Article by Steve N. Jackson (v. 1)

Physical evidence suggests that the bayonet was likely developed by European hunters in the 14th and 15th centuries. During that time portable gunpowder weapons began to find their way into the hands of civil populations, who used them to hunt dangerous game. This game was normally hunted by spears with cross shafts called boar spears. Gunpowder weapons gave the hunter a chance at getting the animal at a range of up to 75 meters, but rarely gave the hunter more than one shot on game that was likely to charge. In addition, the same game the hunter was stalking could also be the target of more dangerous animals such as bears. For that reason musket bayonets were developed to turn the firearm into a spear. These bayonets were usually spear points fit with a wooden sabot at the base. When the bayonet was needed it would be jammed into the firearm. These bayonets would eventually be called plug bayonets because they plugged the barrel of the weapon they were attached to, preventing firing.

The Spanish were the first European military force to adopt human portable firearms in infantry units, but these early weapons had a number of drawbacks. They were deadly, but were bulky, slow to reload, and in some weather conditions they could be rendered useless. In fighting first the Spanish reconquest, and later in Italy, the Spanish created a concept of tercio infantry. These infantry units were made up of arquebus armed soldiers guarded by pikeman (to fend off cavalry) and swordsman (to protect the flanks of the force from skirmishers). In the picture shown above called the Surrender at Breda by Diego Velázquez (1635) the Spanish forces on the right are made up of pikeman, gunman, and swordsman of the basic Tercio. By the 1610s most European militaries had adopted this combined arms approach to fielding infantry.

In 1612 French gunsmiths, most notably Marin le Bourgeoys, developed an improvement over the traditional matched fired arquebus. That was a flintlock that could be carried loaded in most weather and still be relied on to fire, it was also safer than previous designs as Bourgeoys designed a half cock safety position that allowed the priming pan to be loaded but the weapon could not drop the flint onto that pan and fire. The result was a weapon that was considerably more effective than previous weapons.

In the 1670s the French under Louis the XIV began to look for a way to increase the effectiveness of their military forces. Louis, interested in scientific reform of all areas of his government, but in particular the noble-lead armies of France were looked at with disfavor. Working through Michel Le Tellier Louis choose a drillmaster renown for his views on military training to repair the chaotic military. The name of the drill master was Jean Martinet.

Martinet's reforms were classic examples of how efficiency could be brought to military organizations. First he stopped the practice of nobles buying equipment for personal forces by establishing armories near the frontiers to warehouse and store equipment. Next he made all nobles in the military officer's first, nobles second, requiring that they gain and maintain a certain minimal level of military training.

The most interesting of Martinet's reforms for this article is his establishment of uniform infantry regiments armed with only a single weapon, the musket. Martinet reasoned that the majority of an infantry unit's power rested in its musket, and indeed mixed units had been moving to greater and greater numbers of musketeers over other arms for years. In addition, training infantry when there was three or four different styles of fighting and armament choices was difficult and wasted time. Too many times in the 30-years war did regiments shatter themselves because their unit cohesion broke, or because they were unable to bring themselves into position in a well coordinated manner to engage the enemy effectively

Martinet reasons that a regiment was in essence a single weapon which, using volley fire, was designed to use its most effective weapon, the musket, above all others. The problems of cohesion would be solved by training all of the soldiers in the same maneuvers using the same weapon. He choose to discard pikemen and swordsman and to provide musketeers with plug bayonets. Many musketeers would continue to carry swords, but this would not be the main method of fighting that infantry units would support. Once carrying a universal weapon the soldiers could be trained with a single manual of arms to act as one to commands.

Plug bayonets were designed to replace a standard utility or hunting knife so they were short, usually under 200mm, with long, tapering soft-wooden handles that were small enough in diameter (under 20mm usually) that they could the barrel of issued flintlocks. As can be seen from figure 1 below, it did not replace longer cutlery used by French soldiers for melee combat, as swords and scimitars were too effective in close fighting to completely remove from the hands of musketeers, but they were more important than the flashy sword for Martinet-style formation fighting.

Martinet's plug bayonet had a problem, and that was the weapon could not be fired with it in it. While this did not represent a large problem for units in training, on the battlefield in close quarters the requirement that bayonets need be fixed when an enemy moved close meant that a units could loose a significant amount of firepower, while failing to attach the bayonet in time could decimate a unit if it was caught without their bayonets in position to receive a charge. As a result the French adopted a new bayonet design in 1703, the socket bayonet. Socket bayonets were offset from the muzzle and attached to the weapon by a lug. They slowed reloading in muzzle loaders, but they assured that a commander could have his men fire until the last possible second before going into hand-to-hand combat, and that if they were surprised there was more likelihood they would be on a weapon and present.

The socket bayonet was accompanied with a new development, standardized martial arms fighting techniques that could teach new soldiers how to fight with the weapon. These fighting techniques had a practical effect also in that many of them assumed the soldier did not have complete freedom to swing their weapon, but would have to defend themselves while in a line of soldiers.

The French use of the socket bayonet continued for the entire period of the smoothbore musket, whose design settled down in 1717 with the development of the standard armory musket that was widely copied around the world. Despite this, the main complaints with the socket bayonet was that it made muzzle loading difficult, it was additional weight to the kit of a soldier who also usually carried a knife and sometimes also a sword, and that it was not as effective for guard duty use as a spontoon or other spear-type polearm. In addition, the basic shape of the socket bayonet made it subject to being bent or broken in combat.

French socket bayonets started out with blades of under 300mm but those used by France and most other countries grew in length and could be as long as 400mm by the 1850s in keeping with the improved metallurgy of the 19th century. Although the French abandoned the socket bayonet because of its fragility and limited utility off the rifle, many countries continued to use these weapons through the 21st century, especially to fit bayonets to rifles whose muzzle designs resisted newer lug mounts.

The French conquest of Algeria in the 1840s brought them into contact with an old hand weapon used by the Caliphate and later Ottomans for nearly a thousand years. Called variously tulwar, yataghans, or scimitars in period literature, they eventually were light, fast blades with a curve in them to make them effective at both fast slashing attacks and for thrusting attacks. These weapons had prominent quillion to prevent an attacker from running up the blade to the but lacked baskets found in western rapiers, they had fullers or blood groves to make them lighter and to aid in stabbing, and they were edged only on one side to make them more effective at parries and to liming the damage that could be done by an overhead smash attack.

The adoption of slower firing rifles at the same time as their exposure to the yataghan lead them to design a new series of bayonets starting in the 1840s called yataghan bayonets. The primary purpose of these weapons was still to equip a longarm with a cutting edge, but now they began to be useful as small or short swords as well, an important improvement because infantry now could discard other close combat weapons that colonial service had seen creep back into their units. A rifleman could now choose to carry their yataghan into battle as a basic hand weapon while keeping their slow-loading rifle slung.

The first yataghan blades were issued in 1840, while the most common blade was designed to be used with the 1866 Chassepot rifle, and could also be used with the later Gras. The standard French yataghan had a blade of 580mm long and attached to the rifle by a long channel lug on the barrel. Rifles, with their long, heavy barrels made the mounting of the yatagan practical

French bayonets took another change in styles with the advent of emergency medicine near the frontline of battle and the introduction of effective breach loaders, both of which occurred in the late 1860s. Evidence from the American Civil War showed that many forms of sabers were not effective in generation battlefield casualties. The slashing attack, so admired by the French in the 1840s, proved to be difficult to execute with military soldiers who wore wool uniforms in northern climes.

The same problem had been noted by duelist for many years. Slash were very effective at generating deep cuts that, if directed properly, could cause your opponent to be unable to continue to fight due to loss of blood. Some points of contact including the neck, the inner thigh, the hamstring, and the inner arm in particular could be effective at ending a duel, but the reliable "kill" shot was a stab to the center of the chest of an opponent. German duelists had in fact invented a weapon called the foil that made it very difficult to make a solid penetrating attack, thus making dueling less deadly than when rapiers were used. The epee, a narrow bladed dueling sword adopted for nonlethal sport dueling returned to the stiff blade of the rapier, but blunted it to prevent penetration of an armored jacket.

The epee also addressed another concern of the French. It was found in the Franco-Prussian war that soldiers equipped with breach loading weapons such as the Chassepot could quickly fire away an entire load of ammunition. In combat the first unit which ran out of ammunition and could not quickly resupply was often forced to retreat, thus suffering a tactical defeat even if they were achieving superior results. Socket bayonets had an advantage in that they were lighter than sword style bayonets like the 1866, but an epee design is very efficient and tends to be even lighter than the long socket-styles they competed against.

Evidence slowly became overwhelming that it was the tip, and not the edge of a bayonet blade which created the most effective wounds. In 1874, with the adoption of the Gras rifle, long blade slashing bayonets were abandoned and epee style stabbing bayonets became the norm in the French army. By the 1870s most countries quit using yataghan style blades. The last country to use them extensively was Portugal on its Kropatschek.

The 1874 epee design was around 542mm but retained its utility off the weapon by retaining a strong hand grip. To strength the epee it was usually made without a fuller of blood groove, and it was actually t-shaped rather than a narrow, flattened blade. The top crossbar of the blade provided increased strength. The weapon was not traditionally sharpened, and the narrow side of the blade was not expected to cut. This reduced the utility of the blade for soldiers working overseas, who would often use their older yataghan designs to cut brush, and units stationed in the far east often adopted a machete-like utility tool for that purpose that itself was used occasionally in close combat.

As the French were adopting an epee-style bayonet, Germany and many other countries began to think of the bayonet in terms of its utility as a knife. The M1871 Mauser rifle had a 475mm "sword" bayonet that many felt was too long. It was, in essence, a straight-sided version of the yataghan. Because of its length it lacked much of the utility of a knife when used off the rifle, while on the rifle there was no evidence that the thick bladed weapon was more effective than the socket designs still in use, although it was definitely stronger. Germany thus adopted a knife bayonet design for the 1884 modification of the 1871 rifle. Withe the export success of German weapon firms the basic knife bayonet rapidly became standard around the world.

The trend to the knife bayonet was resisted by the French because their own epee style bayonets were technically more effective, although they forced a soldier to carry an additional utility knife in their kit. The main exception was the 1890 and 1892 model Berthier carbines. Although not every version of the carbine could be equipped with a bayonet, the ability to add a bayonet to the carbine was retained not to use in close combat (where it was still expected that a longer sword or lance would be more useful) but for use as a device in riot control. Crowd control using rifles is problematic because soldiers had only one way to keep a crowd back, and that was to shoot. Riflemen used their bayonets for this practice and they proved to be one of the most important reasons for soldiers to carry this device. A knife fitted to a carbine did the same thing, and provided the utility of a short bladed tool to soldier. This was especially appreciated by artillery soldiers who often carried the carbine. The knife had practical utility in prizing open ammunition cases and other tasks, reducing the amount of kit an individual soldier had to carry.

Despite the common move to knife and shorter sword style bayonets the French retained their epee style for the new Lebel 1886 rifle. Early epee bayonets for these weapons were over 500mm long and retained quillion hook. Most rifles except for Remington falling blocks used by the Infantry from 1886 on had these long bayonets.

The 1886 pattern bayonet had an "x" shaped cross section and came to a sharp, narrow point. The cross section of the bayonet increased the strength of the blade while keeping it as light as possible. The handle of the bayonet was designed to allow use off the rifle, but its real function was to mate with the rifle stick with the widest possible cross section. Most rifle bayonets mated with their host rifle with only a small point of contact. Earlier French bayonets such as the 1866 and 1874 solved the limited cross section problem by using a long bayonet stud to attach to the weapon, but this was not as efficient and could in extreme conditions warp the barrel it depended on, making it less accurate - a concern at the time when rifles where slowly becoming weapons that could fire at a kilometer or more distance. The French bayonet design attached to the barrel as was common for most bayonets, but when used the force of a blow was transmitted to the stock of the rifle through a mating with the front cap of the weapon.

French soldiers during the Great War called their bayonets "Rosalie." The length of the issue Lebel rifle with an original 1886 bayonet was so long that the troops called them "fishing poles." During the trench warfare that occurred in the Great War, the French found that the quillon, or the curved finger rest and guard located opposite of the barrel hanger on a bayonet, would often become entangled in barbed wire. During the war with the arrival of new tactics many bayonets were modified and new bayonets made that were shorter and lacked the quillon.

Figure 2 is a closeup of the standard bayonet connector used on the Berthier and Lebel rifles (but not carbines) from 1866 onward. The circular base of the bayonet, which is made entirely of brass or steel, fits into the circular carrier (shown from one taken from a Berthier 1907/15 wartime rifle). This created a weapon that allowed force to travel efficiently down the stock to the bayonet and into a target. During the Great War the combination of the strong mounting system of the French epee style bayonets and its superior penetrating power made them feared in trench close combat by the Germans, who noted their own knife-style bayonets were far less effective. Despite this most nations did not bother to change bayonets in mid-stream because the number of times a bayonet could be used was dwindling. The bayonet was essentially obsolete as a primary weapon by the Great War.

Figure 3 shows the traditional wood handle of an 1874 bayonet. Wood was often adopted for use by bayonet handles because it was easier to hold when the bayonet had been exposed to cold or hot weather. Wood handles though were more expensive than simple metal, a concern with a weapon that would have production runs that could exceed a million units. Despite this wood handles would become the norm on knife and sword bayonets of the late 19th and 20th centuries, and only be replaced by plastic in the 1960s.

After the Great War French rifles that already had bayonets kept them, but the French were determined to reduce the cost and weight of soldier's kit by turning the bayonet into the most minimalistic design that could be achieved. The first example of this thinking was with the MAS 1936 rifle. Bayonets were considered by the French as useful in only a few instances, primarily for crowd control, and as a tool to allow soldiers to prod for mines. The result was the MAS 1936 bayonet that stored under the weapon's barrel. The bayonet was designed to provide muzzle weight to the weapon for controlled rapid-fire shooting, and to be able to be fixed to the rifle. Bayonet charges with it were not a primary concern. The designers felt that the bayonet would instead be simply present if it was needed, but so cheap that it did not materially effect the price of the rifle.

The MAS 1936 bayonet was not particularly sturdy, but its primary job was to provide a tip to the rifle that could be poked into packages, prodded into the soil, or other actions that might foul the barrel of the rifle. It could be removed and used as a basic land mine probe, but had no real cutting edge for other utility work. The bayonet was used again in the MAS 1940 and 1944 semi-automatic rifles, but was dropped from the MAS 1949 rifle, which was unable to mount any bayonet at all. It was available on export MAS 1949s and can be found on Syrian export rifles, but the French had, after a century of perfecting the bayonet, come to the conclusion that the weight and cost of the devices was not worth the effort.

Despite this a fluke of history would save the bayonet. Most soldiers in the 1950s carried straight knives to cut barb-wire, open containers, and for emergency close combat use. These knives, called utility knives, were general purpose tools. During the Vietnam conflict and Algeria the French noted that the Bayonet still had a limited usefulness, although the cost and weight of them was still something to be considered. The French though in the 1950s and 1960s came into contact with Communist inspired close combat techniques.

Western society had by World War Two abandoned the concept of personal attrition in favor of material attrition. The idea was that a war should not be won by killing a large number of humans, but by forcing the enemy to stop fighting because they eliminated all of their resources. Artillery, tanks, and airplanes all contributed to developing warfare that was less indiscriminate and more "humane," at least on a relative scale. Communist nations though, because of some basic flaws in how communism works, had a great deal of difficulty maintaining technical parity with western nations. They did not have the capacity to create weapons that were smart, or to maintain large armies of weapons that could face the west in any even terms. Since communism also appealed mostly to nations who lacked education and human capital systems, newly minted communists nations and communist funded struggles were faced with a clear fact that they could only rarely compete with west on an even setting.

Starting with the Korean conflict the west began to be challenged with a return to attrition warfare where communist movements spent human resources rather than technical resources to achieve their goals. Even the most technologically advanced nations such as the USSR saw their military units as expendable attrition tools designed to stand in the line of fire for a limited amount of time, be wiped out, and be replaced by a new unit. In Korean this same strategy was practiced by the Chinese and North Korean Army, except they also adopted a close combat strategy where units who moved to fight immediately tried to mix themselves with their western enemies. Whereas the west had adopted technology to avoid spending lives, the communist movements had lives to spare, and were willing to spend them in massive numbers. This same technique was also found in newly free Africa and the middle east, where the nations often rejected western ideals with strong press, free speech, and various rights that place a high value on life. Casualties for many of these countries that would be ruinous for the west were simply not considered by the leaders of these countries, and the populations rarely found out the truth about the cost of the wars.

The number of close combat experiences that western forces faces continued to be relatively small, but when they happened it was often essential that some weapon be at hand for close combat. The result was the conversion of the utility knife to a bayonet. These knives, already carried by the soldier, did not add any weight, but they could be added to a rifle in an emergency, and they still allowed a soldier to use their weapon to prod things and search for booby traps. When not on the rifle the utility knife served much as any other knife.

The 1949/56 bayonet was designed for use with the MAS 1949/56 rifle and proved to be a success. It is still used for the FAMAS rifle. The weapon uses two barrel rings to mount to a weapon's barrel, although it cannot remain mounted when grenades are being fired.

The future of the bayonet in French service.

They bayonet is facing another period of obsolescence because of the changing nature of the opponents faced by western forces. The widespread adoption of the AK47 supplied by the Soviet Union and her satellite nations by terrorist organizations, along with the adoption of the RPG series of grenade launchers has given insurgents more incentive to stay away from close contact with western military units. Instead. many insurgent units have adopted some form of human shield system, either by physically using children and women as barricades to fire behind, such as the United States faced in Somalia, or planning military operations to occur only in areas of heavy civilian concentration, making sure that attempts to return fire will likely result in civilian casualties that can result in propaganda victories in the western press.

In addition, most insurgent forces in the 21st century make extensive use of civilian mules to make contact with the population as dangerous as possible for western forces. One theory of the bayonet is that a crowd of protestors can be kept somewhat contained but be allowed to continue their protest simply by lining up soldiers that have a knife on the end of a rifle to form a human wall. When protestors and soldiers are fairly open about their objectives, and violence is not an intended consequence, a knife is enough of a deterrent to keep a limited amount of order. In these cases the cuts that come from accidental contact are a superior outcome to what would happen if the soldiers had to discharge their weapons. Crowd control operations in France, and at the recent Occupy movement in the United States often follow these "peaceful" agreements where both sides actually acknowledge the objective of the other and seek to minimize dangerous clashes from happening, increasing the effectiveness of both public safety and protest operations.

This is breaking down both with insurgent groups and with protests such as those that occur with the G7 and other international meetings, and is no longer a possible method of crowd control for riots at sports events. In the case of the insurgents, insurgent groups often choose children, the mentally impaired, and other vulnerable people to indoctrinate and equip with explosive devices. The bayonet, designed to simply to keep a few feet of separation between an armed soldier and a citizen is ineffective because a child of ten can carry an explosive weapon capable of killing people for a range of 50 meters strapped to his or her chest or back. Soldiers now have to think in terms of keeping at least 100 meters of separation between populations that include insurgents and themselves.

In terms of G7 style protestors the main issue is not the use of advanced explosives, but attempts to create situations where a protestor can actually get a bloody injury to use for propaganda and potentially legal leverage. The bayonet has been replaced in riot control by the baton and ballistic shield, although these devices require special training and are not available to the average soldier.

A final difficulty for the continued use of the bayonet is the widespread adoption of lightweight carbines. The French FAMAS can mount a bayonet, but it is hardly an ideal device to deploy one from. The M4 carbine adopted is likewise not a good bayonet platform. Despite this most nations continue to issue utility type bayonets, even though they are no longer use for riot control in most cases.