Cavalry

[econ21]

Hetman - I am not sure you are right about musketfire in Napoleonic times. At close range, I suspect a volley could be decimate an approaching close ordered formation. My reading of encounters between French and British infantry in that period is that firepower was sufficiently effective to make melee with the bayonet very rare. Typically, British musketry would halt a French infantry advance - the French would try to respond in kind rather than charge home - and often could be sufficiently effective to make the French break in the face of a subsequent British charge.

Even today Americans estimate many hundreds of rounds are fired off for every enemy killed - but that does not mean modern firepower is ineffective.

[Watchman]

By early 1600s a pair of wheellock pistols backed up with a sword was the cavalry weapon in most of Europe. And why not ? In the average soldiers' hands it may not have been accurate beyond much beyond five meters, and could only penetrate decent armor at about five meters or closer, but unlike the earlier lance (which had at best the same reach) it didn't occupy hands or get in the way when not in use. And of course firearms are kind of scary even for veterans.

'Course, the things were pretty darn expensive too, what with being mechanically fairly complex and all - for example the Swedish had to import most of theirs, and official records suggest a pair was about as expensive as a cavalryman's armor...

[Watchman]

A close-range salvo discharge from a massed infantry unit was a nasty thing. Very nasty. The musketeers would of course be kind of screwed if the foe didn't falter and break off and they lacked close-in defenses (like pikemen or cavalry of their own - later on bayonets simplified matters), but that wasn't actually too common of an occurrence.

Or, well, depends on definitions. When infantry attacked infantry there tended to happen a queer version of the game "chicken" - as the discharge was only really effective from fairly close in each commander had to hold his fire as long as possible, to maximise the effect and avoid the nasty case of the foe marching right next to you to fire his own salvo while your guys are helplessly reloading, but if they held it for too long...

Well, at close distances those volleys tended to cut people down like so much grass. It took a pretty determined unit to continue advance in the face of the heavy casualties in the front ranks and the psychological impact, and most had to pull back to reform.

The same more or less applies to cavalry, who had the added problem of the horses being big and squishy targets, and duly tried to avoid head-on clashes with well-ordered infantry. If they had to attack, it usually happened (assuming the infantry officers knew their stuff and the men followed orders) they'd get a point-blank volley in the face which usually made the first wave of horsemen break off the charge. The second and later waves had a better change of charging home, but that was not something to count on either.

Around Napoleonic times cavalry avoided head-on collisions with steady infantry if at all possible, and let artillery and skirmishers to "soften up" the line before attacking. The same more or less worked with infantry - the deep assault colums the French used early on, mostly because they didn't have the time to drill their troops in the volley-countermach routines, were frightfully vulnerable to volleys but almost unstoppable if they could get into close combat (due to local numerical superiority and the advantage of momentum and determination attacker has - though usually the defender broke and fled before the actual contact). Hence the voltigeurs, loose-order light infantry who screened the line troops, sniped at the enemy and if possible drew their fire (whose effect was much reduced against such dispersed targets).

As such loosely ordered units could not rely on the "giant shotgun" principle of the mass salvo to have an effect they naturally had to be better shots on the individual level.

And then there were the light regimental guns. The nasty little buggers had a far longer accurate killing range than musketry, could especially in a pinch fire several times faster than muskets, and normally switched over to grapeshot once the enemy was within about hundred meters. I assume imagination can supply the idea of what those could do to massed formations.

Proper artillery batteries tended to need only a handful of infantry as close guard - their firepower was so staggering they could usually fend for themselves right well for entire battles.

[Mount Suribachi]

2 excellent posts Watchman. I see you're new round here, with posts like that I hope we see a lot more of you

[Watchman]

Gee, thanks. Though be warned - I have a tendency to ramble off topic...

Oh yeah, I've also gotten the impression that toward the end of the 17th century the pistol fell from its exalted position as the primary shock weapon of mounted men, and until about mid-1800s or so "cold arms" (ie. swords) were the main weapon of close-combat cavalry. The pistols (now flintlocks, both cheaper and more reliable than wheellocks) were still carried, and dragoons (who were really just glorified musketeers on nags as far as real cavalrymen were concerned) had their carbines, and some little more specialized forces (around Napoleonic times known as uhlans) had lances, but on the whole a spirited charge with cold steel was the thing.

It actually took the First World War to persuade military thinkers to accept the fact that thing was seriously obsolete, but a lot of men and horses died pointlessly before the idea took ground.

[econ21]

Americans learnt that cold steel was no longer the thing, even with the cavalry, before the Europeans. Confederate cavalry - e.g. Mosby's raiders - found two six-guns to be far more effective in a melee than a Union sword. Later on Union cavalry, with its early acquisition of repeating rifles, were devastatingly effective as mounted infantry.

I'm not sure about the British - yes they developed the wonderfully obsolete 1912 cavalry sword (I have one at home and it is like the bad robot's spiked arm from Terminator 2), but surely they must have learnt something about appropriate tactics for cavalry from the Boer War?

[Watchman]

Sadly, no. The really scary thing about World War One is that not only did people march cheering to sign up and get slaughtered, on the actual battlefield they marched head high in close order and in several cases wearing pretty gaudy and colorful uniforms right against massed rifle fire, machineguns and artilery barrages. Many cavalry forces in all seriousness did not even carry rifles.

The results are well known, and at least the basic lessons were learned inside the first six months or so. As you can imagine both contemporaries and today's historians were and are fairly interested in how such bloody and utterly wasteful stupidity was even possible.

One reason I've seen cited is sheer pig-headed romanticism of the higher officer corps, the last refuge of the decaying military aristocracy, who could not mentally accept the idea that modern war was a war of machines and men operating like machines, not of heroes, individual valor and dramatic cavalry charges. Plus the poor schmucks had been raised up and conditioned to a severely idealized and romanticized version of Napoleonic warfare (the sort of idea involving rearing horses and severe-looking heroic officers in impresssive uniforms you see in old paintings) and actually hadn't experienced a major war fought with modern weaponry firsthand.

Both the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian War had been fought more or less by the old methods and weaponry, and between those and the Great War there were little but colonial brushfire wars whose lessons were, in the spirit of the arrogant racism so prevalent during the Age of Empire, not assumed to apply to "white" armies. Or, the machinegun might be fine for mowing down angry natives and Ethiopian dervishes but surely Western soldiers would be of better stuff...

The American Civil War seems to have been a fair bit more modern in character, in many occasions involving extensive field fortifications and trenchworks as well as (primitive) automatic weaponry, so it's perhaps not that surprising they learned at least some of the lessons sooner. Plus the sabre was of little use fighting Indians - most cavalrymen left theirs at the base when going out, for the thing was just extra encumberance and a general pain in the butt.

[cegorach]

1.

Hetman - I am not sure you are right about musketfire in Napoleonic times. At close range, I suspect a volley could be decimate an approaching close ordered formation.

2.Even today Americans estimate many hundreds of rounds are fired off for every enemy killed - but that does not mean modern firepower is ineffective.

1. This is the average - sometimes more sometimes less bullets were necessary.

2. Yes, but presently 10 men have the firepower of an entire regiment and nobody is using close formation as Napoleonic line or column.

[Watchman]

AFAIK modern military studies suggest it's actually quite unlikely to be hit by shrapnel if you're so much as, of five meters or so away from most handgrenades at the time of the detonation, or something along those lines.

Which isn't exactly something anyone counts on, now is it ?

Anyway, the massive expenditure of ammunition per kill in modern-day armies most likely has a whole lot to do with the way burst fire is used to suppress the enemy ("the first two or three bullets might hit, the rest are just to scare and threaten the enemy" is about how the innish army teaches it) nevermind what dedicated support machineguns get used for. Ergo, you end up with a lot of spent casings for every casualty.

Things were probably a little more accurate back when people fought with magazine-fed bolt-action rifles and the like - you actually need to aim more with those things to get anything done, the range is better and recoil is less of a problem. And having a pansy five to ten rounds at your disposal probably does wonders to fire discipline anyway.

Earlier on, back in the musket-and-bayonet period, the sad fact was that aside from light-infantry sharpshooters and the like most line troops barely knew to shoot. Armies tended to consider the gunpowder that went for marksmanship practice to be an unnecessary expense, and the soldiers were in any case more automatons than warriors - they were drilled to obey orders posthaste, change formations, ready weapons (ie. point them at the indicated direction; calling that "aiming" would be overly generous), fire, and reaload. This in the face of a more or less steady stream of messy casualties in the ranks from artillery fire and enemy shooting.

Nevermind that the accuracy of the smoothbore muskets was a bit so-so in any case. Skilled shots could hit man-sized targets more often than not from as far as about fifty meters, but past that it was pure luck and most soldiers weren't that good shots anyway.

Ergo, the infantry blocks often ended up marching almost next to each other and firing volleys in each others' general direction. It was anything but uncommon for the poor dragooned bastards in the ranks to close their eyes when they fire (partly also as protection against the flash of the priming powder), which naturally resulted in a fair number of shots sailing off to the great blue sky, Momma Earth's bosom or the back of the unlucky fellow in the front rank...

Aside from assorted carbine-toting support cavalry (whose main job was to "shoot in" assault cavalry), dragoons and irregular tribesmen (Cossacks, Indians, Turco-Mongol nomads etc. - these folks tended to be pretty crack shots even from horseback and undoubtly considered the casualty-heavy tactics of the "regular" troops rather stupid) cavalry didn't really do firefights at all and the shooting tended to be of the point-blank pistol kind. On the other hand the sort of cavalry who were supposed to shoot at folks were likely rather better trained to do it than line infantry...

[sharrukin]

Watchman, you sound like you really know what your talking about, so I would like to ask a question thats been bothering me for a long time. Given what you've said wouldn't disciplined bowmen be capable of defeating the same quality musket (not rifle) armed hostile infantry. A composite bow can fire at least 8-12 arrows/minute and it should be as close to accurate if not more than a musket and this at longer range. I believe Benjamin Franklin made a similar point. What is your opinion?

[Bob the Insane]

IMO the archers could well be victorious... But the whole point of firearms is the extension of the use of the crossbow... Archers require way more weapon training to be proficient and effective than a firearm carrying man...

Being a good archer require skill, practice and some pyhsical strength... Using a musket require you to be able to stand, walk, run and see...

Is the musket any more or less effective than the crossbow?? Easier and faster to reload I imagine...

[Watchman]

A decent arquebus and a late-end steel-stave crossbow ("arbalest") are about equals in killing power and armor penetration, and the crossbow actually has a longer accurate range. However, an arquebus is slimmer and takes up less room, is mechanically simpler and more reliable (it's undamentally nothing more than a metal tube plugged at one end), makes for a better club in a pinch, punches through cover better and is, quite frankly, scarier. Both people and animals are simply scared of the loud noise, flame and smoke it produces - I've read that in the first battle in which the Russians used firearms against the Golden Horde the nomads were so shocked by the first discharge (which didn't even cause any meaningful casualties) they simply rode off the field...

This is probably the key to the comparative efficiency of firearms - not so much the killing power as the psychological effect, especially of volley firing.

On the whole an arquebus can do most of the things a crossbow can, and enough of them better that it eventually replaced it.

Now, archers are nice and ones with composite bows even nicer; the problem tend to be the availability, as barring more or less full-time profesional troops who train diligently the about only way to get them is to have a populace who uses them matter-of-factly in their everyday lives. Steppe nomads and assorted hunters are a good source. The English yeoman system was an attemp at "artificially" producing a pool of skilled archers, and while it worked fairly well it was anything but an ideal solution and there were constant issues in making the peasants actually fulfill their training quota in tha practice butts - most of them frankly had better things to do. Medieval Scandinavia (and presumably East Europe) had it better, having vast stretches of sparsely populated woodlands the peasants could hunt in and hence a decent pool of skilled archers who could be enrolled into the military.

The problem, even with composite bows, seems to have been that even the Janissary foot archers do not seem to have had enough drill to reach the sheer volume of fire necessary to stop an armored cavalry charge. You had to pour a pretty serious amount of arrows into the assault line to cause enough casualties and chaos for the charge to falter, and it appears even elite archers rarely achieved this.

The Mamluks apparently managed to drill their horse-archers (who shot standing still, as "regular" horse-archers of settled nations are wont to) to the degree where these could stop a Crusader charge on sheer firepower alone, though.

Infantry makes much smaller targets than horsemen and get more cover out of their shields, but on the other hand are slower moving; it seems to have been a bit case-by-case how well archery worked against such troops, especially if they were armored.

[Krusader]

Wow. Is it just me or did this topic totally derail?