This topic has been a long time coming and I'm super excited to use our True Size series to continue to correct misconceptions about ancient warfare! What should we debunk next? Go to buyraycon.com/invictato get up to 30% off sitewide! Brought to you by Raycon.
Do you have any references for your sources? Feels like a bunch of this information isn't that well known and that you might make the historian's consensus out to be more certain than it actually is. This seemed particularly the case when you talked about how military formations break down and flee. Might just be me though. It is all very interesting.
@InvictaHistory loved the video. However, are you suggesting the front rank remain there (pending death / injury)? Would it not be a better suggestion that the front rank rotates backwards to keep the front rank as the most fresh and allow the battle to go on as long as possible and therefore depth keeps that front rank fresher in that it potentially gets rotated out more often than the opposition. Breaking coming then through tiredness or a sudden breakthrough of wounds or deaths in that front rank. Additionally the crush factor in those front ranks causing an element of fear over how the battle is going but with sufficient training the back ranks can give ground to prevent the crush on the front ranks
I have tried to explain this to my wife for years. It's not the length that matters, it's the WIDTH, the GIRTH and tactical enlightenment of the commanding officer that matters.
@@nice3333333333 My wife tells me that the length can be TO DEEP and it is indeed the WIDTH and GIRTH that matters, when you advance the battle lines further.
One video idea: I have struggled to picture numbers in my mind. What I mean is, when I real say a fantasy book and it says "two thousand soldiers camped outside of the castle", or "ten thousand seen marching this way" or "ten camp/village of the whole army"... I just can't really picture all these numbers. So maybe a video showing different number of people in various stages: -100 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation -500 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation -1 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation -5 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation - 10 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation - 20 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation I did get some idea here for the marching part and of course, they would follow a road in a line but then again, seeing how long of a line different numbers make would be appreciated!
I picture 10,000 men with 100 blocks of 100 men each. In a battle, there may be 30 blocks at the left, 30 blocks at the right, 40 blocks at the center.
I think of it in terms of a meter. One person is roughly a meter wide with shield and a little wiggle room. 10.000 soldiers 10 deep would therefore at the minimum have a1km long battle line. With terrain and such, in reality its probably longer
ditches are nice in theory but they were rarely a thing, except in sieges or some kind of bottleneck where there is no chance of the battlefield movig. they take a long time to dig and could very well be outflanked and thereby be rendered useless.
I think one of the biggest failures of Hollywood is the lack of understanding of chain of command, separate units and such. They always show a shocking amount of micro management by the king/warlord and such.
Yea i agree, once battle starts theres very little command from the top going on. Thats why large armys had really big troubles adapting to a change in the battlefield they didnt forsee
Although in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields LotR they had them attack as a blob, they did have a little detail with Theoden giving his commanders instructions in person before the attack. Would have probably been more realistic if they had communicated with instruments or signals. Some of those commanders might not even have reached their unit by the time the speech was done.
"Ithink one of the biggest failure of Hollywood is the lack of understanding" You should have left it there. As that succinctly puts what is wrong with Hollywood in general.
I'd say the biggest inaccuracies that persist are: 1) that "battlefields" exist, as in these huge open fields (almost steppes) for armies to fight on. Those didn't exist: battles happened on and around farms, vineyards, villages, roads, hills, gullies, etc. 2) The idea that generals could control armies like a Total War player. Generals can't do that today, let alone in pre-radio times. (Gamers especially) often think of complex back-and-forth manoeuvres, like a chess match, but no one could observe and react like that on a battlefield. Battles were won and lost with a plan and maybe a couple of manoeuvres to press an advantage or shore up a weakness. (In the past I would've put the lack of frontlines at number 1 but this seems to be slowly improving.)
Hehe, I was initially disappointed when I first got to Sekigahara thinking, "darn, they built a bunch of rice paddies on this cool battlefield." Fortunately, didn't take me long to realize I was an idiot.
About 1), that is true for smaller skirmishes and for medieval period and latter, but during the classical era especially and especially for greek and macedon armies, that is actually false. Phallanx is so bad at going over terrain even as easy as just shrubs and trees, it will break. So ancient greek battlefields actually were just clear fields. Otherwise, the Phallanx would not work. Macedonians, utilizing the phallanx still, had the same problem. It was one of the points of why Rome dominated so hard, because their three line formation with large gaps was very good at moving through bad terrain, up and down hills, dodging trees and shrubs etc, but also staying in close rank with good order.
@@CZProtton The same is true for early modern pike formations. More mobile than a phalanx perhaps, but tight formation is still essential. Some battles absolutely did take place on open fields, because that's where the generals have the space to maneuver and use their armies the way they want and trained for. But of course it depends on the armies; if one army benefits from an open field, the other probably benefits from a more closed environment.
The importance of communication and organization is too often ignored. We often focus on weapons and training, but the reason the Romans, Mongols and Napoleon were so effective is that they could perform large, complex maneuvers and perform them reliably in a way few of their contemporaries could.
Another thing that is often misunderstood (especially by those of us who grew up on Total War and historical reenactment) is the amount of casualties and how battles are lost. Armies very rarely got wiped out and fought to the bitter end, it's not unusual even for the losing side to have light casualties. Surprisingly, people are not very enthusiastic about getting killed when they don't have the ability to be retrained or respawn for the next round! :) If they start to suspect that something is going wrong and that the enemy is gaining the upper hand, they may start to retreat even if they only lost like 10%. 30% casualties would be considered quite heavy. And most of the time the winning side wouldn't engage in relentless pursuit - as long as you're in the formation you're safe, but if you break formation and start running after those who are retreating you stand a much higher chance of ending up dead yourself. Battle dynamics often came down to human factor, and this is something that is hard to replicate in games or reenactment. If you look at the fall of Constantinople, for example, the battle itself was really close, and if the defenders had stood their ground they would have had some chance. But when the Italian commander was wounded they started fleeing towards the port to board their ships and get away, the Greeks started running back to their homes to protect their families, even though that was basically a death sentence and they would've stood much better chance fighting at the breach points, etc.
Good point. Thats why Sun Tzu talks about the concept of dead ground, where soldiers are intentionally trapped by their commander, placed in desperate straits and forced to fight to the death. This can result in unexpected victory. One example is the battle of Julu by the general Xiang Yu.
show me the great historical battles where there is historical evidence of ditch digging to any major degree. i can only think of a few at the top of my head. for example battle of the golden spurs, but even then they did not have a decisive effect on the battle.
@@stayhungry1503 Ditches and earthworks are more common in siege warfare, but there are plenty of examples of ditches used in pitched battles, from the semi-legendary Battle of the Trench to the battle of the Long Walls of Corinth, the battle of Mantineia (207 BC), the battle of Dara, the battle of Loudoun Hill, and so on
One of things I’m surprised that is rarely mentioned in most historical sources is that the use of formations is about crowd control. Related to this even in the modern world is just how dangerous it is to be in a disorderly crowd. Without some order in a huge crowd where people are not trying to intentionally kill each other people can still perish due to trampling. We can see examples of this in many historical battles and this shows why battle formations were so important and the epitome of this must be the war between Rome and Carthage. Hannibal’s magnus opus the Battle of Cannae 216 BC worked not because the Romans were surrounded, but because the Romans broke formation. In Hannibal’s previous victories in the Battle of Trebia 218 BC and the Battle of Lake Trasimene 217 BC, Roman forces managed to break through his lines causing huge casualties. The Romans were able to do this because their army was much more uniformed and coherent while Hannibal’s army were much closer to a ragtag coalition that were always going to have some difficulty working together effectively. Hannibal correctly observed in both his victories and before the Battle of Cannae that the Roman’s superior cohesion would destroy him with a bigger version of what had worked in previous battles against him. The bending back of the crescent formation Hannibal used at Cannae robbed the Romans of their cohesion and they turned into a disorganised mob crammed into a tight crowd that were easily picked off by the Libyan pikemen and the Carthaginian heavy cavalry. The soldiers in the crescent and better formation only had to hold them there and it turned into a classic hammer and anvil scenario.
Cinematographer: "Yeah we tried that but unless you have a camera panning for a dozen minutes or hours to cover literal kilometers, most of the soldiers will never show on screen. So we instead placed them all beside each other"😂
@@-_Nuke_- Not necessarily required, Alexander (2004) managed to depict both the scale of the battle lines and also make a reasonably engaging battle sequence that has since been lauded for its attempt at recreating history with authenticity. Nobody said "Wow the lines are so wide, I wish they were all squished together!"
FWIW - I once played on a Bannerlord server where each soldier was an actual player. Top we got was ~ 110v110. We also had a few rules in place to make things more tame and true to IRL. It was quite enlightning on how the dynamics of troops work. Your description of how files work vividly reminds me of those times.
My family has some journals from the Civil War. I guess we had family on both sides of the war running intelligence. One worked with the culper ring and mostly were a glorified courier and scout. His notes on the battles made them sound like chaotic and unorganized mixed units comming to head in little pockets with more mobile units trying to get around to either flqnk or directly attack artillery positions. A reply different picture than the organized lines pelting eachother with volley after volley. It's really cool to see some truth to his words and beyond just the American frontier at that
To be fair, the Civil War was really after the pike-and-shot era, where you did have lines of arquebusiers hammering away at each other for hours. By the 1860s, the guns were getting too good, and it was dangerous to keep massive formations out in the open.
People underestimate the sheer size of a single battle, we see the neat little blocks in red and blue facing eachother but fail to realise that for example the battlefield at Gettybusrg covered an area of 46 square kilometers, that at Austerlitz even stretches over an area of 400 square kilometers. The individual soldier probably saw his own unit and the ones on his left and right as well as 3-4 on the opposing side but he might as well just have clashed with a single unit of the enemy or just sat out the battle entirely because the lines never got close enough to exchange fire.
This is fascinating! Great job. It's important that we have a clear understanding of the reality of ancient history. Little by little we are able to peel back the layers of time to get closer to a more realistic depiction of ancient history.
Fabulous job guys! Always great to see these visualizations and Roel! Always love to see it when you manage to get our footage in too, just feels so cool 😎
Some of the favorite historical battles depicted in film in my opinion are Gettysburg (1993), Sekigahara (2017), and Waterloo (1970), because they make an effort to depict the battlefield as a real place/setting with their actual varied terrain and important points to fight over, and they show you how the generals and armies try to adapt to that battlefield. Gettysburg and Waterloo give you a very good sense of how the armies are deployed, where the heaviest fighting is happening, and why it's happening there. Sekigahara on the other hand shows the battle shifting from place to place: fields, hills, woodlands, while also depicting how difficult it was for commanders to see how the entire battle is going and the challenges of communicating with the different units in their army. Gettysburg and Sekigahara also show what happens in the armies' camps behind the frontline too - the headquarters, logistics, medics/wound-treatment - which I loved bec. armies weren't just all fighting men that formed a battle line (Sekigahara even shows battlefield looters as well, taking valuables from dead and wounded left on the battlefield). Gettysburg does deployment and formations the best out of the three, since Sekigahara and Waterloo both have moments where they kinda fall into the trope of having disorganized masses of men advance toward each other.
All great points. My one issue with Gettysburg, which got so many things right, was casting reenactors as all the extras, given they were mostly "old" men in their forties and fifties, with many being overweight. Your average combat soldier across history has averaged around twenty-two-years old, with a plurality still in their late teens. Waterloo (one of my favourite movies of all-time) cast actual soldiers as extras, hence why most of the rank-and-file look much younger.
Basically total war medieval 2 vs total war warhammer. in medieval 2, doesnt matter how deep your ranks are, you get hit in the flanks, you lose half the unit. Meanwhile warhammer be like: lmao, what is a flank?
@@charvakpatel962 As the total war series went on, the way things like unit cohesion works and the importance of flanks and such got slowly looser and looser. If you can make them work, it's really interesting to look at shogun 1 and medieval 1. They're much more oriented towards *trying* to be realistic simulations. What's really ironic though, is that if you dive into those old game files, the mechanics are very strongly based on an old edition of the warhammer fantasy battle tabletop system.
Rome total war 1 and Medieval 2 total war have the most satisfying flank and rear-side charges... reason why i still play these games from time to time to get my mind off of work... 😅
About disciplinarians: as a boy scout we marched in columns and deployed in formations, we found it organically that a rear disciplinarian is a must to keep the column cohesive plus a designated guy that would run from front to back of the column to relay commands. The columns would also be headed by seniors who would dictate the pace and stop at the designated field where we would deploy for assembly before setting up a camp, they would direct the units left and right for their designated spots. So yeah, we pretty much trained military deployment in a timeless manner which Im sure was inherited from military, as most boy scout traditions were worldwide. I'm sure many of fellow watchers have had similiar experiences in their boy scouts!
What is never, ever shown is the switch system. And what that means is that lets say a guy at the very front (the ones that were actually fighting) got hurt or exhausted, he needed to be pulled out of the line and replaced by someone behind him, to literally "hold the line". I believe it is when this "switch" system began to fail that units routed (well one of the reasons, also from being surrounded, leaders being killed, lost banners etc). One noteable thing is that in later battles during the 18th and 19th century, despite much more deadly weapons and less possibility for protection, routing was actually quite unusual. Because by this time the quality of the training and especially discipline was so much higher.
The reason for this Hollywood Style to depict large battles is that a massive deep formation looks more Impressive and is easier to shot by one camera angle
@@jonathanlohaller758nah it only looks more impressive cause of audiences like the wear the aesthetic of authenticity, it makes them feel more intellectual and talk down on hollywood
My headcanon: - Initially you have fighters in the front fencing, prodding, etc. Here, whichever side has higher range has the advantage. I think this is why the phalanx was so effective at its time: It's very convenient for the fighter's individual psychology as they remain at range to their enemies and don't voluntarily put themselves in danger. It doesn't require great individual skill or cohesion. A phalanx would ideally try to remain in this state for the entire battle. - I don't believe these formations should be thought of as super static. Even if you're just prodding with a spear, this becomes very exhausting after a few minutes. You might also just get injured. I imagine frontline fighters attempting to disengage after a while and move to the back of the formation while someone else takes their place. There is I think some evidence for Romans even doing this in a systematic way with entire small units, which of course requires an entirely different level of coordination. - Range disadvantage isn't that big of an issue as soon as you have large enough shields and strong enough discipline to commit to one concerted charge. The unit only needs to get past the speartips ONCE to gain an advantage, but it does take a lot of courage. This is why I would give trained Roman Legionnaires the advantage over a Greek phalanx militia: They are trained enough to go for that charge and then outfight them in hand-to-hand-combat. - While a charge will initially be repelled most effectively by holding formation, as soon as the state of hand-to-hand-combat is reached, units have an incentive to loosen their formation to give individuals space to fight properly, and achieve small-scale numbers advantages. By this I don't mean the formation breaking completely (although that may of course happen), but just loosening it. That may however not always be possible for countless reasons (like terrain). - I don't think pushing was an intentional strategy, it probably occurred involuntarily/circumstantially as soon as a fight had reached hand-to-hand-combat, and probably often for bad reasons rather than for good reasons. There is no way you are fighting an opponent in the front line and appreciate random idiots behind you pushing you into them. You want to push forward when YOU want and move back when YOU want.
The whole pushing thing sounds to me like a misunderstanding coming from scholars that have no concept of fighting. "Pushing" to this day is still in use to mean advance or attack, it doesn't mean literally pushing as a main tactic
This actually reminds me of the couple larp battles I've been to. As you say, we kept distance, sometimes having to lunge forward to land a hit, and we also had to let the "dead" walk back through, which wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, as long as our leader kept an eye on it. (For context: battles mostly 10v10 or 30v30, most with shields and padded weapons or bows, each has 2-4 lifes + respawn point. Fighting for areas, flags, quest items, anything the organisators came up with. It's like reanactment turned into a game.) I didn't notice our formation loosening though. If anything, we could momentarily bunch up, but spacing in which one could fight was our default. Then there are things I can't really comment on, like pushing or collisions. We avoided that for safety reasons. Like you, I assume it happened irl but only if necessary (e.g. pushing through a chokepoint) or when hyped up. I also don't really know how things would play out with a larger and deeper formation. And off course I have no experience with how blood, screams of the dying, real chance of getting killed or going through several near-death experiences during a single day affects a soldier.
@@Fresh562 i imagined pushing happens as the losing side gets exhausted or timid begun falling back within the safety of their formation. In a normal engagement, there might be 1 or 2 guys doing that in a unit of 60-100 to rest their nerves for a while. Imagine more people doing that. They will practically fall back as they try to maintain cohesion.
Would love to see the true size of Napoleons artillery & cavalry army. Especially see how they moved such heavy cannons and its heavy ammo, how it was relocated during battle and so on
honestly using unreal or other 3d programms is such a cool way to show stuff like that especially with the 3. person view its so much easier to understand what actually happens for soldiers itself because usually you see battlefield only from a map
This is what I've studied in the this year as well. I came into the realization, especially after studying Arrian's description of Gaugamela, there were some mistakes in the Oliver Stone's Gaugamela battle scene. When it came to the deployment of the phalanxes against enemy infantry, the movie also doesn't show the battalions being deployed in a *double-phalanx*. A double-phalanx is a formation that increases the depth of the phalanx by combining and reinforcing one Macedonian syntagma with another syntagma together from the rear. When a phalanx forms a *synaspismos* or locked-shields, the depth of the formation decreases from 16 ranks to 8 ranks, but it increases from 16 columns to 32 columns. In a double-phalanx, the columns of hoplites not only retain 32 columns but also increase their ranks to 16. Hence, what we should have seen in most of the battalions in Gaugamela is a front line of six rectangular blocks of three *pentakosiarchies* (that is a unit of 512 hoplites). This was done as by increasing the depth of mass, it would increase the weight and strength of the forward impetus of a sarissa phalanx, making it more impossible to oppose and defeat in the front.
The funny thing is that it would be easier/less expensive for hollywood to accurately depict historical formations. Because they'd have to spend less on CGI/extras. Fewer people on screen and more people further away is less expensive. The only exception I can think of his movies that wanted very, very historically accurate battles using actual 10s of thousands of extras (Gettysburg/Waterloo).
One type of I don't think I've even seen in media is the "encounter battle"- where two armies meet unexpectedly and the engagement develops quickly and chaotically. Famous examples include everything from Cynoscephalae in 197 BC to the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. I suppose this is because encounter battles are much tougher to "fit" int the story emotionally (it's easier to build character arcs and story stakes when you have time to discuss how both sides know the decisive clash will take place upon The Inexplicably Empty Fields of Genericus) but the idea of forcing the characters to make split-second decisions with extremely limited information seems like it should be ripe for storytelling opportunities.
This was a really cool look into ancient armies. It helped me visualize the psychology of a soldier marching into battle and standing as they wait just a little bit better.
This video made me dig three lines of ditches around my house. Now my family is secure and my mind is at ease. I wonder what else awaits me when I go past the thumbnail.
If you subscribe to the “pulse” theory of combat (which I think makes the most sense) then depth provides another advantage: as men up front get tired (which would happen very quickly), wounded, or killed you have more replacements in the formation to take their place to maintain cohesion and fight in the next pulse. Psychologically those men further back in the deeper formation would have been under less proxie stress from seeing the fighting, giving you fresher men to keep cycling through the fighting if necessary.
I would love to see a video with thist type of visual representation about logistics of marching columns. If we take 10 thousand soldiers, marching 4 people in a row, it would be line about 1,5 km. And this is without supply wagons, pack animals and so on. Always kinda fascinated me how much distance this huge columns should've covered
I loved the use of unreal engine to show us from a human perspective, i hope to see more! But now im curious, you showed gaps between the different legions, not in the depth but width, would that be done in antiquity also?
When I see those massive armies like that all together I always wunder who was saposed to have fed all those men and horses. Were looking at whole city populations needing a meal on either side. If an army was that big the supply lines would be intense. Now I want to know how big the biggest fighting force in history was and more so I want to know the logistics that fuelled the campaign. Supply chains are fascinating to me and rarely given the spotlight. Thanks for such an interesting video.
I think you got paritally the wrong idea. Yes, they would probably have some sort of a supply chain, but until modern times, living off the land, seems to have been the norm, meaning, demand, extort, plunder and/or scavenge whatever you need.
you should check up on how steppe nomads would travel with their massive horde armies, the baggage trains following would be much larger than the fighting forces.
@@piaten Living off the land would definitely exhaust a region's supply. They def have a supply chain going on if they're going to feed 100,000 soldiers.
@4thdimensionalexplorer in friendly territory baggage trains didn't have to get very far because of nearby forts, castles and friendly rulers. In enemy territory you had to capture those. Fortifications like castles were heavily defended storehouses.
Alright I can definitely see how it's going with Ancient Greeks context. Especially with depth and width stuffs. I am juat wondering whether it works the same way with Ancient Chinese battles
Should be the same but ancient chinese battles were already in levels of early modern european battles early on. As far as I read, their battles have lots of maneuvers than engagements. With that, I think they care less on the width and depth and more on the numbers of their troops, positioning, and logistics. As their territories and populations are bigger, they may have larger armies but they still have wider land to protect. They rarely concentrate their entire armies to engage in a single field battle. They fought in brigades or similar formations so it's pretty common to see the chinese fought battles in one location for days, months, or even a year before the outcome gets decided.
The honest answer is that we don't have a very clear idea. The writings that scholars left are a bit sparse on the specifics of unit tactics and focused a lot more on the operational/strategic level maneuvers. But there are things we can glean from some of the writing as well as artwork depiction, especially the Terracotta army pits. IMO, there was a long transition period between mid-Han to Jin dynasty when the military emphasis began to shift from infantry to cavalry. Frequent contact and constant warfare with nomads drove the development of the cavalry arm during the Han period. After the fall of the Jin and entering the Sixteen Kingdoms period, Northern China was ruled and fought over by Sinicized barbarian elites that built their military formation around nomadic cavalry core. This influence was subsequently reinforced with the later conquests under the Mongol and Manchus. That being said, Chinese infantry retained an important and complementary role in garrisoning and sieges. The Terracotta army was a depiction of forces under the QIn and represents pre-Han era. What we see is primarily a infantry formation in a combined arms format. A pretty large contingent of archers was deployed in the front rank in linear fashion. Behind them are multiple regiments of heavy infantry arranged into distinct deep columns. The two flanks of the column had solders turned 90 degrees to face their respective flanks. Chariots are interspersed or behind the infantry. The formation is definitely distinct as I have not seen such a depth depicted as battle formation. It may be a marching column but the deployed archers in the front and the side facing flank guards argue against it. So it is possible they employed a very deep formation to bolster the morale of conscripted soldiery. By the Han era, the infantry depth appears to have shrunk to 5-10 men deep. There are tomb figurine depiction of a infantry regiment 6 rows deep with the front 3 rows shield bearer and the rear 3 rows archer? (bit unclear as the weapon was missing). I have seen mentions that each squad is a combined arms unit consisting of shield-bearers, polearm and archer. Sharing similar idea with late Byzantine infantry formations. Cavalry is positioned behind the infantry unit.
@@syjiangso basically pitched battles in china became rare by the time late spring and autumn period to warring stres because mass conscription and standardized weapon? So its more became campaign or series skirmish, pitched battles, and ambush?
According ralph sawyer, the reason pitched battles become prevalent in europe and middle East is because lack of mass conscription, standardized weapon, and centralized bureucracy which influenced by geography and culture, this battle emphasize set planned battle where sometimes both armies meet in place where both sides think its the best place to maximize its advantage While in china especially during western zhou and early spring and autumn period pitched battle still prevalent withb addition weird ethic and law until late spring and autumn period and warring stres coming because war happen in every place forcing regional ruler to creative in making and expand its army for offensive and defensive and thus pitched battles become rare and ended in grand campaign or multiple battle and skirmish in border area
@kameraldbahrul3432 when you look at Wikipedia about some of these chinese battles with massive armies and casualties. One thing you'll notice is that unlike pitched battles they're actually more like campaigns with fighting taking over weeks or even months. This is more in line with early modern or even modern European battles. Units would be rotating and engaging the enemy at different points at different times. There was a lot more on maneuver and strategic positioning. It's not literally 10s or 100s of thousands of Chinese in a giant mosh pit.
Main problem with the depth is it is easier to surround it, like what usually happens with the hoplite vs legionaire battles (or what happened when the romans did a deep but narrow formation at Canae)
What bugs me is how archers are depicted. These archers would have been beasts among men. Not scrawny dude that chill in the back and don't do much. And we never have ditches.
You also see it with women in fantasy novels. "Oh yeah, Peggy is our archer." instead of "Yeah, that hulking guy with the massive shoulders is our archer".
@hoi-polloi1863 ya like Hawkeye in comics is insanely jacked like practically a super soldier I mean if Peggy is jacked and trained let her shoot the bow.
Hell even in training for hunger games Jennifer Lawrence was jacked Stephen amell who played Green arrow for nearly ten years was doing salmon ladders constantly.
Absolutely! Modern History TV did a great video on that. Jason Kingsley is pretty fit, but he was dwarfed by an archer he had on the show. One needed great strength and muscular stamina to keep loosing arrows with those heavy draw bows.
@legionarybooks13 like five or so years ago they found an ancient battlefields and some of the skeletons were warped from how they muscles had to grow and reform to constantly shoot the war bows
They probably started this as a limitation, before CGI they had to use extras and at best try to compose more unitys in-frame and even after CGI they probably like to use some extras as reference, at least in the early days of CGI. And without drones the cheaper they could get a aerial shot was in a crane, with a crane would be hard to get a angle that do justice for a huge line, a deep shoot show the scale of the army better. Once the pattern was established in the public consciousness even if modern CGI and drone tech allows the line, directors will be less inclined to deliver something that goes against what the public expect.
@@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa yes totally agree but now they have cgi, drones and all the tools at hand there’s no excuses for unrealistic period battles so really hope to see the reality and creativity coming to TV and movies soon 🙏🏻🙌🏼
@@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa I still haven’t watched Ridley Scott’s Napoleon so I’m curious to know if, with all the tools at hand he showed formations in the battle scenes.
@@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa Go watch Spartacus, the old one. Final battle shows the entire Roman army forming into line in frame, all extras. It was possible even then. Hollywood just doens't want to fork out the resources for it. Movies like that are a rarity.
For antiquity-era armies, there were practical limits to the depth of a formation as well. The revolutionary Macedonian sarissa was up to ~23 feet long. Considering you needed space in the file, you can't get more than say 12 guys usefully deploying their spears at once. The Macedonian phalanx was typically 16 guys deep, allowing both for reinforcement and extra "pushing weight".
This really depends. There were innovative and or novel tactics that were utilized where depth could be extreme. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the Battle of Leuctra. Where the Boeotian League overloaded their left flank with the Sacred Band + the rest of their elite forces, to a depth of 50 ranks. They advanced in oblique order and just smashed the Spartiates. I think this battle is very interesting because I think in many ways it sort of reveals the truth about the concept of a shoving match. Generally speaking, if a person has any understanding of large crowd dynamics, you know that there was no shoving match. It would be suicide for all the men in the front ranks on either side that were crushed and suffocated by the press. However, anyone familiar with the concept of rucking or a scrum in rugby knows what happens when a large group of dudes push together against a smaller group that have no ability to withstand that push. I think that is likely what happened to the elite Spartan Spartiates at Leuctra. The Thebans and the other Boeotians stacked 50 ranks deep running into ~8-12 ranks deep. They just pushed straight through the Spartans. The Spartans didn't have the mass to cause a press which would have prevented it from happening so they got essentially rucked over. Columns of dudes 50 ranks deep, just pushing on each others backs to bowl over the much lighter force they were pushing into. If the Spartans had the depth to match it, it wouldn't have happened because the press would have killed the front ranks on both sides, but the Spartans didn't, so nothing prevented the Thebans from just bowling through them. Once the Spartan lines broke, the battle was over. So there were always novel examples where a very deep formation could be used as a battering ram to just press through an enemy line.
I think it would be a good point to demonstraight how the Roman system wasn't really linearly that deep because they staggered their different ranks. Where here they are all shown in a straight line back but in reality their actual depth was almost half of what was shown because the Principes manipuli weren't right behind the hastati manipuli but to their back left and right so really their depth wasn't even as deep as shown. the gap between Hastati and Triarii was empty.
Also good point. "Depth" wasn't just about pushing or morale, but having reserves who can be committed to the battle if the frontline breaks, or could be redeployed to face an attack on the flanks.
Each one of those warriors and if they have them horses, requires water, food, shelter, blacksmith, etc. The logistics support would have to be huge compared to those army/warrior formations. An army does march on its stomach after all.
When you started talking about pushing and its impact i couldnt help but be reminded of the castells in catalonia spain. Human towers supported by a base of people leaning in to another
To the first part... that was just, er ... science fiction, yeah. To the second part... well. This *is* Classical Greece. Just lie back and think of Delphi.
A really cool thing to note about warchants with the tribal aristocracies warfare, before Alexander the Great went into the Achaemenid Empire, he and his army were ambushed in a very bad place, one of his biggest blunders that’s often overlooked. The battle was not even a battle. The tribals had the advantage of surprise and terrain on a slope whilst the phalangites were caught between the slopes and a river. They did their warchants and chest beating so to speak, and the Macedonians were collected and disciplined. Alexander ordered his army to drill. Literally. So they were raising and dropping their sarrisa pikes and marching and maneuvering as they did in drill exercise, and the tribals ran away. That’s right, he won a battle without fighting, but by his force doing their drills. Turned an ambush into a drill exercise and won.
The part where the historian mentions depth I feel hits hard. I was playing Pharaoh Total War recently and it made me realize that unit size, especially for cavalry and chariots just gets in the way and makes the units in general feel unwieldly when moving around.
I might have missed it, but in some of the examples given, it seems the environment often dictated the depth of formations. A town or castle can only be so wide, and even fields have their limits depending on the region. In many areas, woods or other natural barriers surround everything, which might lead to deeper formations compared to regions with more open terrain, like parts of Greece or Rome.
About depth of the formation: In my opinion, depth allows to replenish causalities and rotate fresh troops and in that regard, depth disposition is signaling the focus of the attacker (as he usually deploys troops first). There are, off course, many nuances in that - like in classical Greece if similar forces met (so the depth could be enhanced only by considerably sacrificing the width), the elite forces were deployed on the right ("honorable") flank as the hoplite falanx tactics caused slight shifting of the formation to the left during actual melee fighting.
I would think thin lines would also be good for morale. If you’re going to battle and on the front line of a very deep column, you start being afraid that you will almost certainly die.
The only movie that got scale and organisation of a battle right is _Waterloo,_ no other has or will ever come close. And even that was "just" 17'000 soviet soldiers and a "mere" 2'000 horses compared to the 150'000 men and 40'000 horses that were actually present that fateful day.
@@mercb3ast True, _Alexander_ is a great movie. People love to give it crap but it's easily the closest we come so far to a historically accurate pre-gunpowder movie.
Excellent video. Can you also showcase (and maybe simulate) how battles were fought and how that changed formation from the soldier's perspective ? For example, in Canae, even when the romans had 2x of Hannibal and their formation was deep, they still lost because they were envelopped How did that happen ? Why the soldiers from behind didn't react and redeploy ?
Narrow columns for movement are important to cohesion. It's much harder to keep troops aligned in wider formations during movement. Even you watch military drills in the traditional of even the 19th century, You'll see this.
The sizes of ancient armies are much exaggerated. We know this for a number of reasons. 1) the populations of the warring states; 2) logistics - people eat, sleep, and crap. How is the food gathered and distributed? What about water? It’s very heavy and bulky. So armies of a few thousand were common. Armies of the Middle Ages tended to be smaller than in late ancient times because there were few very large populous states with standing army and military infrastructure. Especially after the plagues hit. A Roman Legion had about 10,000 people - soldiers and support. The entire party on the march was a bit larger. But how many battles involved more than 3 legions or so? Not many. There were only about 30 for the entire empire at peak. An army of 50,000 was about as big as you could provision and control on the march.
Interesting detail regarding the mechanics of routs and the location of the Triarii; not only did the Romans use a deeper formation, they put their battle hardened veterans at the rear. I'd imagine that had a massive impact on both the morale of the front line and the likelihood of a rout forming in the typical "back ranks chicken out" manner
Very good visualization. You keep destroying my favorite moments in movies, and I love it! But perhaps also consider geography and vegetation more, because battlefields were seldom flat open ground.
This was a really eye opening video. But I can only imagine how expensive it’d be to make this fit on screen and still look impressive. The big horde is not only cheaper but easier to show.
18:20 - I've always been confused as to where the confusion comes from with the "pushing" thing. I've always interpreted the "pushing" as being mostly symbollic where you try to "push" the enemies away in the sense that you attempt to drive them from the battlefield by poking your spears at them. If you're a soldier and you see these spears coming at you, you're going to instinctively want to run away. So in that sense they push you off. Which is also, I imagine, why the sarissa was so effective. Because instead of just one spear in your face and being able to put your own spear in the enemy's face, you had like 5 spears in your face and you can't even reach the enemy with yours. So you're gonna want to flee a lot more.
The big exception that confirms the rule is obviously the phalanx where units maintained an equal file to column ratio. The 20 foot long spears additionally nearly doubled the depth of a phalanx.
Think the main reason is that the movies go for depth formations over length is that it harder to film a long line formations, and depth formations can get in one shot and looks kewl.
I'd love for you to discuss outliers like the Tercio. From what I know the Tercio would be an exceptionally deep formation compared to the standards discussed in this video yet it was still regarded as highly effective for a long time.
Dann gebe es noch den Vorläufer des Tercio nämlich die Geviert Haufen der Eidgenossen und der Landsknechte. Außerdem noch den Schottischen Schiltrons und die Kolonnen der Franzosen sowie Österreicher. Obwohl ich mir vorstellen kann das die letzten beiden vorallem den im Video besprochen psychologischen Effekt haben sollten. Besonders wenn es zu einem Bajonett Angriff kam. Bei denen historisch fast nie beide Seiten aufeinander trafen. Weil eine kurz vor dem zussammenprall den Mut verlor und sich zurückzog.
14:04 Special note for the one madman who decided on a 50x50 hoplite formation. It's one of my favorite tidbits. "How the Spartan army was defeated by a math equation." - Battle of Leuctra 371bc. 17:00 I'm a fool. Well played. 21:23 "Well endowed" Hah! You know it!
About pushing (non scientific): It makes sense to want to push your enemy, because you might throw him on the ground by doing that and being on the ground is a very vulnerable position. On the other hand I believe too much pushing ,may risk throwing tour own men to the ground ( like tag of war) , may lock the front liners to not being able to use their hands, may make it harder to breathe for those being sandwiched and thus faint. Also not pushing but resisting the enemy pressure would be more important. Like making a wall behind your fellow soldier to support him and not push him on his back
Its funny that the great swedish invention in 17th century was just wider line of gunners :D century later, French create deep attack regiments to survive volleys and engage in melee while brits form thin red line, wider formations to get more dudes firing on the enemy (and appear more numerous than they really were) and hillariously thats also the best tactic in most total war games where flanking beats staying power.
The greeks had a separation of units that is kind of a proto-roman republic formation, since the main body of greek formations was the classic shield and sarissa hoplite. But just the mere fact of being a greek hoplite identified the warrior as an adult male of some wealth and maturity. Less mature, and less wealthy, fighters were formed into skirmishers, slingers and other auxiliary support bodies. The endeavours of those support units are not well documented for the simple fact that Greek military prestige centred on the hoplites (with the exception, perhaps, of the various ways of fighting listed in the Iliad, which describes a mish mash of different time periods in Greek warfare, much of it pre-hoplite combat). The other thing to note in Greek mass warfare is that the rounded shields meant that men in the front ranks probably had a tendency to tuck their exposed weapon bearing side behind the overlapping shield of the man to their right. Leading to a situation where Greek massed formations of hoplites/phalanxes tended to echelon with the men at the right end of the line leading the approach into combat. This accounts for the tendency in Greek battles for the line of contact to turn counter clockwise, occasionally performing a full 180 degree turn during the fighting, one some occasions that turning of the line had decisive consequences. The later curved shield of the romans eliminated that problem by providing a fighting platform that shielded the entire body from right to left. Its also the case that, in earlier large scale battles, command and control was always a serious problem, especially in Greek hoplite warfare, because the noise of a large scale army, muffled by helmets, would make command in combat impossible (and even if you could issue commands how could they be implemented?). So "command" in Greek battles was often mostly just effective in the pre-contact phase of setting up the army. A Greek leader usually being in the front ranks, once the army was committed to the fight, command and control went out the window (Even Alexander the Great fought in the front ranks of his armies - as his various wounds attested ). Again, while armies commanded by Alexander had rudimentary command and control, it wasnt until the roman period that this issue was seriously addressed. The signal flags of the renaissance italian armies - which are still used today but only for displays - are the best our predecessors could do to address command and control issues, along with various sound methods, which the romans mastered with various trumpets and horns. The Greeks used rudimentary horns and trumpets but not with any particular system like the romans. Without that kind of command and control, breaking a mass army into smaller components could be extremely dangerous. And having long lines created the problem that in the dust of battle neither wing of an army could tell how the other end of the line was faring. It was not uncommon for one end of the line to collapse while the opponent's lines were collapsing at the other end (especially in Greek warfare where the strongest warriors tended to be at the place of honour on the right end of the line.
Macedonia and successors ran 16x16 in their syntagmas (what the organization of 256 men was called). The formation was symmetrical for maneuver purposes. You didn't stretch the formation out to be wider than the depth, unless you didn't want them to be able to turn effectively or wheel. We don't know that much about the drill of the Macedonian style pike phalanx (syntagma), it is assumed that they did not have the same drill techniques of later famous pike wielding forces of the medieval period. However, the symmetry of the formation remained paramount in antiquity, and in the medieval period. A pike square is a highly mobile (in terms of turning) formation that has nearly unstoppable forward momentum.
One thing to understand that Tolkien battles are not just fantasy but actually make sense on the surface. If you take account the battle formation of dwarves and elves in the Battle of Five Armies. The size of each army were relatively adequate unlike displayed like 300 and Troy movie. The Orcs according Tolkien were made to flood the field with their numbers. They were created to lesser degree as fodders, akin to rat infestation. So the massive army of Orcs were not based from a historical battle tactics but overwhelming tide of flesh and iron, to put pressure and crush the opposing force. Like a horde of fast running zombies.
The Return of the King commentary, they were complaining at one point about how Pelanor Fields looked so tiny and they just kept having to add more and more and more until they were something like 400,000 Orcs on the field. Well, here's the answer to why they had a problem.
reserve formations really weren't that uncommon and were definitely part of strategies. so whilst i agree that having an endless enormous army way too big for then that is all stacked behind each other with no formation separation is bad, i don't think it's necessarily accurate to have them almost entirely stretched out either. it obviously depends on the battle. another great video, thanks guys.
Just theorizing but the the greater depth being good for the push could just be referring to more energy for the push. By that I mean you have more people so more energy and endurance so you can be relentless in a push (cycling them out etc). The other side would tire out from the pressure of the equivalent expenditure from your side but then you still have more in reserve to continue and break them.
To imagine large army I always use one real life experience that I was in. I witnessed a very big reenactment event (600 anniversary of battle of Grunwald), where vast majority of observers were standing on one side of one hill. I stood under this hill, so I could see them all. Then the speaker said that there are about 100000 tourists observing the battle right now. So, I assume that there was something between 75000 and 100000 of people there in one place. So, I have a "print screen" image of this always in my brain. And every time someone speaks about army numbers, I imagine that and for example cut it in half (when they talk about 40000-50000 soldiers). And so on. It's also not that hard to imagine how these soldiers marched into battle in narrow column(s), or formed a long thin battleline. Because I also seen people on their way onto such events, squeezed into tight passages limited by roads, vegetation, fences and so on.
Having reenacted as a pikeman I found that your visibility is limited and the basic message to fall back is when you're no longer being pushed from behind. One of the reasons I swithced to artillery, you get a much better sense of what's going on. ;-)
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This topic has been a long time coming and I'm super excited to use our True Size series to continue to correct misconceptions about ancient warfare! What should we debunk next? Go to buyraycon.com/invictato get up to 30% off sitewide! Brought to you by Raycon.
That Unreal 5 simulation is really struggling with those 2-D immobile sprites.
Do you have any references for your sources? Feels like a bunch of this information isn't that well known and that you might make the historian's consensus out to be more certain than it actually is. This seemed particularly the case when you talked about how military formations break down and flee. Might just be me though. It is all very interesting.
@InvictaHistory loved the video. However, are you suggesting the front rank remain there (pending death / injury)? Would it not be a better suggestion that the front rank rotates backwards to keep the front rank as the most fresh and allow the battle to go on as long as possible and therefore depth keeps that front rank fresher in that it potentially gets rotated out more often than the opposition.
Breaking coming then through tiredness or a sudden breakthrough of wounds or deaths in that front rank. Additionally the crush factor in those front ranks causing an element of fear over how the battle is going but with sufficient training the back ranks can give ground to prevent the crush on the front ranks
I have tried to explain this to my wife for years. It's not the length that matters, it's the WIDTH, the GIRTH and tactical enlightenment of the commanding officer that matters.
And? how many children do you have?
Man that's deep...
No silly, it's thick.
chode battle tactics
@@nice3333333333 My wife tells me that the length can be TO DEEP and it is indeed the WIDTH and GIRTH that matters, when you advance the battle lines further.
One video idea: I have struggled to picture numbers in my mind. What I mean is, when I real say a fantasy book and it says "two thousand soldiers camped outside of the castle", or "ten thousand seen marching this way" or "ten camp/village of the whole army"... I just can't really picture all these numbers.
So maybe a video showing different number of people in various stages:
-100 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation
-500 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation
-1 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation
-5 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation
- 10 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation
- 20 000 soldiers marching, then camping, then on the formation
I did get some idea here for the marching part and of course, they would follow a road in a line but then again, seeing how long of a line different numbers make would be appreciated!
I picture 10,000 men with 100 blocks of 100 men each. In a battle, there may be 30 blocks at the left, 30 blocks at the right, 40 blocks at the center.
Camping is a good one, because camping takes up way more space than marching.
Easy way to picture it is Sports fans on way to a Stadium, yes the numbers sound huge but most of those there are Followers not Fighters.
I think of it in terms of a meter. One person is roughly a meter wide with shield and a little wiggle room. 10.000 soldiers 10 deep would therefore at the minimum have a1km long battle line. With terrain and such, in reality its probably longer
Picture numbers what exactly?
Theyre at camp, they are not arrayed outside. So just imagine a tent city.
DITCHES DITCHES DITCHES
All hail the Ditch-King!
Dig through the ditches and
dig through more ditches and
even more ditches for
DOCTOR ROEL
DIG ANOTHER DITCH!!!!!!
ditches are nice in theory but they were rarely a thing, except in sieges or some kind of bottleneck where there is no chance of the battlefield movig. they take a long time to dig and could very well be outflanked and thereby be rendered useless.
@@AT-rr2xw
So do it, soldier!
Do it, soldier!
I think one of the biggest failures of Hollywood is the lack of understanding of chain of command, separate units and such. They always show a shocking amount of micro management by the king/warlord and such.
Yea i agree, once battle starts theres very little command from the top going on. Thats why large armys had really big troubles adapting to a change in the battlefield they didnt forsee
Although in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields LotR they had them attack as a blob, they did have a little detail with Theoden giving his commanders instructions in person before the attack. Would have probably been more realistic if they had communicated with instruments or signals. Some of those commanders might not even have reached their unit by the time the speech was done.
@@N0d4chi Caesar enters the chat
"Ithink one of the biggest failure of Hollywood is the lack of understanding" You should have left it there. As that succinctly puts what is wrong with Hollywood in general.
@@Yandarval lol. You ain't wrong.
I'd say the biggest inaccuracies that persist are: 1) that "battlefields" exist, as in these huge open fields (almost steppes) for armies to fight on. Those didn't exist: battles happened on and around farms, vineyards, villages, roads, hills, gullies, etc.
2) The idea that generals could control armies like a Total War player. Generals can't do that today, let alone in pre-radio times. (Gamers especially) often think of complex back-and-forth manoeuvres, like a chess match, but no one could observe and react like that on a battlefield. Battles were won and lost with a plan and maybe a couple of manoeuvres to press an advantage or shore up a weakness.
(In the past I would've put the lack of frontlines at number 1 but this seems to be slowly improving.)
Hehe, I was initially disappointed when I first got to Sekigahara thinking, "darn, they built a bunch of rice paddies on this cool battlefield." Fortunately, didn't take me long to realize I was an idiot.
This is the reason why I generally didn't like games that focus on micromanagement to win. Games that rely on strategic planning were good for me.
About 1), that is true for smaller skirmishes and for medieval period and latter, but during the classical era especially and especially for greek and macedon armies, that is actually false. Phallanx is so bad at going over terrain even as easy as just shrubs and trees, it will break. So ancient greek battlefields actually were just clear fields. Otherwise, the Phallanx would not work. Macedonians, utilizing the phallanx still, had the same problem. It was one of the points of why Rome dominated so hard, because their three line formation with large gaps was very good at moving through bad terrain, up and down hills, dodging trees and shrubs etc, but also staying in close rank with good order.
@@CZProtton The same is true for early modern pike formations. More mobile than a phalanx perhaps, but tight formation is still essential. Some battles absolutely did take place on open fields, because that's where the generals have the space to maneuver and use their armies the way they want and trained for. But of course it depends on the armies; if one army benefits from an open field, the other probably benefits from a more closed environment.
The importance of communication and organization is too often ignored. We often focus on weapons and training, but the reason the Romans, Mongols and Napoleon were so effective is that they could perform large, complex maneuvers and perform them reliably in a way few of their contemporaries could.
I see Ditch Man, i like and click, then i expect him to give me a ditch around my house.
ditch man for 3 minutes
@@Ajaylix We all love him!
Tsk tsk! He expects you to dig the ditch!
Who is Ditch man 😭
@@Ajaylix only one ditch? Pffft, amature.
Another thing that is often misunderstood (especially by those of us who grew up on Total War and historical reenactment) is the amount of casualties and how battles are lost. Armies very rarely got wiped out and fought to the bitter end, it's not unusual even for the losing side to have light casualties. Surprisingly, people are not very enthusiastic about getting killed when they don't have the ability to be retrained or respawn for the next round! :) If they start to suspect that something is going wrong and that the enemy is gaining the upper hand, they may start to retreat even if they only lost like 10%. 30% casualties would be considered quite heavy. And most of the time the winning side wouldn't engage in relentless pursuit - as long as you're in the formation you're safe, but if you break formation and start running after those who are retreating you stand a much higher chance of ending up dead yourself. Battle dynamics often came down to human factor, and this is something that is hard to replicate in games or reenactment. If you look at the fall of Constantinople, for example, the battle itself was really close, and if the defenders had stood their ground they would have had some chance. But when the Italian commander was wounded they started fleeing towards the port to board their ships and get away, the Greeks started running back to their homes to protect their families, even though that was basically a death sentence and they would've stood much better chance fighting at the breach points, etc.
Good point. Thats why Sun Tzu talks about the concept of dead ground, where soldiers are intentionally trapped by their commander, placed in desperate straits and forced to fight to the death. This can result in unexpected victory. One example is the battle of Julu by the general Xiang Yu.
Good point. Mongols used this mindset to create a false retreat path that enabled them to pick off and technically hunted those that broke ranks
Ditch guy= instant click
@@belegthoron8603 Same here 😅
show me the great historical battles where there is historical evidence of ditch digging to any major degree. i can only think of a few at the top of my head. for example battle of the golden spurs, but even then they did not have a decisive effect on the battle.
@@stayhungry1503 Ditches and earthworks are more common in siege warfare, but there are plenty of examples of ditches used in pitched battles, from the semi-legendary Battle of the Trench to the battle of the Long Walls of Corinth, the battle of Mantineia (207 BC), the battle of Dara, the battle of Loudoun Hill, and so on
One of things I’m surprised that is rarely mentioned in most historical sources is that the use of formations is about crowd control. Related to this even in the modern world is just how dangerous it is to be in a disorderly crowd. Without some order in a huge crowd where people are not trying to intentionally kill each other people can still perish due to trampling. We can see examples of this in many historical battles and this shows why battle formations were so important and the epitome of this must be the war between Rome and Carthage.
Hannibal’s magnus opus the Battle of Cannae 216 BC worked not because the Romans were surrounded, but because the Romans broke formation. In Hannibal’s previous victories in the Battle of Trebia 218 BC and the Battle of Lake Trasimene 217 BC, Roman forces managed to break through his lines causing huge casualties. The Romans were able to do this because their army was much more uniformed and coherent while Hannibal’s army were much closer to a ragtag coalition that were always going to have some difficulty working together effectively. Hannibal correctly observed in both his victories and before the Battle of Cannae that the Roman’s superior cohesion would destroy him with a bigger version of what had worked in previous battles against him. The bending back of the crescent formation Hannibal used at Cannae robbed the Romans of their cohesion and they turned into a disorganised mob crammed into a tight crowd that were easily picked off by the Libyan pikemen and the Carthaginian heavy cavalry. The soldiers in the crescent and better formation only had to hold them there and it turned into a classic hammer and anvil scenario.
I'd like to see a "cinematographer reacts to historian" video...
Cinematographer: "Yeah we tried that but unless you have a camera panning for a dozen minutes or hours to cover literal kilometers, most of the soldiers will never show on screen. So we instead placed them all beside each other"😂
Ridley Scott would definitely be funny to watch doing that ahahahah
“Don’t care, I do what I think looks cool and there will be enough idiots happily gobbling up whatever slop I barely manage to cobble together”
@@-_Nuke_- Not necessarily required, Alexander (2004) managed to depict both the scale of the battle lines and also make a reasonably engaging battle sequence that has since been lauded for its attempt at recreating history with authenticity. Nobody said "Wow the lines are so wide, I wish they were all squished together!"
FWIW - I once played on a Bannerlord server where each soldier was an actual player. Top we got was ~ 110v110. We also had a few rules in place to make things more tame and true to IRL.
It was quite enlightning on how the dynamics of troops work. Your description of how files work vividly reminds me of those times.
@@sitrilko can you elaborate on this massive pvp?
My family has some journals from the Civil War. I guess we had family on both sides of the war running intelligence. One worked with the culper ring and mostly were a glorified courier and scout. His notes on the battles made them sound like chaotic and unorganized mixed units comming to head in little pockets with more mobile units trying to get around to either flqnk or directly attack artillery positions. A reply different picture than the organized lines pelting eachother with volley after volley. It's really cool to see some truth to his words and beyond just the American frontier at that
To be fair, the Civil War was really after the pike-and-shot era, where you did have lines of arquebusiers hammering away at each other for hours. By the 1860s, the guns were getting too good, and it was dangerous to keep massive formations out in the open.
People underestimate the sheer size of a single battle, we see the neat little blocks in red and blue facing eachother but fail to realise that for example the battlefield at Gettybusrg covered an area of 46 square kilometers, that at Austerlitz even stretches over an area of 400 square kilometers. The individual soldier probably saw his own unit and the ones on his left and right as well as 3-4 on the opposing side but he might as well just have clashed with a single unit of the enemy or just sat out the battle entirely because the lines never got close enough to exchange fire.
This is fascinating! Great job. It's important that we have a clear understanding of the reality of ancient history. Little by little we are able to peel back the layers of time to get closer to a more realistic depiction of ancient history.
Invicta x Dr. Roel Konijnendijk?? Hell yeah!
He's worked with them for some time, or so I read in another video.
Of course Hollywood ignores logistics of these gigantic battles. Feeding an army tens of thousands is horrifically difficult.
That's why once they had a big army they had to keep conquering people to pay for the army
@@terenceblakely4328 1200-1600 Calories for each person.
And the Confederates went to Gettysburg hoping to loot shoes.
@@alanbeaumont4848 cobblers must have been short in the supply train lol
@@NotASandMan Marching everywhere wears out leather fast.
Fabulous job guys! Always great to see these visualizations and Roel! Always love to see it when you manage to get our footage in too, just feels so cool 😎
Some of the favorite historical battles depicted in film in my opinion are Gettysburg (1993), Sekigahara (2017), and Waterloo (1970), because they make an effort to depict the battlefield as a real place/setting with their actual varied terrain and important points to fight over, and they show you how the generals and armies try to adapt to that battlefield.
Gettysburg and Waterloo give you a very good sense of how the armies are deployed, where the heaviest fighting is happening, and why it's happening there. Sekigahara on the other hand shows the battle shifting from place to place: fields, hills, woodlands, while also depicting how difficult it was for commanders to see how the entire battle is going and the challenges of communicating with the different units in their army. Gettysburg and Sekigahara also show what happens in the armies' camps behind the frontline too - the headquarters, logistics, medics/wound-treatment - which I loved bec. armies weren't just all fighting men that formed a battle line (Sekigahara even shows battlefield looters as well, taking valuables from dead and wounded left on the battlefield). Gettysburg does deployment and formations the best out of the three, since Sekigahara and Waterloo both have moments where they kinda fall into the trope of having disorganized masses of men advance toward each other.
All great points. My one issue with Gettysburg, which got so many things right, was casting reenactors as all the extras, given they were mostly "old" men in their forties and fifties, with many being overweight. Your average combat soldier across history has averaged around twenty-two-years old, with a plurality still in their late teens. Waterloo (one of my favourite movies of all-time) cast actual soldiers as extras, hence why most of the rank-and-file look much younger.
Basically total war medieval 2 vs total war warhammer. in medieval 2, doesnt matter how deep your ranks are, you get hit in the flanks, you lose half the unit. Meanwhile warhammer be like: lmao, what is a flank?
In Medieval 2, you demoralize your enemy to win.
In Warhammer, you got to kill them.
No, not even remotely. Units with high attack or high charge stats are absolutely deadly in a flanking attack or charges, respectively.
@@charvakpatel962 As the total war series went on, the way things like unit cohesion works and the importance of flanks and such got slowly looser and looser.
If you can make them work, it's really interesting to look at shogun 1 and medieval 1. They're much more oriented towards *trying* to be realistic simulations.
What's really ironic though, is that if you dive into those old game files, the mechanics are very strongly based on an old edition of the warhammer fantasy battle tabletop system.
Rome total war 1 and Medieval 2 total war have the most satisfying flank and rear-side charges... reason why i still play these games from time to time to get my mind off of work... 😅
I really wanted to like TW Warhammer, but its got too many issues weighing it down.
About disciplinarians: as a boy scout we marched in columns and deployed in formations, we found it organically that a rear disciplinarian is a must to keep the column cohesive plus a designated guy that would run from front to back of the column to relay commands. The columns would also be headed by seniors who would dictate the pace and stop at the designated field where we would deploy for assembly before setting up a camp, they would direct the units left and right for their designated spots.
So yeah, we pretty much trained military deployment in a timeless manner which Im sure was inherited from military, as most boy scout traditions were worldwide. I'm sure many of fellow watchers have had similiar experiences in their boy scouts!
Roman Centurion: Alert, boys, ALERT! We got Webelos at the gates!
Yep, the rear guards to keep the column in formation.
What is never, ever shown is the switch system. And what that means is that lets say a guy at the very front (the ones that were actually fighting) got hurt or exhausted, he needed to be pulled out of the line and replaced by someone behind him, to literally "hold the line". I believe it is when this "switch" system began to fail that units routed (well one of the reasons, also from being surrounded, leaders being killed, lost banners etc). One noteable thing is that in later battles during the 18th and 19th century, despite much more deadly weapons and less possibility for protection, routing was actually quite unusual. Because by this time the quality of the training and especially discipline was so much higher.
You did not forget the "war cry". Most important and mentioned in many accounts of ancient and medieval battles. Great explanation and display.
The reason for this Hollywood Style to depict large battles is that a massive deep formation looks more Impressive and is easier to shot by one camera angle
i would say a wide line looks more impressive, but maybe that's because of all the losses I take when getting flanked in war games.
@@jonathanlohaller758nah it only looks more impressive cause of audiences like the wear the aesthetic of authenticity, it makes them feel more intellectual and talk down on hollywood
My headcanon:
- Initially you have fighters in the front fencing, prodding, etc. Here, whichever side has higher range has the advantage. I think this is why the phalanx was so effective at its time: It's very convenient for the fighter's individual psychology as they remain at range to their enemies and don't voluntarily put themselves in danger. It doesn't require great individual skill or cohesion. A phalanx would ideally try to remain in this state for the entire battle.
- I don't believe these formations should be thought of as super static. Even if you're just prodding with a spear, this becomes very exhausting after a few minutes. You might also just get injured. I imagine frontline fighters attempting to disengage after a while and move to the back of the formation while someone else takes their place. There is I think some evidence for Romans even doing this in a systematic way with entire small units, which of course requires an entirely different level of coordination.
- Range disadvantage isn't that big of an issue as soon as you have large enough shields and strong enough discipline to commit to one concerted charge. The unit only needs to get past the speartips ONCE to gain an advantage, but it does take a lot of courage. This is why I would give trained Roman Legionnaires the advantage over a Greek phalanx militia: They are trained enough to go for that charge and then outfight them in hand-to-hand-combat.
- While a charge will initially be repelled most effectively by holding formation, as soon as the state of hand-to-hand-combat is reached, units have an incentive to loosen their formation to give individuals space to fight properly, and achieve small-scale numbers advantages. By this I don't mean the formation breaking completely (although that may of course happen), but just loosening it. That may however not always be possible for countless reasons (like terrain).
- I don't think pushing was an intentional strategy, it probably occurred involuntarily/circumstantially as soon as a fight had reached hand-to-hand-combat, and probably often for bad reasons rather than for good reasons. There is no way you are fighting an opponent in the front line and appreciate random idiots behind you pushing you into them. You want to push forward when YOU want and move back when YOU want.
The whole pushing thing sounds to me like a misunderstanding coming from scholars that have no concept of fighting.
"Pushing" to this day is still in use to mean advance or attack, it doesn't mean literally pushing as a main tactic
This actually reminds me of the couple larp battles I've been to. As you say, we kept distance, sometimes having to lunge forward to land a hit, and we also had to let the "dead" walk back through, which wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, as long as our leader kept an eye on it.
(For context: battles mostly 10v10 or 30v30, most with shields and padded weapons or bows, each has 2-4 lifes + respawn point. Fighting for areas, flags, quest items, anything the organisators came up with. It's like reanactment turned into a game.)
I didn't notice our formation loosening though. If anything, we could momentarily bunch up, but spacing in which one could fight was our default.
Then there are things I can't really comment on, like pushing or collisions. We avoided that for safety reasons. Like you, I assume it happened irl but only if necessary (e.g. pushing through a chokepoint) or when hyped up. I also don't really know how things would play out with a larger and deeper formation.
And off course I have no experience with how blood, screams of the dying, real chance of getting killed or going through several near-death experiences during a single day affects a soldier.
@@Fresh562 i imagined pushing happens as the losing side gets exhausted or timid begun falling back within the safety of their formation.
In a normal engagement, there might be 1 or 2 guys doing that in a unit of 60-100 to rest their nerves for a while. Imagine more people doing that. They will practically fall back as they try to maintain cohesion.
Would love to see the true size of Napoleons artillery & cavalry army.
Especially see how they moved such heavy cannons and its heavy ammo, how it was relocated during battle and so on
honestly using unreal or other 3d programms is such a cool way to show stuff like that
especially with the 3. person view
its so much easier to understand what actually happens for soldiers itself because usually you see battlefield only from a map
This is what I've studied in the this year as well. I came into the realization, especially after studying Arrian's description of Gaugamela, there were some mistakes in the Oliver Stone's Gaugamela battle scene.
When it came to the deployment of the phalanxes against enemy infantry, the movie also doesn't show the battalions being deployed in a *double-phalanx*. A double-phalanx is a formation that increases the depth of the phalanx by combining and reinforcing one Macedonian syntagma with another syntagma together from the rear. When a phalanx forms a *synaspismos* or locked-shields, the depth of the formation decreases from 16 ranks to 8 ranks, but it increases from 16 columns to 32 columns. In a double-phalanx, the columns of hoplites not only retain 32 columns but also increase their ranks to 16. Hence, what we should have seen in most of the battalions in Gaugamela is a front line of six rectangular blocks of three *pentakosiarchies* (that is a unit of 512 hoplites). This was done as by increasing the depth of mass, it would increase the weight and strength of the forward impetus of a sarissa phalanx, making it more impossible to oppose and defeat in the front.
Me: how many ditches should someone have?
Ditch guy: Yes!
The funny thing is that it would be easier/less expensive for hollywood to accurately depict historical formations. Because they'd have to spend less on CGI/extras. Fewer people on screen and more people further away is less expensive.
The only exception I can think of his movies that wanted very, very historically accurate battles using actual 10s of thousands of extras (Gettysburg/Waterloo).
One type of I don't think I've even seen in media is the "encounter battle"- where two armies meet unexpectedly and the engagement develops quickly and chaotically. Famous examples include everything from Cynoscephalae in 197 BC to the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. I suppose this is because encounter battles are much tougher to "fit" int the story emotionally (it's easier to build character arcs and story stakes when you have time to discuss how both sides know the decisive clash will take place upon The Inexplicably Empty Fields of Genericus) but the idea of forcing the characters to make split-second decisions with extremely limited information seems like it should be ripe for storytelling opportunities.
Would love to see this type of content for the Mongol Horde or Napoleonic line warfare
This was a really cool look into ancient armies. It helped me visualize the psychology of a soldier marching into battle and standing as they wait just a little bit better.
Guys! the Ditch Man is back 🗣
Awesome video! Love the unreal simulation, i am learning it in my free time as well and its amazing to see it being used for this :)
21:54 I beg your pardon?
🤣🤣
This video made me dig three lines of ditches around my house. Now my family is secure and my mind is at ease. I wonder what else awaits me when I go past the thumbnail.
If you subscribe to the “pulse” theory of combat (which I think makes the most sense) then depth provides another advantage: as men up front get tired (which would happen very quickly), wounded, or killed you have more replacements in the formation to take their place to maintain cohesion and fight in the next pulse. Psychologically those men further back in the deeper formation would have been under less proxie stress from seeing the fighting, giving you fresher men to keep cycling through the fighting if necessary.
I would love to see a video with thist type of visual representation about logistics of marching columns. If we take 10 thousand soldiers, marching 4 people in a row, it would be line about 1,5 km. And this is without supply wagons, pack animals and so on. Always kinda fascinated me how much distance this huge columns should've covered
I loved the use of unreal engine to show us from a human perspective, i hope to see more! But now im curious, you showed gaps between the different legions, not in the depth but width, would that be done in antiquity also?
When I see those massive armies like that all together I always wunder who was saposed to have fed all those men and horses. Were looking at whole city populations needing a meal on either side. If an army was that big the supply lines would be intense. Now I want to know how big the biggest fighting force in history was and more so I want to know the logistics that fuelled the campaign. Supply chains are fascinating to me and rarely given the spotlight. Thanks for such an interesting video.
I think you got paritally the wrong idea. Yes, they would probably have some sort of a supply chain, but until modern times, living off the land, seems to have been the norm, meaning, demand, extort, plunder and/or scavenge whatever you need.
you should check up on how steppe nomads would travel with their massive horde armies, the baggage trains following would be much larger than the fighting forces.
@@piaten Living off the land would definitely exhaust a region's supply. They def have a supply chain going on if they're going to feed 100,000 soldiers.
Every army had a baggage train. They would also forage when possible.
@4thdimensionalexplorer in friendly territory baggage trains didn't have to get very far because of nearby forts, castles and friendly rulers. In enemy territory you had to capture those. Fortifications like castles were heavily defended storehouses.
Alright I can definitely see how it's going with Ancient Greeks context. Especially with depth and width stuffs. I am juat wondering whether it works the same way with Ancient Chinese battles
Should be the same but ancient chinese battles were already in levels of early modern european battles early on. As far as I read, their battles have lots of maneuvers than engagements. With that, I think they care less on the width and depth and more on the numbers of their troops, positioning, and logistics.
As their territories and populations are bigger, they may have larger armies but they still have wider land to protect. They rarely concentrate their entire armies to engage in a single field battle. They fought in brigades or similar formations so it's pretty common to see the chinese fought battles in one location for days, months, or even a year before the outcome gets decided.
The honest answer is that we don't have a very clear idea. The writings that scholars left are a bit sparse on the specifics of unit tactics and focused a lot more on the operational/strategic level maneuvers. But there are things we can glean from some of the writing as well as artwork depiction, especially the Terracotta army pits. IMO, there was a long transition period between mid-Han to Jin dynasty when the military emphasis began to shift from infantry to cavalry. Frequent contact and constant warfare with nomads drove the development of the cavalry arm during the Han period. After the fall of the Jin and entering the Sixteen Kingdoms period, Northern China was ruled and fought over by Sinicized barbarian elites that built their military formation around nomadic cavalry core. This influence was subsequently reinforced with the later conquests under the Mongol and Manchus. That being said, Chinese infantry retained an important and complementary role in garrisoning and sieges.
The Terracotta army was a depiction of forces under the QIn and represents pre-Han era. What we see is primarily a infantry formation in a combined arms format. A pretty large contingent of archers was deployed in the front rank in linear fashion. Behind them are multiple regiments of heavy infantry arranged into distinct deep columns. The two flanks of the column had solders turned 90 degrees to face their respective flanks. Chariots are interspersed or behind the infantry. The formation is definitely distinct as I have not seen such a depth depicted as battle formation. It may be a marching column but the deployed archers in the front and the side facing flank guards argue against it. So it is possible they employed a very deep formation to bolster the morale of conscripted soldiery.
By the Han era, the infantry depth appears to have shrunk to 5-10 men deep. There are tomb figurine depiction of a infantry regiment 6 rows deep with the front 3 rows shield bearer and the rear 3 rows archer? (bit unclear as the weapon was missing). I have seen mentions that each squad is a combined arms unit consisting of shield-bearers, polearm and archer. Sharing similar idea with late Byzantine infantry formations. Cavalry is positioned behind the infantry unit.
@@syjiangso basically pitched battles in china became rare by the time late spring and autumn period to warring stres because mass conscription and standardized weapon? So its more became campaign or series skirmish, pitched battles, and ambush?
According ralph sawyer, the reason pitched battles become prevalent in europe and middle East is because lack of mass conscription, standardized weapon, and centralized bureucracy which influenced by geography and culture, this battle emphasize set planned battle where sometimes both armies meet in place where both sides think its the best place to maximize its advantage
While in china especially during western zhou and early spring and autumn period pitched battle still prevalent withb addition weird ethic and law until late spring and autumn period and warring stres coming because war happen in every place forcing regional ruler to creative in making and expand its army for offensive and defensive and thus pitched battles become rare and ended in grand campaign or multiple battle and skirmish in border area
@kameraldbahrul3432 when you look at Wikipedia about some of these chinese battles with massive armies and casualties. One thing you'll notice is that unlike pitched battles they're actually more like campaigns with fighting taking over weeks or even months. This is more in line with early modern or even modern European battles. Units would be rotating and engaging the enemy at different points at different times. There was a lot more on maneuver and strategic positioning. It's not literally 10s or 100s of thousands of Chinese in a giant mosh pit.
Where are the ditches?
3:38 Aah, yes. The famed Roman Sprites on Soap. Feared all across Europe.
Main problem with the depth is it is easier to surround it, like what usually happens with the hoplite vs legionaire battles (or what happened when the romans did a deep but narrow formation at Canae)
What bugs me is how archers are depicted. These archers would have been beasts among men. Not scrawny dude that chill in the back and don't do much. And we never have ditches.
You also see it with women in fantasy novels. "Oh yeah, Peggy is our archer." instead of "Yeah, that hulking guy with the massive shoulders is our archer".
@hoi-polloi1863 ya like Hawkeye in comics is insanely jacked like practically a super soldier I mean if Peggy is jacked and trained let her shoot the bow.
Hell even in training for hunger games Jennifer Lawrence was jacked Stephen amell who played Green arrow for nearly ten years was doing salmon ladders constantly.
Absolutely! Modern History TV did a great video on that. Jason Kingsley is pretty fit, but he was dwarfed by an archer he had on the show. One needed great strength and muscular stamina to keep loosing arrows with those heavy draw bows.
@legionarybooks13 like five or so years ago they found an ancient battlefields and some of the skeletons were warped from how they muscles had to grow and reform to constantly shoot the war bows
The visuals you have created prove that armies in formations can look visually epic as apposed to the cliche Hollywood hordes we get in movies.
They probably started this as a limitation, before CGI they had to use extras and at best try to compose more unitys in-frame and even after CGI they probably like to use some extras as reference, at least in the early days of CGI. And without drones the cheaper they could get a aerial shot was in a crane, with a crane would be hard to get a angle that do justice for a huge line, a deep shoot show the scale of the army better. Once the pattern was established in the public consciousness even if modern CGI and drone tech allows the line, directors will be less inclined to deliver something that goes against what the public expect.
It's similar to how is very hard to break down the irrealistic cliches of TV sci-fi/space battles.
@@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa yes totally agree but now they have cgi, drones and all the tools at hand there’s no excuses for unrealistic period battles so really hope to see the reality and creativity coming to TV and movies soon 🙏🏻🙌🏼
@@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa I still haven’t watched Ridley Scott’s Napoleon so I’m curious to know if, with all the tools at hand he showed formations in the battle scenes.
@@VitorHugoOliveiraSousa Go watch Spartacus, the old one. Final battle shows the entire Roman army forming into line in frame, all extras. It was possible even then. Hollywood just doens't want to fork out the resources for it. Movies like that are a rarity.
For antiquity-era armies, there were practical limits to the depth of a formation as well. The revolutionary Macedonian sarissa was up to ~23 feet long. Considering you needed space in the file, you can't get more than say 12 guys usefully deploying their spears at once. The Macedonian phalanx was typically 16 guys deep, allowing both for reinforcement and extra "pushing weight".
This really depends.
There were innovative and or novel tactics that were utilized where depth could be extreme.
The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the Battle of Leuctra. Where the Boeotian League overloaded their left flank with the Sacred Band + the rest of their elite forces, to a depth of 50 ranks. They advanced in oblique order and just smashed the Spartiates.
I think this battle is very interesting because I think in many ways it sort of reveals the truth about the concept of a shoving match. Generally speaking, if a person has any understanding of large crowd dynamics, you know that there was no shoving match. It would be suicide for all the men in the front ranks on either side that were crushed and suffocated by the press.
However, anyone familiar with the concept of rucking or a scrum in rugby knows what happens when a large group of dudes push together against a smaller group that have no ability to withstand that push. I think that is likely what happened to the elite Spartan Spartiates at Leuctra. The Thebans and the other Boeotians stacked 50 ranks deep running into ~8-12 ranks deep. They just pushed straight through the Spartans. The Spartans didn't have the mass to cause a press which would have prevented it from happening so they got essentially rucked over. Columns of dudes 50 ranks deep, just pushing on each others backs to bowl over the much lighter force they were pushing into. If the Spartans had the depth to match it, it wouldn't have happened because the press would have killed the front ranks on both sides, but the Spartans didn't, so nothing prevented the Thebans from just bowling through them. Once the Spartan lines broke, the battle was over.
So there were always novel examples where a very deep formation could be used as a battering ram to just press through an enemy line.
I think it would be a good point to demonstraight how the Roman system wasn't really linearly that deep because they staggered their different ranks. Where here they are all shown in a straight line back but in reality their actual depth was almost half of what was shown because the Principes manipuli weren't right behind the hastati manipuli but to their back left and right so really their depth wasn't even as deep as shown. the gap between Hastati and Triarii was empty.
Also good point. "Depth" wasn't just about pushing or morale, but having reserves who can be committed to the battle if the frontline breaks, or could be redeployed to face an attack on the flanks.
Each one of those warriors and if they have them horses, requires water, food, shelter, blacksmith, etc. The logistics support would have to be huge compared to those army/warrior formations. An army does march on its stomach after all.
They had large baggage trains.
they had forager detachments to "procure" food
When you started talking about pushing and its impact i couldnt help but be reminded of the castells in catalonia spain. Human towers supported by a base of people leaning in to another
Professor ditch always provide great information
12:50
Spartans: WHY THE FUCK is there a Roman from 500 years in the future leading us? And why we all have this rod in our asses?
To the first part... that was just, er ... science fiction, yeah. To the second part... well. This *is* Classical Greece. Just lie back and think of Delphi.
@@hoi-polloi1863 Maybe the 2nd part is also sci fi... Vlad the Impaler went 2000 years back in time.
My house has a flood irrigation system, in other words….. I have a ditch with water in it around my house. The ditch man would be proud!!!!!!
I hope Ditch man sees this!
A really cool thing to note about warchants with the tribal aristocracies warfare, before Alexander the Great went into the Achaemenid Empire, he and his army were ambushed in a very bad place, one of his biggest blunders that’s often overlooked. The battle was not even a battle. The tribals had the advantage of surprise and terrain on a slope whilst the phalangites were caught between the slopes and a river. They did their warchants and chest beating so to speak, and the Macedonians were collected and disciplined. Alexander ordered his army to drill. Literally. So they were raising and dropping their sarrisa pikes and marching and maneuvering as they did in drill exercise, and the tribals ran away. That’s right, he won a battle without fighting, but by his force doing their drills. Turned an ambush into a drill exercise and won.
The part where the historian mentions depth I feel hits hard. I was playing Pharaoh Total War recently and it made me realize that unit size, especially for cavalry and chariots just gets in the way and makes the units in general feel unwieldly when moving around.
I might have missed it, but in some of the examples given, it seems the environment often dictated the depth of formations. A town or castle can only be so wide, and even fields have their limits depending on the region. In many areas, woods or other natural barriers surround everything, which might lead to deeper formations compared to regions with more open terrain, like parts of Greece or Rome.
Please Dr Roel just make your own UA-cam channel!
Right? How has the use of ditches changed over thousands of years? Ditch ranking use in movies and shows, so many possibilities!!
About depth of the formation: In my opinion, depth allows to replenish causalities and rotate fresh troops and in that regard, depth disposition is signaling the focus of the attacker (as he usually deploys troops first). There are, off course, many nuances in that - like in classical Greece if similar forces met (so the depth could be enhanced only by considerably sacrificing the width), the elite forces were deployed on the right ("honorable") flank as the hoplite falanx tactics caused slight shifting of the formation to the left during actual melee fighting.
this was amazing!! really makes you think the way you explained marching to battle and lining up. I would have loved to experience that first hand.
I would think thin lines would also be good for morale. If you’re going to battle and on the front line of a very deep column, you start being afraid that you will almost certainly die.
The only movie that got scale and organisation of a battle right is _Waterloo,_ no other has or will ever come close. And even that was "just" 17'000 soviet soldiers and a "mere" 2'000 horses compared to the 150'000 men and 40'000 horses that were actually present that fateful day.
Gaugamela in Alexander is the best representation of an antiquity/medieval period battle ever.
@@mercb3ast True, _Alexander_ is a great movie. People love to give it crap but it's easily the closest we come so far to a historically accurate pre-gunpowder movie.
Excellent video. Can you also showcase (and maybe simulate) how battles were fought and how that changed formation from the soldier's perspective ?
For example, in Canae, even when the romans had 2x of Hannibal and their formation was deep, they still lost because they were envelopped
How did that happen ? Why the soldiers from behind didn't react and redeploy ?
Narrow columns for movement are important to cohesion. It's much harder to keep troops aligned in wider formations during movement. Even you watch military drills in the traditional of even the 19th century, You'll see this.
Great video!
The sizes of ancient armies are much exaggerated. We know this for a number of reasons. 1) the populations of the warring states; 2) logistics - people eat, sleep, and crap. How is the food gathered and distributed? What about water? It’s very heavy and bulky. So armies of a few thousand were common. Armies of the Middle Ages tended to be smaller than in late ancient times because there were few very large populous states with standing army and military infrastructure. Especially after the plagues hit. A Roman Legion had about 10,000 people - soldiers and support. The entire party on the march was a bit larger. But how many battles involved more than 3 legions or so? Not many. There were only about 30 for the entire empire at peak. An army of 50,000 was about as big as you could provision and control on the march.
Interesting detail regarding the mechanics of routs and the location of the Triarii; not only did the Romans use a deeper formation, they put their battle hardened veterans at the rear. I'd imagine that had a massive impact on both the morale of the front line and the likelihood of a rout forming in the typical "back ranks chicken out" manner
Very good visualization. You keep destroying my favorite moments in movies, and I love it! But perhaps also consider geography and vegetation more, because battlefields were seldom flat open ground.
To me the odd thing is audiences would be fascinated by a representation of the real thing.
Great vid man, cleared up some of the facts for me
This was a really eye opening video. But I can only imagine how expensive it’d be to make this fit on screen and still look impressive. The big horde is not only cheaper but easier to show.
18:20 - I've always been confused as to where the confusion comes from with the "pushing" thing. I've always interpreted the "pushing" as being mostly symbollic where you try to "push" the enemies away in the sense that you attempt to drive them from the battlefield by poking your spears at them. If you're a soldier and you see these spears coming at you, you're going to instinctively want to run away. So in that sense they push you off. Which is also, I imagine, why the sarissa was so effective. Because instead of just one spear in your face and being able to put your own spear in the enemy's face, you had like 5 spears in your face and you can't even reach the enemy with yours. So you're gonna want to flee a lot more.
I love the look and feel of the on-the-ground perspective. Very creative use of unreal engine!
Excellent as always.
A must go to for detail!!!
The big exception that confirms the rule is obviously the phalanx where units maintained an equal file to column ratio. The 20 foot long spears additionally nearly doubled the depth of a phalanx.
The king showed this really well. And also, I have to say it. The battle of the bastards in GOT was a really good showing of this on a large scale
can we have more of these???
Think the main reason is that the movies go for depth formations over length is that it harder to film a long line formations, and depth formations can get in one shot and looks kewl.
Once again, girth wins over length.
This is super interesting for me, a topic that I didn't know I needed explained.
I noticed armies deployed like this while playing Scourge of War. Really hits home how big armies are and how long they go.
I'd love for you to discuss outliers like the Tercio. From what I know the Tercio would be an exceptionally deep formation compared to the standards discussed in this video yet it was still regarded as highly effective for a long time.
Dann gebe es noch den Vorläufer des Tercio nämlich die Geviert Haufen der Eidgenossen und der Landsknechte. Außerdem noch den Schottischen Schiltrons und die Kolonnen der Franzosen sowie Österreicher. Obwohl ich mir vorstellen kann das die letzten beiden vorallem den im Video besprochen psychologischen Effekt haben sollten. Besonders wenn es zu einem Bajonett Angriff kam. Bei denen historisch fast nie beide Seiten aufeinander trafen. Weil eine kurz vor dem zussammenprall den Mut verlor und sich zurückzog.
14:04 Special note for the one madman who decided on a 50x50 hoplite formation. It's one of my favorite tidbits.
"How the Spartan army was defeated by a math equation." - Battle of Leuctra 371bc.
17:00 I'm a fool. Well played.
21:23 "Well endowed" Hah! You know it!
About pushing (non scientific):
It makes sense to want to push your enemy, because you might throw him on the ground by doing that and being on the ground is a very vulnerable position. On the other hand I believe too much pushing ,may risk throwing tour own men to the ground ( like tag of war) , may lock the front liners to not being able to use their hands, may make it harder to breathe for those being sandwiched and thus faint.
Also not pushing but resisting the enemy pressure would be more important. Like making a wall behind your fellow soldier to support him and not push him on his back
Its funny that the great swedish invention in 17th century was just wider line of gunners :D century later, French create deep attack regiments to survive volleys and engage in melee while brits form thin red line, wider formations to get more dudes firing on the enemy (and appear more numerous than they really were) and hillariously thats also the best tactic in most total war games where flanking beats staying power.
The greeks had a separation of units that is kind of a proto-roman republic formation, since the main body of greek formations was the classic shield and sarissa hoplite. But just the mere fact of being a greek hoplite identified the warrior as an adult male of some wealth and maturity. Less mature, and less wealthy, fighters were formed into skirmishers, slingers and other auxiliary support bodies. The endeavours of those support units are not well documented for the simple fact that Greek military prestige centred on the hoplites (with the exception, perhaps, of the various ways of fighting listed in the Iliad, which describes a mish mash of different time periods in Greek warfare, much of it pre-hoplite combat).
The other thing to note in Greek mass warfare is that the rounded shields meant that men in the front ranks probably had a tendency to tuck their exposed weapon bearing side behind the overlapping shield of the man to their right. Leading to a situation where Greek massed formations of hoplites/phalanxes tended to echelon with the men at the right end of the line leading the approach into combat. This accounts for the tendency in Greek battles for the line of contact to turn counter clockwise, occasionally performing a full 180 degree turn during the fighting, one some occasions that turning of the line had decisive consequences. The later curved shield of the romans eliminated that problem by providing a fighting platform that shielded the entire body from right to left.
Its also the case that, in earlier large scale battles, command and control was always a serious problem, especially in Greek hoplite warfare, because the noise of a large scale army, muffled by helmets, would make command in combat impossible (and even if you could issue commands how could they be implemented?). So "command" in Greek battles was often mostly just effective in the pre-contact phase of setting up the army. A Greek leader usually being in the front ranks, once the army was committed to the fight, command and control went out the window (Even Alexander the Great fought in the front ranks of his armies - as his various wounds attested ). Again, while armies commanded by Alexander had rudimentary command and control, it wasnt until the roman period that this issue was seriously addressed. The signal flags of the renaissance italian armies - which are still used today but only for displays - are the best our predecessors could do to address command and control issues, along with various sound methods, which the romans mastered with various trumpets and horns. The Greeks used rudimentary horns and trumpets but not with any particular system like the romans. Without that kind of command and control, breaking a mass army into smaller components could be extremely dangerous. And having long lines created the problem that in the dust of battle neither wing of an army could tell how the other end of the line was faring. It was not uncommon for one end of the line to collapse while the opponent's lines were collapsing at the other end (especially in Greek warfare where the strongest warriors tended to be at the place of honour on the right end of the line.
Macedonia and successors ran 16x16 in their syntagmas (what the organization of 256 men was called). The formation was symmetrical for maneuver purposes. You didn't stretch the formation out to be wider than the depth, unless you didn't want them to be able to turn effectively or wheel.
We don't know that much about the drill of the Macedonian style pike phalanx (syntagma), it is assumed that they did not have the same drill techniques of later famous pike wielding forces of the medieval period. However, the symmetry of the formation remained paramount in antiquity, and in the medieval period. A pike square is a highly mobile (in terms of turning) formation that has nearly unstoppable forward momentum.
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So what happens when the front of the line gets tired? Do they switch with the guy behind them?
Great video, getting on the ground in unreal really sent this one over, I can’t wait for that cannae video!
What about waterloo from the 70s since there you also have large armies.
Aahh the ledgend returns!!! We need mlre battle tips and ditch guides :)
One thing to understand that Tolkien battles are not just fantasy but actually make sense on the surface. If you take account the battle formation of dwarves and elves in the Battle of Five Armies. The size of each army were relatively adequate unlike displayed like 300 and Troy movie. The Orcs according Tolkien were made to flood the field with their numbers. They were created to lesser degree as fodders, akin to rat infestation. So the massive army of Orcs were not based from a historical battle tactics but overwhelming tide of flesh and iron, to put pressure and crush the opposing force. Like a horde of fast running zombies.
Excellent video! Thanks!
The Return of the King commentary, they were complaining at one point about how Pelanor Fields looked so tiny and they just kept having to add more and more and more until they were something like 400,000 Orcs on the field. Well, here's the answer to why they had a problem.
Thanks for another video
Love this type of content!
reserve formations really weren't that uncommon and were definitely part of strategies. so whilst i agree that having an endless enormous army way too big for then that is all stacked behind each other with no formation separation is bad, i don't think it's necessarily accurate to have them almost entirely stretched out either. it obviously depends on the battle. another great video, thanks guys.
Just theorizing but the the greater depth being good for the push could just be referring to more energy for the push. By that I mean you have more people so more energy and endurance so you can be relentless in a push (cycling them out etc). The other side would tire out from the pressure of the equivalent expenditure from your side but then you still have more in reserve to continue and break them.
To imagine large army I always use one real life experience that I was in. I witnessed a very big reenactment event (600 anniversary of battle of Grunwald), where vast majority of observers were standing on one side of one hill. I stood under this hill, so I could see them all. Then the speaker said that there are about 100000 tourists observing the battle right now. So, I assume that there was something between 75000 and 100000 of people there in one place. So, I have a "print screen" image of this always in my brain. And every time someone speaks about army numbers, I imagine that and for example cut it in half (when they talk about 40000-50000 soldiers). And so on. It's also not that hard to imagine how these soldiers marched into battle in narrow column(s), or formed a long thin battleline. Because I also seen people on their way onto such events, squeezed into tight passages limited by roads, vegetation, fences and so on.
Having reenacted as a pikeman I found that your visibility is limited and the basic message to fall back is when you're no longer being pushed from behind. One of the reasons I swithced to artillery, you get a much better sense of what's going on. ;-)