The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2026Since its the 25th anniversary of the trilogy, I figured I’d reminisce about my favourite ever scene from all three movies. And explain why I’m objectively right about it.
February 9, 2026
Why This Is The Greatest Lord Of The Rings Scene Ever
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The origins of the First Special Service Force (the “Devil’s Brigade”)
Project ’44 has a nice introduction to the formation and organization of the joint US-Canadian First Special Service Force during the Second World War. The unit was featured in the 1968 movie The Devil’s Brigade, although many liberties were taken in the film’s portrayal of events:
Sgt. Pat O’Neill (Jeremy Slate) in the messhall scene in The Devil’s Brigade (1968).
In August 1942, a unit unlike any other in Canadian military history was formed. Today it is widely known by its nickname, the “Devil’s Brigade”, but officially it was designated the First Special Service Force (FSSF).
This unique formation was a joint Canadian–American unit born from the unconventional ideas of British scientist Geoffrey Pyke. Pyke envisioned a small, elite force operating deep behind German lines in occupied Norway, spreading disruption and chaos. Although this original concept was judged impractical, the decision was made to create the unit regardless.
FSSF patch from Project ’44
The combat element of the Force was composed of roughly equal numbers of Canadians and Americans, while the supporting echelon units were entirely American. Most Canadian subaltern officers were recruited almost directly from the Officer Training Centre in Brockville, and the majority of the Other Ranks were drawn from units across Canada. Some personnel were even selected directly from the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, much to the frustration of that unit’s chain of command.
The Force was commanded throughout its existence by American Lieutenant Colonel Robert Frederick. The initial Canadian second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel McQueen, was injured during parachute training and broke his ankle. Because of the limited time available for training, he was returned to his original unit and replaced by Canadian Lieutenant Colonel Williamson.
Orval Logan and Stuart Diamond demonstrate hand-to-hand combat
Photo by Paul Moore from Project ’44Williamson served both as second-in-command of the FSSF and as Commanding Officer of the 2nd Canadian Parachute Battalion. This designation served as the administrative cover name for the Canadian component of the Force and was later changed to the 1st Canadian Special Service Battalion. This was not a tactical formation in the field, but rather an administrative structure created to manage Canadian personnel within the joint unit.
As a combined Canadian–American formation, personnel from both nations were distributed evenly throughout the Force. While its overall role and employment resembled that of a brigade, its internal organization followed American regimental doctrine. The Force consisted of three regiments. Whereas a standard American infantry regiment normally contained three battalions and approximately 3,000 soldiers, each regiment within the FSSF comprised only 32 officers and 385 Other Ranks, for a total authorized strength of 412 personnel.
January 29, 2026
QotD: Nitpicking the Roman army in Gladiator (2000)
We pick up in an improbably mud-soaked clearing with a title card informing us that we’re in “Germania”, which is correct in a very broad sense that this is the Second Marcomannic War and the enemies here are the Marcomanni and Quadi, who are Germani (Germanic-language speakers), but the army here isn’t operating out of the Roman provinces of Germania (superior and inferior) which are on the Rhine, but rather on the Danube, from the provinces of Noricum and Pannonia (Superior). But in the sense that we’re in Germania magna, the greater zone of Germanic cultural influence, sure, fine.
In the process of Maximus riding up, the failure of negotiations and Maximus riding to join his cavalry, we get something of an overview of the Roman army and its position and both are wrong. Let’s start with the soldiers: we see a very clear distinction between two kinds of soldiers, the mail-clad auxilia, all archers, and the legionaries wearing the lorica segmentata and there appear to be about the same number of both groups. And here is where we first see the clear influence of the Column of Trajan (and to an unfortunately lesser degree, the far more appropriate Column of Marcus Aurelius) on the depiction, because this use of armor to distinctly signal the Roman citizen legionaries and non-citizen auxilia is straight from the Column of Trajan, completed probably around 113 and commemorating Trajan’s two Dacian Wars (101-102, 105-106).
What this sequence gets correct is that the Roman army was divided into those two groups, they were roughly equal in number (by this period, the auxilia probably modestly outnumber the legions in total manpower)1 and Trajan’s Column does use that visual signifier to distinguish them. This component is the crux of the verisimilitude that leads people to trust the rest of this sequence.
The problems start almost immediately from there. Roman auxilia were far more varied than what we see here in terms of equipment and tactics and only very few of them were archers. So let’s break down Roman auxiliary contingents. With all due caveats about the limits of our evidence, infantry auxilia outnumber cavalry by about 2:1 in attested auxilia units (auxilia were grouped into cavalry alae and infantry cohortes, generally of 480 men (sometimes around 800), but unlike for legionary citizen-infantry, these cohorts were not grouped into larger legions).2 So we ought to expect about a third of our auxilia to be cavalry, which is important because the cavalry detachments of Roman legions were very small (and mostly for scouting and messenger duties). Auxilia cavalry ranged in equipment and could include horse archers and even ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry, but most were mailed shock cavalry, equipped quite a lot like how Gallic or Germanic warrior-aristocrats or Roman legionary cavalry would be.
Of the remainder, the most common kind of infantry auxilia by far seem to have been heavy infantry, fighting in fairly heavy armor. These fellows get depicted in Roman artwork generally in mail armor, with flat oval shields (as opposed to the curved, rectangular imperial-period Roman scutum), spears and swords. These fellows, totally absent in this sequence are all over the Column of Trajan, with their flat oval shields being frequently seen (although one must distinguish them from Dacians who carry the same shield; the auxilia stick out for their mail and helmets). A bit less than 10% of auxilia units are attested as cohortes sagittariorum (“cohort of archers”). We also know the Romans used slingers within the auxilia, but as far as we can tell, not in specialized units; they may have been brigaded in with other auxilia cohorts. In either case, they appear in fairly small numbers. Finally, we also see on things like the Column of Trajan Roman allied or auxiliary units that are substantially lighter infantry: on the Column of Trajan, these are local troops shown wielding large clubs and stripped to the waist, presumably representing troops local to the Danube region, fighting in local (unarmored, with heavy two-handed weapons) style.
So whereas the army we see is a nearly even split between legionary heavy infantry and auxilia archers (with a small amount of legionary cavalry waiting for Maximus to show up to lead them), in practice a typical Roman field army would have far fewer archers, indeed around ten times fewer: not almost 50% of the force, but in fact probably a bit less than 5% of the force (since they’re less than 10% of the auxilia who would make up around half of a Roman field army). Meanwhile we’re simply missing the – by far – two most common sorts of auxilia cohorts, those of heavy infantry or heavy cavalry. This mangling of the structure of a Roman army is going to have implications when we get to Maximus’ overall plan for the battle as well.
Meanwhile, the legionary infantry are also much too uniform, literally. This is easily the most pardonable error, because what has happened here is that director Ridley Scott has copied the Column of Trajan but far too uncritically. After all, the Column of Trajan is not a photograph and thus has space for the artists producing it to take liberties, particularly in the name of imperial ideology and propaganda. In this case, showing large numbers of identically equipped soldiers, often moving in unified formation, serves the same rhetorical purpose in antiquity as it does today, suggesting an impressive, inhumanly uniformed and disciplined source. Moreover, the segmented Roman body armor, which we call the lorica segmentata (we don’t know what the Romans called it), was very distinctive to the legions, as it was the one armor that it seems like the auxilia probably (the evidence here can be tricky) didn’t share. And keeping the legions distinct from the auxilia also matters, as the legionary soldiers are higher status citizens who thus get “higher billing” in the imagery, as it were, than the auxilia. So showing all of the legions equipped neatly with this armor makes them seem distinct, impressive and uniform.
In short, it served Trajan’s image (and thus the artists aim) to suggest that all of his legions wore this armor.
Archaeology tells us quite clearly it was not so. Indeed, the lorica segmentata, so iconic because of its use in this way on the Column of Trajan, was probably the least common of the three major types of Roman legionary body armor in this period. The most common armor of the Roman legions was almost certainly still – as it had been in the Late Republic – mail, exactly the same as we see the auxilia wearing. We find fragments of Roman mail in legionary sites in all corners of the Empire and it remained common everywhere. To head off a standard question: no, it does not seem that the Romans ever got the idea to layer other defenses over mail, so when it was worn, it was the “primary” armor (worn over a padded textile defense called a subarmalis, but not under any other armor).3 We also see mail represented in Roman artwork, including on very high status soldiers, like senior centurions.
The next most common armor was probably scale armor, which we find very frequently in the East (that is, on the frontier with the Parthians/Sassanids) and often enough (if less frequently) in the West (that is, the Rhine/Danube frontier). We also know that some auxilia units wore this armor too and we see quite a bit of scale armor – wholly absent in this sequence – on the Column of – wait for it – Marcus Aurelius (completed c. 193). That’s the column that commemorates this war. Contemporary with this fictional battle. But it is less famous and somewhat less well-preserved than 70-years-earlier Column of Trajan, which they pretty evidently used quite a bit more of.
The lorica segmentata shows up the least often and – to my knowledge – effectively exclusively in the west on the Rhine/Danube frontier, where it is still probably not the most common (although it may have been more common than scale on that frontier). So what we ought to see in this army are legionaries who are marked out by their large scuta (the big Roman shield, by this period distinctly rectangular and also (as in the republic) curved), but in a range of mail, scale and lorica segmentata (with mail and segmentata being the most common, because we are on the Danube frontier, but scale hardly rare), along with auxilia divided into specialist cohorts (480 man units) each with different sets of armor and weapons: a few missile cohorts (archers, slingers), a lot more heavy infantry cohorts with spears and long shields, some lighter troops, and so on. The auxilia ought to be wearing basically every armor under the sun except for the lorica segmentata (which to my knowledge we’ve only ever found in sites associated with the legions).
Finally, these units are backed up by a whole load of catapults. We see two kinds, dual-arm arrow-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call ballistae) and single-armed pot-throwing machines (which most folks would casually call catapults), all of them in stationary mounts. Now on the one hand, “the Romans use lots of torsion-based catapults as artillery” is a true statement about the Roman army of this period, but on the other hand once again beyond that basic idea, most of this is wrong. Once again there’s an issue of verisimilitude here: the appearance of strange catapults and the true fact that the Romans used a lot of unusual catapults is likely to lead the viewer to assume some research has been done here and thus that these are the right catapults. For the most part, they are not.
We can start with the easy one, the larger single-armed pot-throwers. These are onagers, a late-Roman simplified single-arm torsion catapult, named for their fearsome “kick” (like an ass, an onager). These are popular favorites for Roman artillery, for instance showing up in both Rome: Total War and Total War: Rome II (both of which have main campaigns set during the Late Republic). There’s only one problem, which is that Gladiator (much less the even earlier Total War games) is set substantially too early for an onager to appear. Our first attestation of the onager is in Ammianus Marcellinus, writing in the last two decades of the 300s AD about the events of 353-378 (his work was broader than this, but only the back end survives). Vegetius, writing roughly contemporary with Ammianus also mentions them. But before the late fourth century, we don’t have any evidence for this design and it doesn’t show up on the Columns of Trajan or Marcus. So this isn’t just a little bit too early for these catapults but, given the evidence we have, around 150 years too early, the equivalent of having a line of M1 Abrams show up in a film about the Battle of Gettysburg.
What we do have are a number of twin-armed bolt or arrow-throwing machines and the Romans certainly had those, though what we see doesn’t match up well with what the Romans used. What we see is a single size of fairly large arrow-throwing engines, aimed upward to fire in fairly high arcs and built with large metal cases containing the torsion springs (generally made of hair or sinew, tightly coiled up; it is the coiling of these springs which stores the energy of the machine).
These two-armed torsion catapults came in a wide range of sizes and could be designed to throw either arrows/bolts or stones (the latter carved into spheres of rather precise caliber for specific machines). And we ought to see a pretty wide range of sizes here, from massive one-talent engines, which threw a 1 talent (26kg) stone and stood about three times the height of a man, to much smaller anti-personnel weapons (scorpiones) that were more like a “crew served” weapon than a large artillery piece. By Trajan’s time, the Romans had even taken to mounting these smaller crew-served engines on mule-drawn carts (called carroballistae) to allow them to be rapidly repositioned, something like early modern “horse artillery” (they were not meant to fire on the move; when we see them on Trajan’s Column, at least one of the operators is usually standing on the ground outside of the cart to winch the machine). These smaller machines, which would have made up the bulk of those deployed in a field battle, seem mostly absent in the sequence.
The result of all of this is that the Roman army presented in the opening moments of Gladiator manages to strike a remarkably unhappy balance: having just enough of the appearance of accuracy to decisively influence two decades of subsequent depictions of the Roman army without actually being particularly correct about anything beyond a very surface level. But subsequent pop-culture (again, I think Rome: Total War played a significant role here) would codify this vision of the Roman army – fire-throwing onagers, lots of auxilia archers, legionary rather than auxiliary cavalry, uniform use of the lorica segmentata – as the dominant model for quite some time.
But the army isn’t the only thing that’s wrong.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator’s Iconic Opening Battle, Part I”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-06.
- See figures in P. Holder, Auxiliary Deployment in the Reign of Hadrian (2003).
- There’s some complexity here because some infantry auxilia cohorts had small attached cavalry contingents too.
- I suppose I should note that is an odd exception for a type of very fine armor sometimes called lorica plumata (“feathered armor”) by modern writers where metal scales were mounted on mail armor (typically with extremely fine, small rings), rather than on a textile backing. This armor type seems to have been rare and must have been very expensive.
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January 19, 2026
QotD: Epaminondas and the defeat of Sparta at Leuctra
Epaminondas led a smaller force (some 6,000 to Sparta’s 11,000, though historians debate the exact numbers) to a field in front of a Boeotian village called Leuctra. The Battle of Leuctra would not only mark the beginning of centuries of Spartan decline, but also change the way Greek armies battled all the way through the conquests of Alexander the Great.
How did Epaminondas do it? How could he upend the mighty Spartan empire with a force barely half the size? The answer lay in resource allocation, patience, and 300 extremely important gay men.
If you had the misfortune of fighting against a Spartan army in the last few centuries BCE, you had to contend with a phalanx of hoplites. Thousands of men would align shoulder to shoulder, stick out their shields and spears, and push. You probably had a phalanx of your own, but against the Spartan line, you stood no chance.
Epaminondas didn’t have the numbers to directly contend with the Spartan phalanx, but he did have a specific elite force: the Sacred Band of Thebes. The Sacred Band was made of 300 hand-picked warriors paired off into homosexual couples. The idea was that lovers would fight more fiercely for each other.
Instead of a futile effort to out-push a force half their size, the Boeotians overloaded one side. They put a majority of their force on the left side, thinning out the right. They advanced this overloaded left wing before the weaker right wing, hoping to win before the Spartans could fully engage.
The Boeotian left wing, led in part by the Sacred Band, broke through the Spartan line. With enemy forces charging the side and rear, the Spartans quickly routed. When the dust settled, Epaminondas inflicted upon the Spartans one of the most decisive blowouts in Greek history.
Diagram courtesy of WarHistory.org
Over 1,000 Spartans perished in the Battle of Leuctra, including their king and military leader Cleombrotus. The Boetians lost around a hundred, but exact estimates are hard to come by. By anyone’s estimate, their casualties paled in comparison. Sparta’s military reputation would never recover, and the next 200 years marked an era of Spartan decline.
Epaminondas didn’t invent the phalanx. In fact, it’s unclear who really did. There is evidence of a similar strategy in Sumer over 2,000 years earlier. It’s a fairly basic idea — everyone hold your shields together and push. But Epaminondas did advance the strategy. Others would continue to innovate on Epaminondas’ “oblique” advance, up to and including Alexander the Great.
Luke Brown, “Pushing Tush Is Ancient Technology”, Wide Left, 2025-10-13.
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December 16, 2025
QotD: Arms and the (pre-modern) man (at arms)
Here we do have some significant price data, but of course its tricky to be able to correlate a given value for arms and armor with something concrete like wages in every period, because of course prices are not stable. But here are some of the data points I’ve encountered:
We don’t have good Roman price data from the Republic or early/high Empire, unfortunately (and indeed, the reason I have been collecting late antique and medieval comparanda is to use it to understand the structure of earlier Roman costs). Hugh Elton1 notes that a law of Valens (r. 364-378) assessed the cost of clothing, equipment and such for a new infantry recruit to be 6 solidi and for a cavalryman, 13 solidi (the extra 7 being for the horse). The solidus was a 4.5g gold coin at the time (roughly equal to the earlier aureus) so that is a substantial expense to kit out an individual soldier. For comparison, the annual rations for soldiers in the same period seem to have been 4-5 solidi, so we might suggest a Roman soldier is wearing something like a year’s worth of living expenses.2
We don’t see a huge change in the Early Middle Ages either. The seventh century Lex Ripuaria,3 quotes the following prices for military equipment: 12 solidi for a coat of mail, 6 solidi for a metal helmet, 7 for a sword with its scabbard, 6 for mail leggings, 2 solidi for a lance and shield for a rider (wood is cheap!); a warhorse was 12 solidi, whereas a whole damn cow was just 3 solidi. On the one hand, the armor for this rider has gotten somewhat more extensive – mail leggings (chausses) were a new thing (the Romans didn’t have them) – but clearly the price of metal equipment here is higher: equipping a mailed infantryman would have some to something like 25ish solidi compared to 12 for the warhorse (so 2x the cost of the horse) compared to the near 1-to-1 armor-to-horse price from Valens. I should note, however, warhorses even compared to other goods, show high volatility in the medieval price data.
As we get further one, we get more and more price data. Verbruggen (op. cit. 170-1) also notes prices for the equipment of the heavy infantry militia of Bruges in 1304; the average price of the heavy infantry equipment was a staggering £21, with the priciest item by far being the required body armor (still a coat of mail) coming in between £10 and £15. Now you will recall the continental livre by this point is hardly the Carolingian unit (or the English one), but the £21 here would have represented something around two-thirds of a year’s wages for a skilled artisan.
Almost contemporary in English, we have some data from Yorkshire.4 Villages had to supply a certain number of infantrymen for military service and around 1300, the cost to equip them was 5 shillings per man, as unarmored light infantry. When Edward II (r. 1307-1327) demanded quite minimally armored men (a metal helmet and a textile padded jack or gambeson), the cost jumped four-fold to £1, which ended up causing the experiment in recruiting heavier infantry this way to fail. And I should note, a gambeson and a helmet is hardly very heavy infantry!
For comparison, in the same period an English longbowman out on campaign was paid just 2d per day, so that £1 of kit would have represented 120 days wages. By contrast, the average cost of a good quality longbow in the same period was just 1s, 6d, which the longbowman could earn back in just over a week.5 Once again: wood is cheap, metal is expensive.
Finally, we have the prices from our ever-handy Medieval Price List and its sources. We see quite a range in this price data, both in that we see truly elite pieces of armor (gilt armor for a prince at £340, a full set of Milanese 15th century plate at more than £8, etc) and its tricky to use these figures too without taking careful note of the year and checking the source citation to figure out which region’s currency we’re using. One other thing to note here that comes out clearly: plate cuirasses are often quite a bit cheaper than the mail armor (or mail voiders) they’re worn over, though hardly cheap. Still, full sets of armor ranging from single to low-double digit livres and pounds seem standard and we already know from last week’s exercise that a single livre or pound is likely reflecting a pretty big chunk of money, potentially close to a year’s wage for a regular worker.
So while your heavily armored knight or man-at-arms or Roman legionary was, of course, not walking around with the Great Pyramid’s worth of labor-value on his back, even the “standard” equipment for a heavy infantryman or heavy cavalryman – not counting the horse! – might represent a year or even years of a regular workers’ wages. On the flipside, for societies that could afford it, heavy infantry was worth it: putting heavy, armored infantry in contact with light infantry in pre-gunpowder warfare generally produces horrific one-sided slaughters. But relatively few societies could afford it: the Romans are very unusual for either ancient or medieval European societies in that they deploy large numbers of armored heavy infantry (predominately in mail in any period, although in the empire we also see scale and the famed lorica segmentata), a topic that forms a pretty substantial part of my upcoming book, Of Arms and Men, which I will miss no opportunity to plug over the next however long it takes to come out.6 Obviously armored heavy cavalry is even harder to get and generally restricted to simply putting a society’s aristocracy on the battlefield, since the Big Men can afford both the horses and the armor.
But the other thing I want to note here is the social gap this sort of difference in value creates. As noted above with the bowman’s wages, it would take a year or even years of wages for a regular light soldier (or civilian laborers of his class) to put together enough money to purchase the sort of equipment required to serve as a soldier of higher status (who also gets higher pay). Of course it isn’t as simple as, “work as a bowman for a year and then buy some armor”, because nearly all of that pay the longbowman is getting is being absorbed by food and living expenses. The result is that the high cost of equipment means that for many of these men, the social gap between them and either an unmounted man-at-arms or the mounted knight is economically unbridgeable.7
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, January 10, 2025”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-10.
- Warfare in Roman Europe AD 350-425 (1996), 122.
- If you are wondering why I’m not comparing to wages, the answer is that by this point, Roman military wages are super irregular, consisting mostly of donatives – special disbursements at the accession of a new emperor or a successful military campaign – rather than regular pay, making it really hard to do a direct comparison.
- Here my citation is not from the text directly, but Verbruggen, The Art of War in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (1997), 23.
- From Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages (1996).
- These prices via Hardy, Longbow: A Social and Military History (1992).
- Expect it no earlier than late this year; as I write this, the core text is actually done (but needs revising), but that’s hardly the end of the publication process.
- Man-at-arms is one of those annoyingly plastic terms which is used to mean “a man of non-knightly status, equipped in the sort of kit a knight would have”, which sometimes implies heavy armored non-noble infantry and sometimes implies non-knightly heavy cavalry retainers of knights and other nobles.
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December 9, 2025
QotD: The development of army discipline and drill in pre-modern armies
The reason we cannot just call this “drill” is because while drill is the most common way agrarian societies produce this result, it is not the only way to this end. For instance as we’ve discussed before, steppe nomads could achieve a very high degree of coordination and synchronization without the same formal systems of drill because the training that produced that coordination was embedded in their culture (particularly in hunting methods) and so young steppe nomad males were acculturated into the synchronicity that way. That said for the rest of this we’re going to place those systems aside and mostly focus on synchronized discipline as a result of drill because for most armies that developed a great deal of synchronized discipline, that’s how they did it.
Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.
The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine. Roman commanders seemed to have thought somewhat better of their soldiers’ bravery, but assumed that harsh discipline was necessary to control, restrain and direct the native fiery virtus (“strength/bravery/valor”) of the common soldier who, unlike the aristocrat, could not be expected to control himself (again, in the snobbish view of the aristocrats).
In short, drill tends to appear in highly stratified agrarian societies, the very nature of which tends to mean that drill is instituted by a class of aristocrats who have at best a dim view of their common soldiers. Consequently, while the core of drill is to simply practice the actions of battle over and over again until they become natural, drill tends to also be encrusted with lots of corporal punishments and intense regulation as a product of those elite attitudes. And though it falls outside of our topic today it seems worth noting that our systems of drill to produce synchronized discipline have the same roots (deriving from early modern musket drill).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-17.
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December 7, 2025
QotD: The Great Applesauce Blight of 1977/78
As we take our own little march down memory lane, let me state up front that I can’t stomach applesauce, just can’t. I liked it as a kid but now it has less appeal than the prospect of being duct taped to a chair, face down, in prison. Yeah, I hate it.
This may seem unreasonable, but anyone who was in at the time, at least in the Army or Marines, and some portion thereof that actually went to the field a lot, will probably remember the Great Applesauce Blight of 1977 and 1978, which was the reason I can’t stand the crap.
The “Great Applesauce Blight?” you ask. Oh, yeah.
The story I got, after some years and some digging, goes like this: It seems that sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a fruit company – the Monterey Fruit Company, so it was said – was going out of business. So the Monterey Fruit Company, if that’s who it really was, called the Department of Defense and said, “Boys, have we got a deal for you. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of Grade A applesauce, and you can have it. All of it. Cheap.”
McNamara and his Whiz Kids – neither of them ever sufficiently to be damned, of course – were gone, but their spirits remained. Department of Defense, ever conscious of the value of a well-squeezed penny, bought that inventory of applesauce, and began to put it into the old style, canned, MCI; Meal, Combat, Individual, which is to say, “C-rations”.
C Rations of the day were entirely canned and composed of a main meal, for one meal, plus either a cake (or very rarely, canned bread) or fruit of some kind, usually a small tin of peanut butter or cheese of some kind of jam or jelly, and one or another type of B Unit, which would have some variant of crackers plus either candy or cocoa. Sometimes, as with the B-2 unit, the cheese was in those.
Now, perusing a case of 1978 C-rats, which would have been newer than those of the Great Applesauce Blight, but still broadly similar, one notes that there were twelve menus, twelve different main meals, and 12 different kinds of dessert, a sundry pack, plus variable candies, spreads, etc. Of that latter twelve, eight were fruit and four were cake of some kind. I seem to recall that, possibly for reasons of economy, the amount of fruit during the Great Applesauce Blight had gone up to usually ten cans out of twelve, some extra cheese or peanut butter seemed to be included with some, and the cakes went down to two, one of which was going to be Chocolate Nut Roll, essentially inedible, from the Nashville Bread Company and the other would be the even more thoroughly disgusting fruit cake. I don’t recall who made that, and that lack of memory may have been an automatic defense against a future charge of capital murder. None of the cakes except pound cake could be relied on to be edible, and pound cake was always rare.
Now picture this, you’re a soldier in the Panama Canal Zone, training – training hard – to fight for the Canal, living in the jungle maybe twenty-five or more days and nights a month, eating C-rats to the tune of sixty or seventy a month, and virtually every meal contains applesauce or something more innately disgusting. “No, none of that nice fruit cocktail or those ever so delectable pear slices for you, young man; Department of Defense, to save a few bucks, has determined that applesauce is good enough, three meals a day, for weeks on end.”
*****
Now we were already kind of thin, because no military feeding system can ever completely keep up with the caloric requirements for a soldier either continuously fighting or realistically training to fight. Normally, this isn’t a problem because he can pack it on in the mess hall. These were unusual circumstances, though, with an unusually high chance of fighting – or riot control, which is worse – over the Canal. So we’re pretty much living out there, in pretty much trackless jungle, with nothing like enough helicopters for regular hot rations from the mess. Besides that, the old 193rd Infantry Brigade, in the Panama Canal Zone, was unusual in that it made a very serious effort to train even the cooks to fight, which takes time, too. C’s are pretty much it.
Even so, thin and hungry or not, after a month or two we could not eat the applesauce. That was probably seven or eight hundred calories a days that just got tossed.
We began going from thin to frigging emaciated.
*****
When I think upon the Great Applesauce Blight, though, I do not think about hardship or hunger. No, I think – as we old farts are wont to – about happier aspects of it.
Now this is no shit:
There we were, the heavy mortar platoon of 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry, stuck on top of a non-descript hill somewhere southwest of Gamboa, Canal Zone.
PFC McBrayer had a birthday out there in the jungle. I think it was his nineteenth birthday. None of us had been able to do any shopping, so we were all just stuck for getting him a birthday present. “I’m not giving up my pet scorpion,” said Big Al, who in fact, had a pet scorpion for the mega-ant versus scorpion gladiatorial combats we used to stage. “I’d offer to give him some of my crotch rot,” said Art, “but I think he already has some of his own.” “Howler monkey?” “Who’s going to catch it? And those suckers are mean, too.” “How about a sloth? They’re easy to catch.” “If the Lord God didn’t see fit to give B’rer Sloth an asshole, I don’t see why we should add to his troubles by catching him and wrapping him as a present.” Finally someone, I don’t think it was me, might have been Sergeant Sais, said, “Gentlemen, there can be only one proper gift under the circumstances,” and then he held up a – you guessed it – can of applesauce.
So we stuck nineteen or twenty Canal Zone Matches in a Nashville Bread Company Chocolate Butt Roll, invited McBrayer over, torched off the matches, sang Happy Birthday, then presented him his can of applesauce.
He was touched; you could see that. As he dashed tears from his eyes while making his, “Gee, you guys are just all so special … you shouldn’t have,” speech, you could see the emotion radiating from his face. And then, all choked up, he turned to go and tossed that can off applesauce off the hill with a casual contempt I have never seen before or since. It was the sheer, distilled essence of everything we all felt about applesauce.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-05.
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December 3, 2025
Battle of Peleliu 1944
Real Time History
Published 18 Jul 2025In September 1944, the US 1st Marine Division is on its way to another amphibious invasion in the Pacific – the tiny island of Peleliu. For almost half the Marines it will be their baptism of fire against veteran Japanese troops with a new defensive doctrine. Some American commanders call for the operation to be cancelled, but it goes ahead. By its end, half the Marines and all the Japanese will be killed or wounded – but was Peleliu worth it?
(more…)
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QotD: Origins of the Mediterranean “omni-spear”
From the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, a bronze spearhead (inv. 10212) from Italy, c. 1300-900 BC, identified as Villanovan or proto-Villanovan.
Why are so many early iron spearheads shaped this way? Well, the easy answer to the question is that it is because even earlier bronze spearheads were shaped this way. In every culture I’ve studied with the omni-spear, you can find bronze spearheads with the same basic shape – the strong mid-ridge, leaf-shaped blades and circular socket – proceeding them. There are differences; the bronze spearheads of this type tend to be shorter and as a result somewhat “stubbier” (that is, they’re just as wide, but not as long) compared to the later iron spearheads which borrow their shape. That seems like it is probably a concession to metallurgy and possibly production. On the production side, bronze artifacts were generally cast to shape and depending on the temperature of the cast and type of casting method, that can place upper-limits on the size of the final artifact. Certainly ancient bronze-smiths were capable of managing very large casts with high quality metals – the heaviest recovered naval ram (the Athlit ram, as far as I know) is absolutely massive at 465kg, cast in a single piece.
That said, I suspect the real issue that limits the size of bronze spearheads is the metal itself. Weapons generally tend to push their materials to the outer edges of what they are capable of, because of the demand to keep weight low: the smith is looking to hit the absolute minimum amount of metal which will handle the strains of impact. And the strains of impact here are considerable! Bronze under stress tends to undergo plastic deformation, which is to say that it bends and doesn’t bend back, it isn’t “springy”. As a result bronze weapons – swords, spearheads, arrow-heads, etc. – tend to be quite a bit shorter than later iron weapons, so that they can withstand the rigors of combat without permanently deforming in a way that would render them useless. But iron when put under mild stress deforms elastically, which is to say it is “springy” and when the force of stress is removed it bends back to its original shape (adding carbon to make a high-carbon “spring steel” can improve this quality), so even while iron isn’t any harder than bronze (though steel most certainly is), an iron weapon can take a bigger hit and not end up hopelessly bent. And that is even more true once you begin adding really any amount of carbon to make even very mild steels.
Consequently, you can push an iron sword to be longer for the same weight because you can count on it withstanding a hit, bending a bit to absorb the force and bending back when the force is removed, better than bronze. I suspect the same thing is happening as bronze spearhead designs shift to iron: smiths are realizing they can get a somewhat longer point, with a longer more deadly taper, without an unacceptable increase in weight.
But then why keep the shape? Because a lot of bronze age sword shapes drop or are extensively modified fairly quickly in the shift to iron in places where the omni-spearhead remains the standard shape, albeit somewhat larger than its bronze variant.
Well, the answer, to me, seems to be that its a pretty useful shape, at least in a particular combat environment.
The round socket, of course, is to fit the round haft of the spear. These sockets are, as noted, generally round, which suggests that these spears are almost entirely being used to thrust. You probably could cut with the edges of these blades, but if that was how you expected to use the spear, you’d want a different haft shape so that you could feel the alignment of the edges of the blades. Interestingly, octagonal or rhombic sockets are a minority type that appears in a lot of places (both Gaul and Spain, for instance), but they remain really rare, as opposed to, say, medieval polearms, where non-circular hafts become common over time so that the wielder can feel that edge-alignment.
Extending the socket to make the mid-ridge also makes a lot of sense, as it provides a nice, thick, stout element of the spear to resist the forces of impact, which is going to be a mix of compression and bending. In an ideal, perfect impact, it’d be all compression, but in the real world, your target isn’t standing still and your hit probably isn’t dead-on, so you want some part of the spearhead that can resist that impact and hold its shape, transmitting the force instead into the shaft. The mid-ridge, being nice and thick (and generally not hollow past the socket) accomplishes this neatly.
Meanwhile, those wide, thin blades ensure a wide wound that is going to slice through a lot of the target. You want that too, because the fellow striking with the weapon wants a wound which will disable their opponent as quickly as possible. After all, all of the time between the delivery of a wound and it becoming disabling is, definitionally, a period where you are in range of their counter-attack and they are not disabled and so able to give it. If you ever wondered why a lot of really narrow, quick effective piercing weapons like rapiers were less common on the battlefield, this is a big part of it: those penetrating wounds are really lethal but often not very quickly and in a battlefield (where you may not be able to quickly back off after having delivered a fatal wound) you want a wound that, fatal or not, is going to disable fast.
Wide slicing wounds do that for you, because they cut across blood vessels, muscles and tendons. The former leads to rapid blood-loss, which can be disabling (and of course, fatal, but again, you care about disabling; fatal or not is a problem to consider once you are out of danger), while the later can instantly render limbs useless. It doesn’t matter how much adrenaline or willpower an enemy has, if a blow has sliced the muscles they would use to move their limbs, they cannot physically move those limbs.
The shape of the blades also seems intentional. While we do see neatly “oval” shaped blades, the most common shapes are “teardrop” or “leaf” shapes, which are widest close to the base. That probably helps in preventing over-penetration, because you need to be able to pull the spear back after delivering a strike; you do not want it stuck in the target. Likewise, I think that’s why truly “arrow” shaped spearheads tend to be both early and relatively rare. Instead the base curves back into the socket rather than having barbs, to make it easier to get that spear back out of an opponent after you strike them.
At the same time, spears are by no means immune to weight considerations. Ideally a combatant wants the longest spear they can manage easily in a single hand. That in turn is going to place a hard limit on the weight of the spearhead; every gram in the spearhead shifts the center of balance forward, making the weapon harder to handle. Shifting that center of balance back means adding a gram to the spear butt. Spearheads are pretty much always heavier than spear butts (often several times over), but the basic interaction is there where adding mass to the tip of the spear imposes weight costs which limit length. The trade-off is actually quite clear in medieval spears, where winged and “hewing” spears with larger spear-tips do, in fact, tend to be shorter and may have often been intended for use in two hands.
And because the humans in these systems don’t differ all that much, everyone more or less hits the same set of tradeoffs at basically the same point and so ends up developing spears with very similar weight and length characteristics. This should, I hope, help to dispel any myths that this or that group of ancient agrarian people were super-strong supermen; Greek, Roman, Spanish, Gallic, and Persian spears are all of the same basic length and weight and modern enthusiasts, reenactors and experimental archaeologists can wield those spears just fine. The basic limits of an average warrior haven’t changed all that much.
What you are left with is a spear with a 2-2.5m haft (probably just under 1kg), with spear-tips ranging from 150-450g, mostly clustered in the center of that range around 200g, and spear-butts typically very light, less than 100g and very simple in design (with an exception here for the elaborate Greek saurotar). A simple, no-frills design that would have been very effective on foot or on horseback.1
But as a basic design, the typical omni-spear provides a very effective balance of capabilities: the longest infantry spear that is easy enough to handle with a tip that is suitably deadly against lightly armored or unarmored targets and typically a spear-butt which both encloses the base of the spear (preventing it from delaminating) and provides a point which can be used to both brace the weapon and as an emergency back-up weapon, without adding unacceptable amounts of weight. Note, of course, that I’ve said unarmored or lightly armored: the wide blade on that spearhead is going to cause a strike to have to move aside quite a bit of armor if your opponent is wearing some, greatly limiting the depth of a strike if you have to move the weapon through, say, thick textile armor or mail. But assuming you only expect to strike unarmored targets, or the unarmored portions of armored targets, the shape is very effective.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Mediterranean Iron Omni-Spear”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry,
- Though the Greek cavalry spear of the late-Classical and Hellenistic, the xyston – pronounced ksuston, not zystin – is differently structured than this.
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November 15, 2025
QotD: The innovation of infiltration tactics in trench warfare
The mature form of this tactical framework is often called “Hutier” tactics, after German general Oskar Emil von Hutier, though he was hardly the sole or even chief inventor of the method. In its mature form, the technique went thusly: instead of attacking with large waves of infantry which cleared each objective in sequential order, attacks ought to be proceeded by smaller units, carefully trained with the layout of the enemy positions. Those units, rather than having a very rigid plan of attack, would be given those general objectives and left to figure for themselves how to accomplish them (“mission tactics” or Auftragstaktik)1, giving them more freedom to make decisions based on local conditions and the ground.
These elite spearhead units, called Stoßtruppen or “Stormtroopers” were well equipped (in particular with a higher amount of automatic firearms and hand grenades, along with flamethrowers). Importantly, they were directed to bypass enemy strong-points and keep moving forward to meet their objectives. The idea here was that the follow-up waves of normal infantry could do the slow work of clearing out points where enemy resistance was strong, but the stormtroopers should aim to push as deeply as possible as rapidly as possible to disorient the defenders and rapidly envelop what defenses remained.2
These sets of infantry tactics were in turn combined with the hurricane barrage, a style of artillery use which focused on much shorter but more intense artillery barrages, particularly associated with Colonel Georg “Breakthrough” Bruchmüller. Rather than attempting to pulverize defenses out of existence, the hurricane barrage was designed merely to force enemies into their dugouts and disorient the defenders; much of the fire was directed at longer ranges to disrupt roads and artillery in the enemy rear. The short barrage left the ground relatively more intact. Meanwhile, those elite infiltration units could be trained to follow the creeping barrage very closely (being instructed, for instance, to run into the shell explosions, since as the barrage advantages, no gun should ever strike the same spot twice; a fresh shell-hole was, in theory, safe). Attentive readers will recognize the basic foundations of the “move fast, disorient the enemy” methods of the “modern system” here.
So did infiltration tactics break the trench stalemate? No.
First, it is necessary to note that while infiltration tactics were perhaps most fully developed by the Germans, they were not unique to them. The French were experimenting with many of the same ideas at the same time. For instance, basic principles of infiltration were being published by the French General Headquarters as early as April, 1915. André Laffargue, a French infantry captain, actually published a pamphlet, which was fairly widely distributed in both the French and British armies by the end of 1915 and in the American army in 1916, on exactly this sort of method. In many cases, like at the Second Battle of Artois, these French tactics bore significant fruit with big advances, but ran into the problem that the gains were almost invariably lost in the face of German counter-attacks. The Russians, particularly under Aleksei Brusilov, also started using some of these techniques, although Brusilov was as much making a virtue of necessity as the Russians just didn’t have that much artillery or shells and had to make do with less and Russian commanders (including Brusilov!) seem to have only unevenly taken the lessons of his successes.
The problem here is speed: infiltration tactics could absolutely more efficiently overrun the front enemy lines and even potentially defeat multiple layers of a defense-in-depth. But after that was done and the shock of the initial push wore off, you were still facing the same calculus: the attacker’s reinforcements, shells, artillery and supplies had to cross broken ground to reach the new front lines, while the defender’s counter-attack could ride railways, move over undamaged roads and then through prepared communications trenches. In the race between leg infantry and trains, the trains always won. On the Eastern Front or against the Italians fighting under the Worst General In History at Caporetto (1917), the already badly weakened enemy might simply collapse, producing massive gains (but even at Caporetto, no breakthrough – shoving the enemy is not a breakthrough, to qualify as a breakthrough, you need to get to the “green fields beyond” that is open ground undefended by the enemy), but against a determined foe, as with the 1918 Spring Offensives, these tactics, absent any other factor, simply knocked big salients3 in the line. Salients which were, in the event, harder to defend and brought the Germans no closer to victory. Eventually – often quite rapidly – the front stabilized again and the deadlock reasserted itself. Restoring maneuver, the actual end-goal of these tactics, remained out of reach.
None of this is to say that infiltration tactics were useless. They represented a real improvement on pre-war infantry tactics and continue to serve as the basis for modern infantry tactics. But they could not break the trench stalemate or restore maneuver.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
- Because it doesn’t fit anywhere else, I want to make a rather long note here. There is an odd tendency which I find quite frustrating, in which military concepts, unit designations and terminology from other languages are all translated into English when used, except for German terms. I suspect this has to do with the high reputation German military thinking holds in among the general public and some military practitioners. I do not share this view; both the German Imperial Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht (another term we never translated yet we feel no need to call the French army l’armée de terre) managed to lose the only major wars they were in, leading to the end of the states they served. Both armies were capable at some things and failed at others; their record certainly does not make German some sort of Holy Language of War. Nevertheless, where German technical terms are notable, I will include them so that the reader will know, should they encounter them elsewhere, that this is a term they are already familiar with, albeit in translation.
- It should be noted that the emphasis here remained on envelopment and destruction rather than on disorientation. The latter is a feature of subsequent systems based on German maneuver warfare, but was not a goal of the doctrine itself initially.
- A salient is a bulge in the line such that your position is bordered by the enemy on three sides. Such positions are very vulnerable, since they can be attacked from multiple directions and potentially “pinched off” at the base.
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November 9, 2025
Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the famous Canadian Corps in WW1
As a counterpoint to the OTT summary of Sir Arthur posted last week, here’s The Black Horse with part one of a two-part look at the man’s early career before joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Europe:
Sir Arthur Currie with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, February 1918.
Libraries and Archives Canada item ID number 3404878.
The Red Ensign is a publication deeply interested in leadership; the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason, this Remembrance Day, I have chosen to draw the audience’s attention to the life and times of Sir Arthur Currie, the first Canadian commander of the Canadian Corps during the Great War. This presents an opportunity to both on honour and reflect upon the courage and sacrifice of the men who have fought under the flag of this great nation, but also offers the language to articulate the task facing any who would attempt to lead Canada today. As Currie’s war was defined by the challenge [of] leadership of Canadians in the context of the shifting priorities of the late British Empire, any who would seek to lead Canadians today face will struggle to harmonize efforts on behalf of the Canadian people and the priorities and policies of the American power block which he cannot eschew.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; but when your country is an Imperial Dominion, who and what is “pro patria“, and how can one spend their life for them?
The Man Before the Great Man:
Arthur Currie was born in 1875 in Napperton, Ontario [50 km West of London], the third of eight children living on a homestead belonging to his grandfather. Raised with a the vigorous discipline of a Methodist home, Currie would remain a convicted Christian for his entire life, though he converted to Anglicanism as an adult. Currie was a good student, intending to pursue a career in law or medicine but dropped out of school twice, first temporarily because of the financial constraints brought on by the death of his father, and then for a second time at 19 because of a quarrel with one of his teachers. After leaving school he went West; after a string of failed efforts to establish himself via entrepreneurship and real-estate speculation he joined the Canadian militia as a gunner in 1897 in Victoria B.C. at the age of 23. A giant man (6’3″ at a time when the average Canadian height was 5’7″) with a noted eye for technical detail and, in the words of his son, a “tremendous command of profanity”, he quickly distinguished himself and was promoted to corporal before earning a commission as an officer in 1900. As an officer in peace time Currie was noted for his detailed inspections and his rapid transformation from “one of the boys”, into a rigid disciplinarian. This duality, an officer raised from the ranks, who could both embody the rigid tradition of the British military and who had an intimate familiarity with the life and ways of the enlisted men would become a defining feature of his career.
During Currie’s peace-time career as an officer he maintained a second career as a real-estate [agent]. After becoming head of Matson Insurance Firm 1904, he and the firm invested aggressively in the Victoria real-estate market. In 1913 Currie’s financial situation began to rapidly deteriorate as a consequence of price declines in the real-estate market. Currie’s financial problems nearly led him to refuse to stand up the 50th Regiment Gordon Highlanders of Canada in 1913. In July 1914 Curry used $10,833.34 of regimental funds intended for the purchase of uniforms and kit to pay his personal debts, and found himself facing forcible retirement just as the Canadian Army was being mobilized for war. At the intervention of one of his subordinates, Major Garnet Hughes, he instead accepted promotion as brigadier-general of the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Canadian Division, and ignored correspondence from the new commander of the 50th regiment, Major Cecil Roberts, about the missing funds until he was overseas.
Currie arrived at camp Valcartier on September 1st, 1914 to find himself charged with 10x as many men as he had ever led before, no staff, a shared tent as a command center, and the duty to prepare these men for one of the most difficult theatres of war the world has ever seen. The six months between taking command and the arrival of his brigade in the trenches near Ypres were marked by two mud besotted poorly supplied training camps, shoddy kit, rampant disease, and the company of a certain bear that was to become beloved by children around the world. Through this period Currie was well liked by the men, but known as a disciplinarian with an eye for technical detail. In March 1915 the brigade was deployed to what was expected to be a quiet part of the front with the intent of allowing the men to gain some experience with trench warfare before they were relied upon for action. Nobody anticipated what would happen next.
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September 22, 2025
QotD: Tactical combat on the pre-modern battlefield
In a fight, after all, a combatant is extremely vulnerable to attacks from behind or in their peripheral vision, especially if they are focused forward on the foe in front of them. A confused melee would thus produce extreme casualties and produce them extremely quickly. But fighters want to survive their combats and their leaders would like not only to win the battle but to have an army at the end of it. Remember: the purpose of the battle is to deliver a siege: if you win the battle but with only a pathetic handful of survivors, you haven’t really won much of anything.
The battle line is the obvious solution: each fighter is only responsible for a few feet of frontage directly in front of them, a small enough area that they can focus on it visually and direct whatever shield or armor or weapons they have towards it, giving them a greater margin of safety. Adding depth to the formation (that is, increasing the number of ranks, that is a row of fighters right to left) both secures each fighter against the possibility of being flanked due to the death of the fellows to their right or left (as now they’ll just be replaced by the next rank moving up) and adds a morale reinforcement which we’ll come back to […] But now you have a formation that consists essentially of a large number of files (that is, a single row of fighters front-to-back) which need to move together to create that unbroken, mutually supporting front line so that no one is being attacked from many sides at once. Again, all of this is before we start adding fighting styles like pike-formations or shield-walls that are designed to excel in this environment (and fare poorly out of it).
As an aside, this is one dynamic that I find games like Mount and Blade or the Total War series that simulate individual soldiers struggle to get quite right. In most games the line of formation either remains almost perfectly rigid (think units on “pike phalanx” in Rome: Total War) or units the moment they come into contact form rough blobs of models all pushing forward. But actually you are going to have men in the rear ranks trying to keep their relative position to the front ranks so the formation neither holds rigidly steady nor dissolves but is going to almost flex and bend (and if you are lucky, not tear or break). This is only an aside though because we’re not well informed about these sorts of dynamics, so it is hard to speak about them in-depth.
But to fight this way now means that all of your soldiers (really here we are talking about infantry; cavalry must also be coordinated but in different ways and because they are often composed of elites that coordination may be produced through different training methods) need to move in the same direction at the same speed in order to retain that front line where they can support each other. Again, we are not yet to something like a shield-wall or a sarisa-phalanx which demands tight coordination; even in a rough skirmish line you need to get everyone moving together just to maintain that unbroken front. A break in the front, after all, would be dangerous: enemies filtering into it uncontrolled could then flank and defeat individually the members of the broader line (two-on-one contests in melee combat typically end in seconds and are very lopsided), causing collapse.
Now the good news is that if all you need an army to do is form up in a rough line a few ranks deep and then move more or less forward, the coordination demands are not insurmountable. We’ve already discussed using marching formations to create the line of battle so all you need is a way to regulate speed (since forward is a fairly easy direction for everyone). It isn’t quite ideal for everyone to simply self-regulate their speed by looking around (at least not for a contact infantry line; for missile-skirmish troops moving in a “cloud” rather than a line they can absolutely do that) because that will produce a lot of stagger-start-stopping and accordioning which at best will slow you down and at worst will eventually turn your neat line into a rough crowd – one easily defeated if it is opposed by a line of infantry in good order. Keeping everyone in the same speed can be handled with music: the regular beat regulates the footsteps. That can be a marching song or it can be an instrument (ideally one easy to hear).
We’ve talked about armies – or components of armies – like this. I’ve described hoplite phalanxes through much of the classical periods, for instance, as essentially unguided missiles for this reason: the general hits “go” and the line moves forward. Likewise a shield-wall formation like the early English fyrd doesn’t need to do complex maneuvers. And for many armies, that was enough: a body of infantry which either held a position or moved forward in a single line, in some cases with a body of aristocratic cavalry which might be capable of more complex maneuvers (that the aristocrats had trained in since a young age). And you can see, if your culture has armies like this, why the general might be focused on either leading the cavalry in particular or else being the motivating “warrior-hero” general – such an army isn’t capable of much command once the advance starts in any event. They haven’t trained or prepared for it.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-17.
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September 4, 2025
QotD: The development of the “halftrack” during the interwar period
What drove the differences in tank development between countries were differences between how each of those countries imagined using their tanks, that is differences in tank doctrine. Now we should be clear here that there were some fundamental commonalities between the major schools of tank thinking: in just about all cases tanks were supposed to support infantry in the offensive by providing armor and direct fire support, including knocking out enemy tanks. Where doctrine differed is exactly how that would be accomplished: France’s doctrine of “Methodical Battle” generally envisaged tanks moving at the speed of mostly foot infantry and being distributed fairly evenly throughout primarily infantry formations. That led to tanks that were fairly slow with limited range but heavily armored, often with just a one-man turret (which was a terrible idea, but the doctrine reasoned you wouldn’t need more in a slow-moving combat environment). Of course this worked poorly in the event.
More successful maneuver warfare doctrines recognized that the tank needed infantry to perform its intended function (it has to have infantry to support) but that tanks could now move fast enough and coordinate well enough (with radios) that any supporting arms like infantry or artillery needed to move a lot faster than walking speed to keep up. Both German “maneuver warfare” (Bewegungskrieg) and Soviet “Deep Operations” (or “Deep Battle”) doctrine saw the value in concentrating their tanks into powerful striking formations that could punch hard and move fast. But tanks alone are very vulnerable and in any event to attack effectively they need things like artillery support or anti-air protection. So it was necessary to find ways to allow those arms to keep up with the tanks (and indeed, a “Panzer divsion” is not only or even mostly made up of tanks!).
At the most basic level, one could simply put the infantry on trucks or other converted unarmored civilian vehicles, making “motorized” infantry, but […] part of the design of tanks is to allow them to go places that conventional civilian vehicles designed for roads cannot and in any event an unarmored truck is a large, vulnerable tempting target on the battlefield.
The result is the steady emergence of what are sometimes jokingly called “battle taxis” – specialized armored vehicles designed to allow the infantry to keep up with the tanks so that they can continue to be mutually supporting, while being more off-road capable and less vulnerable than a truck. In WWII, these sorts of vehicles were often “half-tracks” – semi-armored, open-topped vehicles with tires on the front wheels and tracks for the back wheels, though the British “Universal Carrier” was fully tracked. Crucially, while these half-tracks might mount a heavy machine gun for defense, providing fire support was not their job; being open-topped made them particularly vulnerable to air-bursting shells and while they were less vulnerable to fire than a truck, they weren’t invulnerable by any means. The intended use was to deposit infantry at the edge of the combat area, which they’d then move through on foot, not to drive straight through the fight.
The particular vulnerability of the open-top design led to the emergence of fully-enclosed armored personnel carriers almost immediately after WWII in the form of vehicles like the M75 Armored Infantry Vehicle (though the later M113 APC was eventually to be far more common) and the Soviet BTRs (“Bronetransporter” or “armored transport”), beginning with the BTR-40; Soviet BTRs tended to be wheeled whereas American APCs tend to be tracked, something that also goes for their IFVs (discussed below). These vehicles often look to a journalist or the lay observer like a tank, but they do not function like tanks. The M113 APC, for instance, has just about 1.7 inches of aluminum-alloy armor, compared to the almost four inches of much heavier steel armor on the contemporary M60 “Patton” tank. So while these vehicles are armored, they are not intended to stick in the fight and are vulnerable to much lighter munitions than contemporary tank would be.
At the same time, it wasn’t just the infantry that needed to be able to keep up: these powerful striking units (German Panzer divisions, Soviet mechanized corps or US armored divisions, etc.) needed to be able to also bring their heavy weaponry with them. At the start of WWII, artillery, anti-tank guns and anti-air artillery remained almost entirely “towed” artillery – that is, it was pulled into position by a truck (or frequently in this period still by horses) and emplaced (“unlimbered”) to be fired. Such systems couldn’t really keep up with the tanks they needed to support and so we see those weapons also get mechanized into self-propelled artillery and anti-air (and for some armies, tank destroyers, although the tank eventually usurps this role entirely).
Self-propelled platforms proved to have another advantage that became a lot more important over time: they could fire and then immediately reposition. Whereas a conventional howitzer has to be towed into position, unlimbered, set up, loaded, fired, then limbered again before it can move, something like the M7 Priest can drive itself into position, fire almost immediately and then immediately move. This maneuver, called “shoot-and-scoot” (or, more boringly, “fire-and-displace”) enables artillery to avoid counter-battery fire (when an army tries to shut down enemy artillery by returning fire with its own artillery). As artillery got more accurate and especially with the advent of anti-artillery radars, being able to shoot-and-scoot became essential.
Now while self-propelled platforms were tracked (indeed, often using the same chassis as the tanks they supported), they’re not tanks. They’re designed primarily for indirect fire (there is, of course, a sidebar to be written here on German “assault guns” – Sturmgeschütz – and their awkward place in this typology, but let’s keep it simple), that is firing at a high arc from long range where the shell practically falls on the target and thus are expected to be operating well behind the lines. Consequently, their armor is generally much thinner because they’re not designed to be tanks, but to play the same role that towed artillery (or anti-air, or rocket artillery, etc.) would have, only with more mobility.
So by the end of WWII, we have both tanks of various weight-classes, along with a number of tank-like objects (APCs, self-propelled artillery and anti-air) which are not tanks but are instead meant to allow their various arms to keep up with the tanks as part of a combined arms package.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.
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August 17, 2025
QotD: The benefits of using auxilia units to the Roman Empire
The most obvious of these is manpower. Especially with a long-service professional army, capable and qualified recruits are in limited supply. The size of the Roman army during the imperial period ranged from around 300,000 to around 500,000, but in 14 AD (the year of Augustus‘ death) there were only 4,937,000 Roman citizens (Res Gestae 8.11), a figure which probably (a word I am using to gloss over one of the most technical and complex arguments in the field) includes women and children. Needless to say, keeping something close to a fifth of the adult male citizen population under arms continually, forever was simply never going to be feasible. After his victory in 31 BC at Actium, Octavian (soon to be Augustus) had acted quickly to pare down the legions, disbanding some, merging others, until he reached a strength of just 28 (25 after the three legions lost in 9 AD were not replaced). It was a necessary move, as the massive armies that had been raised during the fever-pitch climax of the civil wars simply could not be kept under arms indefinitely, nor could a short-term service conscript army be expected to garrison the hundreds of miles of Roman limes (“frontier, border”) in perpetuity.
Harnessing the manpower of the provinces was simply the necessary solution – so necessary that almost every empire does it. By their very nature, empires consist of a core which rules over a much larger subject region, typically with far greater population; securing all of that territory almost always requires larger forces than the core’s population is able or willing to provide, leading to the recruitment of auxiliaries of all kinds. But whereas many imperial auxiliaries, as noted above, turn out to be potential dangers or weaknesses, Rome’s auxilia seem to have been fairly robustly “bought in” on the system, allowing Rome to access motivated, loyal, cohesive and highly effective manpower, quite literally doubling the amount of military force at their disposal. Which in turn mattered a great deal because the combat role of the auxilia was significant, in stark contrast to many other imperial armies which might use auxiliaries only in subsidiary roles.
The auxilia also served to supply many of the combat arms the Romans themselves weren’t particularly good at. The Romans had always performed very well as heavy infantry and combat engineers, but only passably as light infantry and truly poorly as shock cavalry; they generally hadn’t deployed meaningful numbers of their own missile cavalry or archers at all. We’ve already talked a lot about how social institutions and civilian culture can be important foundational elements for certain kinds of warfare, and this is no less true with the Romans. But by recruiting from subject peoples whose societies did value and practice the kinds of warfare the Romans were, frankly, bad at, the Roman skill-set could be diversified. And early on, this is exactly what we see the auxilia being used for (along with also providing supplemental heavy infantry), with sagitarii (archers), funditores (slingers), exploratores (scouts) and cavalry (light, heavy and missile), giving the Romans access to a combined arms fighting force with considerable flexibility. And the system clearly works – even accounting for exaggerated victories, it is clear that Roman armies, stretched over so long a frontier, were both routinely outnumbered but also routinely victorious anyway.
As Ian Haynes notes, the ethnic distinctiveness of various auxilia units does not seem to have lasted forever, though in some cases distinctive dress, equipment and fighting styles lasted longer. Most auxilia were posted far from their regions of origin and their units couldn’t rely on access to recruits from their “homeland” to sustain their numbers over the long haul (although some number of recruits would almost certainly come from the military families of veterans settled near the forts). But that didn’t mean the loss of the expertise and distinctive fighting styles of the auxilia. Rather skills, weapons and systems which worked tended to get diffused through the Roman army (particularly in the auxilia, but it is hard not to notice that eventually the spatha replaces the gladius as the sword of the legions). As Ovid quips, Fas est et ab hoste doceri, “It is right to learn, even from the enemy” (Met. 4.428); the Romans do that a lot. The long-service professional nature of these units presumably made a lot of this possible, with individual cohortes and alae becoming their own pockets of living tradition in the practice of various kinds of fighting and acclimating new recruits to it. Consequently, not only did the Roman army get access to these fighting-styles, because the auxilia were actually integrated into the military system rather than merely attached to it, they also got the opportunity to adopt or imitate the elements of the fighting styles that worked.
Finally, the auxilia system also minted new Romans. We’ve already mentioned that auxilia veterans received Roman citizenship on retirement, but that wasn’t the extent of it. We can see in inscriptions that the degree of cultural fluency that soldiers in the auxilia gained with Roman culture was high; they often adopted Roman or Romanized names and seem to have basically always learned Latin (presumably because their Roman officers wouldn’t have spoken their language). While some units of the auxilia kept distinctive national dress as a sort of uniform, most of the auxilia seem to have adopted a style of dress that, while distinct from the legions, was generally in keeping with the Roman tradition of military dress (which was not quite the same as Roman civilian dress). They also partook of the Roman military diet (Roman soldiers kept a similar diet all over the empire, even if that meant shipping thousands of amphora of olive-oil and sour wine to northern England) which would have given them a diet in common with many work-a-day Romans too. Once retired, auxilia soldiers tended to settle where they served (rather than returning to their “home” provinces), which meant settling in frontier provinces where their citizenship set them apart as distinctively Roman, wherever they may have come from.
Exactly how many auxilia would have retired like this requires a degree of number crunching. Given a 20-year tour of service and zero mortality, we might expect around 7,500 men to pass through the auxilia each year. But of course, mortality wasn’t zero and so we have to expect that of our c. 20-year-old recruits, some number are going to die before retirement. Using some model life tables (following B. Frier, “Demography” in CAH^2 XI (2000)), we should figure that very roughly one third of our recruits will have died before reaching discharge. We then we need to adjust our recruitment figures to retain the same total strength and we get something like 9,000 new recruits each year to keep a strength of c. 150,000 with mortality counted for and 20 year tours. That gives us roughly 6,000 auxilia living to retirement each year. That may seem a small number, but that gradual accretion matters when it runs for decades and centuries and the newly enfranchised family units (recall that the citizenship grant covers children and sort-of-kind-of his spouse1) tend to settle on the frontiers, which is a really handy place to have communities of citizens. If we assume that these new citizen families mostly reproduced themselves (or more correctly that they went extinct or split with multiple children at roughly the same rate with no natural population growth), then we’d expect this process to produce perhaps something like 1.5 million new citizen households up until the Constitutio Antoniniana. Being very back of the envelope then, we might – once we account for women and children descendants of those soldiers – assume that on the eve of the general grant of citizenship in 212, there were perhaps 4 million Romans whose citizenship status was a product of service in the auxilia somewhere in their history; perhaps representing something like 7% of the entire population (including non-free persons). Were we to assume larger households (which seems wise, given that retired auxiliaries are probably more likely than average to be in an economic position to have a larger family), that figure would be even higher.
That is a very meaningful number of new Romans. And those figures don’t account for some of the other ways Roman citizenship tended to expand through communities both through manumission but also the political networks citizenship created (your Latin-speaking former-auxiliary citizen neighbors are a lot more likely to be able to help intercede to get you citizenship or get your community recognized as a municipia with that attendant citizenship grant). And not only are those new Romans by legal status, but new Romans who have, by dint of military training and discipline, absorbed quite a lot of Roman culture. As best we can tell, they tended to view the Roman Empire as their polity, rather than as a foreign or oppressive entity. They were “bought in” as it were. Again, this does not seem to have been the Roman intent, but rather an opportunistic, self-serving response to the need to maintain the loyalty of these troops; citizenship was, after all, a free benefit the emperor might bestow at no cost to the treasury (since citizens who lived outside of Italy still owed taxes) or himself.
Of course that fits the auxilia in to a later pattern in the provinces which becomes perhaps most apparent as the Roman Empire begins to collapse …
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
- Note on the coverage of the spouse. The grant of citizenship covered any biological children of the discharged auxiliary but did not extend citizenship to his wife. It did however, give an auxiliary the right to contract a lawful marriage with effectively any free woman, including non-citizens and the children resulting from such a union would be citizens themselves. Consequently, it extended one of the core privileges of citizenship to the non-citizen wife of a discharged auxiliary: the right to bear citizen children. Since the wife would be part of the retired auxiliary’s household (and then later, if he predeceased her, potentially in the household of her male citizen children) she’d be legally covered in many cases because a legal action against her would generally be an action against her husband/child. Given that a number of the rights of citizens simply didn’t apply to women in the Roman world (e.g. office holding), this system left the wife of a retired auxiliary with many, but not all, of the privileges of citizenship, so long as her husband and her marriage survived. That said, the legal status remained vested in her husband or her children, which made it more than a little precarious. One of these days, we can talk more about the structure of the Roman familia.
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August 5, 2025
QotD: Fighting a Middle Republic Legion
As you approach the velites, they scatter back to their lines and now the first real trial comes: when you are about twenty meters out from the enemy line, a storm of those heavy pila come in, thick and all at once. Each one masses around 1.3kg (just short of three pounds) so even if the tip doesn’t bite, one of these things clanging off of armor or a shield is going to hurt, the impacts stagger men near you as you struggle to keep formation (and for a Hellenistic army, get and keep those sarisa-points down). The impact of the massed volley, especially against close-order infantry with tight fighting-width, is going to be chaotic as some men are killed, others disabled, still more suddenly staggered. The volley is followed almost immediately by the on-rush of the hastati. These guys don’t have a long spear for keeping you at a distance, they’re all brandishing swords and aim to get in close, using their large body-shields to absorb any blows you might throw while they get right up in your face, where their swords can stab and slash viciously over or under your shield. These hastati are aggressive and they’re probably better armored than you are.
And of course an engagement in contact like this is unpredictable. Perhaps in some areas, your lines push forward, whereas in other places it bends back. For large maneuver units (like taxeis!) this can be a real problem, but Roman maniples are small, so one maniple can advance if it finds the opportunity while others hold position or are even forced back (we actually see a general give, essentially, an “advance at your own discretion” order at Pydna, Plut. Aem. 20.8).
After a short and terrifying experience – these moments of shock combat probably didn’t last all that long, perhaps as little as just a few minutes – the hastati fall back. The front of your line is already physically and mentally exhausted. Many men are wounded and certainly some have been killed or disabled. I don’t want to oversell the casualties aspect of this: armies don’t annihilate each other in stand-up engagements (instead more casualties happen in pursuit), but wounds and exhaustion matter. Latin has this phrase, of being confectus vulneribus, “exhausted by wounds” or perhaps “worn down by wounds” (Liv. 24.26.14, 31.17.11, Caes. BGall. 5.45) to describe how the accumulation of a lot of little wounds can sap soldiers of their ability to resist effectively, even if no one wound is lethal. And just as important, all of the emotional impetus of your initial attack is spent. And there’s a decent chance that, as you try to breath, you still have these light velites‘ javelins (the hasta velitaris) thudding into your line every few seconds, because – again – they carry seven of them. They’re not out.
And then, as you are getting your bearings, trying desperately to catch your breath, the principes come up. They’re not physically tired or emotionally exhausted, but eager (like you were a half an hour ago when you advanced), they’ve been waiting all this time. Worse yet, these are probably the most combat-effective soldiers the Romans have, in the prime of their life, with years of combat experience. Now the second volley of pila comes in, creating yet more chaos. And then more angry, heavily armored Romans, behind their big shields, stabbing and cutting with their deadly gladii.
Now the men at the back of your single line may be relatively fresh, but you have no real way to get them to the front, so the wrath of the principes falls on men who are already exhausted, already wounded, already tired and already out of fight. Your line isn’t advancing so stridently; the men in the back, if the formation is deep, don’t know why the advance is slowed, why the line seems to be wavering, only that it seems to be wavering. And meanwhile, everyone is hoping that, at any moment, the victorious cavalry on the flanks is going to show up and win the battle, but they can’t see it anywhere in the confusion. Maybe your cavalry has won and is moments away – or perhaps Antiochus III charged it off the field again and no help is coming. Or perhaps the enemy cavalry has tied it up or worse yet, the Romans’ highly skilled Numidian allies might have mastered the flanks. You have no idea, you only know that help isn’t here, you are tired and more Romans are upon you. And somewhere, the thin thread of human courage snaps, either from the exhausted men in front or the confused men behind and the formation begins to collapse.
As the collective defense of lapped shields or serried pikes gives way, the Romans are now truly in their element: their large shields function just fine in individual combat and their versatile swords do as well. Lead by their centurions, the principes, with practiced and experienced skill, are finding the gaps, cutting as they go. As the formation crumbles, the velites can pursue – lightly armored, but well enough armed, backed up by the equites if there are any left.
You can see thus how this is a formation designed to wear down an enemy’s main battle line. It isn’t that the Romans are set massively deeper than a Hellenistic army, either. Assuming a base-3 set of file-depths (which seems to me the most likely), the Roman ranks are probably six, six and three men deep (hastati, principes, triarii), for a total depth over each file of 15, one less than the normal Macedonian formation. And with the wider fighting intervals the Romans use, they won’t normally have much of a problem matching the fighting width of the enemy army, unless substantially outnumbered (as, for instance, at Magnesia).
It’s not the Roman formation is deeper, it’s that its successive battle lines avoid exposing the entire army to exhaustion, attrition and friction all at once. In effect, it uses the same principles as defense-in-depth, exploiting the effect of friction on the enemy line to wear it down, but does so on the offensive. I don’t think it is an accident that when the Romans do lose, it tends to be because this model battle was spoiled in some way, either because the army was ambushed, enveloped, something disrupted the triplex acies or because the enemy was able to carry the field with just the momentum of the first charge – the Roman lines essentially failing like a building undergoing controlled demolition, as each floor pancakes the next without slowing.
But an army that isn’t able to decisively win the battle either at the first onset or somewhere else on the line is going to find itself in quite a lot of trouble as the Romans almost inevitably sandpaper away the morale and stamina of the main line of resistance until it collapses.
Now many of you may already be realizing that this kind of force is going to present a Hellenistic army with a lot of problems, both because it is set up for a different kind of fight than they are, but also because it may end up matching much heavier troops against the lighter parts of a Hellenistic army. But before we jump into battles, we need to zoom up to the upper levels of military analysis – operations and strategy – and talk about the advantages the Romans have there.
Because if all the Romans had was an edge in their tactical system, we might expect them to win battles but sometimes lose wars. Instead, while the Romans sometimes lose battles, they seemingly always win the war.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IIa: How a Legion Fights”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-02-09.
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