It wasn’t that so much. It took 10 years- at least- to train a longbowman. It took a month to train a musket man.
You could field 100+ musket troops for one trained archer. A single expert trained longbowman can beat a single musket. But not 100.
The whole idea of requiring the peasants to train and own a weapon was a bad idea.
This explains why the longbow went out of use.
This obviously begs the question, what did these early guns have in their favor? Why were bows replaced with guns? Obviously, firearms have a much greater armor penetration potential when compared to bows. But they need to hit first! And you can get a similar effect from peppering the target with hundreds of arrows in the time it takes to fire one or two rounds from an early gun! However, guns had one massive advantage over bows! Archery is a highly sophisticated and skillful pursuit that takes years and years of training to become strong enough to wield and proficient enough to use. Such was the degree of mastery needed that it was law in England for all citizens to be proficient in the use of bows in case of war…Regardless of this Nieminen states that “Economic and social factors, especially the training of musketeers as opposed to archers, were more important factors influencing the replacement of the bow by the gun than pure military ‘effectiveness’". It would seem that pure “bang for your buck” ultimately spelled doom for the humble war bow. The ability to build on mass and train on mass the weapons and men who would use them ultimately outcompete the longer, slower and more expensive age-old method of life longing training with a bow. You could train a man to use an early firearm in a fraction of the time it would take to use a bow. For this reason, guns quickly replaced bows on the battlefields of Europe.
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While I agree with the larger point, I think you’re a bit quick to discount the other advantages - of steel weapons and armour and cavalry - that the Europeans usually brought to those conflicts e.g. in the conquest of Central & South America, there were still a considerable crossbow component to the Conquistador forces, but they won anyway.
Getting away of the OP, but the efficiency of Europeans of XV or XVI centuries against “natives” weren’t exclusively from firearms:
steel weapons and armors
horses
warfare focused on killing the enemies instead of taking them alive for sacrifice, or having 1vs1 duels for honor
biological warfare (unknowingly) that killed 80 to 90% of said enemies
As I said in the earlier posts, in the very specific case of the OP, the Romans will win, albeit with losses: Englishmen will open fire at about 100 yards and hit (and kill or disable, since musket ball will pierce scutum or lorica) about 25 legionnaires (one kill for 20 to 30 bullets fired), then the legionnaires advance and cover the distance in 1,5 minute. The Redcoats manage to reload and fire again, killing 75 (estimation for point blank fire), but the legionnaires trow pilae, killing 50 Redcoats. Then charge, and it’s bayonets against gladius. 400 legionnaires against 450 Redcoats, on a 2-men deep formation, the Redcoats lose, badly.
No cavalry, no bowers, no plumbata, no ballista, no cannon, no fortifications as stated in OP.
Try running while in mail armor, with a large shield and maintaining formation with your comrades…
This is not the 100 m Olympics.
You run the last 20 yards, gaining speed to trow the javelins, then unsheathing the sword .
We’ve discussed this before in this thread. See above
Caesar himself discusses why charging into battle works and is a good idea.
If you have a guess that legionaries walked into battle, then I suggest you find a cite to support it. If you haven’t come across multiple descriptions of legionaries running with a shield and armour, by many different Roman writers from different periods, then you’ve never read any Roman military history.
Yep, well-fitted armour doesn’t hamper mobility the way, say, the equivalent weight in a backpack might.
Although it should be noted that (despite what the developers of D’nD might think) mail is actually a bit heavier than plate for the same coverage. Not enough to matter for the 100 yard dash, though.
That’s very true, the steel armor and weapons the Europeans had in the New World were an incredible advantage as well.
Probably a better time period to focus on is the 18th century, which actually saw the British win a number of military victories in the Indian subcontinent against less technologically advanced forces primarily through use of muskets and cannon. It’s worth noting that the Indian subcontinent wasn’t unfamiliar with gunpowder, they just had not undergone the sort of large scale societal/military reforms to produce the sort of line infantry elements the British had by the late 18th century. Like the British faced off against the Mughal Empire at Buxar in 1765, the Mughals had 40,000 men vs 7,000 (most of whom were British-loyal Indian Sapoys who were equipped and trained to fight like the redcoats) for the British and the British won decisively.
The Mughals even had cannons of their own, so again this wasn’t a pre-gunpowder society. They largely lost these battles because of poor military doctrines–the British line formations allowed for massed fire that was made extremely effective when supported by cannon and cavalry. The Mughals were over-reliant on cavalry charges that were easily broken by massed gunfire and cannon.
The Mughals and the British were not ignorant of bows and arrows, it kind of is obvious that muskets were giving them better results because both armies were using them by the mid-18th century. This is also true throughout Europe and the Middle East.
I have no real issue saying at a super close distance of 100 yards, with 0 supporting elements (critically no cannon), a 500 v 500 battle between armored Roman infantry equipped with swords and shields is not going to go well for the redcoats. I’ve never said otherwise. What I struggle with is the people who keep posting further scenarios that seem to suggest basically that the entire idea of gunpowder armies was silly and offered minimal advantage over older weapons. That just isn’t historically accurate.
But again, mind that the New World is not the only place such conflicts played out. Africa and the Indian subcontinent had access to horses, were not susceptible to European diseases, and in many cases had steel weapons and armor available as well (less so in sub-Saharan Africa.)
I go back to something I said much earlier in the thread–a significant element that is misunderstood is that battles are won by killing. That isn’t really the truth, and never has been. Battles are won by breaking the enemy and taking the field. The side that kills the most is not actually guaranteed to be the victor. That’s why trying to retcon things based on expected casualty rate inflicted per volley etc is going to give you a very incomplete picture.
Take the Battle of Buxar that I mentioned–the Mughals of their 40,000 are thought to have lost around 6,000, the British forces around 1,000. These are relatively small % of the total. And these are actually percentages of forces killed than you often saw. There are almost innumerable battles in North America between European and indigenous forces that saw say, only 40-50 dead out of a thousand combatants. The indigenous forces often broke after taking a couple volleys. And I’m not talking like the early 17th century when many of these people were seeing gunpowder for the first time. You see this even in battles like the Battle of Tippecanoe, that had 500-700 natives vs around 250 Americans, the natives broke fairly quickly and only suffered maybe 40 dead.
There’s a lot of talk of how easy it would be to march through the massed musket volleys of line infantry, but there’s a lot of historical evidence suggesting you guys may be a little fictitious there.
It wouldn’t be easy. It would be very hard. If we were talking most any other pre-modern force, I’d be happy to concede that they’d more likely break. But I don’t think it’s the case for Roman legionnaires, specifically.
I don’t think a single person in the thread has really said the Romans would lose, because the OP’s hypothetical just isn’t very interesting. It’s like asking “if you start a gun fight with your gun drawn and the other person’s gun is locked in a safe, who wins.” The only reason OPs hypothetical would be interesting is if muskets were modern day assault rifles or something, I suspect OP just misunderstood the context of musket warfare and massively overestimated their combat capability, so his hypothetical actually puts the musketeers at a hilarious bad disadvantage versus anything related to real history. Again, my issue is not with anyone saying the musketeers would lose in the dumb hypothetical, it’s the people going on to say the Romans would win in combined armed battles with full European armies from 1500+ years later. That’s just silly.
I mean maybe 200 posts ago, I haven’t seen anyone seriously argue that the musketeers would win the 500 vs 500 scenario in a long time. Either way, I’ve never said that, so I don’t actually care I guess if other people have, my point was not dependent on other people making it so disregard I even mentioned them. I personally have never said the OP’s hypothetical was particularly close–other than I did mention that it’s possible the Romans would break in fear of seeing gunpowder used for the first time, which is an “unknowable” and since it’s unknowable not a great platform for discussion, so talk turned to more mechanical matters.
It sure is, and if you are talking about me I certainly didn’t say it. I pointed out the reasons why bows faded away - primarily the difficulty in arming, training and supplying archers in large quantities. Also, I was trying to make the point that weaponry does not evolve in a vacuum, but as part of an overall military doctrine including the enemy’s capabilities and combined arms taxtics. Remove 500 musketeers from the context of the army and put them up against 500 other soldiers, and the whole calculus changes.
For example, consider the tank. A devastating modern weapon, in the context of a battlefield surrounded by support units. But if I asked, “If you sent a tank up against 50 redcoats, who would win?”, I’d put my money on the redcoats. Without auxiliary forces, a tank is vulnerable to all sorts of traps, which is why tanks in WWII moved en masse with ground soldiers and (hopefully) air cover. If a tank got caught alone, say in an urban area, it was vulnerable to very primitive attacks, such as crawling up and putting a satchel charge under it, or trapping it and burning out the crew with fire.
If you told me I had to build an army of 100,000 men and could choose between bows and muskets, I’d pick the musket every time. If you asked me to put together a small force of highly trained soldiers to fight another similarly sized group of soldiers with muskets but no army backing ghem, I’d give serious consideration to bows if the men had trained their entire lives to shoot them. And I would use tactics that give the bowmen maximum advantage. I just think that’s a much closer situation than talking about full armies. The same goes for the scenario of 500 musketmen with a cannon auxiliary vs 500 legionaires with a trained bowmen auxiliary.
These are contrived artificial situations. The reason I brought up Zulus and Native Americans is just to show that in the right conditions the bow was still an effective weapon against musket-armed soldiers. And indeed, Native Americans gave many musket-armed soldiers lots of trouble in the early colonial days before rifled barrels and breechloaders showed up.
How do you think the musketmen would fare against a horde of 500 Mongol horse mounted archers who trained their whole lives to be able to shoot effectively from a galloping Horse? I’d say ‘not well’. But if you put an entire 18th century army up against an ancient Mongol army, the more modern guys would slaughter them, because Muskets work well in the context of giant armies with all kinds of support and other weaponry. But in small group conflicts, not so much. Ten musketmen vs ten archers is very different from armies dukjng it out on a battlefield in the tens of thousands.
The Mongols at least in their golden era were fielding such large armies I wouldn’t want to be fighting them if I was a General leading British redcoats, definitely not without cannon. But the Mongols tended to have issues with areas where their ponies couldn’t live off the land from natural pasturage, they overcame that some by adapting to local tactics and establishing client states on the periphery, but for the steppes I wouldn’t want to fight a bunch of horse archers without anything but pretty modern weapons.
I do somewhat disagree that a single tank would lose to 50 redcoats, tanks have things like .50 cal machine guns mounted on them that would make quick work of redcoats. Now the next 50 and the next 50 after that get problematic. Tanks only have so much fuel and the moment it runs out of fuel or has a part break it’s just a big turret that can’t move.
That famous Reddit alt history “Rome Sweet Rome” which is about a U.S. Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit gets transported back in time to the era of the Roman Empire. It all started from a hypothetical “how would this force fare against the Romans.” It developed organically from a lot of discussions until the author ended up with a pretty plausible concept. Basically the Marines would understand the Roman Empire just had an endless supply of men compared to them, and they had no chance of beating them with pure force. But by showing the power of their modern weapons, they could come to a deal with the local Roman general that was to their advantage.
I mean, sure, one tank can’t defeat an infinite number of soldiers without fuel and ordnance, but it can literally just drive over infantry formations. Without armor-penetrating weaponry capable of harming the crew or damaging something vulnerable, Redcoats probably couldn’t even damage the treads.
Now, as for fighting the Mongols; in practice the introduction of gunpowder decisively tilted the military situation against horse archers. It accomplished this in several ways: first, it made strongpoints effectively invulnerable to attack, even from strong armies. Second, it meant that any organized gunpowder army could field vastly more firepower than a nomadic tribe or even empire. Muscovy started as a principality that aligned itself with one Mongol Ordu, but as it acquired larger territory and gunpowder arms, they eventually grew and threw off that allegiance, and proceeded to defeat any and all threatening nomads.
Redcoats wouldn’t have to damage the tank at all, just stay out of it’s way and wait. I wonder how long that strategy would take? Sure, the crew could park and conserve fuel, but the water is going to run out quickly.
Tanks, offroad, are faster than a sprinting human. You can’t outrun them. You can go hide depending on the terrain, but that’s not entirely practical unless you can attain extreme concealment which is not easy for a group of 50-100 soldiers. A modern tank will have night vision and thermographic equipment and a 250+ mile range. I’m not saying no counter-strategy is possibly, but it’s not a good situation. The only hope any pre-modern force has is basically having terrain where the tank can’t follow. In this case, however, don’t forget that the tank can potentially deny the other force access to water as well unless there’s a flowing stream or something in which case neither side can count on the advantage. The tank crew has a storage compartment for supplies. Soldiers will carry, at best, an extra canteen.
