Breaking the 150,000 page view barrier

It's not as momentous as breaking the sound barrier, or as noisy, but it is a milestone and I didn't even notice when it happened!  So thank you to everyone who has popped in and read my ramblings over the last 11 years.  Your continuing support is very much appreciated, unless you are a data trawling bot, you aren't a data trawling bot are you?  I thought not!  So here's hoping I don't need another 11 years to reach 300,000 views. 

17th Century Armies - Part 3 The Swedes (Part two)

A couple of things to add to the last post.  Firstly the Swedes had abandoned the arquebus before the start of the Thirty Year's War so all infantry units are musket armed.  Secondly in each brigade the squadron with the most pikemen is assumed to have formed the point of the arrowhead or diamond.  Personally I'm finding it difficult to accept that some brigades had no pikemen at all but in the absence of evidence I will go with that interpretation until a better one comes along. 

So, after looking at the Infantry I can turn to what seems (in theory at least) the easier part of the army! 

Cavalry

Native Swedish cavalry had two major disadvantages in the years prior to the Thirty Year's War.  Firstly their horses were neither large enough nor strong enough to carry a heavily armoured trooper as effectively as their enemies.  Secondly they struggled to manufacture sufficient wheellock pistols and armour to create troops capable of acting as armoured cuirassiers.  This is not to say that he did not have small numbers of Swedish cuirassiers available but these were mainly bodyguard units.  Gustavus' solution to this shortage was to use his other cavalry more aggressively, in a similar way to the French Huguenot Miller cavalry.  He took away the carbines from his Harquebusier style troops and left them with swords and pistols, and placed those troopers with armour in the front ranks.  To offset the lack of mounted close fire support for the charging cavalry he deployed bodies of musketeers between each squadron of horse in the front lines.  This would have been effective against an enemy who wanted to use Harquebusiers to soften up the Swedish cavalry prior to a Cuirassier charge but was risky against an enemy who closed to melee quickly unless the Swedish cavalry could hold them off!  Apparently at Breitenfeld Tilly was taken by surprise by the aggressive Swedish tactics as he had never considered Harquebusier style horse as 'Battle Cavalry'.  

Gustavus Adolfus at Breitenfeld 1632 with cavalry in background by Johann Jakob Walther

By the 1630's to support the more lightly armoured Swedish cavalry, heavier cuirassier and better equipped harquebusier style cavalry were provided by German mercenaries or allies.

I would treat the native Swedish/Finnish horse as shock or mixed shock with an option to class some as poorly equipped horse to reflect the lower proportion of troops with back and breast plates.  I would also treat the Finnish 'Hakkapeliitta' Horse as elite to reflect their reputation.  They are classed as trained and experienced or veteran from Sweden's entry into the Thirty Years War reducing to trained and experienced after Lutzen.

Native Swedish/Finnish horse probably deployed in three ranks to fight but probably manoeuvred in six ranks.  Cuirassiers should be deployed in deeper formations of at least six ranks if they are firepower or mixed firepower tactic troops or three ranks if mixed shock.  They are classed as armoured.  Swedish allied cavalry might be considered as unwilling if representing Saxons at Breitenfeld, and should be considered as trained but raw for that battle other wise treat as trained and experienced or veteran if long serving German mercenaries.

Formation sizes are harder to be precise about but seem to have been in the range of 200 - 400 men per battlefield Squadron.  The table below gives some formation data drawn from  Daniel S's blog post: The Swedish Army in the Battle of Breitenfeld 1631 | Kriegsbuch.  The whole site is a mine of information as are his posts on The Miniatures Page (TMP).

Swedish cavalry at 1st Breitenfeld

The table above covers all Swedish, and mercenary cavalry but excludes the Saxon allied horse.  The column titled "Harq'bus'" covers all non 3/4 armoured cuirassier type cavalry, these are both the traditional Harquebusiers and the more lightly armed Swedes and Finns.  The data for Cuirassiers covers all formations that are known to have been or may have been 3/4 armoured.  Based upon this roughly 35% of the cavalry were Cuirassiers and these tended to be in larger formations than their less well equipped brethren.  There were also between 400-500 Dragoons present which are not included in the table.

As a comparison at Lutzen the cavalry (may) have been split as follows:

Swedish cavalry at Lutzen 1632

I'm saying 'may' as my available sources don't show a split between harquebusier and cuirassier style cavalry.  Because of that I have made the following assumptions.  Those squadrons thought to have been cuirassier equipped at Breitenfeld are still equipped that way at Lutzen the following year.  That none of the new units are cuirassiers, except Ohme who formed the central cavalry reserve.  It would seem sensible to have that reserve made up of the heaviest available cavalry so Cuirassiers seemed to fit the bill.  Please note that I have excluded the Saxon and Hessian horse from the above table, as I'm trying to concentrate on the Swedes and mercenaries in their service here.  For completeness be aware that the Saxon and Hessian allies provided three additional squadrons of cavalry at Lutzen.

We can draw some (pretty speculative) conclusions from these two battles.  Cuirassier squadrons formed between 50 - 35% of the total and were deployed as very slightly larger units on average.  There was a fairly large variation in size on paper although in reality the smallest units were statistical outliers (i.e. only one at that small size in each army) probably acting as lifeguards or escorts.  The number of cuirassier equipped squadrons declined as the Swedish involvement went on and the percentage of German mercenaries increasing.  Native Swedish horse probably became better armoured over time as they acquired back and breast plates and helmets from battlefield loot. 

Cavalry may have company sized bodies of 50 or 100 shot attached and after 1631 a single ultra light gun may be deployed with each body of commanded shot as detailed in the rules on sub-units.  These bodies deployed in the spaces between front line cavalry squadrons.

Dragoons

I have struggled to find much information on dragoons in the Swedish army.  The order of battle for 1st Breitenfeld shows 400-500 dragoons were present.  None of my available sources gives any information for them being present at other battles but I find it hard to believe that they vanished after Breitenfeld.  I suggest that unless an OOB clearly states no dragoons were present that you should have a single squadron of no more than 500 dragoons present.  At Breitenfeld they were used to provide fire support to the cavalry on the left of the Swedish army so it is possible that at least some of the shot detachments supporting the cavalry wings in later actions were dismounted dragoons.

Artillery

Like the Dutch the Swedes supported their infantry with artillery at the brigade level.  However, forget the myth of leather guns, which if they ever saw use at all were probably not used for very long and not in Germany.  Instead use 3pdr ultra-light guns as infantry support (if you want to think of them as made of leather that's fine by me).  Each Brigade would have at least one supporting gun per squadron of foot and ideally would have two or even three.  These guns were not automatically deployed with their parent brigade, as at First Breitenfeld  some seem to have been deployed from the second line brigades to boost the support for those brigades in the front line.  At second Breitenfeld (1642) the 3pdrs were allocated in a large part to the cavalry wings at a ratio of one gun per division of commanded shot leaving only 11 to support the infantry centre of 8 brigades.   

 

Swedish 3pdr; the paint scheme may be a later addition

 

The heavier field artillery seem to have been mainly 24pdrs and 18pdrs.  The Swedish had a liking for massing the heavy artillery in batteries to the front of the Infantry centre,  these batteries could be extremely large.  For example at the crossing of the River Lech in 1632 the 72 available guns were all massed into three batteries of 24 guns each (including the 3pdrs)!  In the battles where I could easily find data the heavier guns never exceeded 34% of the total guns deployed.  The table below gives numbers of guns and their percentage of the total artillery deployed and the average number of 3pdrs for each brigade present.  As noted that doesn't mean these deployed with their parent brigade/regiment.

Some examples of the split in artillery allocations by shot weight

The data for Lutzen shown above is an estimate as the Swedish records simply state 70 guns were present of which 20 were heavy guns but doesn't detail their size.  A minimum of three 24pdrs were present as a salvo from three of these opened the Swedish assault.

In every TYW battle I can find details of the Swedes deployed more artillery than their opponents, be those Imperials, Catholic League or Spanish. Well over half the total number of guns available in the army were infantry support ultra light pieces as shown above. 

Army Deployment

Infantry commonly deployed in two lines of brigades to provide support and (as at Breitenfeld) create a reserve that could be deployed to cover a turned flank or replace a frontline brigade. I would use the three squadron Brigade between 1627 and 1631 and the four squadron brigade between 1631 and 1632 (Lutzen seems to have been the last use of four squadron brigades) then revert to three squadron brigades until some point prior to Nordlingen.  From Nordlingen and later the size of the individual infantry squadrons and their deployment pattern shifted to a simpler model as described in the previous post on the Swedes.

A cavalry reserve would be deployed to support the infantry centre although the bulk of the horse were deployed to the two wings of the army.  This could be as small as one squadron, as at Lutzen or two or three squadrons supporting each line of infantry brigades as at Breitenfeld. 

			Infantry	Cavalry	Artillery	Dragoons
	1st Breitenfeld	1631	14,742	7,450	54	400
	Lutzen	1632	13,032	6,240	60	?
	Nordlingen	1634	16,000	9,700	68	?
	2nd Breitenfeld	1642	10,000	10,000	70	?

Split of troop types at major actions across the period

The chart shows the estimated numbers of the main troop types deployed at four major battles, it doesn't give a perfect analysis but gives some indication of the relationships between the various arms.  With the exception of 2nd Breitenfeld cavalry comprised between 33% - 38% of the total headcount.  This was split fairly evenly between the two wings with no more than 15-20% deployed as reserves for the infantry centre.  Because of the way infantry were deployed as brigades the number of manoeuvre units gave more flexibility to the cavalry who deployed and fought as individual squadrons until after Lutzen.  Typically the infantry were deployed in 7-8 brigades but cavalry could number between 25  to 30 squadrons.

A Swedish army is actually a joint Swedish and German force during the Thirty Year's War, although their mercenary troops were intended to fight in the Swedish manner and not in the formations used by the German or Imperial armies. They need some care in use as the Swedish cavalry can be brittle due to the shortage of armour. As a result they need to balance aggression with the need to allow the detachments of shot to have an impact before they charge. Infantry need to cover the cavalry flanks (and vice versa) when advancing. Although they had a reputation for aggression it was tempered with a need to ensure all elements of the army supported each other so that close combat was against an opponent who has been weakened before melee.

Sorry about the length of this post.  It just kept growing!  Everything above is a fast overview and this is an army that really deserves a deep dive into it's history and tactical use.   

2024 a bit of an update

While I know it's not the end of the year (yet) I have been having a bit of an annual review.  It stemmed from my going back over my blog posts from the last couple of years.  Some of them were quite good though I say so myself.  One thing I noticed is that 2024 has been a bit quiet by my standards and has lacked variety of content.  The majority of posts were about 2mm pike and shot or the actual armies which were engaged in early 17th century combat in Western and Central Europe.  What was missing was game reports, mainly because I haven't played a lot of games, figure updates, mainly because I haven't done much painting and wargame show attendance reports, mainly because...well, you can see a picture forming here?  It's discouraging really!

All that said though, I have invested in a new set of rules "Strength and Honour" written by Mark Backhouse.  This was because they are intended for 2mm gaming and had good reviews.  There are some really clever mechanisms and I'm hoping to get a game in soon.  I'm also aiming to attend 'The Other Partizan' at Newark later this month, partly to see Strength and Honour in action but also to see the 28mm replay of Lutzen 1632 being staged by re-enacting friends of mine.  Of course some cash will be exchanged for additional toys!  My plan is to buy some of the Antonine Miniatures 2mm ancients blocks and bases from Warbases.  I could also be tempted by some western shoot out figures from Empress Miniatures as they have some rather nice figures based on the movie 'Tombstone' for both the Cowboys and the Earps.  Of course with any luck there will be some catching up with old friends too.

I have also been looking at the lead mountain (ugh!).  It has decreased in size fairly considerably over the last couple of years but there are still some considerable peaks to conquer in the 6mm pile.  Additions to my Dark Ages forces will probably result if I do get back to the painting table.  I'm also trying to resist a small foray into Wars of the Roses in 6mm.  It's been on my want to do list for a very long time and I'm not sure how much longer I can resist temptation for!  The counter argument is that I'm getting older and might never finish painting the figures I already have, let alone get a game in with them, but, you know, "Oooh shiny" and all that.

Right off to have a kip.  It's my 49th wedding anniversary tomorrow and I really need to be on my A game for the benefit* of the current Mrs E on the morrow!

* Not that kind of benefit, you lot have dirty minds!  I have decking to scrub and paint before the winter sets in and I do not want the memsahib having to do it now I'm feeling better.

Seventeenth Century Armies - counting the troops

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!

Where have I been and what have I been doing?

Always assuming you are at all interested of course!  Well since the weather improved Mrs E and i have been , gulp, gardening.  We have a reasonably big garden by modern house standards and it has a lot of shrubs all around the edges.  Since last years heart attack I had not really felt like doing much garden maintenance until this last month or so.  That was when I realised that if it was left much longer catching back up before the weather turns again was going to be a huge task.  So the last six weeks has seen us cutting back shrubs, grubbing out brambles and nettles and generally tidying up.  we have done about 30% of what really needs doing and to be honest I don't really enjoy it and I am reaching the stage of contemplating looking at the price of garden maintenance services.

It's been a funny old month as for the first time in the 35 years I have been a member of the Sealed Knot I didn't attend the August Bank Holiday event.  There were two other years where there were no ABH event to attend, during the Covid and Foot and Mouth restrictions but I don't count those.  I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that I probably won't be a battlefield participant again as age creeps up on me (creeps, who am I kidding, some days it feels like its galloping towards me whooping and hollering!).  Instead I think I shall give SK event photography a go, and so I have dug out my digital camera and started to get to grips with all it's extra bells and whistles which my previous film SLR didn't have.  It's interesting to see how the world of film photography now seems rather restrictive, but it's restrictions have actually given me a good grasp on composition and the balance between exposure time, aperture and shutter speed.  Well when you only had 36 shots on a roll of film you couldn't waste them so you thought about that stuff before clicking the shutter release!  What is all new to me is the additional abilities digital cameras bring to the party and mine is a fairly basic bridge camera, Lord only knows what the expensive professional level kit can do!

In other news I have regained some of my missing painting mojo which went AWOL last October while I was recovering from my unscheduled cardiac event (TM pending).  Over the last couple of evenings I have completed 96 of Irregular Miniatures' 6mm Pictish Spearmen who had been gathering dust on the painting table since this time last year.  I don't know of anyone else who has these in 6mm so even though the spears are much to short, and I'm not going to cut out the spears and replace them anytime soon, they have now been based and stand ready to repel any passing Romans, Dal Raitian Scots, Saxons, Vikings, Strathclyde Welsh and even other Picts!

96 Picts, possibly in search of a cave and some small furry animals to groove with *.

* Its a Pink Floyd reference

Infantry frontages for FPPS

A question was raised about whether the four infantry brigades of Essex's army at Edgehill would be better depicted in Fast Play Pike and Shot (FPPS) as double width (or two separate bases).  To consider this we need to do some simple maths and to make some assumptions.  The assumptions are that we only want to depict units deployed in fighting formations.  This means that Essex's men are in chequer board deployment with each brigade forming in two lines of battalia.  It also assumes a frontage of 1 yard per pikeman and 1.5 yards per musketeer. 

Actually, it's not quite that simple though as there are additional spaces in the ranks of musketeers to allow ranks to advance or retire during firing drills.  Musketeers were drawn up as several small 'divisions' of between four and six files (also termed a 'corporalship' as each had it's own corporal to keep things in order).  Rather than the entire rank filing back through the body it was common for the front rank of each of the sub-divisions to use the spaces left between corporalships for advancing or retiring between shots where firing by ranks.  There were also spaces between the two wings of shot and the central block of pikemen.  So those spaces need to be taken into account.

Essex's infantry brigades at Edgehill were all between 2,650 and 2,900 men strong. With average sizes for the constituent battalia running around 640 - 650 men formed up in eight ranks.   To make things easier lets consider a theoretical battalia of 648 men (excluding officers and drummers stood outside the ranks) which gives 81 files (648 divided by 8).  With a ratio of 2 musketeers to each pikeman that gives us three blocks each of 27 files, two of shot and one of pike.  Each block totals 216 rank and file.   Four such battalia would give us a brigade of 2,592 soldiers plus officers etc.  

Our theoretical Battalia

Starting with the pike block in the centre the 27 files need one yard of frontage per pike file so that block's frontage is 27 yards, easy so far.  The shot are a bit more tricky as there are gaps left in the frontage to allow easier exchange of ranks from front to back of the body (or visa versa) when firing by ranks.  In Dutch formations (and probably in all European tactical systems) musketeers were divided into sub divisions of between four and six files, each of which was under the watchful eye of a corporal.  These had different names in different armies but here I'm going to call them a corporalship.

It's tricky to divide 27 files to make the corporalships come out even as it would need a divisor of three or nine.  so we will have to fudge things a bit.  Dividing by 6 would work but only if there were four corporal ships on one wing and 5 on the other, but that helpfully gives us a spare corporalship of 48 men close enough to the number of shot sent as to support a single cavalry squadron.  This brings up a side question do battalia strengths represent a unit before or after shot are detached to support the cavalry wings.  I'm leaning towards the before option if numbers are based upon pay returns, however we will come back to this later.

So lets assume our theoretical battalia has lost a corporal ship of shot to support the cavalry.  It now has four corporalships of shot on each wing and a total head count of 384 musketeers and 216 pikemen plus officers etc.  Each wing of shot has 24 files in four subdivisions.  As a musketeer deployed in fighting formation requires 1.5 yards of frontage that gives us 36 yards for the men plus the space allowed for the gaps between corporalships at ,say, 2 yards each or an additional 16 yards.  I make the entire frontage to be two times 36 yards (shot), plus 27 yards (pike) plus 16 yards for the spacings or a total of 115 yards. 

Horribly out of scale battalia laid out to show the gaps in the formation

The small blocks are the corporalships of shot the larger one is the massed block of pikemen. The gaps are between the sub-divisions of shot and also the shot wings and the pike centre.

Last but not least on the formation aspect, the brigade frontage.  Four battalia as described above gives a frontage of 460 yards without allowing any gaps in the frontage between the battalia, which would make it difficult to exchange or merge the lines if pressed.  I'd estimate that a frontage of around 500 yards is the minimum to deploy one of Essex's brigades.

Four battalia brigade in chequerboard deployment

The only fly in the ointment when it comes to the above calculations is that we really know very little about the way a regiment was broken down prior to deploying on the battlefield so although the above looks nice and precise in reality it is anything but.  Who was included in pay returns, what percentage of dead and missing soldiers were still being claimed, how big were corporalships in a specific regiment at a specific battle, how big were the gaps between them (if they were present at all) etc, etc, etc.  As a wargamer I crave precision so I can have nice neat units of toy soldiers.  As an amateur historian I have to accept I don't actually have the data to allow that precision and that really I'm just dressing up an estimate with spurious calculations and that while some of the neat solutions I spot may be accurate they could also just be my preconceptions colouring the few facts we do have.

All that said I'm coming around to the idea that Essex's brigades need to be broken down into smaller formations to fit the 100 - 200 yard grid concept in FPPS.  Which would match the way cavalry has already been dealt with.  I'd have to calculate a frontage for each 'brigade' for each battle to determine what the break down should be but that's not that big of an ask.   What do you think?

Upcoming posts

 Just a quick update so no one wonders about me completing previous strands.  The next few posts will return to the 17th Century armies thread.  Swedish cavalry first then a look at the development of the Imperial and Catholic League formations.  Then it will be on to British Civil War armies to finish that theme.

Next weekend is the Joy of Six show at Sheffield which I'm hoping to attend so there may well be a post covering that.  After which who knows!