War tactics--what are they good for? Absolutely nothing?

Factual Questions
21

I think **Lemur886 ** and **Blake ** touched upon the real reason but it has got lost in the concentration upon firepower and weapon technology - as is the want of history buffs everywhere.

Now those factors are important of course but more important surely are the factors of command and control. Until very recently the mass of your army would be uneducated, relatively poorly training and relatively unwilling to be there. Your command and control of your men at individual unit level would depend on the technology of flags (“here is where the unit should be”), drums and other instruments to make a centre of noise (“follow the sound of the drums”) but also crucially to transmit orders (this drum pattern means form a square against cavalry, that pattern means charge) and the sight, example (“follow me”) and shouted orders of the officers and non-commissioned officers.

All of that could only be done at relatively short range. The proportion of available offcers to men was low and so you had to gather your men in close masses in order to get them to do what you wanted. Otherwise they would do nothing, do what they were last doing, or run away.

Firepower was the constraint on the exercise of that control and command. If and when you got slaughtered by being too close together you either took cover and/or spread out (both losing command and control ability) or if close enough tried to cover the distance between you and who was mowing you down to eliminate that source of firepower. You could then reform your unit to regain command and control and enable you to do something with it again.

Battles were generally won by the side that maintained command and control and morale (all are linked) which were eroded by disorganisation, losses, smoke, noise etc etc. Firepower itself was not decisive until it created one or more of those factors to reach a critical level.

As education levels rose, individual initiative followed and a professional army become possible. When the techology of command and control improved faster than the techology of killing the situation changed. So the nadir was perhaps WW1 when you had airplanes, artillery, gas, machine guns, rapid fire rifles, mines, barbed wire etc etc to kill or restrain versus only shouted orders, whistles, phone lines which immediately broke down and carrier pidgeons to command and control your men. The result of a slaughter that even when the men achieved their objectives could not be exploited due to the lack of knowledge up the chain of command of the local situation - the battlefield had had to spread out as reaction to overwheming firepower despite the lack of any mechanism to control the resultant battlefield.

Come WW2 and radio things changed radically.

22

The_Broken_Column has a strange mixture of good points and confused facts. It is mainly a side issue to the OP but to clear a few of the more obvious errors up:

Tell that to the Roman Legions versus the Auxiliaries, or auxiliary cavalry versus cataphract units.

Wrong. Went out with the fall of Greece many centuries before.

Quite why you wish to restrict the discussion to the medieval period I do not know. I will not quibble about the details other than to point out blocks of 100%archers between blocks of 100% men at arms were the battle winners at Agincourt. Most armies use combined arm tactics, so the composition of individual units is of less importance the individual armour they wore even less so from the viewpoint of grand tactics.

:dubious: You don;t really mean this do you? You can’t

Simply wrong. Roman army tactics changed radically over the centuries. The most obvious being following the defeat of Valens and the traditional legionary tactics by the Ostrogothic cavalry at the Battle of Adrianople (378 AD). The legions declined after that and cavalry largely ruled the battlefield for serveral centuries to come. But their experience against the Persian superheavy cavalry caused a big rethink too.

This would be versus L. Aemilius Paullus and C. Terrentius Varro at Cannae in 216 BC would it? I do not know which sources you are relying on but Polybius claims that 50,000-60,000 Romans died. However the consensus seems to be that some 20,000 were captured, and another 16,000 escaped (among them the future Scipio Africanus Major). For their part the Carthaginians lost 6,000 men, the Celts and Iberians accounting for about 5,000 of these. So decisive, yes, but not unique - what about Stalingrad?

.

Idiot is a little strong for Napoleon even then when he was not at his best. But the square tactic was used in many battles (Quatre Bras for one, only two days earlier) it was Wellington’s reverse slope tactics (positioning the vulnerable infantry on the back slope of the hill out of fire of the artillery) that was the new and decisive element. But even that may have failed had Ney used proper combined arms tactics and brought up Horse Artillery to tear the squares apart at close range. Wellington did not have the strength of artillery to protect his squares from such a tactic.

Seriously, if you had ever been there you would know it is an outer suburb of Tunis, no barren waste hole, nowhere near the Sahara and salting the earth is a myth - or at least the permanent qualities of such action is a myth. It washes out after a few growing seasons - enough to starve the ancient local population but not permanent. There was even a SD thread recently about it and Queen Zenobia’s Palmyra IIRC, the desert there being due to natural salination problems.

23

It was Cannae where the Carthaginians surrounded and annihilated the Romans.

And Carthage didn’t really disappear from history. It’s true that the Romans massacred the original population and burned the city. But the Romans were too practical to abandon a good site; they built a new city a few miles away, named it New Carthage, and filled it with settlers.

There were also several technological developements before the invention of firearms that revolutionized tactics. Two I can think of offhand are stirrups and compound bows.

24

There is one other aspect to the technology of the day that nobody has really emphasized yet. Smokeless gunpowder (cordite) was not invented until 1889, so American Civil War–era battlefields were often a pall of black powder smoke after the first few minutes. I imagine this had to have an effect on the tactics employed at the time; perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I can be more specific.

I would say at a guess that if you cannot see the enemy lines, you have nothing to aim at; and if you cannot see your own side, you have nowhere to retreat to. Lining up might have been thought a good way to keep your troops together and aimed in the right direction. Also, if the generals cannot see the battlefield, it might be harder to see what went wrong and correct it for the next battle.

25

Untrue. the organization of the roman armies changed a lot. In particular, the importance of cavalry was greatly emphatized. At the time of the republic, the roman army was essentially infantry. By the end of the empire, Rome facing differently organized oponents and its armies including large numbers of auxiliaries and federated troops of alien origin, cavalry was vastly more important in number and was playing the main role on the battlefield.

26

Nitpick: Wellington had used similar reverse slope tactics more than once during the Peninsular War. Course, Napoleon had never seen them in person.

27

Absolutely Gorsnak!

And thanks for clarifying - I was no clear enough but meant new to both Napoleon and Ney who largely controlled the grand tactical battle in the afternoon onwards. Napoleon’s Chief of Staff, Soult, on seeing the position Wellington had chosen and having fought against him personally in Spain, actually recommended a left hook IIRC but was dismissed by Napoleon.

Probably correctly too IMHO, he needed to beat Wellington and decisively before the Prussians arrived, not maneovre him out of the postion.

This thread looks dead though I would have been interested in any reaction to my command and control theory over the weapon technology theory that seems the favourite?

28

For your first question I would strongly recommend John Keegan’s A History of Warfare. It is a highly readable book that will pretty much answer your questions on this subject. It is not highly specific, but you will walk away with a much better understanding. I asked a similar question of a history grad student specializing in military history, and who is now an intelligence specialist in the Army, and he recommended this book without the least hesitation. Next, you will want to read Bevin Alexander’s How Great Generals Win. This is quite specific, detailing the tactics and strategies of History’s great generals. There is at least one Civil War general included in the book. This book is also outstanding and quite readable.

But here is the short answer: The cavalry could never beat infantry if the infantry was disciplined–they relied on fear and panic to win. Basically the idea is to charge in and separate a small group from the whole formation and wipe them out. This way, an entire army could be slain in a piecemeal fashion. The Swiss formed the ‘modern’ pike square, i.e. a discliplined force that stayed in formation with long spears. No cavalry using shock weapions (something you hit or stab with, as opposed to shooting a projectile) could win unless they greatly outnumbered the infantry. When the gun came around, the bayonets (sp?) were added on in order to allow the infantry to function as a pike square; otherwise, your army would suffer the same problems that all infantry had suffered against cavalry since Atilla came along: they’d get split up and wiped out piecemeal. It is no coincidence that the great cavalrys all came from herding peoples: Herding sheep is quite analogous to herding men, and the great horse cultures recognized and utilized this fact. At the time of the Civil War, the same problem obtained. The cavalry could move too quickly to permit a bunch of muzzle-loaders to spread out and take cover.

But read the books, they do a much better job of it than I do.
To your second question, in all the reading I’ve done, I’ve never heard a single suggestion that ancient warfare was in any way civilized. At Cannae (sp?), Hannibal’s army killed some 50,000 Roman soldiers in one day–a number to rival the battle of the Somme (sp?). The Romans in turn had to put together a slave army, which was ordered that any slave killing an enemy would be set free. The Romans almost lost when the slaves were so pre-occupied collecting heads that they couldn’t fight. It wasn’t until the Roman general ordered that if they won, then all members of the army would be freed and Hannibal’s brother lost his army and his life. Hannibal was apprised of his brother’s death when the Romans catipulted (sp?) the brother’s head into Hannibal’s camp. At the battle of Agin Court (sp?) (or was it Crecy), Edward took thousands of French nobility as prisoners and had his archers slit their throats on the battlefield. At various points there may have been rules about how to conduct oneself, e.g. taking a knight prisoner and ransoming him to his family, but I suspect that it was more an act of self-reiforcing game equilibrium than some high act of honor–IIRC, if you weren’t nobility (with money), then you’d just be killed right there with no fanfare. Noblesse oblige my ass.

Not that I can improve on other Dopers’ insights, but I hope that helps. Anyway, read the books and you will know more than the vast majority of people out there. And if they whet your whistle, go for Sun Tsu & Sun Bin, and dig up a copy of Harry Turney-High’s Primitive Warfare. That book is an eye-opener.

29

Or watch the History Channel. There was an interesting program on the other day discussing combat training from the middle ages up through today. One of the interesting points was that knights did not fight by banging swords and swinging from chandeliers like Errol Flynn. A lot of the training consisted of grappling moves to imobilize the other persons sword while leaving you free to hack away. There was also a neat illustration in an old manual teaching how to kick your opponent in the nuts. Not exactly “gentelmenly”.

30

Hmm. A left hook would have had to pass through the Hougomont, a nasty proposition. If I recall, it was held by the Coldstream Guards, and was a day-long meatgrinder for French troops. I think just a straight ahead combined arms attack would have carried the day, but I really can’t comment on how capable Napoleon’s army would have been to execute that. Ney, certainly, didn’t seem to have much concept of how to carry one out.

31

Sorry to continue the private hijack with Gorsnak - the left hook Soult was recommending was a wide one through Braine-de-Compte (name/spelling?) so more of an envelopement and in Corp strength. I had the chance to explore the battlefield (mountain bikes essential!) and can see why - the whole ridge feature peters out behind Hougomont. That place was indeed a fortress and way out in front of the Alllied line, the only reason it was occupied by Guardsman was that Wellington was himself very sensitive about that flank and saw the possibilities. It certainly turned into a meatgrinder for the French but only as Jerome exceeded his orders and tried to take the place when all he was supposed to do was mask it and exploit Wellington’s well known sensitivity about his supply lines (which ran NW to the coast not N to Brussels).

None of this alters the fact that Napoleon needed a quick and decisive victory before the Prussians reappeared and so had no time for anything more than a frontal assault. When wargames by modern staff collegues the French pretty much always win!

Back to the OP and I would also recommend the book that made Keagan’s name, “The Face of Battle” - and excellent study comparing Agincourt, Waterloo and The Somme. I would not recommend much of the History Channel from what I have seen!

32

Was it them who had the “Barbarians” program recently? I saw a bit of that and they had Roman cavalry riding in modern saddles with stirrups! Man, the Romans wish they had stirrups! Terrible…

33

By coincidence, I am listening to Don’t Know Much About the Civil War on tape during my commute, and the author discussed the action fictionalized in Glory this morning.

The charge was heroic, inspiring, a demonstration of awesome courage, and unsuccessful. The regiment was driven back by a few hundred Confederates and suffered a casualty rate of almost 50%.

And this was an elite unit - the absolute cream of the free blacks available, well equipped, well-led, and under enormous social pressure to perform well and prove that blacks could serve credibly in the military.

The massed infantry charge, against a prepared position against men armed with repeating firearms, is said to expect a casualty rate at least three times higher than the defenders. Sometimes you can’t avoid it, but until the advent of tanks and modern artillery, the advantage is hugely with the defenders.

As they said about the charge of the Light Brigade, “C’est magifique - mai ce ne p’as le guerre”.

It’s magnificent - but it is not war.

Or, more pithily -

Regards,
Shodan