Musket Warfare (Napolean style)

[Sethik]

I've always wondered at the logic in some of the tactics used in musket warfare. One thing I never got was that lines of armies just march up to one another and shoot each other until someone routs. What about cover and formations(aside from rotating lines)?

I also noticed the complete lack of armor or protection on the average soldier (unless you count several layers of wool or cotten protection.) This may just be because there was nothing available at the time that could stop bullets and let you move around, but come on! Atleast wear a breastplate or helmet or something!

Taking the above into consideration, wouldn't Cavalry completely dominate the battle field? Infantry wore no armor and their only weapons were short bayonets and maybe a saber. If you equip some cavalry with heavy armor and lances they should they be able to shred infantry, no?

Please note that I'm really ignorant when it comes to the warfare of this period as I'm sure what I just stated are common misconceptions.

Thanks in advance.

[Del Arroyo]

I'll try and help you a little. I'm not an expert but I think I can provide some answers.

Dense formations tended to work well for a variety of reasons. Among them:

- the native inaccuracy of the weapons
- lack of widespread marksmanship training
- the benefits of concentrated firepower
- vulnerability to infantry charges
- vulnerability to cavalry charges

Cavalry was a big concern during this period and the infantry would form massive squares to protect themselves. The only problem was that squares were extremely vulnerable to artillery fire.

It is interesting that you should mention armor. The armor of the day pretty much couldn't stop musketballs. Also, armor is pretty flocking expensive.

Cuirassiers-- elite cavalry-- did wear breastplates and helmets, but this was probably less to stop musketballs than to protect from bayonets and sabers, and give the men a certain *cavalier* sort of extra confidence. And they were a small percentage of most calvary forces.

As far as anti-musket armor, in theory I suppose they could have filled lots of small bags with gravel and fitted them like mail onto a leather jerkin-- but do you have any idea how heavy that would be? The sons of bitches would barely be able to waddle up to the line! And a cannonball would kill them anyway. And they would probably be too encumbered to fight off even a simple bayonet charge!

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Based on accounts I've read, cavalry charges were indeed effective, but the cavalry of the day tended to be expensive and not very numerous. They also tended to die very quickly if directly subjected to musket or cannon fire, and had near zero chance of defeating a properly-formed square.

The success of a charge also seemed to depend very heavily on three intangible elements-- a fearless, ferocious leader; high ferocity and courage among the men; and timing, timing, timing, also heavily dependent on the leader and the swift obedience of his men. The cavalry had to be the best or they were next to worthless. If the aim of the defending musketry was true and they did not panic and they presented a steady wall of bayonets and bodies, losses would be high for the attackers. Cavalry charges depended heavily on their opponents tendency to panic and run.

For that matter, so did bayonet charges. Pitched melee was not common.

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With the widespread introduction of improved rifles, cavalry became much less effective and was mostly limited to scout duty and guerilla raids. Cavalry charges continued to be viable even through the initial years of WW2, but much much less so and in much more limited circumstances.
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But to sum up, with regards to your initial questions about infantry-- musketry was not terribly accurate or deadly until improvement in rifle technology. If the men stuck together, formed a straight, orderly line, marched where they were told and fired straight ahead; they were basically safe. Unless they came under massed artillery fire. Or were the object of a sudden cavalry charge. Or were confronted with a massed column of charging infantry.

DA

[Ironside]

I've always wondered at the logic in some of the tactics used in musket warfare. One thing I never got was that lines of armies just march up to one another and shoot each other until someone routs. What about cover and formations(aside from rotating lines)?

The musket age army did use cover, mostly inform of terrain and trenches though. Due to the musket inaccuracy you'll need plenty of muskets to compensate. Formations did change, for example the Spanish tactic (were slow moving, constant fireing squares) were outshoot by the Swedish/Dutch tactic (three rows, all fire at the same time= line infantery) during the 30-years war (1631). The problem is firepower, lines did have maximum firepower and to deploy into any other formation facing a line is going to cost you more men.
Think of this, person A is deploying his 100 men in a square with 10 men in each row. Person B got his 100 men in a line. Say you got in one volley with 20% accuraccy. Person A fires a volley, 2 dead, at the same Person B got his volley, 20 dead. Now person B can use the rest of the men, but now they can only kill 1,6*9= 14.4 men (because he only got 80 men left) with the rest of the unit, thus killing 16.4 men altogether. So now does person A have the most men and is gaining more and more for each volley. And this is without the morale effect that is greater for person A. And a line is better against cannons too.
And don't forget it was a lot of other things to consider. You could deploy dragoons and light cannons in your cav for nasty surprices, your cannons needed good deployment and were preferbly movable during the battle and things like that.
And ofcourse the fact that you as a general had severe problem of controling your army for really complicated movements, made things harder to control.

And I almost forgot, the commanders DIDN'T want a long shootout between two units, it caused too much losses, but tried to get another advantage to change the situation.

I also noticed the complete lack of armor or protection on the average soldier (unless you count several layers of wool or cotten protection.) This may just be because there was nothing available at the time that could stop bullets and let you move around, but come on! Atleast wear a breastplate or helmet or something!

To expensive for the relative small gain. You could stop a musket bullet with armour, but it needed to have slow down quite a bit. Only cav would need it and as Del Arroyo said, they already had units with armour for use in melee.

Taking the above into consideration, wouldn't Cavalry completely dominate the battle field? Infantry wore no armor and their only weapons were short bayonets and maybe a saber. If you equip some cavalry with heavy armor and lances they should they be able to shred infantry, no?

Considering that the musket units had men with pikes until the bayonet, cavalry had to fight pikewalls with support of musket fire if the enemy was well prepared. The bayonet is worse than the pike, but as the replacing of pikes with muskets shows is that improved muskets gave enough fire to kill of the cav thus making the bayonet more of a ok weapon to take out the few remaining cavs than the cav killing weapon. Catching the enemy unprepared with cav is a massacre though.
And the cav importance changed during the musket period, to get very important during the 30-years war to slowly reduce in importance as time passed, so it wasn't stagnant there either.

[English assassin]

just to add a bit more to this:

Some cavalry were armed with pistols as well as swords/lances. Pistol balls had much less power than muskets. Therefore in a cav on cav action there would be some advantage in a breastplate (as there would in hand to hand cav actions of course). Most likely though cavalrymen were simply richer and could afford it.

Infantrymen could afford to laugh at most cavalry IF they were in (square) formation, and kept their nerve. Few horses will charge a wall of bayonets (the musket and bayonet are reasonably long). I've read cavalry fans claiming this is not so, but all I say to them is, Waterloo. If cavalry could take out infantry in square Wellington would have lost the battle.

As noted above, armies did use cover, or at least the lie of the land. Wellington habitually drew up his infantry on the reverse slope of a ridge in the Peninsular campaign so that it could not be fired on by artillery. Eventually the French learnt to treat apparently empty ridge lines with appropriate caution.

Finally, I think inf tactics were more varied than you suggest. The French were fans of attacks in column, for instance.

[TinCow]

Depending on what period of time you are talking about, the tactics were indeed obsolete. This may not have been true for the Napoleonic Wars, but it was certainly true in the US Civil War. The original 'musket lines' were essentially designed for concentration of firepower due to a lack of accuracy. Before rifling, you couldn't really aim and hit anything that wasn't directly in front of your face. Large lines allowed the attackers to throw a wall of bullets forward, thus guaranteeing that something would be hit.

The invention of rifling changed this though. By the US Civil War, the guns that both sides used were relatively accurate and individual targets could be accurately hit from a reasonable distance. The fact that they kept lining up and volleying away at each other was simply a lack of tactical evolution. At that point in time, the technology had outpaced the school of military thought. The exact same mistake was made during the first few years of WWI.

[Del Arroyo]

While it's evident that there was some anachronism in ACW tactics-- what exactly would you have had them do? The Springfield muzzle-loader could still only fire 3 shots per minute-- a thin line would have left them outgunned and vulnerable to a strong enemy advance.

There was a regular application of a thin line in combat-- otherwise known as a skirmish line-- but it had very little staying power, as all the enemy had to do was advance. While it is certainly true that Battle Lines would have been more effective if they would have trained to take cover (as they surprisingly often learned to do!), a full and true evolution in tactics was not feasible until further advances in both range and rate of fire-- and the amorphous lines of today were not even concievable until the introduction of the light machine gun as the Main Fire weapon.

DA

[Del Arroyo]

In the current day and age it would almost certainly be possible for us to launch powerful lasers into space and vaporize key targets from there, saving the risk of man and plane. We could also launch an army of kill-satellites to knock our enemy's communications out of the sky.

If a symmetrical war began tomorrow and we did not have access to these technologies, would we be using obsolete tactics? IMO, no, we'd just be a bit slow on the uptake.

It usually takes a big push like a war to really get people ready to innovate. Look at the light-speed improvement in tanks and AT-weapons in just five years of WW2. You can't possibly say that the industry and materials necessary to produce a T-40, a KonigsTiger or a Pershing weren't available in '39, can you?

DA

[TinCow]

In the current day and age it would almost certainly be possible for us to launch powerful lasers into space and vaporize key targets from there, saving the risk of man and plane. We could also launch an army of kill-satellites to knock our enemy's communications out of the sky.

If a symmetrical war began tomorrow and we did not have access to these technologies, would we be using obsolete tactics? IMO, no, we'd just be a bit slow on the uptake.

It usually takes a big push like a war to really get people ready to innovate. Look at the light-speed improvement in tanks and AT-weapons in just five years of WW2. You can't possibly say that the industry and materials necessary to produce a T-40, a KonigsTiger or a Pershing weren't available in '39, can you?

DA

Completely true, but there is a difference between failure to develop new weaponry and failure to use existing weaponry.

[DisruptorX]

The US doesn't use such weapons because we don't want them used on us. We have the advantage in a conventional war, and we want to keep it that way. We don't want to start a space weapons race.

[lancelot]

The US doesn't use such weapons because we don't want them used on us. We have the advantage in a conventional war, and we want to keep it that way. We don't want to start a space weapons race.

Oh really!?!?

I have read numerous sources quoted from U.S government personell that seemed very interested in exploiting space for their own purposes.

In fact, I believe the USA is one of the few countries who have not (suprise, suprise) signed an international agreement stipulating that space is not for national exploitation and is for "everybody"

And to believe a nation would 'prefer' to send men off to die rather than obliterate cities from the comfort of the Pentagon games room strikes me as a bit far-fetched. Why bother with Nuclear weapons or germ/gas etc etc

[lancelot]

And to get back on topic.

Napoleonic combat-I can see the 'sense' behind it.

WW1-running towards a machine gun!?!? Not too bright.

[Ironside]

And to get back on topic.

Napoleonic combat-I can see the 'sense' behind it.

WW1-running towards a machine gun!?!? Not too bright.

But the big question is, what would you do instead?

[lancelot]

But the big question is, what would you do instead?

Try and come up with a better idea!

[English assassin]

Invent the tank...Oh, wait, we did.

It seems to me that between 1914 and 1917 the technology was so overwhelmingly in favour of the defender (at least if he was prepared) that its very hard to see how any sort of attack would succeed without huge casualties. Everyone knows about machine guns but even humble barbed wire had a huge impact. The principle benefit of the tank was not that it could cross no mans land without being vulnerable to machine gun fire, but that it offered a way to crash though barbed wire entanglements without a preliminary bombardment. the trouble with the bombardments was that they had to go on soe so long that it was obvious where the attack was coming, thus ensuring that the second and third lines of defence were fuklly manned and no breakthrough would be possible.

Back to Napoleon though, standing in line firing I understand, and the failure to take cover man by man I understand (you have to stand to load a musket), what I don't understand is why there wasn't more hand to hand combat. As people say above the maximum effective range of a musket would be about 100 yds. Two shots a minute a man would be good (three in the first minute as the muskets would be ready primed). Even a fat soldier on rough ground could cover 100 yds in well under 30 seconds, AND pause to fire his volley on the way, and receive only one full volley in return. Thereafter it would be bayonets.

there must be a reason why that wasn't done but I'm not sure what.

[Ironside]

Try and come up with a better idea!

They did, but it took them about 3 years.

They tried concentrated artillery fire (needed to be VERY concentrated), gas, airplanes, and probably some methods I missed that was unsuccessful and they had tanks and huge mines as more successful methods.

The principle of a mass charge was to out-number the machine guns.
Unfortunally was the generals dreaming of the "breakthrough", that with the mass charge principle is doomed to cost you a massive numbers of casualities, even if you win.

Some kind of stealth unit that could advance before the charge and take out the German lines could work, but they needed to pass a no-mans land undetected. Another method is to get behind the enemy line with the navy, but that option had to been considered during the war and still unused, so it's probably some downside with that.

Even a fat soldier on rough ground could cover 100 yds in well under 30 seconds, AND pause to fire his volley on the way, and receive only one full volley in return. Thereafter it would be bayonets.

there must be a reason why that wasn't done but I'm not sure what.

Would you like to face a musket volley at point blank range?

[econ21]

What I don't understand about Napoleonic warfare is why entrenchments were not more common on the battlefield.

I know entrenchments were used in Napoleonic times - for example, by the Russians at Borodino - but they seem the exception rather than the rule. By contrast, by towards the end of the American Civil War, they were pretty universal (and warfare resembled that of WW1 trenches).

Granted muskets and smoothbore cannons are less accurate than rifled small arms and artillery, but if you were fighting a defensive battle, surely your men would survive cannon and musketry better if behind a redoubt? Plus if it came to melee, defending such an obstacle would be an important psychological and physical advantage.

For anyone doubting the effectiveness of entrenchments in the Napoleonic period, consider the Chateau Hougomont at Waterloo - this acted like a mini-castle and allowed a few battalions of guards to tie up the better part of a French Corps.

My point of view is well illustrated by the computer wargame Age of Rifles - this makes entrenching incredibly powerful but players have to abjure it in Napoleonic scenarios to get historical gameplay.