![]() (Sidenote: you can see why logistics gets complicated fast. Rule of thumb in the ACW is 80 wagons to a mile of road, so our wagon train ought to take up around another 4,000ft. A good rule-of-thumb I’ve seen for American Civil War estimates is around 20 wagons per thousand, so 60 wagons. How many wagons, pack animals or porters you need varies – the Romans seem to have often moved with a mule for every six-to-eight men, plus the army’s siege train. We also need unit separation (between the regiments, it’s important to avoid ‘accordioning’ on the march and facilitate control WW2 army regs suggested 100 yards between companies, 50 yards between platoons, so these could be quite large), so let’s round up to 4,000 ft (1219m 13 football fields).īut we also have tents, food supplies, spare ammunition and all sorts of other of what the Romans would have called impedimenta (sidenote: if you are thinking, “well, but a pre-gunpowder army doesn’t need this 1) arrows take up space and 2) camp entrenching supplies – the Romans marched heavy). So the infantry is 3,000ft long (914m nine football fields). Unlike in the movies (which love ultra-compact marching formations because it looks cool) you need a few feet of seperation between rows for best effect (WW2 US Army guidelines specified 2-5 yards), let’s assume each soldier occupies about 5 feet in the marching order. You can get five men (a little cramped) into a single row on that road, meaning that the infantry itself stretches 600 ranks deep. 3,000 men) American civil war brigade, marching on a road 13ft or so wide. Let me explain – let’s take a nominally full strength (c. Then everyone needs to get gathered and ready to march.Īnd now – because you are a large body of infantry, you wait. All sorts of small tasks add up to eat away parts of the morning. Tents need to be struck and stowed along with all of the gear in the baggage train and individual soldiers need to stow their own equipment. Breakfast need to happen, which may require making fires. Everyone wakes up and starts to get moving (probably around 5am). So let’s think about – in very general terms – what needs to happen and in what order for a large body of infantry to march. This makes intuitive sense, but if large army logistics made intuitive sense, they wouldn’t be hard, and as Clausewitz says (drink!) “War is very simple, but the simplest thing is very hard.” Logistics is very hard. The intuitive and a touch clever method is to take normal human walking speed – around 3mph – multiply it by walking hours per day (maybe 8) and go with that. Both of these get into “how do we calculate how fast an army can move?” Let’s start with infantry on the march. I realized that I was taking for granted what would be understood in my field – the standard rule-of-thumb marching speeds.Ī lot of readers questioned two things: first that Cersei reports riding from somewhere (King’s Landing?) to Winterfell in “a month” being discordant with the long march time from Highgarden to King’s Landing and second that 12-miles-a-day was much too slow. A lot of readers were throwing up question-marks on how I was figuring marching speeds. No pictures today, just some quick text on the topic. Hey guys, this is just a really quick post to address a question I’ve seen lurking around thinking about my previous post on the logistics of the loot-train battle. This post is now available in audio format here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |