[Jason Daub]

Gentlemen,

I believe that we are overlooking the human element in all of this. Soldiers are not the sum of their arms, armour and equipment. This is not a min/max wargaming exercise with armies of painted miniatures being slid across the tabletop battlefield.

Why did a group of commanders who are nearly invariably portrayed as reactionaries who are more concerned with protecting their aristocratic rights adopt this weapon? Why did the emerging nation states of Europe invest huge sums of money into what is often considered a less effective technology? Are all of the arguments that longbow enthusiasts bring out just a reflection of contemporary objections to firearms as less aesthetic than the bow?

I believe that part of the reason, perhaps a large part of the reason, can be found in the new field of killology as outlined by Lt. Col. dave Grossman.

I will grant that a high quality harness can defeat ball under ideal circumstances, experiments at the arsenal at Graz show that theoretically a man could take fire and survive. The fact that men such as Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard,"le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche" were felled by fire and the rolls of dead from such battles as Ravenna and her like should show beyond doubt that harness was not shot-proof.

In the book "On Killing", Lt. Col Grossman postulates that the "fight-flight" model for intra-species conflict is incorrect and that the correct model is "fight-flight-posture-submit". If we look at our era with this in mind we can see that posturing, the attempted intimidation of the enemy into flight so as not to have to kill, is very obvious. Plumes to make the wearer taller and more intimidating, brightly coloured trappings, war cries and military music, all added to ceremony and ritual designed to demoralize the enemy and shore up the morale of your own troops.

If we look at human conflict with this model we can see that the firearm is a much more effective weapon for the common troop. It allows a very effective means of posturing, to quoteLt. Col. Grossman;

Gunpowder's superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield. The longbow would still have been used in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing efectiveness was all that mattered, since both the longbow's firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of a smoothbore musket. But a frightened man, thinking with his midbrain and going "ploink, ploink, ploink" with a bow, doesn't stand a chance against an equally frightened man going "BANG! BANG!" with a musket.

The longbow was an incredibly effective weapon, it was however dependant on a weapon system operator that had to be literally "grown" to be effective in comparison to a system of drill that allowed any number of "musketeers" to be raised from the general population in a reasonable time frame. The bow also required a logistics train that would be every bit as complex as that required for firearms. If we examine the records of Edward the III's campaigns, the quantity of arrows required on campaign are quite staggering. The ammunition used is not "easy" to make in quantity and is suseptible to damage from damp and rough handling as is gunpowder. The bow is easily made by a semi-skilled bowyer, but requires substancial skill to get the best out of each stave, the staves themselves in this period are getting harder to supply. Examining ordinances of the period we can see that a large percentage of unworked yew staves are imported from countries such as Spain. The firearm, although a more complex weapon, is quite robust and can be made by any skilled metalworker, which all of the countries had in abundance.

If we look at the human element again we can surmise from casualty lists that although both the longbow and firearm have a great potential lethality, the actual battlefield performance left a lot to be desired. We tend to assume that the reason that the bow did not cause vast casualties is due to armour rather than reluctance to kill. There seems to be an unspoken understanding that firearms would penetrate armour and this is why we look at casualties/round and say that firearms are terribly inefficient and inaccurate and that is why the "longbow is better" argument keeps coming up. Here is an examination of potential accuracy as opposed to battlefiel performance; in the 1700's the Prussion army did an experiment where an infantry battalion fired on a target 100' x 6' representing an enemy formation. They scored 25 percent hits at 225 yards, 40 percent at 150 yards, and 60 percent hits at 75 yards. The potential killing power should be enormous. At the Battle of Belgrade in 1717, "two Imperial battalions held their fire until their Turkish oppenents were only thirty paces away, but hit only thirty-two Turks when they fired and were promptly overwhelmed." ( Keegan and Holmes, Soldiers)

A final point to consider, we are amatuers studying this at a half millenium remove. The men who made these decisions were professional warriors, trained in combat from the time they were children, the book most of them owned, beside the Bible, was most certainly Vegetius. They made these choices knowing that they could lose their lives if they had chosen wrong.

[Peter G.]

[Aaron Tam]

I'm an archery myself, but i will have to say that the musket will be better. (cant believe i am saying this). You see, the musket takes a lot less time to learn compared to the bow and the musket's bullets could not go through the body leaving a metal ball in a body. OBV the ball is harder to get out of the body then an arrow shaft