They weren’t perplexed and confounded by their military organisation and discipline, they were dumbfounded (and made livid) by the fact the English would try and use what they felt were unfair tactics. Compound that with the fact that up to that point, nobility was of the opinion that only another noble should be allowed to kill a nobleman (and who could blame them ?)… The use of a missile units wasn’t a tactical innovation at all - however, relying on massed archery and clever use of terrain rather than melee in order to win was.
So the French essentialy were determined to prove that individual valour and social rank trumped tactical underhandedness. Turns out it didn’t. Who coulda thunk it ?! :eek: Once they got their ass in gear and reluctantly let go of that notion, they proved to be very devious themselves (and the English found it unfair that the French would use artillery, forced them into sieges instead of open battles etc… what goes around, eh ;))
I’m not sure on what point we’re in disagreement, other than perplexed/confounded vs. dumbfounded/livid, which sounds pretty much the same to me.
Surely even modern military mapmaking skills would give the modern combatants a critical advantage? Or camoflauge techniques? Or night fighting skills?
And in terms of gear, what about ordinary wristwatches? Being able to know to the minute when your other bunch of guys is going to come in and attack surely would be an advantage.
What I meant was that they (well, the bright ones anyway) perfectly understood the situation - they just refused to adress it in what modern tacticians would think as the proper way. If that’s what you meant by “confounded” then I apologize, I took it to mean “they were too dumb to figure it out”
Military mapmaking ? Sure, if you somehow brought a modern map. And even then you’re the only one who knows how to read it and there’s only one copy - not really helpfull.
Camouflage doesn’t help in a field battle where everyone is organised in regiments and formations - it does help in partisan/guerilla warfare and the like, but they already did that back then. Sure, they didn’t have MARPAT, but they knew to dress in dark colors, stay hidden in the vegetation etc…
Night fighting was part and parcell of ancient warfare - and I doubt modern soldiers are ninjas when they don’t pack NVGs
I doubt watches would make much a difference either - you want a hidden force to strike, you raise a red flag, or blow three times in your trusty war horn. Sure, the other guy knows it’s a signal, but he doesn’t know what for. You want to know how far the reinforcements are, you send a runner.
What would, however, help tremendously : modern communications. Even if it’s a single pair of walkie-talkies. Paraphrasing Tom Clancy, “the most dangerous man in the world is a soldier armed with a radio”.
All right, imagine this: a company of 100 soldiers or marines is somehow transported back to 14th century Europe with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They have access to all of the weapons and gear of the day and in, say, one month they will be thrown into battle. How large of a medieval military force will they be able to defeat in battle, and how?
I don’t know that much about military stuff, but I’m guessing they could go all A-Team on a medieval army 10 times their size.
I think a pretty damn good set of armor could be made with titanium, kevlar, and plexiglass. Easily superior to anything made then, from any aspect… weight, protection, visibility.
You wouldn’t be able to walk onto the battlefield with impunity, but you would have a distinct advantage as far as equipment goes. May want to spend a few years devoted to the study of combat and warfare though(just take a bunch of aluminum with you… worth more than gold back then)
Any number of common items now would offer huge advantages to the side that used them. Timepieces would certainly help, as would a good pair of binoculars.
Nothing but the clothes on their backs? No modern weapons with them at all? They’re screwed.
Seriously, guys, skills matter.
Look, modern strategy and tactics depend on a support and logistics network that wouldn’t exist. They rely on completely different skills and even fundamental premises about the most basic goals in warfare. Highly trained soldiers with skills useful in modern warfare are completely unsuited to medieval warfare. Hand to hand combat is barely even covered in the modern army because it’s almost useless now. Learning how to shoot, maintain and use their equipment, and move as part of a disparate but coordinated force is paramount.
In fighting with spears, bows and arrows, and swords, massed and coordinated forces are what win. They didn’t fight that way for fun, they fought that way because it worked. Any new tactics were adapted to pretty easily. Sure, you can fool someone with a novel trick. Once. After that, you’d better have something new to surprise them with.
A medieval knight was roughly the equivalent of a modern tank. Armor was vital to remaining alive for any length of time and/or preserving your limbs. In another thread I related how a guy who got the chance to do some test cutting with various blades on a cow carcass. He cut through a vertebra of the cow and thought he’d somehow slid between the bones and cut a disk instead because it went through with so much ease. He lopped off a leg of that cow with a backhand cut and said that if he hadn’t had good cutting technique, he could have hurt himself because of the lack of reistance. Without even basic armor any encounter with armed hostiles would be a slaughter.
Your 100 modern soldiers would get themselves killed or captured by the first force of hostiles they come across. If by some miracle they fooled that force so that they could capture the arms and armor, they’ve still got almost nothing in the way of skills to use them, and not every member of their force will be armored. There’s no way to build up the resources in any time scale short of decades to make their own weapons, no way to buy or barter any in a reasonable amount of time, and any knowledge they might have that would be valuable is there for the taking by the guys with armor and weapons: i.e. not the soldiers.
Even giving your soldiers the advantage of then-current armor and weapons to start with wouldn’t help much. They don’t have the skills for using them effectively, don’t understand how that kind of warfare works on anything but the theoretical level, aren’t physically conditioned for it, and worst of all lack experience. Giving untrained guys Apache helicopters and M1 tanks doesn’t do much unless they know how to use them.
Anything they might have learned for improvised weapons is useless because it’s centuries out of date. They wouldn’t even be capable of making simple explosives without ready-made material, or relying on the availability of chemical precursors which aren’t available without an industrial society. All the weapons they trained with are not available. All the skills they acquired through years of training in our world are useless. They are, in short, about as capable of dealing with that kind of warfare as knights would be of dealing with warfare in our world.
CutterJohn, titanium is softer than steel. There’s a reason plate armor was hardened if they could do it; more resistance to edged weapons and piercing. You also have to make parts out of thicker titanium to get the same level of strength and rigidity as steel. Now you’ve got slightly lighter, but extremely bulky armor. Congratulations. What do you plan to do about the joints where the armor has to be thinner so the person can move?
Aluminum is worse for weapons work, by the way, and would only be valuable because it was unobtainable at the time and is soft and relatively easy to shape. Good luck buying weapons fast enough to keep someone who already has a trained and armed force from taking it from you.
Kevlar; see my first post for why that may not be the best idea. Aramid fibers would help if they were used properly as backing material and for harness bindings, but plain old Kevlar isn’t stab-proof.
Plexiglass; have you seen how thick bulletproof “glass” is? Did you know that a war arrow fired from a longbow would have more kinetic energy than most bullets? Wanna bet on how well plain old plexi would do against a rain of arrows? It would literally be a rain of hundreds of arrows per second.
While we do have materials that, if used in the right way, would be superior to what they had, the materials alone wouldn’t make men invulnerable, unstoppable, or even much superior to a decently armed force of the time. It would provide better protection for the weight, but I doubt that would be enough to offset the disparity in skills and knowledge of that type of warfare.
Sleel said everything I wanted to say and about 100x better. If I had a hat on, I would tip it in your general direction sir.
It really baffles me how anyone could think otherwise. Can anyone explain the reasoning behind believing that a group of modern soldiers without access to their modern weapons would do anything other than die, dramatically? Heck, even with modern rifles, ammo is not infinite. medieval soldiers would die at first until they realized that the foreigners carried some type of powerful missile weapons, then they’d stay at a distance and harass until their ammo run out or wait to ambush when terrain allowed for a closer attack. So even then I wouldn’t give them much survivability, in the long term, at least.
You know, it might make for a good movie though. But I’m sure it’s already been one.
Interesting discussion - my original question was not about the capacities of medieval vs. modern soldiers, though … I’m assuming purely for the purposes of this exercise that our hypothetical warrior has the same martial skills as his opponents, and no access to machine-guns and the like. Only the armour is different.
I take it that the general consensus is that the stuff could be made lighter and offer marginally better protection than say a good suit of plate, but would not be really decisively better?
Yes. It should be able to provide an advantage, but not a decisive one.
Put it this way, the choice of weaponry would be more important. If you gave one guy a sword and the other a spear, I’d bet on the guy with the spear, even if the guy with the sword has the superior armor (assuming equal skill of course, at least in this hypothetical).
I know the OP was about one on one hand to hand fighting with modern material, but the part I quoted is nearly as important as gunpowder and airplanes, let alone raw materials science, to the relative success of modern armies.
I realized something the other day when I asked myself a question: assuming no airplanes, gunpowder, or vehicles, what was the best army ever fielded? The Red Army of WW2. Because there are so many of them (and they had more cavalry than the other great powers.) A medieval army would beat them one on one handily but there are more than 100x as many of them.
So, if an army of modern people were transported back to medieval times, we would win hands down, because there’d be a butt ton of us, all with the best armor and weaponry, because we outproduce them, (and the agricultural revolution means we’re healthier and can afford to have more people in the army and also focus on materials sciences.)
Even if we just had as many people as the medieval army, most of them would not have the best equipment whereas we would.
I don’t know if it quite fits the OP, but it’s not completely irrelevant to point out how cheap modern armor is relatively speaking. In a medieval army only a few nobles would be good plate armor, and the masses in whatever they could find and scavenge. If modern technology allowed you to armor every single grunt, that is a huge advantage.
Modern experienced infantry with access to medieval weapons and a month to train against a medieval army? Depends on the medieval army. Against a peasant levy? The marines would do pretty darn well, just by virtue of professionalism, training together, etc.
Against an experienced professional mercenary group? Not so much.
From your previous posts, it sounds like you’re referring to Agincourt. I’ve read a little about this, as Henry V was my favorite Shakespeare play. From my understanding, the terrain was the key feature in the English domination of this battle. The field was freshly plowed and there had been rain, so there was a lot of deep mud. The initial French cavalry charge churned it up pretty well, so the following dismounted attackers already laboring under a heavy load of armor with its inevitable restrictions of vision and oxygen had an even heavier slog. And if they opened their visors to get some air, they were exposed to that ‘terrifying hail of arrows’. So when the armored French finally got to the English line, they would be pretty exhausted already, without landing a single blow. And if they fell, well, apparently some of the armored knights actually drowned in the deep mud.
Ok, a couple of problems with this. First, harder metals don’t make better armor. Highly hardened steel is so brittle you can shatter it by dropping it on the floor. Tougher metals are what make better armor. Titanium works well for armor because it’s a damn tough metal. With the right titanium alloy you can substitute Ti for Steel on an inch-by-inch basis with about a 25% weight savings. Other options are lightweight ceramics and composites, or even aluminum, especially for the very light impacts (compared to modren firearms) you’d expect from a spear or a sword.
The best armor system against low-energy impacts and piercing trauma is a layered system, with a shell to prevent penetration and spread the strike out, and a buffer layer to prevent blunt trauma from energy transferred through the shell. Even polycarbonate is tough enough to withstand several blows fairly easily. I guarantee you that you can’t drive a sword or spear through a ceramic or plastic trauma plate, and those only weigh 4-6 lbs.
As far as arrows go, your ideas are completely backwards. Arrows have a kinetic energy of about 60 foot pounds for a modern arrow fired from a compound bow. A regular .30-06 round has around 2600 foot pounds of kinetic energy. Even so, arrows can in some cases penetrate better than bullets, because they have a much higher sectional density. But in the case of penetrating a solid, bullets have it all over arrows. Look at the development of armor. As crossbows and longbows appeared, armor got heavier and heavier, requiring winches in order to help the knight mount up. When gunpowder weapons became common, armor almost totally disappeared – because it was worthless against the penetrating power and pure kinetic energy of a .70 caliber lead ball. (Furthermore, I doubt that your few square inches of plexiglass visor would be taking ones of arrows per second, let alone hundreds.)
Another factor is our metallurgy technology. Medieval steel was of a much lower quality overall than what we can do today. Visors, especially, tended to fail because of the stresses involved in punching holes through the sheet steel. A poly visor shield is going to be stronger for that reason alone, will provide better vision, and weigh less to boot.
It would be fairly simple to design armor to be used against swords, arrows, and the like that outperforms medieval steel plate by a factor of 10. It won’t make you invincible, but it will make a HUGE difference. Near the “end of chivalry”, armor started becoming incredibly heavy and cumbersome. The knight was nearly unstoppable by the average peasant infantry, true, but it was the armor and the horse doing most of the work. The armor was far too heavy for any fancy moves other than block with a shield and pound on the enemy. Unhorsed, these guys had trouble with mud, overbalancing, peripheral vision, etc etc. So imagine that you had a modern suit of armor that provided better protection than that huge steel shell (again invincible vs average unarmed peasant) except that it weighed 75% less. If nothing else, you could trade blows all day, holding your 15 lb shield (vs his 50+ lb shield), until the other guy collapsed from exhaustion – which would be pretty fast.
Add to that the fact that the guy from the middle ages is going to be short, lightweight, probably suffering from several diseases, the endurance advantage alone is huge.
Furthermore, individual weapon skill in ancient armies was not the force multiplier that other factors were. Discipline was the biggest, which is why the Roman legions were so good. Historical accounts of the age of chivalry indicate that the knights were anything but disciplined, charging whenever they felt like it (often unsupported), breaking formation, and charging through their own screens. As you mentioned, armies adapt to new things. That’s why every modern military today concentrates on combined arms and sound unit-level tactics, rather than training personal prowess and hoping elan will carry the day. Even better, look at what riot police do. They line up and protect each other’s flanks. There isn’t much of a jump between holding back a riot and standing against a charge.
In a tourney, a noble would do better than a modern soldier given a bit of training and good armor. But in a battle, a modern force’s discipline and gear advantage would far outweigh the training nobles had – ESPECIALLY if you get to armor everyone in your army, not just the 10-20% who are men-at-arms.
ETA: Also, the battle of Crecy is the one that was considered the “end of chivalry” where English forces defeated a bunch of knights.
This is inaccurate and is just stuff that Mark Twain made up. I didn’t think anyone still believed that nonsense.
Again, totally inaccurate, Armor thrived, even after early fire arms became popular. A properly made cuirass could stop even a lead ball fired form the guns of the period.
More inaccuracies. An armored knights remained very mobile on the battlefield whether on a mount or not. And towards the height of articulated plate, shields had fallen out of favor as well, the armor defended so well, that it was preferable to use two hands on a weapon.
Obviously, armor failed to thrive, given that there have been a notable lack of knights in full plate on the battlefield sin the 16th century or so. It’s not like they all woke up one day and said “Drat, so much for this armor thing”, but that increases in firearms technology rapidly made armor obsolete (until the very recent past).
I am no expert on medieval arms and armor but your link very specifically refers to tournament jousting armor, stating:
“Because tournament armor was worn only a short time for a specific purpose, it was thicker and heavier to provide maximal protection for the participant.”
That’s the only mention of people having limited mobility off their horses or needing aid to mount their horse. I’ve seen seen video of men in recreations of historical plate armor running around, doing somersaults and so forth.
As far as 50lb shields go I have a hard time accepting that - that’s a plate 1/5" thick, 2’x3’. Nobody is going to strap that on their arm and go into a fight. I just did a quick bit of googling and found a table showing the weights of actual historical shields in a collection - not one of them is over 11lbs (that’s for a steel shield) and the majority are several pounds less. Another link mentioned the same thing as Kinthalis did - shields became less popular when well-built plate armor came on the scene and made the protection of a shield less necessary.
It was more a case of increasing expense relative to usefullness. It wasn’t that heavily armoured calvary was rendered obsolete by gunpowder per se, as that it was just pricier to train and maintain relative to trained infantry, whose effectiveness was increasing with the advances in firearms. But armored calvary didn’t disappear - they just formed smaller and more highly specialized units, rather than the preeminent arm. Well-armored cuirassiers continued to be utilized and useful well into the 18th century and ( perhaps a bit anachronistically ) beyond, into the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed armored shock calvary was still the arm of decision as late as the early 17th century under the Swedes.
Missed the edit window - early 18th century I meant ( Charles XII ). Heavy calvary were even more important in Eastern Europe through the 18th century, where the large open areas with discontinuous settlement placed a premium on mobility over firepower for somewhat longer than it did in the west.
Once they got their ass in gear and reluctantly let go of that notion, they proved to be very devious themselves (and the English found it unfair that the French would use artillery, forced them into sieges instead of open battles etc… what goes around, eh ;))