Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Military warfare history? Bows vs muskets

There was no "honor" or "code" that changed their tactics, and their "appropriateness" of battle against other Christian white men was frankly just as brutal as they could make it. Give up the delusions about them finding some sort of "moral" reason to not use certain tactics, because there's no truth in that.

What all the others have said about the logistics and training required is spot on. Those were the reasons behind the changes in equipment from longbows to muskets.

In both archery and sword battles, as many died later from infections as on the field.

I think it was Agincourt where Henry executed French, Christian, POW's when the English felt their position might be over run. Their decisions were driven by practicality, not some flowery "code".

I believe it was in the 18th century when an English high ranking officer wrote a book outlining the military code of conduct for combat. The English followed it closely when possible. It contained stuff like how to honorable conduct a seige, how to correctly surrender, and about every other aspect of war at the time.
I've seen a number of movies of the period, like 'The Patriot' for example, where the code is briefly mentioned. In modern warfare, the whole thing is as ludicrous as masses of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder and shooting volleys at each other.

There were some "gentleman's" almost "agreements" during the age of reason, all of which had their practical logic behind then. As an example, during siege warfare, if the garrison surrendered at the moment the wall was breached, they and the city would be spared. If however they fought on after the walls were breached the defenders would be put to the sword and the city looted.

Since generally, the attacking forces were superior in size, one the walls were breached a cities fall was considered inevitable, this encouraged surrender at the point of inevitable loss to minimize damage to the attacking army. If you made them fight for it, they were allow to compensate themselves for the additional risk and loss by looting your town.

On the field this was taken to an extreme, where an outmaneuvered army was allowed to retire from the field. Again, not because it was "honorable", but because armies were expensive and nobody wanted to risk theirs. One thing that set Napoleon apart was his willingness to take calculated risks by joining battle to crush his opponents forces, removing them from the board of play. It was another modern innovation that allowed him to change his thinking, called Conscription.

And conscription was possible because he was at the head of the first modern totalitarian state. Napoleon famously quipped about spending 30.000 lives a month.

Lobbing arrows- ungentlemanly. Lobbing cannonballs...what was the question?

Someone beat me to the bayonet punch. I believe it was a Seminole that said something like his men could beat the whites but not their bayonets.

And wasn't it Santa Anna who asked " what are the lives of soldiers more than of so many chickens?"

The value of human lives used to be a lot cheaper than what a selfie taking millenial thinks his is worth today- that's for sure!

Crossbowmen can also be trained in a weekend.

But they are short ranged and more or less useless unless of an extremely high pull weight. And that, of course, makes them overly complex, heavy, slow to load, and very fatiguing.

I would think the cross bow rate of fire would be about the same as muskets. And not as fatiguing to shoot as the longbow.

The longbow and the shorter recurved horsebow were far superior weapons, but they took a lifetime to master.
A Mongol horse archer could have his next arrow on the way before the first one hit. And from the back of a horse running as hard as he could run. And do it again the next morning twenty miles away.

Exactly. Excellent for defense of fixed positions with internal resources (like castles), but terrible for anything else.

Ditto the Sioux and Lakota warriors, but when a mere boy could be trained to shoot a musket in a day, or a rifle in a weekend, why bother with the bow? A horse bow man was a force unlike any other, just too late and against firearms overpowered by numbers.

Fifty years after the Revolution the Comanche were the Lords of the Plains in Texas, Kansas and Colorado. They liked the 16 foot long lance but their main weapon was the bow and arrow.
The Spanish and Mexicans got beaten time and again by the fierce mounted warriors. The reason there exists a city called Nuevo Laredo, on the south side of the Rio Grande, is because Comanche warriors burned Laredo to the ground and the Spanish figured if they rebuilt south of the river the water might provide some security.

The Spanish were using muskets, in fact the Mexicans were armed with Brown Bess muskets.
When the Anglos came in in 1830 and 1840 they had all they could stand from the Comanche archers.
It was only when the Texans began arming themselves with Colt six shooters, around 1840-1850 that they began to defeat the Comanches. Even then, it took until about 1875 to wipe out the Comanche.

A crossbow of a weight required to be useful against armor require a windlass and/or a crannican to load. They had a maximum rate of fire of two shots per minute.

I would think too that the faster speed and flatter trajectory of a lead ball vs that of an arrow probably had at least some influence in the switch to firearms over bows, especially for war. Mere fractions of a second of difference in the time it takes for a projectile to reach the target can make a big difference in where the target was and where it is when the projectile arrives.

Penetration of armour has been mentioned too, and then there's the psychological effect of the noise, flash and smoke, especially in the form of volleys from a disciplined enemy in line. Also the noise as the big lead balls hit home (something contemporaneous accounts from the musket period mentioned, often describing it as like an axe into soft wood), and the way they'd make terrible wounds, even taking heads and limbs off, and often punch through more than one rank too. All of these likely played a part.

I wouldn't like to walk into a hail of arrows, but I suspect it would have been a great deal worse to have to walk steadfastly into volleys of musket balls and cannon.

Three historical examples of bow versus musket


1) The Memoirs Of Lieut.-General Baron De Marbot (Talking about his service in the Napoleonic Wars)

"During our stay at Pilnitz, the enemy was receiving strong reinforcements, notably 60,000 Russians under Benningsen. These came from beyond Moscow, and included many Tartars and Bashkirs, armed only with bows and arrows. I have never understood with what object the Russian Government brought up from so great a distance these masses of irregular cavalry, who could be of no use against troops armed in the modern fashion, and only made food more scarce for the regular troops. Our soldiers were in no way impressed by the sight of these half-savage Asiatics, whom, from their bows and arrows, they nicknamed 'the Cupids'. The new-comers, however, who had never seen Frenchmen, encouraged by officers nearly as ignorant as themselves, expected to see us fly at their approach. The very day after their arrival they assailed our troops in countless bands, but were received with musketry fire, and left many of their number dead on the ground. Their losses seemed only to excite them further ; and as any ground suited them they began wheeling round us like swarms of wasps, and it was hard to catch them. When our troopers did get at them, the execution was considerable. Still, as the Russians took advantage of the disorder into which they threw our line to support them by detachments of hussars, the Emperor ordered the generals to keep a redoubled watch and to visit the outposts frequently."


2) Here's what drove the Mohawks to side with first the Dutch and then the English:

Battle of Sorel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sorel

"Champlain singlehandedly killed three Iroquois chiefs with an arquebus despite the war chiefs having worn 'arrowproof body armor made of plaited sticks'.


3. The Sioux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe

"Through their friendship with the French traders (coureurs des bois and voyageurs), the Ojibwe gained guns, began to use European goods, and began to dominate their traditional enemies, the Lakota and Fox to their west and south. They drove the Sioux from the Upper Mississippi region to the area of the present-day Dakotas, and forced the Fox down from northern Wisconsin. The latter allied with the Sauk for protection."

"In 1745, they adopted guns from the British to defeat the Dakota in the Lake Superior area, pushing them to the south and west."

No way the bows of indians compared with that of the steppe peoples.