Gustav II Adolf and pike squares

[Rodion Romanovich]

I heard somewhere that it was mainly Gustav II Adolf during the thirty years war that developed the first tactical system for crushing the devastatingly effective square formations. What was his system for doing this, and is it correct that he played a major role in inventing it and he was the first to use it?

[King Henry V]

Well I'm not sure wether this was the same tactic used by Gustavus Adolfus, but in the Napoleonic Wars the best way to destroy an infantry square was to bombard one side heavily with artillery or attack with musketeers (one side of a square will not be able to give as much firepower as a fully deployed infantry unit), then rush the gap with cavalry. This usually destroyed a square pretty effectively. Hope this helps.

[Kalle]

Hi,

@King Henry, the napoleonic sqaure and its destruction is not the same thing as the destruction of the tercio allthough applying firepower is never wrong in both cases.

@LegioXXXX, yes Gustavus was the one who did make the tercio obsolete, he draw upon dutch tactics and also tactics from his uncle Erik XIV of Sweden who was indeed the first to try similar things. What the tactics were I think you can read in some other threads that are very active at the moment.

Basically though Gustavus developed the artillery very much and each infantry regiment had its own light pieces that followed them on the battlefield. The first artillerygeneral in history was the Swede Lennart Torstensson who also for some time was the commander in chief of Swedish forces during the 30-year war.

Lines were much thinner then the massive tercio and relied upon firepower and mobility more then weight - you could say its an early version of the thin red line. Cavalry got a much more offensive role then in other westeuropean armies - the caracole was replaced with charges. The cavalry also worked closely together with the infantry.

Kalle