Gripen
Published on 3 Dec 2015One of the bloodiest battles of the Thirty Years War. Sweden vs. the Holy Roman Empire. A mass grave has been found, with the victims from the battle. Are they Swedish/Finnish soldiers or German mercenaries?
(This Swedish documentary has English subtitles).
From the comments:
Blah b
2 years ago
This documentary is often painful to watch, the way inexperienced modern people with no sense of empathy project their values onto those times. They weren’t “defenseless men standing still”. Armies had learned the hard way that massed musket fire won battles. If everybody is looking for cover and looking out for themselves, you can never operate such rigid units.So the individual soldier was harshly drilled to indeed stand still even with cannonballs tearing through his unit, or another unit standing 30-80 meters away. Because if individuals acted as individuals, the battle would be lost and the army would be destroyed.
But when that machine operated, it would win battles. The system invented by Maurice of the Netherlands ensured that if you were attacking a group of musketeers, every 20-25 seconds, they could deliver a crushing volley that can kill or injure 10-25% of a another unit, that means they only needed 2-3 salvos to achieve a local victory. Untrained units would literally never touch a musketeer, as his unit would’ve routed the attackers before they got within touching range.
Also there were no standing armies, there was no national identity as such. Mercenaries were totally acceptable. Mercenaries could become very loyal and reliable if paid on time [and] consistently, and would easily crush national armies that usually lacked the routine of professional soldiers. Loyalty and your identity was constructed differently. It would’ve been perfectly normal for me to utterly hate and maybe kill my neighbours if they were of a different religion. Otherwise, a Swedish protestant from far away was an ally with the right ideas. I wouldn’t have been able to understand him and everything would be alien about him, but I’d consider him a friend, and Catholics from the next village where I’d lived all my life would be enemies.
Unless the king comes around and says the Catholics are friends. Because the king is appointed by God who runs the world on a day to day [basis], and you obey without question. If the king says it’s so, that means God himself agrees and says it’s so, and you don’t question God. Loyalty until death is about the least you owed your king in those days.
People who can’t understand how such things worked historically, really should not be making documentaries…
