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"Traditional" is perhaps putting it a bit strongly, but yes this was a real norm in real warfare. In European Culture. From around 1750-1915. So there are definite book-ends and caveats. The quote OP was referring to is, probably apocryphally, by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, Commander-in-Chief Allied Forces, Seventh Coalition. Okay the last two are modern terms retroactively applied but the point stands. At Waterloo, 1815, Wellesley was told that his artillery had sighted Napoleon, and that he was within range, requesting permission to fire. Wellesley icily replied that:
Now the only source for this quote is from a book written in 1860, so there's reason to doubt it was ever said. But the fact that such a quote could be applied to a General of the time, and believed or was intended to be believed, probably suggests an existing norm. There's a story from the American Civil War about Grant at the Battle of Chattanooga, where he accidentally rode out beyond the Union pickets and came across the Confederate picket line. The Confederate troops recognized him, and called out a muster of the picket to... present arms and render honors to the commanding general. During the Atlanta Campaign, Confederate General Leonidas Polk was killed by Union artillery, which had been ordered to fire by General William Tecumseh Sherman. In his autobiography, Sherman took great pains to note that he didn't want to kill Polk! He was just trying to scatter the Confederate officers, and appeared to regret Polk's death.
There was, at the time, a feeling that officers and gentlemen (but I repeat myself) were necessary for not just the prosecution of a war, but its conclusion. As the quote from "By Dawn's Early Light" (1990) goes:
The fear of European officers, beyond simple self-preservation, was the idea of giant masses of leaderless armies scouring the countryside, despoiling everything in sight, clashing in titanic battles to no greater purpose than bloody-minded destruction. This fear was, to be clear, not unfounded. Warfare has a long and ugly history of bands of deserters doing just that. Roaming the countryside, raping murdering and pillaging, and occasionally (though rarely) fighting pitched battles to keep possession of a prime piece of looting real-estate. This was especially bad during the Peninsular Campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars, in which bands of deserters sometimes numbered in the hundreds.
Then of course you have to remember that the idea of even being able to target a single man before the proliferation of rifled firearms was functionally non-existent. You could send an assassin to poison him or knife him in his sleep or ambush him along a highway, but that was about it. You couldn't point at one man and say "shoot that guy in particular" from any distance of more than say 150 yards with a longbow, or 50 yards (realistically less) with a musket. It wasn't until rifling became prolific that you actually could target an enemy officer, and by the time European powers clashed in a truly existential struggle again after Napoleon... well... the Somme did not lend itself to Gentlemanly conduct.
Note that Wellesley had three horses shot out from under him, presumably to bullets intended for the rider - and he was an infantry officer so he was only on horseback later in his career when he was in field-grade and general officer positions.
Sniping enemy officers as SOP appears to date back to the invention of effective sniper rifles, given when troops stopped saluting on the battlefield.
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The Romans made a custom of using their artillery to target chiefs in particular when in small-scale sieges; thé ninjas were basically assassination specialists, thé historical assassins weren’t terribly mainstream but Islamic sources seem to be more upset about them being alawites than their mode of geopolitics. This is a very European custom driven by the medieval custom of ransoming high value captives- Hundred Years’ War era English armies actually funded themselves by doing this.
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This is interesting to contrast with American conduct during the Revolutionary War, where marksmen at Cowpens and Saratoga took particular aim at enemy officers.
Although I don't recall off the top of my head if I've ever read if the stigma trickled down to more junior officers. At Saratoga General Fraser was legendarily targeted, but the legend is of dubious provenance, and perhaps he was killed by a stray shot.
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There's a fun alternate-history series called Look to the West in which a British prince, disinherited and exiled to America as a viceroy in year 1727, overturns this norm in 1749 by having a team of rifle-armed Americans (winners of a shooting tournament organized by the prince) assassinate the rightful king (with a false-flag attack from a French-flagged fishing boat). This incident causes rifle-armed skirmishers/snipers to proliferate far earlier than historically.
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This must be an army thing because admirals get killed all the time. Nelson and Maarten Tromp were shot by sharpshooters. De Ruyter was hit by a cannonball. Lütjens went down with the ship (many such cases). Etc.
I'm not saying that Generals/Admirals/other high ranking officers didn't die, just that they were rarely specifically targeted for killing during this specific era and culture. And of course all norms have their exceptions. But I would argue none of the men you named were specifically targeted for death. Tromp was killed in 1653 by an English "sharpshooter" yes, but the British did not have any units with rifled guns until the 1750s, and didn't issue mass-produced rifled weapons to their troops until 1801. And of course the French only issued rifled muskets to their Voltigeur NCOs, and only for about 3 years before discarding rifles entirely until well after the Napoleonic Wars ended. The men who shot Nelson and Tromp were almost certainly equipped with smooth-bore muskets, perched on the rigging of a pitching and heaving ship (the effect of which was of course exaggerated by their being in the rigging), firing at probably a hundred or so yards. They were pointing in the general direction of the enemy ship and trying to hit one of those guys over thataway. De Ruyter certainly was not targeted for death so much as his ship was shot at by a canon, and Lütjens died well after the period in which "gentlemanly" warfare can be said to have died.
I mean, maybe you can say it's not specific targeting, but if the admiral is on deck and you're shooting muskets and cannonballs at the guys on the deck it's a far cry from the examples where the army specifically avoided killing enemy generals.
No? Those confederate armies didn’t expect the northern invaders to hold their fire because the general was leading from the front. Admirals kinda can’t get off a ship easily. Nobody was saying sufficiently high ranking officers were a human shield for the men. They just weren’t targeted specifically.
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Thank you for this.
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