Comments on: Doinkers Lose

By: Joseph Fouche

Joseph Fouche — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:29:27 +0000

The socket bayonet was a technological leap forward because it eliminated the need for a dedicated pikeman. With the socket bayonet, every infantryman was a musketeer and a pikeman. The proper context to see bayonet use in is not a offensive bayonet charge but a defensive infantry square. Like the pike or sarissa, the bayonet is as much about dissuading horses and their riders from charging down on the infantry as it is about infantry attacking with bayonets blazing. This insight is as old as Narses but people kept forgetting it through out the Middle Ages, allowing horsemen to develop big heads.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 19:10:25 +0000

The number of casualties from bayonets has always been vanishingly small compared to the supposed deadliness of cold steel. It’s largely a moral weapon. People run away from a charge. Even in close-quarters combat, where bayonets should find plenty of use, soldiers tend to prefer clubbing their enemies with a blunt rifle butt.

I’ll accept that there’s some circularity in the relationship between winning and suffering few casualties, but Alexander’s troops hardly won against superior numbers with such tiny casualties through superior attrition rates. They swept the enemy from the field and didn’t have to fight face to face, over and over, to the last man.

By: Baduin

Baduin — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 13:52:27 +0000

He quotes Keegan (a specialist of everything and nothing), and this is already suspicious. Further, Keegan quotes percentages of wounds treated by physicians. In combat, it is impossible to survive a bayonet wound — the attacker is right there to hit you again if you are not quite killed the first time.

And if Grossman thinks it is “virtually impossible to stab an opponent” he should read less and play football more. It is difficult to stab an opponent, because he defends himself, and can stab you right back, not because attacker has any special sentiment for him.

In addition, he has things backwards: Alexander won because he was losing few men in combat, not lost few men because he was winning. Greek way of fighting was superior exactly because it depended on close combat, not on ranged combat as Persians did. Greeks were fighting as units, and were superior in hand-to hand fight. Read Herodotus.

As for Clausewitz and du Picq, they were explaining why the bayonet charge is so important.