enemy, and proved themselves invaluable.

By the time you use it, you've been firing on each other with modern weapons, often under artillery fire,

grenades being used, anti-tank rockets being used, machine-guns...

By the time you close with the enemy, the blood-lust is certainly up,

and the bayonet...isn't a precise business at that point.

You just use it. You kill him any way you can.

Even in an era of smart bombs and missiles, the bayonet remains an essential part of the soldier's kit.

This is the SA80 - standard issue weapon of the British Army.

This is the bayonet. It comes with the weapon.

It's designed so that, when thrust point-first into an enemy,

it will part the ribs without sticking in the bone.

At the rear, this little lug

holds the bayonet on to the weapon, and that will stop it falling off in a contact situation.

It has a multi-purpose scabbard.

Firstly...

It's got a multi-purpose saw.

At the front, it's got this little lug, which is for bottle-opening.

To be honest with you, I've never opened a bottle with it, and it's a bit dubious as to why it's there.

This little lug here fits in conjunction with the bayonet to produce a wirecutter - very handy.

It's fitted to the side where the soldier can get at it

and use it whenever required.

There'll always be a future for the bayonet,

in that it is a weapon which carries you forward.

You can shoot until the cows come home.

But you WIN by taking the fight to the enemy's ground and standing on his ground.

You may need the bayonet to do it.

As long as we do have wars, and we need a show of strength,

bayonets are an important part of that, even in parades, when they parade with fixed bayonets on.

It's a sight which makes you think twice.

Especially if you have been in wars and you know what it's for.

It's glistening there for some particular reason.

I think that as long as you need infantry, you're going to need the bayonet.

Anyone that's ever taken part in close-quarter combat,

where you're fighting hand-to-hand with bayonets...

I think that can only ever just stay with people who've done it.

Because, by its nature alone, you are within feet of this man -

you can hear him, you can see him, you can smell him -

and, ultimately, with a bayonet,

you're only ever killing him at a maximum of three feet, say.

With small arms, pistols or whatever, yes, they are close-quarter weapons.

But there is a detachment.

When you stab someone with a bayonet,

you're holding on to one end of something that's stuck into him.

You are physically joined. You're not ten feet away with a pistol.

So it's a very memorable, em... difficult event,

which is the true nature of warfare,

much, much different to pressing a button that releases bombs.