Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire

>> I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover.

Which is why formations were used. The inexperienced men were placed in the center, hemmed in by more experience soldiers who were less likely to run for cover. Sun Tzu would call this a death zone. A soldier will fight when to fight is his only option.

This was a nice write and it would be nice to hear about the advantages of the long bow.

>Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible

and that is where volley may be helpful - simultaneous hit to multiple horses and soldiers may break the pace and may cause stumbling and local pile-ups. Slow down of advance -> more exposure time to the follow up arrows.

The article's point about the lethality of arrows.. I feel like every Youtube test I've seen on the subject shows that Arrows can pierce even full plate pretty reasonably easily, though this is not scientific at all ofc.

> that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.

I mean there are lots of people that dumbbell row 95s or 100s or 105s for 8-10 reps (I used to be one em...). That's not really "seconds" but sure it's not a lot either. But then again no one literally only trains dumbbell rows so it's not at all unbelievable to me that you could do this (train to draw a high weight bow many times without "gassing").

> First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it

Proving a negative is difficult, but it is evidence that an historian of warfare has never seen it. If it happened much at all, there should be examples of it.

Edit: To quote the OP: "... as hard as it is to prove a negative, I will note that I have never seen a clear instance of volley fire with bows in an original text and so far as I can tell, no other military historians have either. And we have been looking."

> it still seems perfectly reasonable to me

Where's your evidence? "seems perfectly reasonable" leads to belief in witchcraft, the stars orbit the earth, leaches cure disease, the lack of germ theory, etc. That's why we modern humans require evidence.

> But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.

It’s not perfectly reasonable at all. When the enemy is charging, what you want is maximum efficiency, which means a rate of shooting as high as possible, which means everyone shoots as soon as they are ready, which precludes synchronisation.

When the enemy is not charging and just manoeuvring, volleys are counter-productive because you just give them some time to hide behind their shields and move between volleys.

I can imagine maybe one time when such tactics could work, it’s in an ambush. But then it’s not large scale and it is quite difficult to pull it off, because you need to synchronise the archers without giving away their presence. And it’s quite far from the autor’s pet peeve, which was archers fighting like they had guns in big battles.

> upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.

You cannot really do that without extensive drills that were not really a thing in pre-modern armies. There are too many variations in individual strength, not really standardised equipment, and different people behaving differently. Even if you take 10 people, you would not get synchronised arrows if you did that.

> Am I missing something here?

Why would they? What advantage would they gain doing so? Particularly when doing it more naturally is more efficient and effective (not going to repeat the story’s argument, but there are several).

I don't see what's so beneficial about a volley. Concentrating the arrows allows the opposing force to ready their shields which renders the volley less effective, and advance in between volleys. It's better to rain arrows continuously which prevents the opposing force from defending in any capacity without stopping their advance entirely.

Arrows are not more effective (e.g. armor penetration) in a volley, and the psychological effect is also less for volleys I would argue: you know a volley is coming, duck and cover, and afterwards it's clear, vs a continuous rain where you never know when an arrow is headed toward you specifically.

> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields

Why wait for a specific command? It sounds like as an archer maybe you could try and hit a few far-off enemies whenever you wanted. There will be a critical period when most of the arrows will be released and be most effective, but the primary limiting factor is the archer's fatigue level. The article makes it clear there's not really a shortage of arrows.

So it's probably more like "people start talking, some arrows start flying, as the enemies get closer more arrows start flying". Which is pretty different from a coordinated volley.

There's no evidence of it in contexts where we would expect something like this to be mentioned. So the absence is a strong indication that it didn't happen.

> You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy.

Yeah, pretty much nothing of that is actually reasonable.

First off, pre-modern military command at a tactical level is almost completely nonexistent. The only command that can be reliably given is "go", and even then, unless you're decently well drilled, that's still as likely to come from following what your neighbors are doing than being able to pay attention to your battlefield commander who might be a half-mile away. And archers are the least trained portion of the pre-modern battlefield!

Second, actually trying to hold everybody for a single coordinated volley seems incredibly counterproductive. The primary purpose of volley fire, as explained in the article, is to mitigate slow reload times. Archers have the opposite problem; they're going to exhaust their ammunition supply in a few minutes. Staggering the start time of the archer attack over, say, 30 seconds is actually a very significant percentage increase in the amount of time the attacking army is going to be harried by the archers.

> And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.

Already by this point, that means you don't have a single, solid pulse of arrows, but rather a continuous stream that's going to take--at least--2 or 3 seconds before everyone has loosed their first arrow. And quite probably, your slowest archers are loosing their first arrows after the fastest archers have loosed their second arrow. It doesn't make sense to me to call that a "volley", since it's not going to look anything like what we would think of as a mass volley of arrows.

Given that you're already stretching the definition of "volley" quite hard to match what you think is happening, and given that there is absolutely no sign that anyone ever thought trying to achieve a more cohesive initial volley was worth striving for, I think it does more harm than good to argue that volley fire existed in some form with regards to regular bows.

I think his argument about draw weight is compelling. In order to do a coordinated valley you would have to have everyone draw and hold.

Bows have highly variable “lock time”. There is no trigger and you can’t reasonably get an army to draw at the same rate.

Reload times are fast enough that the fastest archer may be able to be ready to fire again before the last archer has completed their first shot.

In those circumstances, you would simply get orders to start and stop firing.

I don't think the article is arguing there would not be a starting point to archer fire. One would expect commanders to make some decision about when their forces would engage, and even without explicit command most soldiers would probably recognize the same point as being ideal to start firing. It might not be as sharp as a line of muskets, but odds are everyone would have shot an arrow before anyone got off their second.

But volleys imply a specific coordinated cadence. If you're just telling your troops to open fire, whether it be with bows or fire arms, that's not a volley.

I think the blog post is arguing against a volley that happens all in one instant, requiring all the archers to synchronize perfectly. This seems pretty easy to argue against because while movies do it because it's dramatic and cool, it's harder to justify in actual combat situations (and the post goes into great detail on the pros and cons).

However, it seems a lot more reasonable to suppose that archers were sometimes told to hold until a given strategic moment. In that case, you might see something resembling a volley when, say, an advancing enemy reaches a particular position and the archers begin loosing. But I don't think that's what the post was talking about.

There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.

There's a variety of essays on Total War and various infantry types, how well the tactics are modeled, etc.: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Facoup.b...

i remember a history channel show using the total war games in order to determine the best type of bow. I'm not sure how accurate it was

The name of the blog is "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry". The symptoms you see are caused by Unmitigated Pedantry. It's the author's style