The standard explanation given for the emergence of personal firearms in warfare is not that early firearms were particularly good, but that they were much easier to use than bows and arrows. A man with an early firearm couldn’t match a skilled archer for range, accuracy, or rate of fire - but he could be dragged off his farm and made combat-ready in a matter of weeks, whereas top-notch archers (especially horse archers) had to be trained from childhood. This ease of training and recruitment gave early firearm-equipped militaries a formidible advantage - their troops may not have been as dangerous man for man, but there were a lot of them and they were readily replaceable.
Obviously, this is no longer the case. Put a man with a modern rifle in a fight against even a highly skilled horse archer, and we’d expect the archer to die. My question is: When did this become the case? When did firearms become tactically superior to bows and arrows, as opposed to strategically or logistically superior?
Posted to Great Debates because, well, I expect debate. But if there’s a fairly simple and widely-accepted answer, splendid!
I’d have to say that it was with the invention of massed fire and the bayonet when firearms became more formidable and tactically superior on the battlefield than the bow. Even before that, as you mentioned in your OP, it was the simple fact that you could train and equip troops with muskets much faster and cheaper than you could train and equip really good archer regiments. The musket troops scaled much better (i.e. you could have a lot more for less money than good archers).
I’d say somewhere around the time Red Coats with unrifled, imprecise, un-machined flintlocks only accurate up to around 50 paces and sometimes flinging shot 45° from where they were pointed beat the shit out of bow & arrow wielding Native Americans.
But do note that firearms had more to them vs. bows than just ease of training: from that standpoint, crossbows were just as easy. So easy in fact the for a time the Pope banned them from Western warfare, because they were just too effective. IOW, unsporting.
But firearms also have an important morale effect (big boom, can’t see the shot coming). They punch through armour easy peasy (and before someone starts that again: no, English longbows did NOT punch through plate like butter at Agincourt). Firearms are also easier to make than good bows. Their logistics are also easier: it takes time and skill to make a decent arrow or bolt in the field, but any moron with two left thumbs can cast a lead ball over a campfire (although if I’m not mistaken, at first they used polished rocks).
Gunpowder is admittedly trickier, but since armies packed tons of it anyway for their cannon (which were 100% better than other siege engines)…
I’d say the point where firearms finally and definitively replaced the bow is when repeating firearms appeared. So rather late in their history - mid-19th century at best. That’s not to say guns didn’t have a lot of advantages before that. But that was the point where the last remaining serious combat advantage of the skilled archer, rate of fire, was lost. After that point there was really no advantage to the bow beyond the trivial.
Not necessarily - it depends on time period. Early musketry ( arquebuses and the like ) might penetrate heavy armor at very close ranges, but that effectiveness dropped off quickly as ranges increased. That’s at least part of the reason armored cavalry lasted as long as it did.
I’d have gone back farther in time than everyone else here, and say the 1500s, certainly the 1600s – about the time that archery pretty much disappears. The English Civil War didn’t rely on archery, but muskets, crude as they were, were fairly decisive.
Rifling certainly had a lot to do with making even crossbows obsolete, but I have to go with breech loading being the absolute end for combat archery. It allows one to fire and reload from a prone position which is really tough to do with any kind of bow.
Firearms dominated the battlefield long before the invention of metallic cartridges and long before rifling or repeating actions were widely available to the common soldier. Even in North America, the Native Americans were keen to trade with the Europeans for firearms whenever possible.
Exactly. That’s not to say that firearms were across the board superior to a bow, which is how some folks are taking the OP, but if we are talking about tactical superiority of the weapons system itself, then one has but to look at history and see when armies completely stopped using the bow or crossbow in favor of firearms. Like I said, when they figured out how to mass their fire in coordinated volleys and when they figured out how to put a big knife on the end of the gun, that was pretty much the two things that put the firearm weapons system over the top of a bow or crossbow weapons system. Everything else that’s been mentioned in this thread just made it more effective and whittled down the few remaining aspects where a bow was superior (i.e. individual bow can hit a target at longer range, or have a higher rate of fire, etc).
One thing which should be mentioned, though, is that firearms training wasn’t any easier because the guns were a little easier to use than bows. Instead, armies began training even more, barring a few outliers like Welsh bowmen. The need for increased discipline overcame any benefit of easier marksmanship.
Guns are easier to use than bows. You could train a soldier in musket drill in a few months, tops, while it took literally years to train a bowman…especially to train a bowman to not only hit a target but to loose on time and angle with other bowmen to produce an effective arrow storm.
That’s a good point actually. The musket didn’t just replace the bow in large, draftee-based European armies. Pretty early on it replaced the bow as a hunting, and self-defense, weapon amoung the civilian population, and was even preferable for tribal societies which had no concept of massed infantry warfare.
That says to me that the whole idea of archery’s superiority to musketry is somewhat overstated.
Out of curiosity, what was their order of battle? What did they use to protect their archers/crossbowmen? Pike units? And who were they fighting against? I know it’s a bit of a digression, but if you have a moment I’d be interested in hearing more about it.
That will make a big difference if we divide this into man vs. man and army vs. army. I think a single skilled archer had a big advantage over a single skilled gunman until the accuracy of rifling and the use of cartridges began.
Sorry, doesn’t compare. Native American bows were primitive compared to the European bow, and the Native American’s would be trading for European bows whenever possible if that’s what the Europeans had, they just happened to have firearms
But why was that. If bows were so superior to muskets why did the colonists and traders not bring European bows for protection and hunting, instead of muskets? They would have had plenty of opportunity to become proficient in their use, and their survival was directly related to their ability to hunt and protect their settlements.
The fact they didn’t says that by the time of the colonization of the US the individual musket was actually superior to the individual bow.
Out of curiosity, what was their order of battle? What did they use to protect their archers/crossbowmen? Pike units? And who were they fighting against? I know it’s a bit of a digression, but if you have a moment I’d be interested in hearing more about it.