{"id":95722,"date":"2026-05-29T01:00:45","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T05:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=95722"},"modified":"2026-05-28T10:18:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T14:18:52","slug":"qotd-what-is-volley-fire-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/05\/29\/qotd-what-is-volley-fire-for\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: What is volley fire and what is it for<\/em>?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We want to start by understanding what volley fire is<\/em> and what it is for<\/em><\/strong>. Put simply, “volley fire” is the tactic of having a whole bunch of soldiers with ranged weapons (typically guns) fire in coordinated groups: sometimes with the entire unit all firing at once or with specific sub-components of the unit firing in coordinated fashion, as with the “counter-march”. In both cases, the problem that volley fire is trying to overcome is slow weapon reload times<\/strong>: this is a solution for slow-firing<\/em> but powerful<\/em> ranged weapons. That has generally meant firearms, historically, but we do actually see volley fire drill with crossbows in China from a very early period as well (but, interestingly, there’s no evidence I am aware of that volley fire was ever done with crossbows in Europe \u2013 when Europeans decide to do volley fire with firearms, it seems to have been an entirely new idea).1<\/sup><\/p>\n

Volley fire can cover for the slow reload rate of guns or crossbows in two ways. The first are volley fire drills designed to ensure a continuous curtain of fire; the most famous of these is the “counter-march”, a drill where arquebuses or muskets are deployed several ranks deep (as many as six). The front rank fires a volley (that is, they all fire together) and then rush to the back of their file to begin reloading, allowing the next rank to fire, and so on. By the time the last rank has fired, the whole formation has moved backwards slightly (thus “counter” march) and the first rank has finished reloading and is ready to fire. The problem this is solving is the danger of an enemy, especially cavalry, crossing the entire effective range of the weapon in the long gap between shots. This, by the by, was the volley fire tactic that was being used in China with crossbows before gunpowder; I don’t know that anyone ever did volley-and-charge with crossbows, which lack the lethality of muskets.<\/p>\n

The other classic use is volley-and-charge<\/strong>. Because firearms are very<\/em> lethal but slow to reload, it could be very effective to march in close order right up to an enemy, dump a single volley by the entire unit into them to cause mass casualties and confusion and then immediately charge with pikes or bayonets to try to capitalize on the enemy being demoralized and confused. You can see variations on this tactic in things like the 17th century Highland Charge or the contemporary Swedish G\u00e5\u2013P\u00e5<\/em> (“go on”). By charging rather than waiting to reload, the attacker could take advantage of the high lethality of firearms without suffering the drawback of long reload times.<\/p>\n

Crucially, note that volley-and-charge works because it compresses a lot<\/em> of lethality into a very short time, which I suspect is why we don’t see it with bows or crossbows (but do<\/em> see it with javelins, which may have shorter range and far fewer projectiles, but seem to have had higher lethality per projectile). As we’re going to see in a moment, the lethality of bows or crossbows against armored, shielded infantry \u2013 even in close order \u2013 was pretty low at any given moment and needed to add up over an extended period of shooting. By contrast, muskets were powerful enough to defeat most armor and thus to disable or kill basically anyone they hit, limited of course by reload time: with a reload time of as much as 30 seconds for earlier matchlocks, a line of musketeers might only be able to fire a few times at an advancing infantry unit (which might take two or three minutes to walk through effective range) and given the limited accuracy of smoothbore muskets, only the last shots would hit at a high level. By contrast, a unit doing volley-and-charge is compressing probably close to 50% of the lethality of sustained shooting, devastating moment and then immediately<\/em> charging.<\/p>\n

Putting that much<\/em><\/strong> lethality into a singular instant was valuable from a morale perspective and of course it enabled a unit to quick march through the enemy’s effective range, stopping only briefly to fire and charge, limiting losses from steady enemy fire. But as we’re going to see, the lethality of bows (and, to a significant extent, crossbows) was much lower<\/em><\/strong> and so couldn’t be effectively compressed into that single, devastating, confusing moment.2<\/sup><\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2005-05-02.<\/p>\n

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  1. On drill and in particular, counter-march volley fire with crossbows, see Andrade, The Gunpowder Age<\/strong> (2016), 149-160.<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. It also didn’t generate a smokescreen to help with the final rushing charge, whereas a musket-and-bayonet unit might benefit significantly from firing and then charging through and out of its own obscuring smoke into a terrified and confused enemy.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    We want to start by understanding what volley fire is and what it is for. Put simply, “volley fire” is the tactic of having a whole bunch of soldiers with ranged weapons (typically guns) fire in coordinated groups: sometimes with the entire unit all firing at once or with specific sub-components of the unit firing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,5,41,663],"tags":[1594,31,1457,49,1103],"class_list":["post-95722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","category-weapons","tag-archery","tag-army","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-guns","tag-infantry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oTU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95722"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102728,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95722\/revisions\/102728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}