When did soldiers stop fighting in tight formations?

Factual Questions
1

Whether on TV, movies, video games or history books, we’ve all seen that the first few centuries of gun warfare had most soldiers fighting in tight formations like this: http://constitutionclub.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/redcoats.jpg

I know that even during the US revolution and Civil war, there were skirmishers who fought in loose formation but most soldiers were still fighting in tight formation. When did the change take place? What factors most contributed to this change?

When the change took place, how did soldiers start fighting? Was it as loose as today’s units where platoons and even squads can be some distance apart from each other?

2

It was a gradual change. There’s no one reason why soldiers starting fighting apart, so there’s no once point at which they decided to not fight shoulder to shoulder.

Basically there are four major factors behind how the change from tight to loose formations came:

  1. Lethality of firearms. As has been pointed out by many SDMB posters, an 18th-century musket just isn’t the same weapon as a rifle. It’s of no use beyond 75-100 meters and so men are better off sticking together and firing together. More lethal weapons and rates of fire fored men to take cover and be further apart.

  2. The efficacy of artillery. Better and more powerful artillery forces men to entrench and breaks up the ability to move in formation.

  3. The mentality of the soldier. In the early days of infantry combat many armies were made up of men of questionable motivation; a lot of men joined armies basically because they weren’t good at anything else, were forced to, or just wanted regular meals. They were trained in little more than marching and shooting and had to be kept together or else they’d run away. You couldn’t trust them to be apart. That isn’t so much the case with a modern army.

  4. Radios and other forms of long distance communication. If you’ve no way of commanding people who are far away from you, there’s no point in having them far away from you.

3

The end of tight formations came with the machine gun and with improve artillery. If I had to pick just one time I would say 1865 at the end of the American Civil War. At this point weapon technology had improved to where small numbers of well armed men could devastate large numbers of enemies together in the open.

-By 1865 the large magazine, rapid fire, long range accurate rifles were available.

-The range, accuracy, and leathality of canons jumped up exponentially in the few years after 1865.

-And this is when the gatling gun was making it’s appearance. Limited at first but soon to evolve into the machine gun.

By the year 1900 the rifle, machine gun, and canon had all reached such a level of lethality that grouping men in the open was suicidal and maybe criminal in war. Large formations have often been used since then but seldom with success and always with phyrically high losses.

4

Even in the Napoleonic era (and earlier!) the advantages of the loose, open, skirmish line was well-known for some types of operations. I’ve seen references to loose skirmishing in the English Civil War. It’s often a good idea to have a kind of loose cloud of guys out in front, to prevent ambushes, to bring back information, to scout the terrain, etc.

Meanwhile, WWI used a lot of very massive, tightly-packed troops in (futile!) attacks, and the idea was used, now and again (poorly) in WWII. The Japanese “Banzai” attacks were one instance, and the Soviets occasionally used mass infantry attacks to overwhelm German lines of defense.

I’ve also heard it said that Iran practiced “human wave” attacks against Iraq in their wars. Here is one reference, although it’s only Wikipedia.

5

I think the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 was the first main war where both sides used cover instead of massed formations. The breech loading rifle is the cause for this. Barrel loading weapons, like mainly used in the U.S. Civil War is a lengthy multistep process. So it makes sense to have people do it all together to avoid screwing it up. Contrast that with a breech loading rifle. In a breech loading rifle, you just open the breech and put in the cartridge (like a bolt action rifle). This is a one step process and it makes sense to have your soldiers shoot as fast as they can, as they can’t screw up loading.

Probably even more important than that is that you can load a breech rifle while on the ground. Doing that with a barrel loading rifle is difficult to impossible.

Along those lines, breech loading artillery came into the field. This was much, much faster loading than old cannon style artillery. Artillery+ massed formations = lots of dead soldiers. The Prussians used this concentrated and rapid artillery fire to great effect in the Franco-Prussian War.

6

As I’m sure you know, even as late as WWI (1914 - 1918), troops attacked many abreast, in long lines, with little attempt to take cover except by running.

When trying to advance in such a manner, even one or two well placed machine guns could mow down hundreds, even a thousand men in minutes. One wonders, then, why it took until the German offensive of March 1918 to attack in a way that would seem rational to our modern (tactical) sensibilities. Specifically, the assaults in that offensive made use of what were called “storm troopers”, i.e. “small groups of seven to ten soldiers, making tactical decisions dynamically as the situation called for it, and using gullies or other natural cover to slip between British machine gun posts” (quoted section paraphrased from To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild).

7

When conditions merit it,even modern soldiers go in Shoulder-to-Shoulder.

8

[/QUOTE]

Except this isn’t true. It didn’t take until 1918 to figure out how to mount attacks properly. There had been all kinds of successful attacks before 1918; the lines were broken many, many times. As to the “Storm trooper” idea I’m absolutely floored Mr. Hochschild seems to be claiming this was a new idea, inasmuch as the British had been doing this for years; they called it “trench raiding”

The problem is that the attacks could never be followed up. When the Canadians broke through at Vimy Ridge in 1917, the German line was defeated completely… at that was it. There simply wasn’t any way to further exploit the attack because they didn’t have any sort of mechanized transport and they didn’t have radios to coordinate infantry formations or call upon artillery. So the Allies won their little salient, but the Germans simply reformed a line before anything could be done with it.

9

Indeed, and even back to antiquity; the use of slingers as skirmishers dates back to Homer and earlier.

Just to note, banzai charges were never expected to succeed. They were literal suicide charges to die in battle rather than surrender. The Japanese referred to them as Gyokusai (“shattered jewel”) attacks.

10

I’d say WWI-the British generals (Battle of the Somme) finally realized that marching units of men into german machine guns was suicidal.
Ironically, had any of these military experts bothered to study the Russo-Japanese War (1905), they might have learned faster-Japanese units repeatedly charged the Russian lines (the Russian soldiers were equipped with Maxim guns). The Japanese took horrific casualties(up to 80%) without taking an inch of ground.

11

The easier it is to kill many people at once, the less you want to bunch up your men.

Back in the day with weapons being inaccurate, you wanted to compress troops to do the most damage to the enemy as you could (funny how nobody thought the opposite - spread way out and you might be near impossible to hit)

I would have invested all my time an energy in fighting a defensive war, behind cover, and used as much arty as I could muster.

Or better yet, how about not fighting a war in the first place.

12

People did think of this, and it was used in skirmishing tactics. But while a spread-out unit is less vulnerable to musket and artillery fire, they are far more vulnerable to cavalry or infantry bayonet charges. And there’s an oft-quoted statistic stating that a third of casualties in the Napoleonic wars were caused by the bayonet.

MADNESS! :eek: Who could conceive of such a thing!

13

But if you spread out your soldiers in a skirmish line, they’ll be cut to pieces by enemy cavalry. A massed troop of cavalry can charge in and stomp your skirmishers with impunity. Best case is that they all get killed. Worse case is they try to run away. And then your other troops see their comrades running away, and figure they better run away too. And then you have a rout, which is when your soldiers really get massacred.

Also, how do you exercise command and control over your dispersed soldiers? You have to give orders in some way, there aren’t any radios. So bugles or drums or signal rockets or flags, but those signals don’t carry far over a noisy battlefield covered in smoke. You have to send runners–literal runners–to your officers, and they have to relay the orders to their sergeants and the sergeants have to scream the orders to the men in front of them. Men who are dispersed behind cover are very reluctant to leave that cover. So they’re safe, but they aren’t doing much good fighting the enemy.

The point is, a dispersed line can easily be broken by a concentrated force, because the concentrated force has local superiority. If you’ve got 1000 in a dispersed line, and a mass of 1000 guys attacks the line, most of your guys will be unable to shoot at the massed soldiers.

You’re used to the idea that if somebody sees a glimpse of an enemy soldier, they aim their weapon at them, fire, and the enemy soldier drops dead. But old fashioned firearms just didn’t work that way. They didn’t have anything close to the range or accuracy or rate of fire of modern firearms. If you have muskets, the enemy can literally line up outside of musket range, fix bayonets, and charge you. And you have time for one, maybe two, maaaaybe three aimed shots before they reach your lines. If you ever watch movies where the sergeants are screaming at the troops to hold their fire, that’s the reason. Fire too quickly and you’ll waste your shot at troops that are out of range. Fire a bit later and they’re in range, but you’ll probably miss anyway. Fire at point blank range, and you’re pretty sure to hit someone. But you can’t just start firing, because you have to stand up to reload a muzzle-loader, and it’s a complicated process.

So consider that for 400 years armies fought in very much the same way. If winning a battle was as simple as “disperse your troops and get behind cover” then why wasn’t this a standard war-winning tactic during this period. People back then weren’t stupider than people today, and they didn’t like being shot at or killed. Yes, generals are conservative, but when the old generals armies lose and they get massacred, new generals take the place of the old generals.

14

[QUOTE=Lemur866;14717860 People back then weren’t stupider than people today, and they didn’t like being shot at or killed. Yes, generals are conservative, but when the old generals armies lose and they get massacred, new generals take the place of the old generals.[/QUOTE]

More accuratly the Colonels becomes the generals and the Captains the Colonels. The Colonels know first hand that tactics don’t work.