Now just because this subsistence system is built around the horse doesn’t mean it is entirely made up by horses. Even once domesticated, horses aren’t very efficient animals to raise for food. They take too long to gestate (almost a year) and too long to come to maturity (technically a horse can breed at 18 months, but savvy breeders generally avoid breeding horses under three years – and the Mongols were savvy horse breeders). The next most important animal, by far is the sheep. Sheep are one of the oldest domesticated animals (c. 10,000 BC!) and sheep-herding was practiced on the steppe even before the domestication of the horse. Steppe nomads will herd other animals – goats, yaks, cattle – but the core of the subsistence system is focused on these two animals: horses and sheep. Sheep provide all sorts of useful advantages. Like horses, they survive entirely off of the only resource the steppe has in abundance: grass. Sheep gestate for just five months and reach sexual maturity in just six months, which means a small herd of sheep can turn into a large herd of sheep fairly fast (important if you are intending to eat some of them!). Sheep produce meat, wool and (in the case of females) milk, the latter of which can be preserved by being made into cheese or yogurt (but not qumis, as it will curdle, unlike mare’s milk). They also provide lots of dung, which is useful as a heating fuel in the treeless steppe. Essentially, sheep provide a complete survival package for the herder and conveniently, made be herded on foot with low manpower demands.
Now it is worth noting right now that Steppe Nomads have, in essence, two conjoined subsistence systems: there is one system for when they are with their herds and another for purely military movements. Not only the sheep, but also the carts (which are used to move the yurt – the Mongols would call it a ger – the portable structure they live in) can’t move nearly as fast as a Steppe warrior on horseback can. So for swift operational movements – raids, campaigns and so on – the warriors would range out from their camps (and I mean range – often we’re talking about hundreds of miles) to strike a target, leaving the non-warriors (which is to say, women, children and the elderly) back at the camp handling the sheep. For strategic movements, as I understand it, the camps and sheep herds might function as a sort of mobile logistics base that the warriors could operate from. We’ll talk about that in just a moment.
So what is the nomadic diet like? Surely it’s all raw horse-meat straight off of the bone, right? Obviously, no. The biggest part of the diet is dairy products. Mare’s and sheep’s milk could be drunk as milk; mare’s milk (but not sheep’s milk) could also be fermented into what the Mongolians call airag but is more commonly known as qumis after its Turkish name (note that while I am mostly using the Mongols as my source model for this, Turkic Steppe nomads are functioning in pretty much all of the same ways, often merely with different words for what are substantially the same things). But it could also be made into cheese and yogurt [update: Wayne Lee (@MilHist_Lee) notes that mare’s milk cannot be made into yogurt, so the yogurt here would be made from sheep’s milk – further stressing the importance of sheep!] which kept better, or even dried into a powdered form called qurut which could then be remixed with water and boiled to be drunk when it was needed […] The availability of fresh dairy products was seasonal in much of the steppe; winter snows would make the grass scarce and reduce the food intake of the animals, which in turn reduced their milk production. Thus the value of creating preserved, longer-lasting products.
Of course they did also eat meat, particularly in winter when the dairy products became scarce. Mutton (sheep meat) is by far largest contributor here, but if a horse or oxen or any other animal died or was too old or weak for use, it would be butchered (my understanding is that these days, there is a lot more cattle in Mongolia, but the sources strongly indicate that mutton was the standard Mongolian meat of the pre-modern period). Fresh meat was generally made into soup called shulen (often with millet that might be obtained by trade or raiding with sedentary peoples or even grown on some parts of the steppe) not eaten raw off of the bone. One of our sources, William of Rubruck, observed how a single sheep might feed 50-100 men in the form of mutton soup. Excess meat was dried or made into sausages. On the move, meat could be placed between the rider’s saddle and the horse’s back – the frequent compression of riding, combined with the salinity of the horse’s sweat would produce a dried, salted jerky that would keep for a very long time.
(This “saddle jerky” seems to gross out my students every time we discuss the Steppe logistics system, which amuses me greatly.)
Now, to be clear, Steppe peoples absolutely would eat horse meat, make certain things out of horsehair, and tan horse hides. But horses were also valuable, militarily useful and slow to breed. For reasons we’ll get into a moment, each adult male, if he wanted to be of any use, needed several (at least five). Steppe nomads who found themselves without horses (and other herds, but the horses are crucial for defending the non-horse herds) was likely to get pushed into the marginal forest land to the north of the steppe. While the way of life for the “forest people” had its benefits, it is hard not to notice that forest dwellers who, through military success, gained horses and herds struck out as steppe nomads, while steppe nomads who lost their horses became forest dwellers by last resort (Ratchnevsky, op. cit., 5-7). Evidently, being stuck as one of the “forest people” was less than ideal. In short, horses were valuable, they were the necessary gateway into steppe life and also a scarce resource not to be squandered. All of which is to say, while the Mongols and other Steppe peoples ate horse, they weren’t raising horses for the slaughter, but mostly eating horses that were too old, or were superfluous stallions, or had become injured or lame. It is fairly clear that there were never quite enough good horses to go around.
Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part II: Subsistence on the Hoof”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-12-11.
October 14, 2023
QotD: Horses and sheep on the Eurasian Steppe
October 11, 2023
QotD: A rational army would run away …
It is a thousand years ago somewhere in Europe; you are one of a line of ten thousand men with spears. Coming at you are another ten thousand men with spears, on horseback. You do a very fast cost-benefit calculation.
If all of us plant our spears and hold them steady, with luck we can break their charge; some of us will die but most of us will live. If we run, horses run faster than we do. I should stand.
Oops.
I made a mistake; I said “we”. I don’t control the other men. If everybody else stands and I run, I will not be the one of the ones who gets killed; with 10,000 men in the line, whether I run has very little effect on whether we stop their charge. If everybody else runs I had better run too, since otherwise I’m dead.
Everybody makes the same calculation. We all run, most of us die.
Welcome to the dark side of rationality.
This is one example of what economists call market failure — a situation where individual rationality does not lead to group rationality. Each person correctly calculates how it is in his interest to act and everyone is worse off as a result.
David D. Friedman, “Making Economics Fun: Part I”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2023-04-02.
July 17, 2023
QotD: Cavalry combat in Rings of Power versus history
… the scene [in Rings of Power] as a whole seems poorly executed. We’ve gotten some good views of the topography of this village and it is very small. The village is at a three-way road intersection, with the inn at the meeting point on what I am going to call the East side (we see the sun rising over it once and it faces Orodruin); the inn has a small fenced-in area behind it. Beyond that there are four small houses on the road and one further up the hill and the land slopes from high in the north and east to low in the south and west. Finally on the west side there is our small bridge over the stream; a forest directly abuts the village on the south side.
The first thing we see is the cavalry in a great mass riding down into the village with Orodruin clearly behind them; they must be approaching then along the East road. Then we see a 2-horse wide column of cavalry crossing the narrow bridge from the West (at 39:14), then a bunch of orcs gather up into a mass to engage that cavalry force as it gallops up the main road into the village (from 39:16 to 39:26) before getting hit by the vanguard of that column in a really dumb moment we’re going to come back to at 39:30. And now look up at the village above there again and note that it takes one cavalry column at full gallop 16 seconds to go from that bridge to the inn, but the massive wave of cavalry coming over the hill from the other direction has still not managed by this point to actually enter the village proper. They have, apparently, frozen completely solid the moment they were off screen.
So it seems like, while galloping wildly to the rescue of a village they didn’t know was under attack, the Númenóreans also took the time to carefully work their way around the village in order to strike it from two sides at once (somehow filtering through the forest without being noticed, rather than working around the more open terrain to the north side; I cannot communicate clearly enough that cavalry generally avoids moving through forests for a reason), then galloped in at full speed. But the one direction they do not attack from is the North road, which is the only area that is clear and unobstructed (good cavalry ground) and where the slope of the ground is favorable (they’d be charging down hill) with enough space to form up into a proper charge. Instead when we see Galadriel next, she is charging up that hill.
So on the one hand this battle plan doesn’t make any sense, but at the same time I feel I must note just how inferior this is as film-making to the battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings (or even, dare I say it, Game of Thrones). I had to rewatch these scenes, slowly and carefully multiple times to get any sense of where anyone was. By contrast, good battle scenes are careful to make sure the audience understands the geography of the space. Hell, the “battle” scenes in Home Alone are careful to establish the geography of the place (I found the video at that link, by the way, a very approachable introduction to some elements of film study). In The Lord of the Rings we get a lot of big wide shots at high altitude showing us where the armies are in relation to each other […]
Moreover, Peter Jackson’s cavalry doesn’t simply show up. In both of his Big Cavalry Rescues at Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith he follows the same highly effective pattern of first revealing the presence of the cavalry, then pausing a moment for the cavalry to form up and to give the characters there time for some dialogue and character beats. At Helm’s Deep this is a short exchange between Éomer and Gandalf, while at Minas Tirith it is Théoden’s big defining character moment and speech. From a realism standpoint, it gives the audience time to understand where the cavalry is and how they’ve set up (and a sense that this is organized, planned and prepared).
But this brief delay before “the good stuff” also serves an obviously important emotional narrative aspect that Rings also loses here: it builds anticipation. By the time Théoden is giving his speech outside Minas Tirith, the audience has been waiting for about an hour since the beacons were lit for this very moment of emotional release, waiting for the score to be evened, waiting for the emotional satisfaction of the bad guys getting their come-uppance and so Jackson draws that out just a little bit longer, which builds the anticipation that creates that intense emotional response when the charge at last surges forward. You can even hear the emotions he wants you feel in the music, which starts low and subdued but builds and builds as Théoden sets up his army and gives his speech, booms across the charge itself but then cuts hard to silence in the moment of impact – the moment of greatest suspense (will the charge work?) – before surging back as the charge succeeds, culminating in a big overhead shot showing the good guys winning. It is not historically perfect, but the emotional beats land flawlessly and Rings just fumbles shockingly on both counts.
The resulting melee is also confusing. This village is tiny and while we don’t have a good idea of Adar’s remaining force, it isn’t huge because it seems to all fit in this village which looks to be a fair bit smaller than a regulation soccer pitch. A cavalry charge should be able to run from one side of this road to the other in under 10 seconds (moving at c. 12m/s, a rough horse’s gallop speed); the two leading edges of this charge should be slowing down to meet in the middle in well under five seconds. Consequently the decisive phase of this battle, the one in which orcs are trying to hold the open ground between the buildings (these wide mud streets) should last only seconds, but instead it draws out into a minutes-long melee because, as far as I can tell, the Númenóreans have next to no idea how to fight on horseback.
The thing is, fighting from horseback is quite hard but it is also quite simple. If using stirrups, one’s feet remain in the stirrups pretty much the whole time because the goal here is to retain a firm seat on the horse. Horse archers will sometimes stand up just a little in the stirrups to create a stable firing platform, but only a little bit and at speed an observer may not even notice they are standing at all. But showrunners, it seems, just love putting in all sorts of equestrian tricks; Game of Thrones had to make the Dothraki shoot while standing on the saddle (not a great idea), and so Rings of Power has to do some trick riding. In this case they have Galadriel flip over the side of her horse upside down to slash at an orc while dodging an arrow […]
A close look and you can see that this trick requires a special handhold on her saddle just for the purpose (just like the Game of Thrones standing horse-archers required special trick saddles for that stunt too). And she then cuts an orc’s head off while flipping herself back on to the horse, a sword-stroke that is traveling in the opposite direction of her horse’s movement (it is moving forward, she is swinging backwards), which she cannot brace properly and thus, if it had hit anything but CGI would have been a fairly weak strike; fortunately for Galadriel, CGI orcs are very flimsy so their heads come straight off. The whole thing is a too-clever-by-half effort to look cool, which I also find a bit confusing because Elves don’t seem to me to fight on horseback very often in the Tolkien legendarium; they do it from time to time, but the great elf heroes tend to fight on foot, so it’s not clear to me why Galadriel has to also be the best rider. But that routine is then topped by the baffling idiocy of Valandil here who, despite having a perfectly good sword (though he seems to have lost his spear in the fighting) decides his best plan of attack is to jump off of his horse and tackle two orcs […]
Needless to say a high speed falling dismount is a good way to injure yourself in an actual battle but also that jumping off of your horse is not a good use of you or the horse. Meanwhile the rest of the Númenórean cavalry seem to have mostly come to a stop and are now having stationary fights with orc infantry; some of them get pulled down off of their horses which, yes, is the predictable result of being stupid enough to bring your cavalry to a full stop without of any kind of mutually supporting formation or infantry support. I think many of the problems in this sequence stem from the apparent need to have this seem like a fight that could go either way, when in practice this should have been a short and decisive engagement the moment the cavalry arrived, given that the cavalry is more heavily armored, faster, has the advantage of surprise and presumably outnumbers the orcs given how small the village is. I suppose it might take a bit longer because Adar’s first wave of orcs are hitting their respawn timer so there were adds. Once again the utter inability of the show to keep track of just how many orcs there are ruins any sense of tension but also any hope of the battle making sense; it sure seemed like there were just a few dozen orcs left, which ought to make a battle against 300 armored riders a remarkably short and one-sided affair.
But the moment in this whole fight that broke me completely actually came quite early right after the Númenóreans crossed the bridge. […] I will admit that I burst out laughing when this happened: the horseman ride up in a pair holding on to opposite ends of a chain, which they then use to clothesline about two dozen orcs while steadily fanning out. Once again this is one of those too-clever-by-half Hollywood tactics moments, which defy both physics and logic. The first problem is that I’m not clear on how long this chain is: they need to be holding it tightly or it is just going to snag on the first impact, but they also fan out meaning they need to keep letting out more chain to cover the increasing distance between the two horses. In practice looking at the stills it seems like the chain isn’t under much of any tension at all, which would make it fairly useless as a weapon here – sure a metal chain will have some momentum to it, but not enough to knock multiple ranks of armored troops down.
But of course the broader problem is that if the plan is to merely smash into the orcs with a lot of kinetic force you should just trample them. Putting all of that impact energy in the chain is just going to pull the rider off of their horse since the sole point of contact for that energy is their arms. By contrast, medieval knightly cavalry eventually adopted high-backed saddles, couched lances and lance-rests on their armor all to help keep the knight in his seat through the force of a heavy impact at full speed (cavalry with or without these various devices might need to let their point trail at impact that it wasn’t pulled from their hand but rather the movement of their horse pulled it from their target, a motion pattern easily observed in the modern sport of tent-pegging). But just carrying a chain gives none of these advantages or options: if there’s enough force to knock down a half-dozen orcs, there’s enough force to knock a rider out of his saddle.
Of course in an actual battle this wouldn’t even get this far because the other disadvantage of this chain is that it sacrifice’s the reach of a spear. Now, credit where credit is due, the Númenóreans do seem to have standard issue spears (good!), except for these two guys with the chain (a tactic that only works when advancing two-by-two, which is a terrible way to fight, through a narrow space where cavalry should not be, but nevertheless apparently one the Númenóreans come ready for as standard). No one seems to use their spears on horseback (they shift to swords immediately), but at least they have them. The advantage of a spear or lance of course is that it is a weapon which can project beyond the head of the horse, thus reducing some of the reach advantage an infantryman might have, while concentrating all of the energy of impact at a single point.
But the riders here have to hold this silly chain on their laps, which puts it several feet behind the head of their horse and because it isn’t perfectly taut it lags their motion meaning that it impacts the orcs several feet behind that, which means – as you can see above – the entire horse has to gallop past the target orc before he is hit by the chain. Any any time during that operation that orc could strike at the horse or the rider, spilling them both to the ground and to make the whole thing worse because the riders can’t have a sword or a shield in their hands, they can’t even defend themselves if an orc decides to do this.
Much like the ships, much like the falling tower trap, much like the nonsensical ring forging, it is another instance of the creators attempting to be novel and clever without really understanding the historical practices they are working from. Cavalry tactics, like battle tactics, like ship design, like metalworking, were fields of human endeavor that absorbed the sharpest minds humankind has to offer and persistent experimentation and adaptation for centuries, resulting in highly tested, highly refined patterns of behavior. I will not say that improvement on those practices is impossible, but it would certainly be very hard, the sort of thing which would itself require extensive dedicated study and experimentation. It is not the sort of thing likely to be accomplished in a writer’s room brainstorming session, which is why efforts to “outsmart” the past tend to end up looking silly, rather than clever.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-02-03.
June 30, 2023
QotD: Changing patterns of combat on the Great Plains
The popular image of the Great Plains Native America is unarmored, of course, but that image fundamentally formed in the late 19th century, when – after centuries of the development of gunpowder weapons – everyone was unarmored. A longer view shows that Plains Native Americans were perfectly capable of both developing or adopting defensive measures which worked. And to get a full sense of that, we need to outline the major phases of the changing warfare on the Great Plains.
F.R. Secoy (op. cit.) essentially breaks warfare into four phases, which happen at different times in different places, based on if they have horses, guns, both or neither. Because horses entered the Great Plains from the South (via the Spanish) but firearms entered the region from the North (via the British and the French, the Spanish having prohibited gun-sales to Native Americans) and spread out from there, for a brief time many of these systems were active on the Plains at once, as both guns and horses diffused through the region.
In the pre-horse, pre-gun phase (described by McGinnis as well, op. cit., 8-9), battles consisted of long-range missile exchanges between warriors who stood behind large shields which protected their whole bodies. Native American warriors in this system also wore armor, heavy leather coats, laminated in multiple layers using thick hide with glue that was sometimes mixed with sand or gravel (one more example of how “leather armor” is almost always hardened leather armor, not modern clothing-leather). Some of this armor may have been effectively quilted leather as well. Clearly, there was plenty of concern about survivability here.
Both guns and horses were apt to disrupt this system. Horses allowed attackers to rapidly close the distance between the two opposing lines of shield-protected foot-missile-warriors, causing the shield-lines to drop away (though smaller shields, used on horseback to ward off arrows and blows were still used) and for both sides to seek instead the mobility of mounted fighting. That was not the end for armor though, because contact with a supply of horses meant contact with the Spanish, and the Apache at least swiftly adopted some of the Spanish methods of making leather “buff coats” into their own armor tradition and copied the shape and pattern of the buff coat itself (while often still making the material using their own tradition). As Secoy notes (op. cit., 18-20), our sources are quite clear that these forms of armor (both original and Spanish-influenced Native armors) were quite effective at resisting the archery fire that dominated both the pre-horse, pre-gun system and the post-horse, pre-gun system.
Meanwhile on the Northern Plains, while the horse had not yet arrived, firearms had, and these had different effects. Firearms spelled the end of the armor once they became common enough, since there was no protection which could resist bullets; some shield use survived, since arrows remained fairly common as well. But this didn’t lead to suicidal warfare. Instead – as had happened on the East Coast as well, Native Americans adapted their warfare to the increased lethality of firearms (on this, note Lee, op. cit. above) by mostly avoiding pitched battles as they became too lethal (which, by the by, the relatively low lethality of pitched battles pre-gunpowder is often taken to mean that Native North American warfare in general was low-lethality; this is wrong. As with most forms of non-state warfare, most of the killing happened in surprise raids and ambushes, which could be extremely lethal and were still quite common).
Once the horse and the firearm were both in wide use in an area, warfare shifted again. War parties became smaller, faster moving and more reliant on surprise (essentially an extension of the raiding-focus of the pre-horse, post-gun system to the high mobility horses supplied). Infantry battle dropped away entirely because it was too lethal and resulted in casualties that low-population density nomads could not sustain (the contrast with the much higher population-density agrarian United States, which was self-immolating in massively costly massed-infantry engagements during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, at exactly this time is striking). These are fairly big, noticeable changes in warfare patterns!
In short, the tactics used in all four of these systems were conditions by casualty aversion, which makes a lot of sense in the context of a low-population density society which simply cannot afford massive losses.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.
May 27, 2023
Lee 1875 Vertical Action Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Aug 2014The 1875 Lee Vertical Action was an experimental rifle designed by James Paris Lee (of Lee Enfield and Lee Navy fame) as an idea to increase the rate of fire from single-shot Army rifles. He touted an impressive 30 rounds in 45 seconds with the rifle, thanks to several design elements that combined to make a very fast manual of arms. In total only 143 of these guns were made at Springfield Armory, and this example is the only known carbine variant.
(more…)
May 23, 2023
QotD: Cavalry operations in Rings of Power versus cavalry operations in history
Now before I lay into this, fair is fair: Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings had a real habit of having the horses almost always move at the trot or the canter when they ought to have been walking (horses have four “gaits” – patterns of moving – which, in escalating speed are the walk, the trot, the canter and the gallop). Horses can walk or trot for long periods, but canters and gallops can only be maintained in short bursts before the horse wears itself out. So for instance when Théoden leads the Rohirrim from Edoras in Return of the King the horses are walking in the city but by the time they’re in column out of the city the whole column is moving at a canter (interestingly, you can hear the three-beat pattern of the canter in the foley, which is some attention to detail), which is not realistic – they have a long way to go and they won’t be able to maintain this gait the whole way – but fits the forward momentum of the scene. Likewise most of the horses look to be at a canter when his army leaves Dunharrow for Gondor; again this is a bit silly, but on roughly the level of silly of having Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pursue a band of orcs by jogging for three days and nights without rest.
By contrast [in Rings of Power], the Númenóreans rush to the battle at a full gallop, apparently the whole way or at the very least for hours through the morning. Horses will be vary, but generally two to three miles is the maximum distance most horses can gallop before fatigue sets in (for most horses this distance is going to be shorter), which they’re going to cover in about six minutes. The gallop is a very fast (25-30mph), very short sprint, yet Galadriel has this whole formation at full gallop even before she can see their destination. And I just want to remember here the absurdity that these horsemen do not even know there is a battle to ride to; for all they know this is a basic scouting effort (which might be better accomplished slowly and without wearing down all of the horses). Théoden at least has the excuse that he’s on the clock and knows it!
The way we are then shown the cavalry arriving is very confusing to me. The speed of their arrival makes at least some sense. We have already established that both Arondir and Adar are incompetent commanders so the fact that they have set no scouts or lookouts checks out. Pre-modern and early-modern cavalry could effectively out-ride news of their coming, and so show up unexpectedly in places with very little warning. Not this little warning, mind you – the time from the first sound of hoof-falls (heard by Elves – the orcs evidently hear nothing) to the cavalry deluging the village is just about fifteen seconds; horses move fast but they do not move that fast (at full gallop a horse might cover 150-200 meters in those fifteen seconds and the orcs would absolutely hear them coming before they saw them). But the idea in general that the Númenórean cavalry could appear as if out of nowhere to the orcs checks out – that was one of the major advantages of cavalry operations.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-02-03.
March 27, 2023
Why Russia Lost the Polish-Soviet War
The Great War
Published 24 Mar 2023
The Polish-Soviet War was one of the most important conflicts in the aftermath of the First World War when Eastern Europe was in flux. Both the Polish and the Bolshevik Army had the advantage numerous times and at the Battle of Warsaw is looked like the Bolsheviks would carry the revolution into Western Europe.
(more…)
March 21, 2023
QotD: The elephant as a weapon of war
The pop-culture image of elephants in battle is an awe-inspiring one: massive animals smashing forward through infantry, while men on elephant-back rain missiles down on the hapless enemy. And for once I can surprise you by saying: this isn’t an entirely inaccurate picture. But, as always, we’re also going to introduce some complications into this picture.
Elephants are – all on their own – dangerous animals. Elephants account for several hundred fatalities per year in India even today and even captured elephants are never quite as domesticated as, say, dogs or horses. Whereas a horse is mostly a conveyance in battle (although medieval European knights greatly valued the combativeness of certain breeds of destrier warhorses), a war elephant is a combatant in his own right. When enraged, elephants will gore with tusks and crush with feet, along with using their trunks as weapons to smash, throw or even rip opponents apart (by pinning with the feet). Against other elephants, they will generally lock tusks and attempt to topple their opponent over, with the winner of the contest fatally goring the loser in the exposed belly (Polybius actually describes this behavior, Plb. 5.84.3-4). Dumbo, it turns out, can do some serious damage if prompted.
Elephants were selected for combativeness, which typically meant that the ideal war elephant was an adult male, around 40 years of age (we’ll come back to that). Male elephants enter a state called “musth” once a year, where they show heightened aggressiveness and increases interest in mating. Trautmann (2015) notes a combination of diet, straight up intoxication and training used by war elephant handlers to induce musth in war elephants about to go into battle, because that aggression was prized (given that the signs of musth are observable from the outside, it seems likely to me that these methods worked).
(Note: In the ancient Mediterranean, female elephants seem to have also been used, but it is unclear how often. Cassius Dio (Dio 10.6.48) seems to think some of Pyrrhus’s elephants were female, and my elephant plate shows a mother elephant with her cub, apparently on campaign. It is possible that the difficulty of getting large numbers of elephants outside of India caused the use of female elephants in battle; it’s also possible that our sources and artists – far less familiar with the animals than Indian sources – are themselves confused.)
Thus, whereas I have stressed before that horses are not battering rams, in some sense a good war elephant is. Indeed, sometimes in a very literal sense – as Trautmann notes, “tearing down fortifications” was one of the key functions of Indian war elephants, spelled out in contemporary (to the war elephants) military literature there. A mature Asian elephant male is around 2.75m tall, masses around 4 tons and is much more sturdily built than any horse. Against poorly prepared infantry, a charge of war elephants could simply shock them out of position a lot of the time – though we will deal with some of the psychological aspects there in a moment.
A word on size: film and video-game portrayals often oversize their elephants – sometimes, like the Mumakil of Lord of the Rings, this is clearly a fantasy creature, but often that distinction isn’t made. As notes, male Asian (Indian) elephants are around 2.75m (9ft) tall; modern African bush elephants are larger (c. 10-13ft) but were not used for war. The African elephant which was trained for war was probably either an extinct North African species or the African forest elephant (c. 8ft tall normally) – in either case, ancient sources are clear that African war elephants were smaller than Asian ones.
Thus realistic war elephants should be about 1.5 times the size of an infantryman at the shoulders (assuming an average male height in the premodern world of around 5’6?), but are often shown to be around twice as tall if not even larger. I think this leads into a somewhat unrealistic assumption of how the creatures might function in battle, for people not familiar with how large actual elephants really are.
The elephant as firing platform is also a staple of the pop-culture depiction – often more strongly emphasized because it is easier to film. This is true to their use, but seems to have always been a secondary role from a tactical standpoint – the elephant itself was always more dangerous than anything someone riding it could carry.
There is a social status issue at play here which we’ll come back to […] The driver of the elephant, called a mahout, seems to have typically been a lower-status individual and is left out of a lot of heroic descriptions of elephant-riding (but not driving) aristocrats (much like Egyptian pharaohs tend to erase their chariot drivers when they recount their great victories). Of course, the mahout is the fellow who actually knows how to control the elephant, and was a highly skilled specialist. The elephant is controlled via iron hooks called ankusa. These are no joke – often with a sharp hook and a spear-like point – because elephants selected for combativeness are, unsurprisingly, hard to control. That said, they were not permanent ear-piercings or anything of the sort – the sort of setup in Lord of the Rings is rather unlike the hooks used.
In terms of the riders, we reach a critical distinction. In western media, war elephants almost always appear with great towers on their backs – often very elaborate towers, like those in Lord of the Rings or the film Alexander (2004). Alexander, at least, has it wrong. The howdah – the rigid seat or tower on an elephant’s back – was not an Indian innovation and doesn’t appear in India until the twelfth century (Trautmann supposes, based on the etymology of howdah (originally an Arabic word) that this may have been carried back into India by Islamic armies). Instead, the tower was a Hellenistic idea (called a thorkion in Greek) which post-dates Alexander (but probably not by much).
This is relevant because while the bowmen riding atop elephants in the armies of Alexander’s successors seem to be lower-status military professionals, in India this is where the military aristocrat fights. […] this is a big distinction, so keep it in mind. It also illustrates neatly how the elephant itself was the primary weapon – the society that used these animals the most never really got around to creating a protected firing position on their back because that just wasn’t very important.
In all cases, elephants needed to be supported by infantry (something Alexander (2004) gets right!) Cavalry typically cannot effectively support elephants for reasons we’ll get to in a moment. The standard deployment position for war elephants was directly in front of an infantry force (heavy or light) – when heavy infantry was used, the gap between the two was generally larger, so that the elephants didn’t foul the infantry’s formation.
Infantry support covers for some of the main weaknesses elephants face, keeping the elephants from being isolated and taken down one by one. It also places an effective exploitation force which can take advantage of the havoc the elephants wreck on opposing forces. The “elephants advancing alone and unsupported” formation from Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, by contrast, allows the elephants to be isolated and annihilated (as they subsequently are in the film).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-26.
March 9, 2023
Look at Life – The Cherry Pickers (1965)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018Following the 11th Hussars from Hanover to Coburg.
February 18, 2023
British Empire Crackdown in South Africa – Boer War 1899-1902
The Great War
Published 17 Feb 2023The 2nd Boer War saw the British Empire bring to bear the entire imperial might to put to rest a dispute with the Boer Republics in South Africa. With scorched earth tactics and the use of concentration camps, the Boer War was a glimpse of what was to come in 20th century warfare.
(more…)
February 11, 2023
Tank Chats #167 | French Panhard EBR | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 28 Oct 2022How much do you know about the Panhard EBR? Join David Willey for this week’s Tank Chat as he covers the development, design and use of this French armoured car.
(more…)
February 3, 2023
Tank Chats #166 | SOMUA S35 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 14 Oct 2022Join David Willey in this week’s Tank Chat as he details the history of the SOMUA S35, a French cavalry tank of the Second World War.
(more…)
January 11, 2023
Repurposing Obsolete Rifles: The Lebel R35 Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Dec 2017The French military had investigated the possibility of a Lebel carbine in the 1880s, but by the 1930s a different set of priorities was in place. In an effort to make some use of the vast stockpiles of obsolete Lebel rifles France had, a plan was put in place to shorten then into carbines for auxiliary troops like artillery crews and engineers. These men needed some sort of rifle or carbine, but they did not need the best and newest weapons. By giving them shortened Lebel carbines, it would free up more modern rifles like the M34 Berthiers in 7.5mm and the new MAS-36 rifles to go to the front line infantry who needed them most.
The R35 conversion was developed by the Tulle arsenal and adopted in January of 1936. The French government ordered 100,000 to be made, and deliveries began in April of 1937. Production would accelerate and continue right up to the spring of 1940, with a total of about 45,000 being actually delivered before the armistice with Germany. The conversions were all assembled at Tulle, but four other factories manufactured barrels for them: Chatellerault (MAC), St Etienne (MAS), Société Alsacienne de Constructions Mécaniques (SACM), and Manufacture d’Armes de Paris (MAP). These barrels were 450mm long (17.7 inches), and with the similarly shortened magazine tube, the R35 carbines held just 3 rounds. Production would not continue after the liberation of France in 1944.
(more…)
November 28, 2022
QotD: The Carolingian army
In essence, the Carolingian army was an odd sort of layer-cake, in part because it represented a transitional stage from the Germanic tribal levies of the earliest Middle Ages towards to emergence and dominance of the mounted aristocracy of the early part of the High Middle Ages (note: the Middle Ages is a long period, Europe is a big place, and it moves through a lot of military systems; to talk of a single “medieval European system” is almost always a dangerous over-generalization). The top of the layer-cake consisted of the mounted aristocrats, in basically the same organization as the lords of Rohan discussed above: the great magnates (including the king) maintained retinues of mounted warriors, while smaller (but still significant) landholders might fight as individual cavalrymen, being grouped into the retinues of the great magnates tactically, even if they weren’t subordinate to those magnates politically (although they were often both). These two groups – the mounted magnate with his retinue and the individual mounted warrior – would eventually become the nobility and the knightly class, but in the Carolingian period these social positions were not so clearly formed or rigid yet. We ought to understand that to speak of a Carolingian “knight” (translated for Latin miles, which ironically in classical Latin is more typically used of infantrymen) is not the same, in social consequence, as speaking of a 13th century knight (who might also be described as a miles in the Latin sources).
But below that in the Carolingian system, you have the select levy, relatively undistinguished (read: not noble, but often reasonably well-to-do) men recruited from the smaller farmers and townsfolk. This system itself seems to have derived from an earlier social understanding that all free men (or all free property owning men) held an obligation for military service; Halsall notes in the eighth century the term arimannus (Med. Lat.: army-man) or exercitalis (same meaning) as a term used to denote the class of free landowners on whom the obligation of military service fell in Lombard and later Frankish Northern Italy (the Roman Republic of some ten centuries prior had the same concept, the term for it was assidui). This was, on the continent at least, a part of the system that was in decline by the time of Charlemagne and especially after as the mounted retinues of the great magnates became progressively more important.
We get an interesting picture of this system in Charlemagne’s efforts in the first decades of the 800s to standardize it. Under Charlemagne’s system, productive land was assessed in units of value called mansi and (to simplify a complicated system) every four mansi ought to furnish one soldier for the army (the law makes provisions for holders of even half a mansus, to give a sense of how large a unit it was – evidently some families lived on fractions of a mansus). Families with smaller holdings than four mansi – which must have been most of them – were brigaded together to create a group large enough to be able to equip and furnish one man for the army. These fellows were expected to equip themselves quite well – shield, spear, sword, a helmet and some armor – but not to bring a horse. We should probably also imagine that villages and towns choosing who to send were likely to try to send young men in good shape for the purpose (or at least they were supposed to). Thus this was a draw-up of some fairly high quality infantry with good equipment. That gives it its modern-usage name, the select levy, because it was selected out of the larger free populace.
And I should note what makes these fellows different from the infantry who might often be found in the retinues of later medieval aristocrats is just that – these fellows don’t seem to have been in the retinues of the Carolingian aristocracy. Or at least, Charlemagne doesn’t seem to have imagined them as such. While he expected his local aristocrats to organize this process, he also sent out his royal officials, the missi to oversee the process. This worked poorly, as it turned out – the system never quite ran right (in part, it seems, because no one could decide who was in charge of it, the missi or the local aristocrats) and the decades that followed would see Carolingian and post-Carolingian rulers more and more dependent on their lords and their retinues, while putting fewer and fewer resources into any kind of levy. But Charlemagne’s last-gaps effort is interesting for our purpose because it illustrates how the system was supposed to run, and thus how it might have run (in a very general sense) in the more distant past. In particular, he seems to have imagined the select levy as a force belonging to the king, to be administered by royal officials (as the nation-in-arms infantry armies of the centuries before had been), rather than as an infantry force splintered into various retinues. In practice, the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire under his heirs was fatal for any hopes of a centralized army, infantry or otherwise, and probably hastened the demise of the system.
Beneath the select levy there was also the expectation that, should danger reach a given region, all free men would be called upon to defend the local redoubts and fortified settlements. This group is sometimes called the general levy. As you might imagine, the general levy would be of lower average quality and cohesion. It might include the very young and very old – folks who ought not to be picked out for the select levy for that reason – and have a much lower standard of equipment. After all, unlike select levymen, who were being equipped at the expense, potentially, of many households, general levymen were individual farmers, grabbing whatever they could. In practice, the general levy might be expected to defend walls and little else – it was not a field force, but an emergency local defense militia, which might either enhance the select levy (and the retinues of the magnates) or at least hold out until that field army could arrive.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle oF Helm’s Deep, Part IV: Men of Rohan”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-05-22.
September 21, 2022
Radom’s Vis 35: Poland’s Excellent Automatic Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Feb 2016In the 1920s Poland began looking for a new standard military pistol, and tested a variety of compact .380s. The representative from FN brought along an early iteration of the High Power (along with their other entry) even though it was much too large and heavy to meet the Polish requirements. After a couple iterations of testing, it became clear to the Polish Ordnance officers that the High Power was a much more effective service pistol than the compact guns they had been instructed to look for.
Lo and behold, the ultimate choice was a domestic design based largely on the High Power (a direct deal with FN was not an option after Poland’s relationship with FN had suffered through problems with the wz.28 version of the BAR). Toss in a delay to redesign the early decocking mechanism to satisfy the Cavalry (who didn’t realize that the decocker wasn’t actually meant to be used, but rather to just add another claim to the patent), and by 1935 the pistol was finished and formally adopted.
The Vis 35 is one of the best automatic pistols of WWII in terms of both handling and quality. In total 46,000 were made pre-war for Poland’s military, and German occupation forces built another 300,000+ during the war.
(more…)