This is probably false to some extent because I get this perception mainly from movies and other media, but did soldiers in old wars line up in formations exposing themselves and take turns to fire? If so, why?
Edit: Ty for all the detailed responses guys! I had one more question- wouldn’t it make more sense for them to spread out or take cover while fighting?
In: 2518
I assume the turn dynamics formed automatically because re-loading took a sh1tload of time.
The formations were probably just left-over habits.
Old muskets took a long time to reload. They were also pretty inaccurate. The methods you’ve seen, three ranks working together, meant that you were unleashing an almost constant stream of fire on the enemy. One reason the Civil War was so horrible was that the muskets and rifles of 1860 were much better than the ones of 1800, but the tactics hadn’t evolved.
Side note: back in the 1960s the USSR went out and trained 60,000 of its troops in Napoleonic War tactics. Horsemen, riflemen, and artillery troops were used in two movies, ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Waterloo.’ I suggest watching the last part of Waterloo for an accurate reproduction of how the fighting looked.
edit =16,000. Still a lot of people.
Formations had critical purposes for medieval warfare: soldiers not in formation behind a wall of shields could be chased down and killed easily by cavalry, or surrounded and just killed.
When guns were introduced, they didn’t have very good accuracy or range, so it was critical for an entire line of people to all fire at once, to have any sort effect. And then reloading took forever, so they took a step back and the next line of people behind them fired while they reloaded. So formations still had a purpose.
They stopped having a purpose and started being detrimental with the introduction of machine guns (automatic fire / automatic reloading) and artillery.
For a certain period of time yes.
Early muskets were often fired in lines where a group of soldier would line up and then fire. They would then fall back to reload as reloading could take a minute or more depending on the exact circumstances and the person in question.
Volley firing in this manner also helped with how inaccurate muskets were.
Of course the two sides are not taking turns firing each other but it might look like that depending on the timing of the two separate lines.
Nobody has picked up the key historical point that once armies closed to musket range firing second was an advantage due to the slow reload times.. Therefore ‘waiting for your opponent to take their turn’ meant inching your forces closer to try and get them to fire first and then… between your advance and their charge… Choosing to fire at the ideal range.
As accuracy and reload times improved.. this gave way to rank volley fire (forgotten the exact term). But first rank fire, second rank fire, third rank fire etc, by which time the first line has reloaded.
Because it worked and was the best tactic for the era
People like to rag on the accuracy of muskets but they’re good out to about 100 meters which is plenty. Even now most combat is <300 meters and that’s with much much faster firing weaponry.
Muskets are slow to reload, a fast group could fire a volley every 15 seconds but if your army isn’t super well trained you’re looking at more like 20 seconds. Putting soldiers in rows with 3 being able to shoot would mean a well trained army could be firing a volley every 5 seconds and keep up the pressure on the enemy. Constant fire means that there’s decent sized groups of people going down every few seconds, this is more effective than one here, two there, another one here, even if the total casualties are the same, the big volleys had a bigger impact on morale. If your line held you would win, if morale faltered and your line broke you lost the battle and took heavy casualties because now your soldiers were out of formation.
The groups also provided protection against the other common unit of the day – cavalry.
A single soldier or even a small group can be easily taken out by a few horsemen with swords, if they miss their first shot they cannot possible reload before the horse reaches them. Small pockets of foot soldiers would get steadily picked off by the faster horsemen and the army would be defeated in detail.
A large group of soldiers with muskets that have bayonets are effectively pikemen and can switch to either a spear wall or a square formation to defend against horses. The squares have multiple rows of soldiers bracing each other with their pointy sticks pointed outwards and their friends in the middle can still be reloading and firing at the enemies nearby
Its not that they had turns, its that you spend a long time reloading and aren’t intentionally trying to synchronize your firing with the opponent.
The formations are for a few reasons. One is command control. Large groups of soldiers would be hard to control without formations in pre modern times. Some of it is for protection from cavalry. If cavalry gets going in among your men, your in for a bad day. Third is for volume of fire. Putting more bullets on the enemy group, trying to break them down quickly.
There’s really four things going on here.
1) Smoothbore muskets fired fairly slowly and weren’t super accurate….nothing like a modern machine gun, for example. One shot, then a while to reload This means the soldier by himself was vulnerable while reloading. The closest thing they had to a machine gun was a big group of soldiers all firing in coordination. A big mass of muskets shot all at once has a bigger psychological and physical impact than a ball flying here and there at random. Conversely, a big threat to your own men was an enemy “human machine gun”…IE, a coordinated formation firing a lot of ammo rapidly. To win that conflict, you have to rout the enemy before they rout you, and the best way to do that is to have your men be more disciplined and more coordinated and have higher morale…which meant keeping them in a formation and drilling them to fire in volleys.
2) Coordinating armies was much more difficult at the time due to lack of any sort of radio. By keeping your soldiers in groups you could more effectively control them during actual battle. Even with this, it was still hard, but you had some chance of being able to order a formation forward to exploit a gap or something like that. This would be near impossible with more open formations.
3) Muskets didn’t really have the rate of fire needed to deter cavalry charges, especially if you didn’t have a lot of musketmen firing in a coordinated way. The best defense against such a charge is to be in a big group, where you can form a wall of spears or bayonets to hedge off the horses. Horses don’t like to run into a wall of spikes at full speed any more than anyone else, and even a dense group of people provides some deterrent. But they will absolutely tear through a loose group of people standing around.
4) Artillery was less developed, especially early on. These days, a close group of soldiers will get absolutely destroyed by artillery firing explosive shells. But especially early on, these sorts of weapons weren’t really available. Sure, you had cannon, and skipping a ball or firing grapeshot through a mass of soldiers would kill a lot of them, but it wasn’t on the same level. And these cannon shot more slowly from lower range and didn’t use explosive shells. That meant the armies could afford to group up in ways they just can’t today.
As others have said, muskets were actually not as inaccurate as commonly believed. A trained soldier would be expected to hit a man at 150m roughly.
The main reason the age of muskets saw rigid formations was because of the slow rate of fire. I’ve seen 4 shots per minute quoted here, but even that is ambitious: most trained, professional companies would expect 3 per minute, but when under fire from the enemy it could easily drop to 2 per minute.
When you have such a low weight of fire to bear upon the enemy, you have to make it count. Melee was still usually the deciding factor in battle, with a determined charge often resulting in the enemy breaking before even engaging. It was important, therefore, to ensure the enemy was thinned as much as possible from one or two really good volleys to encourage them to break when you fix bayonets and charge. Also, one really big volley can have a huge psychological impact on the enemy as a literal wall of lead rips through the company, versus disparate shots picking them off one or two at a time.
Without radios, and with the carnage and noise of battle, companies had to remain in tightly packed formations to retain control and ensure orders could be heard clearly. Each company often had around 88 men supported by maybe a dozen junior officers and sergeants to maintain control and discipline. They would be positioned on all sides to make sure that the lines were straight, gaps in the ranks were closed and so on (as well as discourage men from running away).
If the integrity of the formation was compromised, it usually resulted in routing. If you and some buddies were separated from your company and lost the smokey haze, alone and surrounded by the enemy with weapons that, at best, would give you one shot each before being nothing more than a spear, your only realistic option is to get the hell out of there.
A 1770s musket might be reloaded by a well drilled man in 20 seconds.
Alone, he can fire a shot every 20 seconds. But if has a friend stands behind him he can fire, then kneel and reload as his friend fires. Together, they can fire once every 10 seconds. A third rank makes it about every 7 seconds.
Now imagine he has his 90 men of his infantry company with him. Every second more then 4 muskets go off, starting at one end of the line and working to the other as they fire by platoon. Any force attacking from the front faces somewhat indifferently aimed gunfire, but enough to shatter a frontal attack from even the most determined foes.
Line infantry was used because it was very, very effective and hard to counter without massed artillery.
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