With no heavy infantry, how could melee units be effective, facing competition from ranged units?
Upvote:4
Light infantry often carried small or medium sized shields. Peltasts for example carried their own type of shield. Even a buckler offers some form of protection against arrows. Not all light infantry carried shields, but many did. any kind of shield, even a simple wicker shield gives fair to reasonable protection against arrows. That's the defense side.
On the offense side, you don't have that much time to make it count. You have a range of about 50 to 100 meters for most bowmen. 50 meters is more likely. A running man can do that in less than 15 seconds. Given that his life is on the line, probably faster. How many arrows can an archer fire? Two, if he is speedy and lucky. Perhaps even three, if those archers are very experienced.
It's not enough to hit your enemy, but you need to render him combat ineffective as well. An angry infantryman with an arrow in his hip can kill you just as well as an unhurt enemy.
That's pretty difficult, even for an experienced archers equipped with a heavy longbow. Most archers weren't that good, and didn't have such powerful weapons.
I didn't mention combat stress. That's something you have to figure in as well. Shooting at a stationary target is vastly different from shooting at a rapidly approaching enemy who will definitely try to kill you within next few seconds. It's quite likely your archer won't even shoot that arrow, and either runs away (most likely) or grabs whatever he is carrying to defend himself.
Under normal circumstances archers would try to barricade themselves, so they can't be easily overrun. Light infantry normally wouldn't bluntly charge a line of archers.
Actually, a proficient, quick-firing archer would be able to kill a few melee soldiers
It's surprisingly difficult to kill an enemy. Even with modern rifles it takes a lot of ammunition to do just that. I don't have figures at hand, but several thousand (on average) is what you'll need at least. Even expert bowmen cannot match a rifle in accuracy. Making one kill is pretty good already.
Upvote:6
How it is possible that modern unprotected soldier close in to a machine gun?
Simply you try to be out of the way. If you are unprotected, you just don't put yourself where you can be hit. Light infantry with no protection against archers would simply do not engage unless compelled by external reasons. They would wait for the archers to move and attack them when they are less effective, for example in a wooded area or under the rain.
It is a common mistake: since the weapon A can beat weapon B, how is it possible that sometimes B won? The answer is: nothing happens in isolation. Tactics can compensate some weaknesses or create unexpected strengths. A guy with a Zippo can probably destroy a multi million MBT if he can drop it into the fuel tank ...
More post
- 📝 Why was there relatively little use of land mines in WW1?
- 📝 What are the counterarguments to calling German nazism a right-wing movement?
- 📝 Did Stalin disarm the Chinese Communist Party around 1927?
- 📝 What was the significance of the BEF moving into the gap between German forces in First Battle of the Marne?
- 📝 Why did the Allied attack at Gallipoli fail during WWI?
- 📝 Where did the Roman money involved in the spice and luxury trade end up?
- 📝 Did Cato the Elder think destruction of Carthage was more important than anything else for Rome?
- 📝 What was the dominant government system in the 1600s~1800s?
- 📝 Fish/Shark skin sandpaper
- 📝 Was "the modern c**ktail" intended to mask the foul taste of Prohibition-era liquor?
- 📝 Why were Austria-Hungary's Slavic minorities put into multinational states?
- 📝 Racism, or Nationalism, represented in 19th century English Wills?
- 📝 What is the approximate value of a Spanish ducat in 1557?
- 📝 How did Red Army achieve to manipulate German Army in 1942 and 1943?
- 📝 When did the German people learn that they had a large, powerful military, in violation of the Versailles Treaty?
- 📝 Could someone help to identify this Japanese mon found on what appears to be a late Edo Period Jingasa?
- 📝 How and when was the Temple of Trajan destroyed?
- 📝 What was the size of surface of a cereal crop needed per man per year during the Dark Ages in Western Europe?
- 📝 What effect did the Bronze Age collapse have on India?
- 📝 Prevalence of Torture
- 📝 Why were Catholic priests so instrumental in the Mexican independence movement?
- 📝 Why was the Aztec Empire known as an Empire?
- 📝 Was there a way for ships to disengage from boarding actions?
- 📝 Is this newspaper article describing the Battle of Glorieta Pass?
- 📝 In what contexts did male friends kiss in Europe in the 1700s?
- 📝 Chiang's allies were "a kidnapper, a hooligan and a bully" but which was which?
- 📝 Does any library hold the archives of the Russian-American Company?
- 📝 Did the council of Tours abolish January 1st as the beginning of the year?
- 📝 What was the basic structure of power in the CPSU and how were the politicians at each level chosen?
- 📝 How was law enforcement handled in large US cities before professional police?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 With no heavy infantry, how could melee units be effective, facing competition from ranged units?
- 📝 How could temporary surrender of self-government help Newfoundland with its debts?
- 📝 How effective were German SS units compared to non-SS Heer units?
- 📝 How was Germany able to hold itself together, while Austria-Hungary could not?
- 📝 How did the ancient Romans count with their fingers?
- 📝 In the Battle of the Coral Sea, how could two Japanese scouts grossly mis-identify two American ships?
- 📝 How did people deal with ice on the roads during the horse-and-buggy era?
- 📝 How could Jews integrate into Western modern society back when Saturday was a normal working day?
- 📝 How many different countries could a person alive today have lived in without leaving their hometown?
- 📝 How far could an English war bow shoot?
- 📝 Why were troops with bayonets often effective against enemy cavalry even though the bayonet was a "secondary" weapon?
- 📝 How to identify this coin with a bust on one side and the letters S and C on the other side?
- 📝 How quickly could the Roman legions march? How did it compare to their cavalry?
- 📝 How accurately could ancient astronomers find latitude and longitude?
- 📝 How could Eratosthenes measure the circumference of the Earth?
- 📝 Did line infantry units have designated marksmen?
- 📝 How effective were longbow archers against plate-armored infantry?
- 📝 How does one wash with sand?
- 📝 How could it be that 80% of townspeople were farmers during the Edo period in Japan?
- 📝 How did France worsen its relationship with Turkey?
- 📝 How do historians deal with Historical Bias?
- 📝 How far away could one be and still see the atom bomb explosions?
- 📝 How did Azerbaijan come to be allied with Turkey and Israel?
- 📝 Were British infantry trained to shoot attacking aircraft with rifles?
- 📝 How effective were peace walls in Northern Ireland at reducing violence?
- 📝 At what point did Soviet armored units have qualitative parity with Wehrmacht armored units?
- 📝 How much contact did Sub-Saharan Africa actually have with the rest of the world since the beginning of civilization?
- 📝 How effective was Civil War-era artillery in the rain?
- 📝 How did the Falasha make contact with Jews outside Ethiopia?
- 📝 How did the way commanders ask their troops to deal with the immediate death of their comrades vary by country/culture during WWII?
