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Firepower ; weapons effectiveness on the battlefield, 1630-1850
A classic study of the evolving use of infanty and artillery weapons from Gustavus Adolphus to Britain's conquest of India.
- GenresHistoryMilitary History
174 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
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February 11, 2026
This is really a neat and unique work. I don't know of any other author who has attempted to calculate the actual effectiveness of firepower in the age of smoothb0re muskets and ordnance.
One of the reasons for this is, as Hughes informs us, that the weapons remained essentially unchanged for so long that the authorities of the time felt little need to discuss their performance or to repeat these facts, since every military man would have been well-acquainted.
One of the things that Hughes argues is that the bayonet was usually secondary, and that the charge was typically only done after the enemy formation had been weakened by fire. I'm not sure how far this applies to every army.
I would say that a weakness in this study is that it tends to focus on the British and French armies, and really it focuses mostly on the British. The British were not very numerous but they were very well-disciplined, so they tended to rely on firepower.
It may be the case that the French also relied on firepower to weaken an enemy formation when they were facing soldiers like the British. But was the bayonet secondary in all of their battles? Traditionally historians and military theorists have concentrated on the use of shock tactics by the French in column, allegedly to overcome inferiority in discipline which reduced the effect of their musketry, but Hughes believes that this is questionable.
The French and the Russians are credited with achieving stupendous victories through us of the bayonet en colonne against such enemies as the Austrians and the Turks. One suspects also that the bayonet would have been immensely effective against the Spanish in the Peninsula, or against the American rebels in the American Revolution.
But none of these armies are examined, apart from the French and British the only army even really mentioned is the Prussian, apart from the early parts of the work where the innovations of Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedish Army are considered.
This, I feel, is a major weakness of the work since no other major armies of the time are examined in any detail.
That aside, it is full of useful information on the evolution of tactics in the early modern period. It starts in 1650 so sadly we don't learn about the earliest innovations in firearm use. There's an article by Ben Cassidy that briefly discusses Spanish use of firearms at Cerignola and the lessons Machiavelli derived from this, which leaves one wanting more but alas.
James Tritten in a critique of the concept of military revolutions argues that the polearm ended the supremacy of cavalry and not the firearm, but here Hughes contends the opposite. He says that in order to counter the longbow armor got heavier, but the advent of the handgun made armor obsolete because the kenetic force was so great that the amount of armor needed to result a bullet made the idea impractical.
European armies eventually gave up armor altogether, but Hughes is convincing here. We might say that a combination of pike and shot ended the dominance of heavy cavalry, and we might glean an insight in this by Hughes's description of infantry squares. Horses were reluctant to charge them, and the firearms could take a steady toll on the cavalry.
Mass squares of pikes supported by arquebuses would have achieved, I imagine, a similar effect.
It's interesting to note that field artillery was a rather late innovation, as artillery was so cumbersome it could only be used in sieges for a long time. We are given a walk-through of how this changed, and how rate of fire for ordnance was improved by casting lighter and sturdier pieces, improving the gun-carriage, using the elevation screw and so forth, so that the guns could be moved quickly and aimed in little time, which was also helped by the invention of the tangent sight.
What is most interesting, however, and the core premise of this work, is that fire was surprisingly ineffective. Perhaps not so surprising, since we know of battles where soldiers were able to cover open ground with relatively light casualties, which suggests that the fire against them was not particularly intense.
Hughes himself notes that there are instances of this which would have been suicidal with modern firearms. And we recall here the move towards the doctrine of the empty battlefield as firepower increased and men were forced to disperse and take cover rather than concentrate in dense masses.
Nicholas Murray wrote an interesting book on the evolution of trench warfare, and in Perilous Glory by John France the author contends that European military tradition evolved to rely on the dense formation, more or less square or rectangular, which provided a number of advantages in terms of controlling and moving men about the field, and preventing desertion. Hughes's work complements these in my mind by showing that the advent of firepower did not preclude movements or mass attacks that would have been recognizable to the Greeks and Romans.
Hughes makes a number of calculations in various battles to try to estimate the effect of fire and it's usually very low. Beyond certain ranges it must have been zero.
A fundamental lesson that emerged is that weapons' designers decided to sacrifice accuracy and range, which could have been improved by making a ball that fit the barrel more tightly, for rate of fire.
This is extraordinary because this is the consistent lesson that is highlighted over and over again even in modern times with modern weapons. It is well-known that the US Army made a study showing that American soldiers fired thirty or fifty-thousand rounds for each KIA in Korea or Vietnam, and this sentiment is echoed by a military authority quoted by Hughes who said that to kill a man you needed to fire his weight in lead.
Then, as now, most bullets were simply going to miss. So then, as now, it is clear that volume of fire is more important than accuracy or range. Armies learned this in WWII when the semi-automatic or the sub-machine gun proved more effective than the bolt-action rife in actual combat conditions.
But muskets were on such a level that they did not preclude shock tactics. Part of this was because even at the max performance rate of fire was still very low by our standards, and part of this was due to the obscurity of the field by smoke. Hughes does a great service by reminding us of this often, the battlefield would have been very hard to perceive as both sides would have been shrouded in thick black smoke.
We often forget that the revolution in modern weapons was not in rifling, which already existed in the time period covered here, but in modern propellant. Not only did this allow for cleaner firing that did not foul the barrel, and thus for much faster firing, but it also produced much less smoke. Indeed, it was originally advertised as smokeless powder.
So men could shoot much farther, much faster, and they could see much better. This led to the eventual abandonment of shock tactics, but authors like France, Murray, and Cassidy note that European generals often relied on the idea of covering the ground quickly enough to break the enemy formation with shock before his fire could shatter the attack.
Cassidy criticizes this tactic, which failed at Cerignola, but it would appear to me that in the absence of fieldworks or fortifications this was an entirely viable strategy. And it explains why authorities like Foch and Grandmaison clung to it up to WWI. It had always proven true in the past.
For military enthusiasts the popular perception of fire by ranks at close range being stupid is an amusing oversimplification. This system was in fact the best one to get the maximum advantage from the weapons of the period.
An army firing more accurately, but more slowly, would be shot to pieces by an army that was just belting out lead. Or worse, they'd be trampled by cavalry.
One thing that emerges from all this is that firepower was more effective on the defense than on the offense, especially artillery. And Hughes goes to some lengths to explain why counterbattery fire was unproductive of results and it was better to concentrate fire on the enemy infantry.
He goes to some pains to describe the different types of ammunition and their effectiveness under various conditions, concluding that round shot was consistently the most reliable. Sadly there is no discussion of naval artillery but that is to be expected given the subject.
The rate of fire of artillery was bound to have been affected by the overheating of the piece and by the recoil which required the artillery to be repositioned after firing. But Hughes explains how despite this rate of fire continuously improved throughout the period.
The last section of the book includes a number of case studies where Hughes tries to demonstrate his points under actual conditions, and I was delighted that he chose three famous battles from the Peninsular War. Albuera, Talavera, and Bussaco, which are well-known to students of Wellington.
His fourth example comes from the Sikh Wars and it was interesting to read because I know very little of these conflicts.
Not much is mentioned about Napoleon's use of the grand battery, unfortunately. Frederic Natusch Maude in his short work on the Evolution of Modern Strategy considers Napoleon's use of artillery to have been a major tactical innovation, though he thinks Napoleon got lazy and came to rely on it too heavily. 'That fellow was just a pounder after all' as Wellington rued in disappointment after Waterloo.
But the use of mass artillery to blast holes in the enemy line must be seen as a marked improvement of artillery use, and it is a shame that Hughes concentrates more on artillery used for enfilade fire on the defensive.
I would imagine that this because, again, his sources are primarily British.
Overall I enjoyed this work immensely and I was gratified that it underscored the lessons on firepower that have long been consistently salient. That rate of fire and volume of lead is king. This is all the more remarkable because in the middle of the nineteenth century a number of armies rejected breech-loading rifles (like the Austrian Army) because they argued men would fire away all of their ammo without hitting anything, and that accuracy and range were more important.
This was decisively disproven by the war between Austria and Prussia in 1866, where Prussian rate of fire shot the Austrian formations to pieces just as one would expect. But this study shows that the evidence that this would happen was already there to see, it had already been demonstrated in warfare during the entire preceding period.
It was a more justifiable debate to decide whether shock or firepower was more decisive, but accuracy and range should never have entered the equation. This study makes clear that since the advent of firepower, despite the inefficiency of the weapons, unreliability (and Hughes takes into account misfires too, or empty fires from men under pressure) was overcome by sheer volume.
The lesson seems to be that you should bring as much fire as you possibly can, all the time in every battle. I would have liked if Hughes discussed the effect of artillery on fortifications and sieges, but he chose to focus on the field of battle and this made for a short crisp read full of unique information and we can only hope that it inspires others to emulate his example.
One of the reasons for this is, as Hughes informs us, that the weapons remained essentially unchanged for so long that the authorities of the time felt little need to discuss their performance or to repeat these facts, since every military man would have been well-acquainted.
One of the things that Hughes argues is that the bayonet was usually secondary, and that the charge was typically only done after the enemy formation had been weakened by fire. I'm not sure how far this applies to every army.
I would say that a weakness in this study is that it tends to focus on the British and French armies, and really it focuses mostly on the British. The British were not very numerous but they were very well-disciplined, so they tended to rely on firepower.
It may be the case that the French also relied on firepower to weaken an enemy formation when they were facing soldiers like the British. But was the bayonet secondary in all of their battles? Traditionally historians and military theorists have concentrated on the use of shock tactics by the French in column, allegedly to overcome inferiority in discipline which reduced the effect of their musketry, but Hughes believes that this is questionable.
The French and the Russians are credited with achieving stupendous victories through us of the bayonet en colonne against such enemies as the Austrians and the Turks. One suspects also that the bayonet would have been immensely effective against the Spanish in the Peninsula, or against the American rebels in the American Revolution.
But none of these armies are examined, apart from the French and British the only army even really mentioned is the Prussian, apart from the early parts of the work where the innovations of Gustavus Adolphus and the Swedish Army are considered.
This, I feel, is a major weakness of the work since no other major armies of the time are examined in any detail.
That aside, it is full of useful information on the evolution of tactics in the early modern period. It starts in 1650 so sadly we don't learn about the earliest innovations in firearm use. There's an article by Ben Cassidy that briefly discusses Spanish use of firearms at Cerignola and the lessons Machiavelli derived from this, which leaves one wanting more but alas.
James Tritten in a critique of the concept of military revolutions argues that the polearm ended the supremacy of cavalry and not the firearm, but here Hughes contends the opposite. He says that in order to counter the longbow armor got heavier, but the advent of the handgun made armor obsolete because the kenetic force was so great that the amount of armor needed to result a bullet made the idea impractical.
European armies eventually gave up armor altogether, but Hughes is convincing here. We might say that a combination of pike and shot ended the dominance of heavy cavalry, and we might glean an insight in this by Hughes's description of infantry squares. Horses were reluctant to charge them, and the firearms could take a steady toll on the cavalry.
Mass squares of pikes supported by arquebuses would have achieved, I imagine, a similar effect.
It's interesting to note that field artillery was a rather late innovation, as artillery was so cumbersome it could only be used in sieges for a long time. We are given a walk-through of how this changed, and how rate of fire for ordnance was improved by casting lighter and sturdier pieces, improving the gun-carriage, using the elevation screw and so forth, so that the guns could be moved quickly and aimed in little time, which was also helped by the invention of the tangent sight.
What is most interesting, however, and the core premise of this work, is that fire was surprisingly ineffective. Perhaps not so surprising, since we know of battles where soldiers were able to cover open ground with relatively light casualties, which suggests that the fire against them was not particularly intense.
Hughes himself notes that there are instances of this which would have been suicidal with modern firearms. And we recall here the move towards the doctrine of the empty battlefield as firepower increased and men were forced to disperse and take cover rather than concentrate in dense masses.
Nicholas Murray wrote an interesting book on the evolution of trench warfare, and in Perilous Glory by John France the author contends that European military tradition evolved to rely on the dense formation, more or less square or rectangular, which provided a number of advantages in terms of controlling and moving men about the field, and preventing desertion. Hughes's work complements these in my mind by showing that the advent of firepower did not preclude movements or mass attacks that would have been recognizable to the Greeks and Romans.
Hughes makes a number of calculations in various battles to try to estimate the effect of fire and it's usually very low. Beyond certain ranges it must have been zero.
A fundamental lesson that emerged is that weapons' designers decided to sacrifice accuracy and range, which could have been improved by making a ball that fit the barrel more tightly, for rate of fire.
This is extraordinary because this is the consistent lesson that is highlighted over and over again even in modern times with modern weapons. It is well-known that the US Army made a study showing that American soldiers fired thirty or fifty-thousand rounds for each KIA in Korea or Vietnam, and this sentiment is echoed by a military authority quoted by Hughes who said that to kill a man you needed to fire his weight in lead.
Then, as now, most bullets were simply going to miss. So then, as now, it is clear that volume of fire is more important than accuracy or range. Armies learned this in WWII when the semi-automatic or the sub-machine gun proved more effective than the bolt-action rife in actual combat conditions.
But muskets were on such a level that they did not preclude shock tactics. Part of this was because even at the max performance rate of fire was still very low by our standards, and part of this was due to the obscurity of the field by smoke. Hughes does a great service by reminding us of this often, the battlefield would have been very hard to perceive as both sides would have been shrouded in thick black smoke.
We often forget that the revolution in modern weapons was not in rifling, which already existed in the time period covered here, but in modern propellant. Not only did this allow for cleaner firing that did not foul the barrel, and thus for much faster firing, but it also produced much less smoke. Indeed, it was originally advertised as smokeless powder.
So men could shoot much farther, much faster, and they could see much better. This led to the eventual abandonment of shock tactics, but authors like France, Murray, and Cassidy note that European generals often relied on the idea of covering the ground quickly enough to break the enemy formation with shock before his fire could shatter the attack.
Cassidy criticizes this tactic, which failed at Cerignola, but it would appear to me that in the absence of fieldworks or fortifications this was an entirely viable strategy. And it explains why authorities like Foch and Grandmaison clung to it up to WWI. It had always proven true in the past.
For military enthusiasts the popular perception of fire by ranks at close range being stupid is an amusing oversimplification. This system was in fact the best one to get the maximum advantage from the weapons of the period.
An army firing more accurately, but more slowly, would be shot to pieces by an army that was just belting out lead. Or worse, they'd be trampled by cavalry.
One thing that emerges from all this is that firepower was more effective on the defense than on the offense, especially artillery. And Hughes goes to some lengths to explain why counterbattery fire was unproductive of results and it was better to concentrate fire on the enemy infantry.
He goes to some pains to describe the different types of ammunition and their effectiveness under various conditions, concluding that round shot was consistently the most reliable. Sadly there is no discussion of naval artillery but that is to be expected given the subject.
The rate of fire of artillery was bound to have been affected by the overheating of the piece and by the recoil which required the artillery to be repositioned after firing. But Hughes explains how despite this rate of fire continuously improved throughout the period.
The last section of the book includes a number of case studies where Hughes tries to demonstrate his points under actual conditions, and I was delighted that he chose three famous battles from the Peninsular War. Albuera, Talavera, and Bussaco, which are well-known to students of Wellington.
His fourth example comes from the Sikh Wars and it was interesting to read because I know very little of these conflicts.
Not much is mentioned about Napoleon's use of the grand battery, unfortunately. Frederic Natusch Maude in his short work on the Evolution of Modern Strategy considers Napoleon's use of artillery to have been a major tactical innovation, though he thinks Napoleon got lazy and came to rely on it too heavily. 'That fellow was just a pounder after all' as Wellington rued in disappointment after Waterloo.
But the use of mass artillery to blast holes in the enemy line must be seen as a marked improvement of artillery use, and it is a shame that Hughes concentrates more on artillery used for enfilade fire on the defensive.
I would imagine that this because, again, his sources are primarily British.
Overall I enjoyed this work immensely and I was gratified that it underscored the lessons on firepower that have long been consistently salient. That rate of fire and volume of lead is king. This is all the more remarkable because in the middle of the nineteenth century a number of armies rejected breech-loading rifles (like the Austrian Army) because they argued men would fire away all of their ammo without hitting anything, and that accuracy and range were more important.
This was decisively disproven by the war between Austria and Prussia in 1866, where Prussian rate of fire shot the Austrian formations to pieces just as one would expect. But this study shows that the evidence that this would happen was already there to see, it had already been demonstrated in warfare during the entire preceding period.
It was a more justifiable debate to decide whether shock or firepower was more decisive, but accuracy and range should never have entered the equation. This study makes clear that since the advent of firepower, despite the inefficiency of the weapons, unreliability (and Hughes takes into account misfires too, or empty fires from men under pressure) was overcome by sheer volume.
The lesson seems to be that you should bring as much fire as you possibly can, all the time in every battle. I would have liked if Hughes discussed the effect of artillery on fortifications and sieges, but he chose to focus on the field of battle and this made for a short crisp read full of unique information and we can only hope that it inspires others to emulate his example.
July 31, 2022
It is a rare thing to see someone actually using mathematical analysis applied to topics of military history, although the subject matter lends itself so neatly. General Hughes here does an excellent job of basically systemising the effect of both smooth bore artillery and musketry. The technical discussions are well researched and insightful, the diagrams are useful and plentiful, the illustrations and photographs are well selected and informative. However not all of the battle pictures are easily understood and some could have done with even more explanatory text. There are also a few typos and one diagram I think repeated instead of the one that was supposed to be included. This has long been one of my favourite Napoleonic military books.
This book is hugely powerful in actually making sense and giving understanding of what happens particularly on the Napoleonic battle. While covers the whole period 1630-1850 (there is a typo in the book entry by Goodreads reading 1750) the emphasis is on particularly the Peninsular campaign as the three best case studies are all Peninsular battles. Nevertheless the findings no doubt can be extrapolated into a wider Napoleonic context and back and forward in time throughout the smoothbore period.
Overall the conclusion is that these were not particularly deadly weapons and the battlefield a lot less lethal an environment than we have hitherto been led to believe. Even ideal under direct combat conditions (so we are not talking of merely blasting away in the vague direction of the enemy such as we see so much of with modern rapid fire weapons) artillery are inflicting barely one casualty per shot on average (on average is important!), and musketry only 5% of shots cause casualties. And in all this Hughes has explained why!
This book is hugely powerful in actually making sense and giving understanding of what happens particularly on the Napoleonic battle. While covers the whole period 1630-1850 (there is a typo in the book entry by Goodreads reading 1750) the emphasis is on particularly the Peninsular campaign as the three best case studies are all Peninsular battles. Nevertheless the findings no doubt can be extrapolated into a wider Napoleonic context and back and forward in time throughout the smoothbore period.
Overall the conclusion is that these were not particularly deadly weapons and the battlefield a lot less lethal an environment than we have hitherto been led to believe. Even ideal under direct combat conditions (so we are not talking of merely blasting away in the vague direction of the enemy such as we see so much of with modern rapid fire weapons) artillery are inflicting barely one casualty per shot on average (on average is important!), and musketry only 5% of shots cause casualties. And in all this Hughes has explained why!
May 23, 2018
A rather unusual work similar to John Keegan's classic, The Face of Battle. The author sets out to look at blackpowder weaponry, and it's effectiveness, on the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century fields of battle with the eye of the forensic scientist. It is a sucsessful endeavor.
The book is lavishly illustrated with drawings from various military training manuals from the time as well as modern photos illustrating the difficulty of accurately using a smoothbore cannon against advancing troops.
This is not a general history of the armies of this time. It does not concern itself with the social aspects of the armies or their respective societies. An excellent companion for Christopher Duffy's work; The Military Experience in the Age of Reason . This book concerns itself with the physical effects of the weaponry on the battlefield proper, both strengths and weaknesses.
While a trifle dry in parts it manages to keeps one's interest and is an intelligently written work. Though something of a specialist work it is a great contribution to the study of military history from the Age of Reason through the Napoleonic Wars. It even has a place as an addendum in an American Civil War collection since so many of the weapons and tactics examined were still being used in the 1860's. A good addition to one's collection.
The book is lavishly illustrated with drawings from various military training manuals from the time as well as modern photos illustrating the difficulty of accurately using a smoothbore cannon against advancing troops.
This is not a general history of the armies of this time. It does not concern itself with the social aspects of the armies or their respective societies. An excellent companion for Christopher Duffy's work; The Military Experience in the Age of Reason . This book concerns itself with the physical effects of the weaponry on the battlefield proper, both strengths and weaknesses.
While a trifle dry in parts it manages to keeps one's interest and is an intelligently written work. Though something of a specialist work it is a great contribution to the study of military history from the Age of Reason through the Napoleonic Wars. It even has a place as an addendum in an American Civil War collection since so many of the weapons and tactics examined were still being used in the 1860's. A good addition to one's collection.
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