I'm busy with the second part of the Swedish Army post at the moment. I had to take a few days out for recovery from having a kidney stone lasered but I'm back at the keyboard again now. The enforced rest gave me time to think about one of the things I'm finding quite difficult. Which is getting hard information on Swedish unit sizes, well unit sizes for any nationality really. That left me thinking about how units were assembled for use in combat and their actual sizes.
I have already stated that the Regiment (or it's local equivalent) was an administrative body, pure and simple. The combat formations were a different beast as they were formed from the regimental manpower pool but would have been merged or split as required to make up battlefield manoeuvre formations. Companies or troops would have been kept together as these were bodies used to fighting as a group so I expect there to be some variation in unit sizes but not to a huge extent. This is where the difficulties arise.
The vast majority of the manpower figures I have seen are from pay returns or casualty returns. These were drawn up by the administrative formation; the regiment not the combat formation so are not automatically an accurate reflection of the numbers in the combat units. On top of which as mentioned before the practice of drawing pay for dead deserted or entirely fictional soldiers means the returns are not as accurate as we might hope. (Yes I know you're dead Smith, now just stand there and be counted by the nice pay master there's a good lad). I do wonder if that was worse or better in European armies which employed a large number of mercenaries as the contractor wants to increase his profit, but the engager wants to know they are getting value for money.
Either way we do know the theoretical size favoured under the various, and different, tactical doctrines from looking at the writing of the military authors of the day. We can test that by the simple means of dividing total head counts by the number of tactical formations to see how close these come to the theoretical head counts. And that dear reader is as good as it gets, unless you have a TARDIS about your person!
Hmmm! Food for thought. I knew in the ECW some tactical units were drawn from several regiments where the regiments were massively under theoretical strength. I didn't realise it might work the other way. Is this where we get the emergence of battalions being a sub-unit of a regiment from?
ReplyDeleteI always assumed that this was the source of battalions as a subdivision of Regiments too.
DeleteInteresting post and an interesting subject! I understand that for example in the ECW the typical battlefield formation seems to have been the 'battalia' of about 500-600 foot, and that may have been made up of 2 or even 3 small regiments, or larger regiments could perhaps be split into two battalia. As you say, this presumably comes from military manuals of the time (where's my copy of 'Pallas Armata' to check? ). I was thinking, have never really tried to look closely at contemporary battle paintings, is it possible that the tactical units shown there might be 'true' size, and could you count the ranks and files depicted? hmmm..
ReplyDeleteThe Snayers paintings look like the formations are about the right size but I have never tried doing a head count. One for a long dark winter's night when I'm bored perhaps?
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