When I went through basic at Fort Ord, CA, we had bayonet training. This was in 1959.
About all I can remember about the training was: "WHAT’S THE SPIRIT OF THE BAYONET? Response: TO KILL!!!
Fun times…
I went through Basic in 1989 and we were taught bayonet techniques. The drill sergeant was very implicit that the Russian equivalent AK-47 had a longer barrel, its bayonet was several inches longer than the M-16’s, and the individuals who use them have been using them much, much longer than we have, therefore bayonet warfare was the absolute last resort.
We had a couple more call and responses as well including blood making the grass grow and the only good Commie is a dead Commie.
Well, I’ve never had advanced training, but for that last bit, my guess would be to maybe attach the knife to the end of a long gun …
Well, they called it a Mine Plow, but I guaran-goddamned-tee you that if you saw this advancing on you at speed, you’d crap your pants, and if it hit you, the crew would be slightly upset.
They’d have to drop the plow blades down into the dirt to get all the little bits of you-meat off the blades.
Damn crunchies, always gettin’ in the way.
Touché!
Yes, when portable firearms were first introduced they would take forever and a day to reload. The earliest infantry formations integrating firearms were mixed formations of pike, sword and arquebusiers such as the Spanish tercio. The invention of the bayonet allowed those with firearms to act as their own pikemen, eventually leading to the obsolescence of the pike and infantry formations to consist entirely of firearms.
You must have a horrible combatives program at your unit. Or a horrible instructor, or something.
As a level 3 instructor, I can tell you that the Modern Army Combatives Program is much more relevant and integrated into combat/deployment training than these guys are letting on. Or at least it is supposed to be.
Yes, level 1 has a lot of basic MMA stuff, for the obvious reasons. Soldiers need to start somewhere. It is easy to learn, and gets soldiers interested. It also stresses the ability to close the distance with an opponent. Since the defining characteristic of a warrior is the willingness to close with the enemy, this helps to develop that spirit in all soldiers. Instead of backing away or dropping their head, they are taught the confidence to close the gap, secure a clinch, and take the opponent to the ground.
In the more advanced courses, soldiers are taught boxing and kick boxing techniques, as well as more advanced MMA type stuff to include doing it all in full kit. They are also taught how to engage combatants with less lethal techniques while clearing rooms, while patrolling villages, and while conducting traffic control points. Handcuffing (zip ties, actually) techniques, transporter techniques, more take downs, etc are all taught. Extracting personnel from vehicles (through windows if necessary) is also taught.
Further training on using clubs and knives and defending from such weapons is also taught. At no time is someone taught to bring a knife to a gun fight. Knives and pistols are taught to be used in some instances as a secondary weapon, but the first option is always gain space and engage with the rifle. That isn’t always possible in close quarters.
Also, with recent ROEs, Soldiers are much better off knowing how to handle themselves so they do not have to resort to the rifle right away. If things get a little physical inside a house, should soldiers have more options than just killing? Of course they should. Modern Army Combatives Teaches all of this.
At no time are soldiers taught to respond to a threat of deadly force with something less than deadly force. And at no time are they taught to pull out a knife if the opponent has a gun or anything silly like that. But if your target is being nonviolent, but physically resistant, shouldn’t soldiers be taught how to deal with that? Or a violent but unarmed person? Same thing. If the guy has a gun, Soldiers are taught to shoot. But then… that is marksmanship training, not combatives. In a properly integrated program, the two can be combined in the same training sessions.
This video does a great job of explaining the program. Also, keep your eye out for the M9 Bayonet. Its use is shows several times in the video.
https://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/197th/combatives/content/Video.html
And just to be clear, soldiers do not need to attend the higher level courses to get the advanced training. Those courses are to train instructors in the advanced techniques. The instructors, in turn, are supposed to be teaching those techniques to soldiers back at the unit level.
Yeah, but I notice a conspicuous lack of horses in your “advanced” combatives training. 
Don’t American soldiers deserve to learn how to properly tilt from a destrier?
Just got it. There are those things, and we have boats that go underwater.
This Italian weapon designer designed the most in-your-pants-craptastic one ever imaginable.
Wiki has a good article on other earlier Italians who actually used weapons similar in concept, and some other similar innovations.
Likewise, the bayonetting comes after you’ve already disrupted the formation with bullets. Few non-gunpowder armies could stand up to that kind of punishment long enough to get into melee range. It was possible, but took a very different kind of fighting force and would face heavy casualties in the process.
The British, for example, certainly had some nasty defeats against relatively primitive forces. But it was far easier for Britain to field a new force, and few of these enemies managed to win two engagements. Guns had the kind of flexible firepower that any victory against non-gunpowder enemies was usually overwhelming, even if the gunpowder side was seriously outnumbered.
In short, the bayonet had many uses, and once the enemy was disrupted by a couple volleys, an aggressive and disciplined bayonet charge would usually seal the deal.
Now* that’s* a sythe.
Particuarly after the mid 1860s when breech loading rifles became widespread. You start seeing small colonial forces inflicting 10-1 casualties on numerically superior forces.
From what I understand, from the 1400s to the late 1600s, armor, heavy cavalry, archers, crossbomen and pikemen lost importance to the jack-of-all-trades mustket+bayonet man. The bayonet was to repulse charging cavalry and close in with other musketmen and so was amply sufficient.
While a musketman with a bayonet would have gotten beat by a Greek hoplite at being a hoplite, the musketmen had a lot of flexibility. If the musketmen had failed to be gentlemen and be nice enough to fight the hoplites in the way most advantageous to hoplites, the musketmen would have won easily.
Bayonets didn’t come till later. They emerged around 1675.
That’s true, and it’s true even before the bayonet. That let armies double-up on ranged firepower while retaining enough force in melee to win.
So, before that they used pikes?
I think the flintlock mechanism was invented in the late 1600s and made firing more reliable, right? So the turning point which gave us 90%+ mustketmen would have been around that time.
Hand cannons were invented in China and made their way to Europe where they became pretty popular by the 1400s or so. The big problem with a hand cannon is that to fire it you grab your handy dandy piece of burning rope and touch it to the touch hole on the cannon (just like for a big cannon), and now you’re looking down at the cannon instead of looking up at your enemy. The next thing was the matchlock which basically stuck the burning rope on a little holder that you could pull down to the touch hole by squeezing a trigger. It’s not exactly a huge improvement over the hand cannon but at least you are looking at the enemy now instead of looking down at your own hands. They also added wooden stocks to make the weapons easier to use. These spread through Europe in the 1500s.
The flintlock was just a matchlock with a flint and a striker instead of a burning rope, which was definitely an improvement. The “classic” flintlock mechanism is usually credited to Marin le Bourgeoys in the early 1600s but probably existed in some form slightly before then. These quickly replaced the matchlock. The flintlock dominated for over 200 years and was finally replaced by the percussion lock in the 1840s and 1850s. A lot of flintlocks were dug out of the closets and used in the U.S. Civil War, especially at the start of the war, due to arms shortages. After the Civil War, muskets were considered obsolete and were scrapped or converted into breech loaders.
Bayonets came along in the late 1600s (maybe 1660 or so). At first they were plug bayonets, meaning that you literally plugged the end of the barrel with it. That meant that you could either shoot the musket or use it as a pike, but you couldn’t shoot it with the bayonet attached. By the 1680s they were using socket bayonets which didn’t plug the barrel. By the early 1700s they had ironed out a lot of the problems with bayonets and they had then become pretty popular on the battlefield.
Triangular bayonets came in the early 1700s and contrary to popular belief, they weren’t invented to make worse wounds that couldn’t be easily sewn up, but instead were a simple way to make the bayonet as strong as possible while keeping it as a light as possible (by comparison a knife style bayonet can be much more easily bent to one side or the other). Triangular socket bayonets were used up through the U.S. Civil War, at which point they became obsolete and were replaced with knife style bayonets which could be used as a useful camp tool but could still function as a bayonet in an emergency.
Yes, the standard quickly became mixed formations of pike and firearms.
The big shift that did in the pike was the invention of the socket bayonet circa 1670. Prior to that the plug bayonet had been invented, but using it meant plugging the barrel with it. Hmm, engineer_comp_geek beat me to it so I’ll just add this link to Bayonet History.