Line infantry tactics

It always makes me think, when someone affirms that the reason why battles used to be conducted in lines is because the muskets were inaccurate. What makes them think that being in close formation improves the accuracy of a weapon ? 10 shooters in loose order can shoot just as well as 10 shooters in close order. All it does is make you a bigger target, so it didn't give any advantage for ranged combat.

But if you look at how infantry fought before the age of gunpowder, you can see why they use the close order : it allowed each man in a formation to assist the next one in melees.
Even after the invention of firearms, cavalry and bayonet charges remained a threat. Because of the reloading speed of the weapons (roughly 20 seconds), a unit that had just fired became vulnerable to a counter-charge, and that's why the tight order was used.

Another bizarre opinion is that Volley fire was supposed to offset, again, the inaccuracy of muskets. Could you explain to me how that works ? How I see it : 100 shots in one volley have the same firepower than 100 staggered shots. The only difference is, if not waiting for the order to shoot, everyone reloaded at different times, which could cause problems, I suppose, for the group to be able to maneuver as a unit.

Many reasons exist, but I can't answer with any certain authority on the matter beside what I know.

The one reason that comes to mind is:
>Loose formation
>Shoot one round
>Begin to reload
>Cavalry, an injun, some Hoodoo, or General Custer himself begins to charge me
>Forget about reloading and just run and drop my shit
>Enemy gains all that ground that I just retreated from

In a formation:
>We all fire at once
>Their forces fall by 5%
>Kneel
>Line behind me fires
>Their forces fall by another 5%
>Line behind THEM fires all at once
>Their forces fall by another 5%
>After all that, we're finally done loading, so we can just straight up continue shooting again until they all either rout, surrender, or die

The first row would shoot, then duck to reload while the line behind them fired over their heads. This is the only way they could press fire continuously considering the reload time. Order is important in carrying out military operations, if you gave a bunch of dudes guns and told them to charge it wouldn't turn out well.

>Another bizarre opinion is that Volley fire was supposed to offset, again, the inaccuracy of muskets. Could you explain to me how that works ? How I see it : 100 shots in one volley have the same firepower than 100 staggered shots. The only difference is, if not waiting for the order to shoot, everyone reloaded at different times, which could cause problems, I suppose, for the group to be able to maneuver as a unit.

Because again, as you've pointed out, melee combat, or the threat of melee combat, was still an important part of line battle. Sure, you want to kill enemy soldiers when you shoot, but that's not all, you want to kill them in the most efficient manner to either force them to break and run, or to set them up for a decisive follow-up, possibly in melee. To that end, killing specific sections of their army is more useful than just randomly killing people all over their formation, ideally, you want most of your firepower concentrated at a small section of their group, break that, and then flood through the gap.

But, as noted, muskets don't have great accuracy. Getting that sort of pinpoint concentration is hard to do when your formation is scattered, because they can't fire all that far and hope to hit anything, and it's hard to direct them in an era where signalling was done by flag or by shouting.

It's not about maximizing overall deaths from musket fire, it's about breaking a specific point of the enemy, which you are better served by tightly packing your men.

Morale shock.

If you had 1,000 musketeers open fire and even if only 10% hit, that's still about 100 enemies hit. For a random peasant conscripted into the army, you'd be terrified shitless if you start hearing screams of pain and deathrattles from all these guys around you. You start to waver, your CO orders you to fire, you fire, and the enemy is so far away you think you miss. Enemy returns fire. That random bumfuck who cucked you is clutching his gut from a musketball. You decide fuck this I'm going home to my cumdumpster 15-year old wife.

Ideally, you beat and drill the shit of these peasants to stand firm in the face of fire.

If you just let them do whatever like they're light infantry standing 5-10 feet apart and don't condense them into moving death blobs, they'd just break and run like the undisciplined fucks they are.

Look at how a lot of the early battles in the American Revolution went when they had carefree officers and weak discipline among the milita and regulars. British regulars pounded the shit out of them because they'd break and run.

The advantage of close order and volley fire wasn't that it improved the accuracy of contemporary muskets, it was that it improved the volume of fire concentration. Now in small numbers this is pretty redundant for two reasons:
1. 30 or so guys shooting in formation won't be anywhere near as effective, proportionally speaking, as 500 guys in formation in the degree in which their zone of firepower will be amplified.
2. It's very easy to convey an order to 30 or so guys even when they're spread out so the two reasons for shooting in formation, in this case, are just redundant.

So here's an image I drew to get my point across. In the denser formation everyone in the front line has a roughly equal target to shoot at. In the loose formation notice how much further the guys are at the fringes from the enemy formation? It's hard enough to hit a target with a musket let alone at an even further distance than the rest of your formation. Also in the dense formation it would be incredibly easy for officers and NCO's to give and convey orders whereas in the loose formation it's incredibly difficult to do so and would take far more time.

So the denser formation wins due to the degree of fire concentration which it affords combined with the ease of giving commands and controlling the formation. And I haven't even gotten into what would happen to the loose formation if they were charged but that's pretty self evident really.

Interesting and fair points, I've never thought about the idea of concentrating the fire on one section of the enemy line in preparation for a follow-up charge.

As for the situation that you point out , one advantage that I see is that the loose formation in this case would have an easier time flanking and harassing the enemy line. Although, the flaw is that the red infantry itself would then become incredibly vulnerable to a charge on its flanks and its rear, so I can see why an entire line of infantry wouldn't attempt to do that.

>one advantage that I see is that the loose formation in this case would have an easier time flanking and harassing the enemy line
But you have to remember that the means of communicating orders in the time of musket and sail was the same it had been for thousands of years up until that point. The fastest a message could travel was that of a horse and for junior officers and NCO's they had to get their orders across through shouting.

So if we continue to use my pic as an example how are the red soldiers supposed to effectively coordinate a flanking action when they're so spread out? It is impossible for the left flank to effectively communicate with the right. Any order the commanding officer gave would have to take much longer to be given let alone acted on than a dense formation. And the time the soldiers are spending trying to convey and then carry out the order is time they're not spending shooting.

>look at how infantry fought before the age of gunpowder

That's the one that had the most impact on the use of close order fighting with muskets.

People are lazy as fuck, and resistant to change. This is especially true in the military where there's a persistent mindset of "this is the way we've always done it" that exists at ALL levels even to this day. What this means is that they are slow to change, which is good if that change is for the worse, but not so good when it's actually for the better.

So to follow up on this let's assume the denser blue formation sees this spread out formation and charges it. Now the loose formation is cut in half and whereas before it was difficult to convey and order and ensure communication between the two flanks, it's now impossible.

So let's assume you're some some junior officer on, say, the left flank whose superior officer has either been killed or routed when the center was charged. What do you do? Are you in command now? Do you continue fighting or do you withdraw? If you withdraw will you abandon the right flank who choose to fight instead? If you fight will the right flank abandon you? You have no idea because you cannot communicate with them. And what if, somehow, both flank commanders choose to continue fighting: will it even be effective? Sure you're flanking the enemy but there's no coordination to ensure there's any effectiveness in this. And what will the enemy formation do? It would have taken much fewer casualties charging the scattered center and so now not only is it closer to you where its superior firepower can be brought to bear but it can turn and bring itself to about with ease because it isn't spread out like you.

So you've lost a substantial number of men, there's no communication between the flanks and a much stronger enemy is right up close to you. You're essentially fucked.