Longbows in the Penisular campaign

[Jason]

And frankly this buiness about training archers is forgetting that there were no professional armies back when the longbow was used. Villages were required to have their men practice but that was spotty.

There is no reason a fit man cannot learn to use a longbow well in a few months of hard training. You just need a good system and training regimen.

Sorry but yes there is. As perhaps one of the few people on this board who owns an accurate reproduction of a longbow and has trained to use it, believe me, to use it to anything like its full potential requires more than a few months training. The need to build up the muscle strength takes quite some time and is best done when still young (one of the reasons I only have a range about half of what was normal for the time). Also bear in kind that a longbow, except in the hands of an expert shot, is not a precission weapon. you fire it in large numbers at a large body of advancing men and hope that sheer numbers mean they will hit home. Not so far different to muskets of the tiem to be honest.

The expert shots were the longbow version of the baker rifle-armed soldier, a few of them might be of use.

 

[Thande]

Didn't Wellington once face archers while he was fighting the Marathas in India? I can't remember if it was longbows or crossbows, but it might be relevant for this thread.

I don't think the Russian Bashkirs someone mentioned are comparable because they're horse archers.

 

[MrP]

Didn't Wellington once face archers while he was fighting the Marathas in India? I can't remember if it was longbows or crossbows, but it might be relevant for this thread.

I don't think the Russian Bashkirs someone mentioned are comparable because they're horse archers.

The image of British aristocrats with shortbows on horseback is just too compelling now! Dies the Fire in the Napoleonic Wars, anyone?

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Frankly I think it was pretty stupid for the longbow to be dropped as early as it was. Remember how well the american indians did with arrows for so long- and their bows were nowhere near as powerfull.

Umm... How well is that? These are the same American Indians that essentially dropped the use of their bows as soon as muskets became available, no?

 

[Thande]

Umm... How well is that? These are the same American Indians that essentially dropped the use of their bows as soon as muskets became available, no?

"The American Indians" is a bit of a vague term, I know the eastern "more civilised" (in European eyes) peoples like the Cherokee and the Iroquois tended to adopt muskets (and rifles), while he's probably thinking of plainsmen like the Sioux who traditionally could indeed get off several arrows while one was reloading a musket or pistol - hence the invention of the Colt revolver.

 

[Kidblast]

"The American Indians" is a bit of a vague term, I know the eastern "more civilised" (in European eyes) peoples like the Cherokee and the Iroquois tended to adopt muskets (and rifles), while he's probably thinking of plainsmen like the Sioux who traditionally could indeed get off several arrows while one was reloading a musket or pistol - hence the invention of the Colt revolver.

As someone who owns a 1851 Colt Navy revolver replica, I can say that even those are a pain to load unless they shoot cartridges.

 

[Jasen777]

As someone who owns a 1851 Colt Navy revolver replica, I can say that even those are a pain to load unless they shoot cartridges.

But they made the Texas Rangers more than a match for the Comanches. Which makes you wonder why the Comanches didn't stay out of accurate pistol range...

 

[Thande]

As someone who owns a 1851 Colt Navy revolver replica, I can say that even those are a pain to load unless they shoot cartridges.

To load, yes, but you could fire off six shots without reloading...

 

[67th Tigers]

To load, yes, but you could fire off six shots without reloading...

Five shots. Without safety catches, the best safety was simply to leave to chamber under the hammer empty.

Collating responses:

Smoothbore muskets aren't that inaccurate (I use accuracy in the vernacular, accuracy is down to the shooter, precision is a property of the weapon). With a clean musket and a patched ball getting hits on a man sized targets at 2-300 yards is reasonable. Even with a reasonable windage (i.e. a normal ball), the MOA is such that a well aimed shot at the centre of the chest will strike the man at over 100 yards.

Like all weapons, human factors decreased the accuracy of the musket. Picard and Muller's tests both agree that a reasonable musketeer will hit at several hundred yards. Muller's tests are particularly useful as he compared recruits with veterans:

At 100 yards, recruits hit a man-sized target 40% of the time, veterans 53%.
At 200 yards, 18% and 30%
At 300 yards, 15% and 23%

Hughes has concluded that well trained infantry in a musket firefight could hit with between 3 and 5% of rounds, contrasted with 0.1% reported by some pretty poor infantry of the era. Meanwhile, the British at the Alma (armed with Minie rifles, but without any rifle training) hit with 7% of shots.

If we were to go forward to the ACW when untrained rifle armed infantry are generally hitting with less than 0.5% of their shots (often that 0.1% typical of untrained Napoleonic infantry).

It's the training that matters, not the hardware.

 

[Flocculencio]

There is no reason a fit man cannot learn to use a longbow well in a few months of hard training. You just need a good system and training regimen.

As Jason said, yes there are a number of reasons. If you could train longbowmen in a few months everyone would have done it. This is why only the English were able to field longbowmen in large numbers- it was a cultural weapon, so to speak, and there were large reserves of yeomen who had trained with the longbow all their lives.

 

[ljofa]

What about Longbows being used in the Trenches of WW1? Fairly inaccurate but they could be used at strategic spots to shower arrows on enemy troops. Perhaps Incendiaries could be fixed to them to cause some real havoc.

 

[Fellatio Nelson]

What about Longbows being used in the Trenches of WW1? Fairly inaccurate but they could be used at strategic spots to shower arrows on enemy troops. Perhaps Incendiaries could be fixed to them to cause some real havoc.

That job was taken by (rifle) grenades and mortars.

They used to drop steel arrows from aircraft (think called Fleches, after the French).

 

[burmafrd]

My position is that while it does seem it will take more then a few months, say it takes a year to make them reasonably competent. You still have a range advantage and a HUGE advantage in rate of fire.
Even taking out the range advantage you still have the rate of fire.

I have fired smoothbore muskets and the claim that you can reliably hit anything beyond 100 yds is a joke.
Add a battle where they are working in the midst of all that gunsmoke and other distractions and even for veterans
you probably only get a 25% hit rate- and how many of them are enough to put the person down or out of the battle?
I imagine those hits mentioned includes grazes and slight wounds, not just leg arm or torso hits.

There was a reenactment of Agincourt- I think it was in the 60's or 70's, and they were able to get together about 200-300 longbowmen for it; from what I remember they said the grouping of the arrows at 100 meters and then 200 meters was much tighter then any muskets could ever match. And once again you have such a massive rate of fire edge. And you do not have all the trouble of reloading a musket and the complicated process that is, and you also do not have all the gunsmoke as a complicating factor.

 

[Barry Bull]

Longbowmen are all well and good, gentleman, but in the end I believe in only three things. Wellington, the Baker Rifle and the ability of the English chav to stand under fire

How can you ignore the glourious English cavalry?

Still, one important to note is that both the Allies and the French made use of riflemen and light infantry equipped with longer range rifles. This can be a serious counter against longbowmen.

 

[Flocculencio]

There was a reenactment of Agincourt- I think it was in the 60's or 70's, and they were able to get together about 200-300 longbowmen for it; from what I remember they said the grouping of the arrows at 100 meters and then 200 meters was much tighter then any muskets could ever match. And once again you have such a massive rate of fire edge. And you do not have all the trouble of reloading a musket and the complicated process that is, and you also do not have all the gunsmoke as a complicating factor.

200-300 longbowmen...who had probably been practicing archery for ages.

Now if I wanted to re-enact Waterloo I'm pretty sure I could find a helluva lot more people who could be trained to use a musket on short notice.

The end of the matter is that by the 18th C we've reached the age of mass armies. This isn't a question of shooting the French knights to pieces and watching the rest run away. This is a question of being able to break men en masse. The longbowmen you train up will be able to do this. But every one you lose is a waste of a lot more resources than the musketeers they kill. This means that your enemy can just keep fielding mass armies while your pool of longbowmen gets whittled down. In the end you're going to get stretched and swamped.

Secondly, musketeers are better able to protect themselves against cavalry. At least a musket battalion can form square and basically laugh off enemy horse. Longbowmen are going to need pikes (or musketeers, ironically) to protect them against horse. Again, one screw up by a guarding unit and you've had a battalion of expensive troops chewed up.

If training and fielding longbowmen was as relatively simple as you say it was, why didn't other European armies use sizeable longbow contingents like the English. One assumes the Swiss pike squares would have found longbow contingents useful- why didn't they use them? Or the French- after all they'd seen how effective the longbows were first-hand, why didn't they start training their own? The answer is that you need that initial pool of yeomanry to draw from- due to historical and cultural reasons this was present in England and Wales in the 13th C.

How can you ignore the glourious English cavalry?

Still, one important to note is that both the Allies and the French made use of riflemen and light infantry equipped with longer range rifles. This can be a serious counter against longbowmen.

Well, if you disregard the actual British units, Britain had a good force in the KGL cavalry, I suppose, but as far as I'm concerned by this point, cavalry were pretty much useless as a major arm of battle- everyone was just in denial about it. The only thing they were of use for was scouting, raiding and supporting infantry and artillery. The bloody head-on charges everyone was so obsessed with were useless.

Good point re. skirmishers. If I send my skirmishers hunting longbowmen, I can still replace them faster than you can archers.

 

[burmafrd]

I still find it very hard to believe that you could not recreate the longbowmen within at most a few years. Maybe not as good as the orginals, but with better bows and arrows the edge to the old guard would not be as great. And as regards fighting cavalrymen, longbowmen can just shoot the horses- a much bigger target. And there is no reason you could not have a Pike regiment with each longbow regiment- not like they would take all that much time to train. As regards why no one else did it- that could be asked about many time periods and situations.

 

[Fellatio Nelson]

Longbowmen were rubbish at defending themselves, dependent upon others. Same as pikemen would be very limited in attacking musket-armed troops.
Whereas muskets with bayonets are strong defensively and offensively.

It'd limit what a commander could do, in much the same way as ECW era armies were limited through division between poor offensive pikemen and poor defensive musketeers, which wasn't solved fully until the arrival of the socket bayonet.

So if you were to retain archers, how many would you want in your army? Unless you had a reasonably large number, except for irregular warfare I can't see much point.

Moreover, no one seems to have mentioned artillery, which could far outrange arrows.

 

[burmafrd]

It would certainly take more complicated tactics then were used in the 13th through 15 th centuries. The Longbowmen and Pikemen would have to train to work together, and react more quickly to situations. But I see no reason why that could not be done. Now the artillery situation is different; but up untill the late 18th century field artillery was not that great a threat due to the size of guns and the still relative primitive nature of field artillery vs siege artillery. There is no reason that longbowmen cannot maneuver as quickly as a musket equipped regiment.

 

[Fellatio Nelson]

It would certainly take more complicated tactics then were used in the 13th through 15 th centuries. The Longbowmen and Pikemen would have to train to work together, and react more quickly to situations. But I see no reason why that could not be done. Now the artillery situation is different; but up untill the late 18th century field artillery was not that great a threat due to the size of guns and the still relative primitive nature of field artillery vs siege artillery. There is no reason that longbowmen cannot maneuver as quickly as a musket equipped regiment.

How, on a battlefield full of gunpowder smoke, where orders are relayed by messanger and very often the commander cannot see the bulk of his army once the firing starts, are these more complicated orders to be given?

How do the pikemen and archers retain their cohesion? How are they organised? One pikeman per archer, which reduces your firepower by half.

They'd be terribly difficult to move en masse, particularly against a flanking manoeuvre by cavalry: pikes are not the easiest of things to carry.

The enemy would just get in very close, as per normal, and seek close quarter battle, then any longbow advantage would be lost: indeed, the precious and ill-armed longbowmen would be easy prey and the pikemen wouldn't be able to shoot back to deliver a volley before charging (the common British tactic).

While they'd have some use defensively, albeit limiting a commander's options apropos getting to grips with the enemy, how would they fare undertaking an attack or counter-attack? Less well and less versatile than those with muskets and bayonets.

Which is why, coupled with the relative ease of training someone to stand in line and fire 2-3 shots a minute in the general direction of the enemy, was so much easier.

Only use I could see for archers after c.17thC. is having them used as irregular horsemen, as in Spain, or perhaps having them on ramparts to shoot at attackers trying to assault fortifications.

 

[Flocculencio]

It would certainly take more complicated tactics then were used in the 13th through 15 th centuries. The Longbowmen and Pikemen would have to train to work together, and react more quickly to situations.

Which, again adds even more training time to your troops since the pikemen now have to be drilled in very precise maneuvers to cover the longbowmen. As Fell points out, the advantage of musketmen is that they may not be as great at ranged fire as longbowmen, nor as impenetrable on defence as a line of pikes but they can do both jobs well enough without the problems of crosstraining differently armed people to work in precision with each other.

Basically, your idea just adds more potential for people to screw up- usually it's the simplest ideas which work the best. Quality certainly matters but simplicity matters more. If the pikes are caught wrong-footed and the French lancers come howling out of the smoke on the other flank your mixed formation is buggered where a musket battalion would have a fighting chance.