The Youtuber Brandon F has a 4 part series talking about why they fought like this. Spoiler- it wasn’t because they were stupid.
TLDR- if you split up you just get run down by enemy cavalry.
TLDR- a close formation lets you concentrate your firepower at one point.
TLDR- a close formation makes communication and controlling the army much much easier (or even possible at all).
TLDR- the formation makes the troops less likely to run away.
Fun (and short) read, the Manual of 1791, the gold standard of how to Infantry in the French army (translated): https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/62609125/french-drill-manual-1791
It’s literally ALL marching and formation drills. How to not-shoot the guy in front of you, how to place your feet when firing, how to go from colums to line. Marksmanship isn’t in there, bayonet practice isn’t in there. None of the actual-killing-the-enemy was considered required knowledge, because the formation stuff was considered FAR more important.
And as a reenactor who has been clubbing in the back of the head with a musket more than I count (on account of being clubbing in the head a lot), this stuff really isn’t as easy as it looks. The French might have had a YEAR to learn this at first, the latter recruits had a week.
Ex-Military here.
Seems not much has changed. Unless you’re a Tier 1 or Special Forces, you don’t spend all that much time on marksmanship either.
Maybe 5-10% of actual training time goes to marksmanship. The rest of it is infantry skills. Squad level movement, field craft, field defenses, cover and concealment,urban ops, the list goes on. These are the things that win wars, not a 3rd Prestige COD pro.
These are the things that win wars, not a 3rd Prestige COD pro.
That’s exactly my point. They learned what they had to know to win, just like today. And that generally isn’t hitting a stationary target from a shooting table. And since nobody is training for that, it’s hardly surprising they’re not all that great at hitting stationary targets from a shooting table.
Nowadays, small-unit tactics and field ops win wars, back then, formation movement won wars. So that’s what they trained, and as a result, they’re not an army of sharpshooters. But they did win wars.
Yup.
What do you think would send a rag-tag group of fighters running, efficient use of ammo, or a regimented wall of firepower? Wars back then were won by breaking up the army so disease and desertion can take its toll, so you want your army as regimented as possible so you’ll eventually win.
Look at the Revolutionary War, George Washington lost more battles than he won, but he knew defensive wars were won through attrition, not shooting more of your enemy. So he focused on disrupting supply lines and harassing the enemy (so more disease and attrition), not on direct confrontation. I imagine other musket-era wars were similar: if you have superior numbers, you break up the enemy armies; if you have fewer numbers, you disrupt enemy supply lines. In both cases, accuracy isn’t important, strategy is.
… But they were also a little stupid
Well, in the sense that knowingly going somewhere that’s likely to host crowds of people trying to kill each other is pretty stupid, sure.
So, from what I remember from history, this was widely used by British forces right up until the invention of the machine gun by the Germans. Once you could deliver a large number of projectiles down range very quickly from a single position, this was an insanely stupid strategy. Before that, most rifles were very slow to load and fire, and had the accuracy of a storm trooper.
By lining up like this you would create a dense “cloud” (if you will) of projectiles every time the commander would yell “FIRE!” Making it far more likely for something to land on an intended target (whether that was the target being aimed at or not). Additionally, it wouldn’t just be one row of soldiers, more like 5+ rows of soldiers in this formation. When someone inevitably gets shot, the next soldier in line would step forward, over their dying friend to take their place. The result was a wall of firepower that worked very effectively in field combat.
More soldiers = more guns = more projectiles going down range for the enemy. If you wanted to be effective in the field, having more bodies to throw into the battle was a way to ensure success.
Once the machine gun was invented, one small troop of 3-4 soldiers could effectively counter this maneuver by simply holding down the trigger and panning across the field of battle half a dozen times. Which is when trenches and fox holes were the preferred way to ensure you didn’t lose your entire military trying to fight the enemy. With the improved accuracy of weapons and the invention of automatic fire, these battle tactics only spelled failure for anyone attempting them. Suddenly having cover either in the form of a trench or sandbags or something, was the only effective way to ensure you didn’t get “mowed down”.
In the modern era, field combat is a complex operation of coordinating troop movements and directing them towards the enemy while maintaining cover to protect the lives of the soldiers. Somewhere between radio and high accuracy assault rifles is where modern combat exists. Keeping in communication with your team while coordinating your movements, and accurately firing at the enemy as you go is now the norm. In times between WW2 and the modern (electronic) era, you would use code names and reference places with specific, agreed upon alternative namings for locations. Once cryptography became efficient enough to be portable, encryption has become favorable to increase the security of communications and clarify names and locations by using more plain language while protecting that information from eavesdropping. Before encryption and digital transmissions, everything was either AM or FM voice (not dissimilar to AM/FM radio), and could be intercepted or listened to by any person, friend or foe, with the equipment to do so; the only option was to use namings that would obfuscate the intention, locations, attacker, and size of force from anyone who may be listening in.
The cypher/cryptography of the age was fascinating, and “both sides” employed code breakers to try to understand the messages being sent. It’s very fascinating. As an amateur radio operator, I get what they were doing, and it employed some very clever tactics, which had varying degrees of success. Now it’s just a matter of using a digital encryption cypher to encode any communications (not dissimilar to what is used for secured websites) which is nearly impossible to break without significant time and effort, and usually by the time the cypher is broken the operation is complete and the codes have been changed. Being an IT person by day, and knowing how those cyphers are generated and used, it would be nearly impossible to “crack” in a reasonable time frame, even with even powerful supercomputer hardware. The modern digital and military communications systems are only really countered by employing jamming technology to scramble legitimate signals with noise. The only counter to such jamming is moving to a channel which is not jammed, which may be impossible with limitations to the equipment that is employed in field operations (they generally have a fairly small operational frequency band, which they cannot exceed), however, with software defined radios and multi band radio transceivers, this limitation is getting easier to overcome. However setting up multiple jammers to cover the useful radio bands for long distance communications, is becoming easier at the same time (generally bands below 500Mhz or so). The arms race to find ways to overcome these problems is far from done though.
But now I’m way off topic.
Well written and all.
However I’d like to point out that even modern warfare, despite how much it’s changed (take for instance rather basic troops having access to small drones to drop grenades with into foxholes and trenches), kinda the basics remain: you have men advance to a position by any means necessary.
Since, idk, thousands of years ago when first actually organised militaries appeared, the basics — or “the game”, if you will — has been very much the same, but the technology changes “the meta.”
When I was sitting lessons in the army in 2009, most of us were wondering why we needed to drill such basic strategies and tactics, and why would they ever matter, because the enemy has thousands of nukes. The lieutenant explained rather well how despite modern weaponry and technology, a lot of the basics of war are still very much the majority of it.
Like for example the Gatling gun made this strategy quite bad, but the Gatling gun wasn’t instantly everywhere. It’s not like with videogames where the whole game is patched and everyone has to use the new meta because everyone has the same rules. Unlike in real life, where the “meta” changes slowly and not everywhere all at once.
And where one reliable thing is that in war things like new tech can’t always be relied upon.
Wars are just so futile nowadays. I get that global cooperation was a practical impossibility even just 50 years ago, but nowadays it really isn’t. Case in point, I have no idea which country’s army you the reader thought of when I said “army.” With probability, American, but I actually talked about the Finnish one.
I’ve also veered quite far from the original point. Here, have some Doctor Who as compensation:
The guns were quite accurate. They had rifling etc long before the Maxim gun.
Being a top grade British rifleman required hitting a 3 foot wide target at 900 yards or something. That’s pretty fucking good without glass optics.
They were slowish to fire, but they had paper cartridges that made it not too slow. Lower casualty rates probably have more to do with soldiers not being brainwashed yet, lots of people didn’t actually shoot to kill. Compare the casualty rates of the colonial campaigns where soldiers didn’t consider their enemy human.
I don’t think that sort of accuracy or equipment was common in the revolutionary war, tbh.
They had about a thousand Pattern 1776 Rifles made in 1776 and a few Ferguson Rifles but the British Army still commonly used the Bakers flintock until the 1840s, and all of the above still used standard ball projectiles. It was so impressive when Tom Plunkett shot the French General Colbert-Chabanais at 370 meters (400 yards) it got recorded as a great feat.
The colonial campaigns didn’t have an organized or well equipped enemy
Um people in India were well equipped and organised at least, idk about the rest. Hell the 1857 war for indepence was using the poms own training and weapons against them but long before that the various and sundry kingdoms did alright.
The British empire and their trade companies were just absurdly bloodthirsty and inhumane.
Oh ! I have a history question :
Every time is watch a movie about some war in the USA, with their inefficient guns and all, there is guns, there is bayonets, there is swords but where are the arrows and bows? How come there isn’t any depiction of such an efficient weapon ?The Comanche were some of history’s finest horse archers and it required the invention of the repeating rifle to end their supremacy of the plains.
There could have been a much stronger Spanish influence on the plains of North America had the Comanche not been there to turn their empire back.
There’s a good reason for doing these types of engagements. First things first: The rifles were inaccurate, people had to be close enough to clearly see each other to hit a person. It takes a person out of battle 20s to reload a rifle but raw recruits with shaking hands take a lot longer.
So here’s what you would like to do with an army. Shoot them all down before they reload or even engage them in melee with bayonets to create a breach and crossfire the side of the opponents line.
To make this more effective you stack as many guns as you can in as little space as possible and use the men as cover for the men behind.
There is of course space for guerilla warfare but if you want to take out a big army of flintlock muskets you cram everyone into a line and blast them. The other side does the same since it’s the current war meta and you end up with 2 lines of people lining up and shooting each other.
So why not just guerilla warfare? This comes down to the same reason why castles forts and fortified cities were important in medieval times.
To win a war you take the capital, large cities and whatnot. To take a major objective you need an army. There’s no army without supply. Running supply lines between forts means you won’t really get a lot of them. So you need to prevent a big blob from taking them. You can’t win with guerilla warfare fast enough before the opponent takes major objectives.
That’s how you end up with the meta from 1700 until bullets.
First things first: The rifles
It has nothing to do with the weapons, and everything to do with communication. You can’t coordinate a battle you can’t observe, and you can’t command your troops beyond the distance that a drum or bugle can be reliably heard.
The advent of the telegraph and the telephone took us from Napoleonic formations to trench warfare. Front line defensive could directly communicate with commanders, logistics, and artillery support tens or hundreds of miles away. Attacks still couldn’t be coordinated very well, giving fixed defenders a strong advantage and leading to the stalemate.
It wasn’t armored vehicles that brought the end of trench warfare. It was the radios in those armored vehicles. Once radios appeared on the battlefield, attackers gained the ability to effectively coordinate, and fixed defenses lost their inherent advantages.
Napoleonic tactics worked fairly well in the 19th century. Mixed results in mid to late-19th.
It’s when they tried to apply them to WW1 that the body counts got ridiculous.
It’s my understanding that they really didn’t. The American Revolution was won in part because the Americans more often “adopted Native tactics” (I.e. attacking from tree lines, on paths on unsuspecting units moving from place to place, aiming for officers, etc).
The big Napoleonic blocks were done, but often just out of honor and so officers had some sense of “control” over the battle so they could both easily pull out before it descended into a large brawl where they might actually be killed
Not really. The American Revolution was still fought with the same Napoleonic tactics used by the regular army. The irregulars might have adopted more guerrilla methods in the frontier, but they weren’t widely adopted.
Reinforcements from the French army and navy won the war. The French Revolution followed shortly after.
And IIRC those Napoleonic tactics were still used in the American civil war and beyond. The “big Napoleonic blocks” led to trench warfare in WW1.
I agree, also important to note that the “big square” actually served a purpose in preventing cavalry from picking off separated infantry and detering cavalry charges. From my understanding the formation was genuinely effective until horses stopped being a factor in war.
I mean maybe “honour” played a role in why they did things but i think we’re sometimes too quick to assume people in the past were idiots.
This was shock and awe tactics at the time. Professional soldiers were trained to accept the casualties dealt out at the start of the battle and keep advancing until the enemy broke and then slaughter them as they attempted to flee. Everyone who makes fun of George Washington for how he conducted his troops conveniently forgets that his army consisted of untrained volunteers who consistently broke when confronted with the British war machine.
And Joe Rogan wants me to believe these people could build pyramids?
