I’m looking for how the basic engagement of armies at that time was like. I’m pretty familiar with military tactics of the middle ages. I understand the role the various units of the time played on the battlefield and I’m aware of the general tactics of the period. I’ve also read a lot on various campaigns and the blunders as well as the great victories of some of the best (and worse) generals.
But as I prepare myself of the next installment of Empire: Total war I realize I have no clue how engagements played out in the 18th century, the role of the various units and how gun powder changed all of the previous era’s tactics. The only things I know come from two movies: Last of the Mohicans (the one with Daniel Day Lewis) and the Patriot. And the latter, I’ve been told, does not portray combat of the time accurately.
Again, I know it’s a broad subject so if you could provide me with just some (educated) thoughts off the top of your head and perhaps a suggestion for a book or two? Maybe a film or documentary?
Did Napoleon leave behind memoirs? Maybe a battle map or two?
As I understand it–and I mainly get this from movies like Barry Lyndon and Sharpe’s Rifles–the British would march in formation, get their hidden enemies to use up their ammunition on the losers on the front line, thereby revealing their hidden positions, and then swoop in for the kill on their now-helpless opponents. Washington countered this, with considerable success, with guerrilla warfare (fewer formations, more and better-armed snipers, etc.).
Napoleon was mostly nineteenth century. But there is a very good book called “The Campaigns of Napoleon” by David Chandler. It’s available on Amazon, but it ain’t cheap, so I would recommend looking for it in a library. It gets into napoleonic strategy and tactics at all levels.
For true 18th century warefare, though, you should be looking for material on people like Marlborough, Frederick the Great, etc. Napoleon changed things a lot, and though he started in the 18th century, his strategy and tactics aren’t typical of that century.
I’m not much of an expert on the overall military tactics from back then, but I do know a fair amount about muskets. There are three main misconceptions about muskets that you get from Hollywood.
They always fire.
They were accurate.
They were used like modern rifles.
The reality is that flintlock muskets misfired about one out of every three times (a bit more or less depending on the model musket and how well it was maintained). Percussion cap muskets (which didn’t come into being until the 1840’s) reduced the misfire rate from about 1 in 3 to about 1 in 1000.
Muskets also always fire curve balls. The round ball fits loosely in the barrel, and it’s going to hit one side of the barrel more than another, just at random. It’s good out to about 50 yards (maybe 75). After that, it doesn’t matter how good of a marksman you are. You are going to have a hard time hitting the broad side of a barn at 200 yards. If you see a guy in Last of the Mohicans or the Patriot sniping someone at a distance, forget it.
Battles back then were up close and personal. This was not only because the muskets weren’t accurate, but also was because the smoke from all that black powder would completely obscure the battlefield. Rifles existed back then, but they weren’t used by the military because they were slower to load and the added accuracy range didn’t matter much in the overall scheme of things. Muskets were used very much like pikes. In the U.S. Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic Wars about one third of the casualties were caused by bayonets and blades. The tactics that you usually see in Hollywood didn’t really come about until the U.S. Civil War when rifled muskets became widely used. One thing that George Washington’s army did very poorly at first was bayonet fighting. After his army got properly trained in bayonet fighting at Valley Forge, only then could his men really hold their own against the British.
The greater accuracy of rifled muskets in the Civil War pulled back the armies into longer distance fighting, which reduced the bayonet casualties from about 30 or 35 percent to about 1 or 2 percent. This type of fighting is what you usually see in Hollywood movies, and you don’t get that with smooth bore muskets.
Well, in the American Revolution, many of the militiamen carried rifles. They were personal weapons, and it’s quite a bit easier to take game with accurate fire. But they couldn’t fit bayonets (not totally clear on why not). But because of this, the militias never faced British bayonet charges without the Colonial Army alongside.
Not a military historian but I can give you a few generalities.
(European) war in the 18th century was less characterized by innovation than in both previous and following centuries. The flintlock musket in various versions was a mature technology and wouldn’t be substantially improved until the invention of percussion caps in the early 19th century. The relatively poor range of the smoothbore muskets in use meant that musketmen had to work in formation to fire concentrated volleys to achieve good effect (and in turn, give the enemy’s musketmen something to shoot at. )
The large clouds of smoke generated by musketfire made visibility an important consideration: generals and commanding officers were sometimes stymied by the sheer inability to see what was happening, and the colorful and flamboyant uniforms of soldiers were as much for allowing commanders to see who was where as they were for esprit de corps. Similarly, the drum, the pipe and the horn were functional signaling instruments as much as morale boosters.
Armies were also “modern” in the sense that they were based on the groundwork done in the 17th century by such figures as Jean Martinet, who established methods and standards of training, discipline, and logistics that allowed a mass army to be created from raw recruits in a reasonably short time. A standarized strategy of seigecraft mean that any fortress or defense could eventually be systematically broken given enough time and manpower.
The three main classes* of warriors were infantry, cavalry and artillery. Infantry fought with musket and bayonet. The enlisted were either career soldiers or conscripts; the officers were professionals, almost always from the noble classes, and high military rank rated one as a member of upper society. Cavalry were more glamorous still. They fought with saber, lance and occasionally pistols or carbines (guns bigger than a pistol, smaller than a musket). It was usually a bad idea for cavalry to attempt a frontal charge, so they concentrated on using their mobility to outmaneuver the enemy infantry and attempt to attack their flank or rear. The artillery were manned by specialists in the handling of powder, shot and shell.
*In addition, many armies had what were sometimes called “dragoons”: essentially, specialized mounted infantry, who rode on horseback but dismounted to actually fight. The modern mechanized equivalent would be mobile infantry using APCs.
I’m certainly less of an expert than** Lumpy**. Only things to add are that first, for infantry, firing the muskets was still sort of just an interim measure until things got close enough for bayonets. The attack plan was ‘march up to within range, and maybe exchange a couple of volleys or not, but at any rate, end with a bayonet charge’. Second, direct cavalry charges could still work, but only if the enemy was already starting to think about getting out of there, either because they weren’t well disciplined to begin with, or had been shot at for hours without relief, or saw that everyone else on their side was already running away.
That, and it might be worth mentioning by then fortifications and siege engineering had figured out how to deal with cannon, and were pretty advanced. That’s when they started building all those star-shaped forts with low earth walls. And attackers knew to dig trenches for cover, gradually extending them closer and closer to the walls.
