Bayonet - 19th Century and The Multi-purpose Bayonet

19th Century and The Multi-purpose Bayonet

The 19th century introduced the concept of the sword bayonet, a long-bladed weapon with a single- or double-edged blade that could also be used as a shortsword. Its initial purpose was to ensure that riflemen, when in ranks with musketmen, whose weapons were longer, could form square properly to fend off cavalry attacks, when sword bayonets were fitted. A prime early example of a sword bayonet-fitted rifle is the British Infantry Rifle of 1800-1840, later known as the "Baker Rifle" (to this day, no matter what length of bayonet, British rifle regiments "fix swords"). The hilt usually had quillons modified to accommodate the gun barrel, and a hilt mechanism that enabled the bayonet to be attached to a bayonet lug. When dismounted, a sword bayonet could be used in combat as a side arm. When attached to the musket or rifle, it effectively turned almost any long gun into a spear or glaive, suitable not only for thrusting but also for slashing.

While the British Army eventually discarded the sword bayonet, the socket bayonet survived the introduction of the rifled musket into British service in 1854. The new rifled musket copied the French locking ring system. The new bayonet proved its worth in the Battle of Alma and the Battle of Inkerman during the Crimean War, where the Imperial Russian Army learned to fear it as well.

In the United States Navy before the American Civil War, bayonet blades were even affixed to single-shot pistols, although they soon proved useless for anything but cooking. Cutlasses remained the favoured weapon for the navies of the time, though Queen Victoria's Royal Navy gave up the pikes once used to repel attacks by boarders in favor of the cutlass bayonet.

From 1869, some European nations began to develop new multi-purpose sword bayonets suitable for mass production and for use by police, pioneer, and engineer troops. The decision to redesign the (dismounted) bayonet into a multi-purpose tool was viewed by some as an acknowledgement of the decline in importance of the fixed bayonet as a weapon in the face of new advances in firearms technology. As a British newspaper put it, "the committee, in recommending this new sword bayonet, appear to have had in view the fact that bayonets will henceforth be less frequently used than in former times as a weapon of offence and defence; they desired, therefore, to substitute an instrument of more general utility."

One of these multipurpose designs was the sawback bayonet, which incorporated saw teeth on the back spine of the bayonet blade. The sawback bayonet was intended for use as a general-purpose utility tool as well as a weapon; the teeth were designed to facilitate the cutting of wood for various defensive works such as barbed-wire posts, as well as for butchering livestock. It was initially adopted by the German states in 1865 (until the middle of WWI approximately 5% of every bayonet style was issued with a sawback version) Great Britain in 1869, Belgium in 1868 and Switzerland in 1878 (they introduced their last model in 1914). The original sawback bayonets were typically heavy sword-type bayonets, issued to engineers, with to some extent the bayonet aspect being secondary to the "tool" aspect, later German sawbacks were more of a rank indicator than a functional saw. The sawback proved relatively ineffective as a cutting tool, and was soon outmoded by improvements in military logistics and transportion; most nations dropped the sawback bayonet feature by 1900. The German army discontinued use of the sawback bayonet in 1917 after protests that the saw-toothed blade caused unnecessarily severe wounds when used as a fixed bayonet.

The trowel bayonet or spade bayonet was another multipurpose design, intended for use both as an offensive weapon as well as a digging tool for excavating entrenchments. From 1870, the U.S. Army issued trowel bayonets to army infantry regiments based on a design by Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Rice, a U.S. Army officer and Civil War veteran, which were manufactured by Springfield Armory. Besides its utility as both a fixed bayonet and a digging implement, the Rice trowel bayonet could be used to plaster log huts and stone chimneys for winter quarters; sharpened on one edge, it could cut tent poles and pins. Ten thousand were eventually issued, and the design saw service in infantry operations during the 1877 Nez Perce campaign. Rice was given leave in 1877 to demonstrate his trowel bayonet to several nations in Europe. One infantry officer recommended it to the exclusion of all other designs, noting that "the intrenching tools of an army rarely get up to the front until the exigency for their use has passed." The Rice trowel bayonet was declared obsolete by the U.S. Army in December 1881.