Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) “celebrated” Good Friday by discussing The Battle of Breitenfeld from the Thirty Years’ War, a religious war between Protestants and Catholics.
At the time, everyone feared the Spanish infantry, who fought in a dense phalanx called the tercio (“thirds”): one-third swordsmen, one-third pikemen, one-third musketmen.
But the Swedes were about to introduce their own ideas:
They had a couple of other things going for them in this battle, things the Imperial forces weren’t expecting. First, the Swedes had been fighting on the Eastern Front against Polish/Lithuanian cavalry, some of the best around, and they’d perfected combined-arms tactics on the Polish plains. Second, they were organized in battalions of about 600 men instead of Tercios three times or four times that size. And they were more heavily armed than the infantry in the Imperial tercios, because one of the combined-arms lessons learned Gustav brought back from Poland was that if you used these new, light (relatively light) artillery pieces, you could wheel them along right with the infantry in the battalions, and when you stacked your musketeers four or five deep and added the firepower of cannon firing homemade grapeshot, you could stop any cavalry charge or infantry advance dead in its tracks. And the small size of the battalion, compared to the Tercio, made for a thinner, longer line, with more guns sprouting from it. Dangerous when edged weapons and cavalry ruled the battlefield but a good idea as firepower improved for the infantry.
Gustavus was a true pioneer in the use of field artillery, mobile artillery. The guns he used look ridiculous; some were so crude they used leather to hold a copper barrel together, and let me tell you, if somebody was going to fire one of those anywhere near me I’d want to be sure he measured out the powder charge with a teaspoon. But they could be carried by a couple of horses, or a half-dozen Swedes if horses were scarce, so the Swedish had a lot more tubes, operating a lot closer to the front line, than their opponents. These pieces had no range or accuracy, but loaded with forks and spoons, they were Hell up close; think of them as early Claymore mines, more than artillery.