When did the tactic of volley fire die out? I imagine it would have been as the bolt action rifle came out...

>Trench fighting was common since the beginning of firearms.

Older than that, actually. Digging a trench to protect the camp is at least Marian era, and very possibly older still. I mean hell, one of the biggest victories in the rise of Islam was literally called "The battle of the trench".

Trenches existed before then, but before the Civil war it hadn't been used en masse.

General Longstreet wasn't dumb. He realized the new rifles of the era could take men out farther away than old smoothbore muskets could.

He was against Picket's Charge at Gettysburg and suggested they find a fortified position and let the Union come to them.

You should read Victor Davis Hanson's "The Western Way of War" then. He discusses the history of the West's method of straightforward, brawling warfare starting from greek hoplites stabbing each other to death while standing in a line.

No.
Yes
Close.
No, Hanson isn't an actual real historian and none of his thesis holds up.

That's like reading guns germs and steel, when you should be reading biological Impreslism.

Read Paddy Griffith instead, or on Infantry.

Breech loading allowed for easier reloading of rifled firearms as well as laying down while reloading. Aerodynamic bullets like the Minie ball allowed for enhanced accuracy and accurately shooting at man-sized targets at great distances.

>american inventions
>trenches
>burgers

Hanson received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1975[3] and his PhD in classics from Stanford University in 1980. He is a Protestant Christian.[4]

Hanson is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Fellow in California Studies at the Claremont Institute, and professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno,[5] where he began teaching in 1984, having created the classics program at that institution.

?????

He's an idiot, Harold White is employed by NASA, doesn't make him not an idiot.

The Greeks almost never fought pitched battles, they preferred raids. As did the Knights, (Chevachee)

Go on ask historians and bring up Hanson, or on any history forum worth it's salt. He was paid by bush to try to make the Iraq war look good.

Aye, this guy helped them a lot with fortifications and he is definitely not American.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Kościuszko

That sounds like a lot of bull though.

It wasn't change in the firearms from muzzle-loaded muskets to breach-loaded rifles that changed volley fire or bayonet charges but the firepower of artillery. If there wasn't artillery that was capable of rapidly decimating whole regiments in WW1 there wouldn't be trench warfare. Hell, even in WW1 Austrians for example were using outdated tactic of unrelenting attack with volley fire and bayonet charges but got utterly destroyed due increase of firepower compared to amount of men. Austrians themselves had powerful artillery which was used by Germans to completely level forts which would be considered impregnable before.

So I would say late 19th century is when volley fire died out.

It was Ottomans who used volley fire first as far as I know but the craziest one is definitely the Swedish salvo fire.

Also they didn't stand in line and shoot at each other often but rather did bayonet charges or cavalry flanking as well.

>When did the tactic of volley fire die out?
When smokeless ammo appeared and started making accuracy more of a factor than volume of fire.

Not one post about the range of firearms increasing in the mid 19th century?

>In the 1840s and 1850s, many smooth bore muskets had their barrels rifled so that they could fire the new Minié ball. These "rifled muskets" or "rifle muskets" were long enough to serve the function of muskets in close formations of line and square, were as quick to load as the old muskets and as easy to use with a minimum of training. Yet the Minié-type rifled muskets were much more accurate than smooth bore muskets. The loose fitting ball in a smooth bore musket was accurate to ranges of 50 to 75 yards (46 to 69 m), or less. Rifled muskets increased the effective range to about 200 to 300 yards (180 to 270 m), and a rifled musket could often hit a man-sized target up to 500 yards (460 m) away.[6] This potential accuracy, however, required skills only acquired through training and practice; a rifle-musket in the hands of a raw recruit would not have performed very much better than a smoothbore.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifled_musket

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minié_ball

There is your beginning of the end of volley fire.

samefag
This user gets it.

Your rifle can be as accurate as you want, but if you can't see where the fuck you're aiming because of the smoke you can't really expect to hit your targwt.

Like ten years later you have breach-loading rifles, rifled muskets didn't change anything then, they were mostly used by skirmishers like it was in Napoleonic wars who generally harassed enemy lines. Also rifling was not a new thing, armies often still preferred muzzle-loaded smoothbores because they had a greater rate of fire. It isn't until breach-loading rifles, which had both better rate of fire, better range, better accuracy and basically no downsides compared to smoothbores aside from ease of production that changed the nature of the combat.

>This potential accuracy, however, required skills only acquired through training and practice; a rifle-musket in the hands of a raw recruit would not have performed very much better than a smoothbore.

This is the key point. Rifle-muskets hardly made a difference to anyone except sharpshooters. Men of the line continued to fire more or less at random. When you compare hit rates and casualty rates of the Napoleonic Wars to the ACW, they're about the same.

A rifle-musket, ironically, would have been less accurate in the hands of men who weren't thoroughly trained in marksmenship. The conical bullet is heavier and slower than the round ball, and has a much more arcing trajectory, making it much easier to shoot over or under the target if the sights weren't adjusted to the correct range.

Since under combat conditions, for whatever reason, soldier's aim is highly impaired compared to their theoretical performance, soldiers hit their targets purely by chance. What did line formations in wasn't accuracy but higher rates of fire. More bullets in the air meant more chances to hit the target. Even going from 3 shots a minute muzzleloaders to 6-10 shots a minute breechloaders made a massive difference.

>[Longstreet] suggested they find a fortified position and let the Union come to them

Yeah, and when Lee didn't accept his suggestion, he sulked and dragged his feet on the second day, probably costing Lee the vicroty.

Where is this image from? Google images is being useless as fuck (as usual since they "improved" it)

Looks like an osprey book. Based on their clothing I'd guess it's 80 years war, possibly 30 years war.

>best hypothesis for this image: agriculture

I literally have an entire book that is nothing but orthdoxists and revisionists arguing about hoplite warfare.

And by arguing, I mean each chapter is just a summation of each side of one part of a four day debate.

They agree on one thing:
Fuck hanson, nothing he says holds up to scrutiny.

Mesopotamia had men engaging in decisive infantry battle when the greeks were still banging rocks together. Meanwhile, the celts evolved towards decisive shock charges by infantry totally independently.

WW1 walking fire anyone? Literally why the Entente was so invested in finding semi auto or full auto infantry weapons by the last two years of the war.