Why did Soldiers Fight in Lines? | Animated History 

Let's hope this video gets as many views as possible, to educate uneducated people on the reality of linear warfare during the early modern period!

Your game is basically like rules of survival, warpath, and those other games. Same concept and it’s boring In my opinion.

I thought the industrial revolution happened before the Napoleonic wars.

@@aaronfield7899 well it began in Britain around the 1750s, but there was only the most minor of advancements before the 1820s and 1830s. so no, but I can understand where the mistake comes from, as the industrial revolution is often said to begin around 1750

This game is garbage. They will spawn a strong AI to attack your base with max everything and they decimate your base and when your units die, they prompt you to buy micro transactions. They did the same with this WW1 game called “Game Of Trenches” and its the same thing.

It's him again!! He has appeared once again!!

But then again, these soldiers have been very strictly disciplined to exactly stand in front of these ranged weapons to the point it didn't matter all that much for them anyway.

Early muskets and other guns weren’t very accurate, so if soldiers weren’t close enough to the enemy, they weren’t get hit. This form of warfare is HUGLY less stresful than standing in shield wall and looking the enemy in the eyes while stabing them with a sword in the face, as for instance Romans did in certain period.

@@ZofTheFather I don't get this whole "muskets were innacurate" all that much, though. Yeah, they _were,_ but when you bunch a lot of gunners in a wall against _another_ line or wall of men, does the inaccuracy even matter at all? Unless vertical accuracy were also something at play, but it wasn't exactly the only type of accuracy of a gun or projectile.

Nice pun

Its like that one guy that asks why shields werent used in the age of muskets and line formations. Like bruh humans have been fighting wars for thousands of years, do you really think we were so different back then that we cant figure out whats practical and what is not. Btw that shield questions is quite a good one, they didnt use shields, put it simply, because theyre too cumbersome, a soldiers was already carrying alot of kit, so you would need extra soldiers to hold the shield which wasnt worth the cost or manpower to do because each man could carry a musket, also shields would need to be produced in huge quantities, and why do that when you can give every man a musket instead which actually shoots and has potential to harm the enemy, basically tacticians at the time deemed a man with a musket is worth more than a man with a shield, and who am i to say theyre wrong since they lived at the time and observed warfare just like we do today

One thing I've disliked about movies or shows set in the past. The amount of knowledge a "caveman" needed to know in order to survive is huge. They observed everything about the world they lived in. I one saw part of a video on people in Siberia. They know exactly what furs from what animal should be used for every layer of warmth - with the added complication of needing to be killed in the right time of year so the coat is right for that specific purpose The knowledge of materials and construction for making a compound bow is intricate.

There’s a big trend today to depict people from history as stupid (especially this era for some reason) but people from history are no smarter than you or I.

@@Quincy_Morris It's not a new trend, it's always been that way.

Ok, they weren't stupid, but they weren't very smart either to dress in bright clothing and not hit the ground when bullets are coming at you!

Battlefield "ethics" (of that time)

Just let people watch a well made video like armchair historian deserves

@@b.jellis I'd assume majority if not all tribes in the amazon has some form of contact with modern civilization, be it just sending a couple tribesmen to work / do stuff in cities or towns.

@@b.jellis we dont know for sure. The Amazon is huge and dense and it is generally accepted that we havent explored every single bit of it (think of it as "around about 95% explored"), so there may still be uncontacted populations. Also, our government agency that handles indigenous matters, FUNAI, doesnt tell us about uncontacted populations as a way of keeping them uncontacted, so that missionaries and other kinds of people who might make them suffer some sort of violence cant get to them, but they have said that they know about indigenous groups who have not had direct contact with us and they suspect they have heard about us and what we have done to other indigenous groups, so these uncontacted populations deliberately avoid us

​@@b.jellisSame thing I ask you, do Native Americans keep in touch with modern society or are they isolated? Answering your question, yes, the indigenous people still live from hunting and gathering, yes, there are still several tribes that are isolated, our institutional bodies do not speak or do not know about the whereabouts of the indigenous people, but this is the choice they made themselves, they preferred to preserve their way of life. life and its culture, which is part of our Brazilian society, since our society and indigenous society, have completely different values, there is a lot of conflict in terms of values, morality and worldview, so that no one gets hurt, each one is on their side , so no one is bothered

Gotta make sure to play this video 20 times on repeat and re-explain it every single time given the cognitive capacity of your average BOSTtillian if you what I mean, lol.

One other thing to consider: Victorian era warfare used black powder, which creates a thick dense smoke. They line infantry firing in unison as a single volley created a giant cloud of smoke that concealed them entirely within only a couple shots. While firearms were introduced alongside pikemen as mentioned in this video, as a means to hit advancing enemy and cause chaos, the commanders quickly realized that the smoke screen was in fact the most powerful advantage of it. It's hard to hit an enemy you can't see...it's even harder to defend against those pikemen and bayonets when they're being thrust into you before you saw them coming. The use of artillery smoke rounds and smoke grenades in WWI to conceal advancing troops on the trench lines in what was known as the "Creeping Barrage" was a tactic that was born out of this.

That's what the video says.

He mentioned that in the video?

@@denvil6489 Yeah I know. It just felt like people really undersell the practicality of formation fighting so I felt like emphasizing it.

@@ryanluong2005 this is the internet after all, bound to be someone asking that even after watching.

I more or less agree in the comment I made above with the exception that line formations were really not any better or worse then just letting one's soldiers "spread out" if they wish to. I'm guessing that in open terrain it might be better to have soldiers cluster together in a line formation if there is ABSOLUTELY no cover if for no other reason then they would be better prepared to defend against (or take part in) an overrun attack but I would have to assume if there was any kind of real cover that it would be better to use it than to have to stay in formation. I imagine that it would be more effective to do things like order one's soldiers to only shoot "when they can see the whites" of their enemies eye and have rotating volleys then maintaining a line formation. If you have a chance read the comment I made and give me your thoughts. :D

I hope they are saying "can you believe they were still fighting those things called wars?".

@@tnwhiskey68 War never changes.

@@tnwhiskey68humans will never stop warring on each other

@@tnwhiskey68 I guarantee you, that will NEVER happen! To be fair, they might actually say that but not because there are no Wars anymore but they might no longer call it that. Look at the Wars today. They are called "Military Operations" or "Anti Terror Ops" or "Peace Keeping Missions".....of course they are Wars in all but name but we like to lie to ourselves a lot! As long as there is life and death, there will be Wars!

Generally, we send *other* humans into battle. We just supply munitions and encouragement.

There was a Spanish tactic in the earlier days that involved the entire unit going prone just as the enemy ranks were starting to fire. Very hard to go “wait never mind” as you are giving the order to fire to thousands of men.

most would probably miss you anyways

I'm pretty sure by that time armies on both sides were fighting in loose skirmish lines rather than close order formations most of the time (not saying it didn't happen but it wasn't the norm at that point)

what did the japanese do? (Rather than volley fire)

@@Godzillagamer1577 Frontal charges, which of course gave the military observers wrong impression how battles should be fought in WW1.

@@BadBomb555 90% of WW1 generals stop their frontal assault right before they overwhelm the enemy. But to be serious, there's not much you can realistically do when you're going up against a line of trenches (that can not be out manuevered in any real fashion) that streches from the alps to the english channel. The very start of WW1 was much more like the Eastern Front and the Franco-Prussian war, and that's how most assumed the war to go in the West. WW1 was unfortunately the product of being right in the middle of the industrial revolution, where you have all of these advancements, but they were too undeveloped to be used effectively (planes, tanks, radar, AA, etc). That is not an excuse for throwing away the lives of these soldiers, there shouldn't have been 12 battles of the isonzo

​@@CausticSpace did they have radar in WW1 I thought that came in WW2?

Hedley: "Repeat after me. I." Hoodlums: "I." Hedley: "Your name here." Hoodlums: "Your name here." Hedley (to himself): "Shmucks!"

It's also important to note that, despite depictions of these battles in movies, it wasn't the mass slaughter people think it was. It wasn't until technology advanced significantly that fighting this way became a bloodbath. And unsurprisingly, they immediately stopped fighting like this. And that's been the story with every single military advancement through history. Fighting is done one way, then someone innovates and battles turn into slaughters, then tactics change to adapt to the new technology.

@@dash4800 Well it was exactly immediately, they did take some rather brutal battles to learn that it wasnt really efficient anymore. Of course any commander that was paying attention to the end of the US Civil war and the several conflicts between then and WW1 should have learned that lesson.

​​@@dash4800When the musket with a round ball was accurate to 100 yards or so, the linear formation made sense. When the shaped Minét or "Minnie" ball arrived, rifled muskets made these tactics suicidal. The American Civil War was unspeakably bloody. Yet 50 years later, they still attacked this way. Why? I was an Army officer and a college history instructor. For a long time, I thought I was the only one who knew. Then I saw a program where an audience member asked an expert what would have happened if one side had had just one machine gun. The expert said that the big change would have been if one side possessed a working set of walkie talkies. I almost fell out of my chair. He knew. Linear tactics persisted at least until the 1930s and in some places beyond. It was tactically futile before 1860. The linear formation was necessary for command and control. Soldiers hate officers for a variety of understandable reasons, but the officers know what the unit is supposed to be doing. They communicate with lesser units to keep the unit on task and on mission, AND to make adjustments to the plan when the situation changes. When thousands of rifles and dozens of cannons fill the air with sound and smoke, how to communicate? Flags. Fife and drum. Bugles. Messengers on foot or on horse. Flares and smoke signals some times. Carrier pigeons on occasion. That's about it. To keep control of an army, soldiers had to be kept together. Even through WW1, where machine guns mowed men down by the thousand (a young Adolf Hitler was a regimental messenger in WW1. An undersized carrier pigeon named Cher Ami carried the message giving the location of the "Lost Battalion" of the US 77th Division so they could be relieved). In WW2, man-portable radios allowed the infantry to communicate over distance and stop bunching up. Nowadays, officers try to keep their soldiers spread out, as they tend to bunch up. Grouping together is still dangerous, but soldiers tend to bunch up for comfort, to chat, etc.

@@dash4800 In early modern warfare, far more soldiers died from disease and infection than directly from enemy action. In addition, the armies of the early modern period were significantly smaller than those of the Industrialized era, when mass production techniques made it economically feasible to produce weapons and kits for huge armies. Before the Industrial Revolution, nearly all firearms were made by hand, and without interchangeable parts. Thus, if the frizzen on your musket broke, you'd have to get a gunsmith to make you a new one--simply unscrewing the frizzen from a dead soldier's musket and sticking it onto yours may not have worked, as there was no guarantee that the parts on his musket would fit yours precisely.

Ukrainians would like to have a chat with you in their glorious offensive.

indeed, that is what modern audiences don’t understand

Did you not watch the video? Forming into lines was very tactically effective.

@@android175 Do you read my comment?

@@fellington2398 you know what, i get it

Well it turns out that they were stupid, tight squads that can move independently and use the ground as cover (trenches or foxholes), was the superior tactic. Hence why they lost. Yeah, it's easy to call them stupid now, back then they couldn't change their entire strategy based on theory.

@@C_CREATURE_ Guh? Must be trolling.

The impact of cavalry alone is if at all understated here. With a muzzleloading musket, you get *ONE* shot at an incoming cavalry charge. Even if you're the ideal of a well-drilled shot and fired at max range, by the time you can reload you'll be about to get very closely aquainted to sabres and hooves. (So the actual best move is to hold your shot until the last moment.) And if you're not in a tight formation with bajonets out and everyone holding their nerve at the point that charge reaches you, you're a dead man. Loose order skirmishers getting hit by cavalry is not a fight, it's a massacre.

Imagine now. You don't even see your death coming from the air. It makes sense why asymmetrical warfare is now so common. If you are fighting a superior enemy then that is your only option.

That was most of human civilized warfare. Imagine being the guys who were looking at thousands of sharp spears and swords, but also MF'ing elephants.

​@@recoil53 The idea that european warfare is 'civilised' is a liberal fantasy. Guns may tale out the up close and personal nature of warfare but its far more barbaric than its ever been considering wars used to mostly happen between two armies loyal to king/lord as opposed to a state fighting another state/state like entity. There has always been raiding and sacking but civilian casualties would still always be less than the armies which is now almost never the case due to strategic bombing and drones

@@perhaps1094 the only liberal here is you fruitcup

​​@@recoil53 The difference is that you at the very least had some sort of individual protection to deal and react to circumstances as needed. Be it your armor, your melee training skills to parry and block with your sword/spear and shield, or the formation of your comrades supporting eachother in the brawl. With muskets, all you had on your side was luck and nothing else. You couldn't dodge a musketball. You couldn't "face tank" it because you had no armor. You couldn't take cover anywhere. You couldn't even move around to make aquisition harder. You essentially had to forgo all the layers of the Survivability Onion and pray...

Yep, modern ignorance leads people to think that the people of the era that birthed the foundations of modern science, math, and medicine, were too stupid to know the drawbacks of skirmishing tactics that had already existed for millennia.

Ditto for grapeshot

​@@eriztonoqarzwoss cannister rounds you mean were used extensively during the Napoleonic wars and didn't stop the need for lines. These rounds require the cannons to be closer to the troops. It was a defensive shot used mostly against charging cavalry.

There were 250 French cannons at Waterloo and these shells exploded. Lines were necessary for an effective battlefield.

That's been the case for centuries. Rather close order formations became obsolete as rifles became increasingly deadly which allowed troops to more easily hold off enemy cavalry.

It's not just most muskets could only be reliably accurate to about 100 yards. Also the soldier firing will have a great deal of his own inaccuracy. With how chaotic battle is. It's not that you need to fire all at once to be more accurate, you need all of your firepower to be in one place to have accuracy my volume. And firing all at once can help time the perfect opportunity.

actually there were smoothbore rifles that existed during the era, such as the Jager Rifles, Kentucky Long Rifle, Ferguson Rifle, and the Baker Rifle, to name a few

that depends on the drill, which can vary from army to army and regiment to regiment. Some would probably have said aim, what im familiar is the order "present"

Many armies did not provide sufficient range time for their soldiers to become proficient with their muskets, and aiming a long, heavy firearm is difficult anyway. It didn't help that volley fire meant that everyone fired on command and not when individual soldiers were actually pointing the muzzle at the enemy ranks.

the americans used aim instead of present due to lack of soldiers

Still soldiers would aim

Routing the French guard?

@@loyalpiper ?

Except thats litterally what you would do

The Prussian army under Frederick the Great was famous for being able to achieve that rate of fire. The standard for professional troops in other European armies of the era was three shots per minute. It was a large part of why the Prussians were so formidable on the battlefield, even when outnumbered.

That's not true. Militias were typically poorly trained compared to regulars and frequently could not hold their lines. The US revolution was won not by militia guerrillas, but by troops drilled to fight conventionally in lines. Line infantry was not weak to artillery. The typical response when facing artillery is through open ranks. The issue was if cavalry is present, the Infantry needs to be formed into squares which then becomes vulnerable to artillery. This was why cavalry was important because you needed them to keep the enemy cavalry at bay so your infantry can advance.

Yes. More to the point, reloading a rifle took a lot longer because the bullet had to be a tight fit inside the bore to grip the rifling properly. And that problem got worse rapidly as it started to get fouled by powder residue. It's only with the Minié bullet that that issue was solved.

I believe this was also said in the video. 7:40

@@android175 I know, I just wanted to summarize.

No, he shouldn't

I think you used the wrong word.... People were NOT educated. They might have more intelligence... Has often been argued, as they had to solve things and get creative themselves. Can't just google something or buy a product to solve a problem. But educated, they were not.

@@timsearle5837 People back in those days were educated and were not dumb in order to do things you need to be educated on how to do them and people back then were

​@@thebasedspectre3048 They needed money not an education. the landed classes fought drank and hunted. if they were lucky they went to a decent school, a lot didnt. most didnt attend university. this is very easily verifiable.

@@timsearle5837 you don't need to go to school to be educated, that is a modern way of thinking. back then if you didn't go to school but had a trade or profession you were educated in that trade and everything else I'd argue that schools haven't made us smarter and Instead limited our way of thinking by the governments rigid way of doing things

They could always have stood up if a cavalry charge came.

Imagine dispersing all those guys out and expecting to control them effectively. You can't. The specialist skirmishers that they had operate in small numbers and were highly trained troops. You underestimate just how hard communication and cohesion is to achieve back then without radio.

@@eriztonoqarzwoss It would be too late by then. Cavalry move faster than infantry can unscramble themselves back into formation.

especially when the loud chaos started, and ear piercing rounds leave you deaf.

Casualty rates back then were actually much lower than modern warfare. Most deaths back then were the result of disease and not combat.