Friendly fire in the olden days

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been watching Historical epics during the last few months, such as Alrexander, Troy and Kingdom of Heaven.

In Kingdom of Heaven in particular, there’s a scene a breach is made in the walls and for a while there’s just huge mass of men in a confined space hacking away at each other.

My question is, how the hell did soldiers tell who they were killing in the thick of battle? For a long time, there were no standredized uniforms, and if there were, there’s always the possibility that they may be coated with mud or dirt. Assuming of course the common rank and file had such unifroms or livery int he first place.

So how did one keep from accidently stabbing their countrymen in the thick of battle?

2

“Friendly stab” was always a problem. You generally tried to stay in some sort of formation, so you could just poke your spear at anybody in front of you.

3

Thats why there was heraldry. Barring that I believe that soldiers used to tie strips of colored clothe to their arms. And of course there were a lot of blue on blue deaths. Thats what killed Stonewall Jackson…and this was much later in history after more standardized uniforms were in use.

-XT

4

These sort of things happened. That is one reason everyone stayed in line.

Of course with the advent of firearms the problem became worse. Fancy uniforms were one way to cut down on the problem. Still I recall at First Manassass and at Wilson Creek (during the American Civil War) troops were fired on by friendly units.

5

I understand that. The big problem seems to come up when you have melee attacks, I guess you’d have when attacking a position.

6

It would only be a (major) problem if both armies were very similar (or if one army was using auxilliaries that were similar to the enemy units). For instance I doubt that Romans fighting Germanic armies would have much difficulty distinguishing between friend or foe…but Romans fighting Romans would probably be a trial. I think they would resort to some device or colored strips of clothes to distinguish friend from foe…and just hope that you didn’t have TOO many friendly fire type deaths. I’m sure battle commanders when in with the knowledge that some deaths were unavoidable. Even today we have friendly fire deaths with all the technology we have at our disposal…especially when there are multiple allies on the same battle field.

-XT