Why is simultaneous firing more effective in warfare?

Factual Questions
21

The eventual, probably most important reason, already mentioned, is to facilitate every rank to fire. Fire at will makes the first line fire as fast as possible and second possibly somewhat, but third probably not at all. The soldiers can’t fight in one row, cavalry or more dense infantry formation would wipe them out easily. This is even more evident with early muskets and their deep formations in counter-march tactic.

But also important is the terrible inaccuracy of smoothbore weapons, which makes it important to shoot as close to enemy as possible. The ideal defensive set-up when enemy is close is that you have one line of troops with bayonets fixed and loaded muskets that stands first. This is pretty much invincible. So your officer will want to know if your gun is empty or not.

The best possible offensive set-up is that the enemy fires from too long a distance, you can run close to them, empty your weapons from close range, they are probably running by now, try to catch as many as possible. (And probably soon run into the standard second line of battalions standing behind. Chaos insues.) When all guns are emptied from close enough, it has a crushing effect, but if the troops fail to engage in a bayonet fight, you might loose very easily. But before you know you can do this risky trick, you have to know if everybody’s gun is loaded.

All this makes the approach a complicated chess manouvre, where you want to shoot as much as possible, load as fast as possible, but never empty all your guns. Your best option is that your troops load under pressure faster and more reliably than the enemy’s, so continued shooting contest from far away (by that time’s standards) is sufficient for you.

This led to very complex trainig maneuvres but I’m not sure we actually know which ones worked in practice. Officers of the time were sometimes more worried about nervous soldiers shooting too early than enemy’s new fancy maneuvres. While the ideal was a clock-like battalion, normal sane men take any oppoturnity to leave the formation. Carrying wounded seems to have been one of the most popular. Stopping loading to simply duck must have been common too.

So it didn’t go as well as in the movies, but still one of the most decisive factors in battle was discipline and control. Part of this is is that the officer should always know how many loaded muskets he has to make decisions about the right distance to enemy.

This is obviously relevant to musket fire only. For arrows I have no other idea than making the use of shield difficult.

22

They (at least the british) also used “platoon fire” where individual platoons would fire together, giving the effect of the fire rippling up and down the line almost constantly. No gaps in firing is demoralising to the enemy, and it also would seem to decrease the chances of enemy soldiers being struck multiple times. Ideally you want each enemy to receive one ball only.

23

This was maybe written too hastily. I don’t mean the concept of carrying wounded, but that 6 guys are carrying one wounded and one or two help with the muskets. This is visible in some paintings and regulation to restrict wounded-carrying was at least discussed.

Also, I don’t mean lying on the ground ducking, but it seems that when the British went for two lines, it was argued that men in the first line tended to stay sitting too long after the second line had fired, because they were smaller targets that way. The musket is quickest loaded standing, so this was bad. This would imply that the second British line was supposed to fire “doubling”, stepping into the first line for the short period of firing? I guess this is what the third line did normally in other armies. Other countries stuck with three lines.

24

Think of a line of troops as a single weapon. It is much easier to control if everybody fires at one time, when the commander says so. That makes it easier to hear what he is saying and eliminates some of the confusion inherent in such a noisy occupation.

Think of the approaching enemy line as a single weapon. Hits here and there are pinpricks that might cause a little confusion but clearly won’t stop a determined advance. You need the shock and awe of a full volley. The goal isn’t to kill every man on the enemy side, it is to make them think they will die if they continue fighting.

If we fought wars with robots the we probably wouldn’t need volley fire.

25

Volley fire was primarily a matter of lead on target, due to limited range, conscript soldiers, poor accuracy and slow reloading of smoothbore muskets.

Soldiers of the era were unlikely to hit anything outside of say… 75 yards, and it takes a short while to reload a musket- like 20 seconds.

The idea behind volley fire is that commanders could delay the firing until the optimal range, have everyone aim at the enemy formation, not at individual soldiers, and by doing so, ensure that the most bullets hit something in the enemy formation. Without volley fire, many soldiers would fire too early, too late or not at all, and due to the limitations of the weapons, wouldn’t have hit what they were firing at. Plus, in Seven Years War days, the usual tactic was for the attacking force to fire a volley then charge with bayonets. Saving the defensive volley until the bayonet charge was much more effective than just having the guys fire at will as the enemy advanced, fired and charged.

This remained true to an extent up through the early 20th century; I had a 1920s era US Infantry manual that detailed how to direct volley fire from the 1903 Springfield rifle on targets greater than 400 yards away, because your average soldier wasn’t going to hit what he was aiming at that far away with iron sights.

By the time of the US Civil War, the bayonet charge was long gone, and the rifles were much more accurate and long ranged than the smoothbore muskets used up until then. It was generally more effective at that point to have one initial volley and then sustained at-will firing until one side or the other broke.

26

Right. A single musket is close to randomly throwing a lead ball once you get to any range beyond point-blank. But a wall of muskets discharged at once is like a claymore mine or a giant shotgun.

27

Hijack – I see this remark everywhere, including serious history books. But whenever I read about war or watch documentaries, I’m shocked at the prevalence of mentions of bayonet combat and hand-to-hand fighting. I watched four programs in one afternoon last week – one on WWI, two on WWII (European and Pacific theaters), and one on the Korean war, and ALL FOUR described specific incidents of bayonet and hand-to-hand combat, rifle butts cracking skulls, and so on. If you look for this sort of thing, you’ll see what I mean; it’s constantly popping up…often in the same work that said “effectively no such combat took place anymore” elsewhere in the text/film/program.

So I can’t figure out what’s happening. Are historians exaggerating the amount of hand-to-hand combat when they recount dramatic incidents? Many of these cases appear to be documented, though. Are they making a gross overgeneralization when insisting that it never happened? Are we talking apples and oranges, maybe – maybe they’re saying the bayonet “charge” was not used, but thousands of individual incidents of bayonets being used is something different?

28

I think **bump **was comparing bayonet charges being long gone in the Civil War to the earlier period when “the usual tactic was for the attacking force to fire a volley then charge with bayonets.”

Hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and such still happened, (Little Round Top at Gettysburg, trench fighting in WWI, etc) it just wasn’t the preferred or standard method.

29

Hand to hand combat certainly occurred, and I’m sure the accounts you read about and saw were accurate. Anyone saying hand to hand and bayonet fighting never occurred after the mid 1800s is flat out wrong. The bayonet did however see a rather dramatic decrease in use between 1800 and 1850 though.

In Napoleonic and U.S. Revolutionary times, the bayonet was extremely important in combat, so much so that it accounted for roughly a third of battlefield casualties. George Washington got his backside kicked up and down the battlefield until he went into Valley Forge. One of the things he did there (besides starve) was get his troops properly trained in bayonet fighting, as well as teaching them some proper military discipline as well. Only when he came out of Valley Forge after all of this training could his troops really go toe to toe with the British.

In the 1840s though things changed rather dramatically. Prior to this, rifles were very rarely used on the battlefield, because in order to be effective, a bullet has to fit a rifle pretty tightly so that it can grip the rifling and spin when it is fired. The black powder at the time quickly fouled the barrel, making it harder and harder to load a tight fitting round. A smooth bore musket with a loose fitting round was much easier to load, and was therefore preferred on the battlefield.

In the 1840s, the newly invented Minie Ball allowed muskets to be rifled. The Minie Ball isn’t a ball at all. It’s actually a conical shaped bullet with an expanding skirt. You make the round smaller than the barrel so that it still fits and can be rammed down even after the barrel is all fouled from powder, and the expanding skirt still grips the rifling and gets a nice spin when the round is fired. The U.S. Civil War was fought mainly with rifled muskets.

The longer range of the rifled musket, combined with changes in tactics, resulted in very dramatic changes on the battlefield. Bayonet casualties went from being roughly a third of all battlefield casualties to being less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties. They didn’t disappear completely, but bayonet fighting went from being a major component of every battle to being a last ditch type of fighting like it is today. After the Civil War, bayonets were redesigned to be more like a utility knife that could be used around camp, with its use as a fighting weapon being secondary, which is how they are still designed today.

A modern bayonet looks very much like a knife:

A bayonet for a musket looks much more like a spear, and isn’t very useful as a knife:

30

Watch the film Zulu. Michael Caine directing the volleys near the end of the final battle scene. That should answer your question. And the film is very very good.

31

The reason these moments of hand to hand combat are noted is that compared to the overall amount of combat is that they are exceedingly rare. Their rarity is why they’re noteworthy.

32

This argument doesn’t make any sense to me. A musket’s accuracy doesn’t change based on how many other muskets are fired at the same time.

Sure, muskets are incredibly inaccurate. But firing 20 of them, 1 per second, isn’t going to be any worse than firing all 20 at once, every 20 seconds.

33

Limiting ammo consumption was a major concern. Resupply during battle was difficult to impossibile. As metallic cartridges and repeaters came on the scene, it remained a concern. Single shot weapons continued to be issued even though repeaters were available and magazine rifles had magazine cut-offs to effectively make them single shots. All this because command was very, very much against soldiers wasting their ammo. Massed firing on command limits ammo expenditure and also directs the fire to where it is, in the commander’s judgement, going to do the most good.

34

Another factor to remember is that shooting an early style firearm was a really complicated process. There was something like twenty steps to follow. Soldiers in the middle of a battle tend to get distracted for obvious reasons. So having everyone follow the same rhythm kept individual soldiers from going too fast and forgetting a step in the shooting process.

35

I’m wondering the same thing. I don’t see how the physical damage done by a volley is greater than that of the individual shots if fired over time.

I can definitely see the effect of a volley on morale, discipline, and firing by rotating lines to the front though. Seeing 5 people near you die at once is definitely scarier than seeing someone die every now and then. I imagine anticipating the next volley is pretty bad for morale too, as you could almost count seconds while seeing the enemy get ready for another one. It would be pretty natural to want to run away or hit the ground.

It’s probably a lot easier for the commander to give orders in between volleys too. If everyone is firing at their own pace, giving orders over the constant noice would be harder than giving orders in between volleys. Having everyone following the same actions as a unit might also help with maintaining overall discipline compared to everyone essentially doing their own thing.

Having someone setting the pace might actually increase the rate of fire of the slower shooters. If they’re pushing themselves to meet the set pace, they might end up shooting faster than if left to their own.

36

Well, there’s a whole military system underlying the comment. I don’t know how much discussion people can stand. :slight_smile:

A major part of the effectiveness of volley fire is direction by officers or noncoms. Soldiers of the Ancien Regime were often impressed, not volunteers, and anyway the expectation of their initiative and marksmanship was low. The goal was to weld them into a unit, almost a machine, that could deliver effective fire, and let an expert direct that machine.

The 20 guys firing sequentially are picking their own targets; but volley fire not only is unleashed at the timing and in the direction indicated by a (trained) officer, the officer quite often physically positioned the elevation of the guns themselves for the range. In many armies, officers of the period used a pikestaff of some sort to knock down the barrels of individuals who aimed high and even, I have read, at times laid the stick along the barrels to line all of them up at the same angle with respect to the vertical. The end result was indeed more like a claymore mine – a directed mass of balls hitting a mass of men at one time – than individual “sniping,” and, unless your grunts were pretty good, the officer’s direction probably improved their ranging a great deal (especially in correcting the apparently universal impulse to fire high as the foe approaches closely).

Another issue, early on, was protection from cavalry. Before the bayonet (and really before the ring bayonet), musketeers were vulnerable to rushes by cavalry. There were two issues that recommnded volley fire. Plinking away one at a time won’t stop a cavalry charge; you either have to fire all at once to break the charge, or you have to put pikemen in front to deter cavalry. These pikemen you’d kill, sooner or later, if you let individuals (especially the allegedly low-skilled, probably nervous types that governments assumed their infantry would consist of) plink away. Better to move the pikemen out of the way, deliver a volley, then reposition the covering pikemen while reloading.

Lastly, as the “time-on-target” comment above alludes to, there’s the moral effect. As historian John Keegan says, inside every army is a crowd close to breaking out. The principal expectation of the musket years was that closely directed fire would cause the opposing formation to dissolve into a crowd and flee. American studies after WWII have established that it’s not loudness of bang nor bigness of blast nor time under fire, but the sheer intensity of many many bangs delivered all at once that most effectively breaks morale and induces an overwhelming urge to seek personal safety. This feeling could be described as “My God, I can’t survive THIS shelling.” (Lengthy bombardments have been found to produce the opposite effect – sort of a contempt for the enemy’s shells). Modern artillery officers aim to produce a whirlwind of violence quite suddenly that will invoke an almost involuntary need to stop performing a task (like an advance) and hug the ground.

But the principle was understood to some degree back in the old days, and volley fire seeks to create a similar effect. Instead of waiting for individuals to notice “Say, there seem to be fewer of us, I think enemy fire is beginning to statistically increase my odds of dying,” you are intending to kill or knock down a significant number of men all at once with a loud noise, leaving the rest thinking something like, “My God, I have to get out of here! Did you see that?” It is intended to overawe and terrify the superstitious, easily impressed creatures the rulers of they day assumed enemy soldiers to be.

Lastly, there’s a minor issue of reducing friendly fire accidents.

37

The answer is it’s about the evolution of combat.

Going back to the begining combat was mostly single people fighting other single people. Maybe while others also fought individually.

Then it was discovered that if you fight as a group you become more effective. People protect your flanks and it is harder for the enemy to get behind you. So soldiers started to fight in groups.

As ranged weapons, like bows and arrows, were invented they were initially deployed to elite units. After all it isn’t easy to use an ancient bow and it is very very inaccurate with very limited range. The problem is that bow and arrows fired straight to the target cause the archer to be exposed.

So the next change occurred where arrows were fired in an upward angle to the enemy. This gave the archer more distance between them and the target, but it reduced the accuracy even more. So they started to fire many arrows in an arch to the enemy so that even if many missed some still died. The more arrows fired the harder it was for the target to dodge, block, and parry away the arrows.

This is why volly’s were invented.

The basic idea is that anytime you have a less accurate weapon you can increase the chance of a hit by firing many of them, but it makes the weapon more effective in battle.

38

Yup, it was fairly common from what I have heard to see in revolutionary war days (US) the occasional ramrod sailing across the the battlefeild because someone neglected to pull it out before firing.

39

That doesn’t really explain why weapons are fired in volley. Sure, individual arrows might be inaccurate but there’s no reason why a bunch of arrows shot simultaneously are more effective than the same bunch of arrows being shot sporadically.

40

Let’s say that 100 men are advancing in line formation against another 100 men in line formation.

In the individual fire scenario, it takes the attacking side 5 minutes to march far enough to stop, fire a volley, then charge with bayonets. Let’s say that the attackers take 40 casualties from individual fire during the five minutes of marching on the way to the stop, during the volley, and during the bayonet charge, and the defenders take 50 casualties from the attacker’s volley, leaving 60 on 50 for the final melee.

Now let’s say that instead of firing individually as the enemy advances, the defenders don’t fire on the advance, but instead fire before the attacker’s volley. The same 40 guys die, but in one blast of smoke, fire and noise, AND the defenders are now thinking that they have to now charge, 40% down from where they were a half-second before.

Which situation holds the most likelihood of the bayonet charge carrying the day?

Sailboat’s explanation is a big part of this also.

One more thing- individual fire is each man picking out a target, while volley fire is more of a formation firing at a formation thing.