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
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.
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