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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.
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.
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.