Swords VS Bayonets?

[thatguy]

It depends who was using it. British cavalry were taught to hack and bludgeon with their heavy, often blunt, swords. The french cavalry were trained to use the point. (Obviously this is on average - many French chasseurs preferred the edge, many British used the point.)

But..but thats so damn stupid! if your going to teach your soldiers to hack and slash, give them an axe! its better for it! if your goign to teach the mto bludgeon, give them a mace! gah the whole point of a sword is it can do everything, hack slash AND stab.
Stupid Imperial aged armies, not using wepaons to their full potential..

[Spartacus the Irish]

But..but thats so damn stupid! if your going to teach your soldiers to hack and slash, give them an axe! its better for it! if your goign to teach the mto bludgeon, give them a mace! gah the whole point of a sword is it can do everything, hack slash AND stab.
Stupid Imperial aged armies, not using wepaons to their full potential..

It's about cost. Armies were massively, massively expensive, and only the expansion of trade allowed Napoleon to field half a million trained men in 1812. Training is one of the greatest costs, and as such, you want to train the troops as cheaply as possible - one way of doing this is to only teach the basics. I the case of the British, whose cavalry sword was heavy and thick at the point, the best way to use the sword was to hack and cut. The French cavalry sword was lighter and thinner, but straighter - and thus more useful to stab with. Plus many French cavalry officers had experience of fencing with the epee or foil, rather than with the cutting sabre.

Axes and maces are stupid weapons, much too heavy to take on extended campaigns, ungentlemanly weapons, and again too heavy to use in battles that lasted hours, rather than minutes in the medieval period.

[thatguy]

Hmm and since cvaly would mostly be fighting infantry ( ithink...) it probably would be better to have a heavy bladed chopping sword, as you'd chop downwards.
Of course, that could easily have been solved by not fighting in the first place heh.

[Spartacus the Irish]

Hmm and since cvaly would mostly be fighting infantry ( ithink...) it probably would be better to have a heavy bladed chopping sword, as you'd chop downwards.
Of course, that could easily have been solved by not fighting in the first place heh.

Bearskins, shakos and greatcoats were surprisingly effective at stopping sabre cuts. The Prussian infantry at Waterloo used to roll their greatcoats up, and coil them over their left shoulder - this would protect them against a cavalry-deliver sabre cut if the Prussian infantryman continued to face the charging cavalryman.

[Dulce_et_Decorum_Est]

Musket balls do expand when they hit - they are made of soft lead, and flatten on contact with muscle, let alone bone. Especially considering the often poor casting process that left air pockets inside the lead - essentially making some musket balls hollow shell 'dum-dum' bullets.

You would think that was the case, and certainly I assumed as much until I attained enlightenment on terminal ballistics matters. Sounds reasonable, right? Lead is soft, and soft-pointed bullets have an exposed lead core, and expand. Therefore, musket balls should expand like nobody's business upon impact, right?

Wrong, as it turns out.

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot28.htm

http://www.firearmstactical.com/imag...20Buckshot.jpg

Look what happens when historically accurate .45 long colt loads with cast lead bullets are fired through water jugs (a sort of poor man's tissue simulator) and when buckshot is fired through ballistic gelatin. The buckshot gets a little buffered in profile, yes, but most of that deformation actually occurs in the barrel! Granted, the alloys used in bullet construction in the mid 1800's were probably harder than those used in the 1700's, but the velocities were higher too, and that objection does not apply to buckshot. Point stands; musket balls do not expand nearly as aggressively as you would think.

You are entirely mistaken about their lethality.

A musket ball would have a very low muzzle velocity (the speed at which the projectile exits the muzzle of the barrel) when compared with modern high velocity guns.

Not exactly. Muskets have muzzle velocities in the same range as non-magnum handgun rounds like .45 ACP and 9x19mm. Alternatively, a modern 12 gauge 2 3/4'' slug is a decent approximation of a musket.

You will note that to achieve expansion of the bullets in such cases a hollow point is necessitated. Even if you were to put a hollow point on a musket ball, it wouldn't work, since musket balls aren't spin stabilized and there would thus be no guarantee that the projectile would be facing the right way around when it hit something.

This means that the bullet is travelling (relatively) quite slowly when it hits flesh.

Now where's that bleeding great long post I did on the intermediate ballistics of musket fire?

Anyway, it breaks down like so; a musket has a muzzle velocity of 300 m/s or less. Actually, since each soldier is counted upon to measure his own powder charge down the muzzle and each charge is hand-wrapped, shot to shot velocity is going to be somewhat variable, but we'll go with 300 m/s since it's a nice round figure.

Second, we take the approximate ballistic coefficient of a 500-700 grain musket ball of .11, and we plug this all into the ballistics program of choice. I use this one:

http://www.handloads.com/calc/

and we find out that at any reasonable engagement distance, no, musket balls are going at about the same speed at modern pistol bullets are during modern pistol engagements.

In Vietnam, many enemy Viet Cong and NVA troops survived multiple hits by M60 rounds because the velocity meant the round would go straight through their bodies, hitting nothing immediately vital. The same in the Second World War, where a Stuka gunner was hit seven times by .303 shells from a Hurricane, yet survived.

This has more to do with the full metal jacket design of the bullets than it does with their velocity. At or above c. 800 m/s 5.56x45mm m193 ball projectiles fragment on contact with human flesh, causing a most unpleasant looking wound channel:

http://www.firearmstactical.com/imag...files/M193.jpg

And some 7.62x51 NATO loadings will do the same:

http://www.firearmstactical.com/imag...Winchester.jpg

My favorite is the Soviet 5.45x39 round:

http://www.firearmstactical.com/imag...4%20545x39.jpg

Yeah, that's right. The bullet actually spins around in your insides when it hits you.

So while modern FMJ ammunition tends to punch neat little holes in you, that is by no means the rule and it is certainly not a function of its velocity.

A slower round means that the entirety of the force would be transferred to the target - the shock from being hit by a musket ball would be tremedous in many cases.

What is this mysterious "shock" you speak of? It smells suspiciously of the benighted pre-Facklerian era of terminal ballistics when smelly men sat around campfires and told ridiculous lies.

Simply put, a bullet or a sword or a bayonet or any weapon that isn't poisoned kills or incapacitates by simple expedient of turning the central nervous system off. This can be accomplished by causing a catastrophic loss of blood pressure as in the case of damaging a vital organ or severing a major blood vessel, or by direct action upon the nervous system itself.

Bullets crush and cut flesh immediately in the path of their contact. They also create a temporary cavity if they are going fast enough (which musket balls don't) which, due to the elasticity of human tissue, generally doesn't cause much damage except to stiff organs like the liver. Probably something interesting happens if the projectile is going at above the speed of sound in the tissue medium, but since only anti-tank APFSDS darts regularly attain that speed, it isn't much of an issue.

Again, where does this "shock" nonsense come into play?

In short, a musket ball will make a remarkably unexciting wound that looks like a tunnel through the flesh that's about the same diameter as the hole in the end of the musket what caused it.

Here is everything and more you could ever want to know about what happens when bullets hit people and why.

(the deforming larger projectiles alluded to in that article are not musket balls, but rather large-caliber rifle bullets popular before the adoption of small calibers and smokeless powders. Those had about 50% better muzzle velocity than an 18th century musket and bullets with much, much higher sectional densities in addition to being spin stabilized. Apples and oranges; modern bullets are nastier. These people also agree.)

A musket ball hitting you would, in all probability, not provide a linear entry and exit wound. It would probably hit, and either lodge in the wound, giving the soldier death by septacemia, or, a la the Nelson bullet, ricochet off bone, cartilage, and even muscle, tearing through organs and bodily systems, and even worse breaking bones; which would need immediate amputation to prevent deadly marrow poisoning.

If it hits a bone, sure. Otherwise it'll do what any unstabilized projectile will do and follow the path of least resistance, which may very well be a straight line.

Of course, there would be no statistics to prove or disprove this. And if they were, they could still not completely prove it in one case or the other, because the wounds would be received in different situations. A person receiving a musket wound could fall to the rear and get treatment - a fusileer receiving a bayonet wound would most likely be in close proximity to a large number of enemy troops, and thus more likely to receive additional wounds until dead; close combat was horrific in this period, even though field battles were often only a modicum less horrific.

We'll never get an answer over which was deadlier - but there is not doubt that the majority of casualties were caused by ball wounds rather than bayonet wounds.

Good points all. I suspect that close combat did indeed have a nasty sort of finality to it, and those lucky enough to come out of it more or less the same as they went into it were probably the winners. Losers either died or bled out on the spot, else they broke and fled.

[Leutrim]

Yeah but with two guys one foot either side of you and another guy right behind you, jumping to a side or back is going to be pretty hard. I'd agree that in a one on one fight, sword would beat spear heavily, but in unit fighting, such as 18th century fighting was, bayonet/spear would beat sword. Mainly because of longer reach.

Agree with you.

P.S, are you of Illyrian decent, like me?!

[Wexeee]

But..but thats so damn stupid! if your going to teach your soldiers to hack and slash, give them an axe! its better for it! if your goign to teach the mto bludgeon, give them a mace! gah the whole point of a sword is it can do everything, hack slash AND stab.
Stupid Imperial aged armies, not using wepaons to their full potential..

The thing is that the British Heavy cavalry saber and to a lesser extent its sister the light cavalry saber were both fearsome slashing weapons. A quote from a contemporary French officer stated that the British Heavy cavalry because they slashed would miss 19/20 times however on the 20th time it would be likely to remove a whole limb or even the head of the enemy.
Also a large heavy sword is excellent for running down fleeing infantry which is what cavalry was really their for ( having broken the infantry first).

[Dain]

I'd always take a bayonet and musket in any situation vs. a sword for the same reason I'd take a spear against a swordsman.

[the_mango55]

I think Irishman summed it up pretty well, the bayonet is an inferior melee weapon to the sword, but the bayonet won out in the long run for other reasons, mainly cost and the fact they complimented the gun (the primary weapon of the soldier) so well.

For another example of this, see heavy armor. In a melee situation, a heavily armored soldier in plate and chain will have a great advantage over later soldiers wearing wool coats. However, it was ineffective in stopping firearms, and heavy armor was fantastically expensive, and it would have been impossible to equip the hundreds of thousands of troops fielded in later armies with custom fitted plate.

Eventually the bayonet completely replaced the sword, just as wool coats replaced plate armor, but that doesn't mean they were better at their specific purpose.

[Commodore Barry]

In terms of cutting ability a fine-crafted srowd will always beat out a boynet in skwering ability, but I belive a boynet is more tacticly efficent esspecially if you need to quickly stab someone

[paolo1976]

Swords would look cooler but would take more time to draw, as for bayonets they say that it makes shooting more difficult when there is a bayonet attached to the rifle. Do Please correct me if i am wrong. But i think before the bayonet appeared during the early 18th century, Infantry soldiers who had no swords used their muskets as crude clubs in close combat.

[Dain]

Hrmm, I just noted this post:
"I'd agree that in a one on one fight, sword would beat spear heavily,"

Do you have any idea how utterly wrong you are?

[Inhuman One]

With a bajonet they would have the same problem as soldiers had with spears, and since they are shorter they wouldnt be too effective against cavalry.

Once someone with a sword would surpass the bajonet in melee, the one with the bajonet would be vurnerable.

[Spartacus the Irish]

Point stands; musket balls do not expand nearly as aggressively as you would think.

But they do expand. It's a spherical round, of course it can't expand in the way a long cylindrical round can (which blossoms or balloons outwards).

Not exactly. Muskets have muzzle velocities in the same range as non-magnum handgun rounds like .45 ACP and 9x19mm. Alternatively, a modern 12 gauge 2 3/4'' slug is a decent approximation of a musket.

Yes, but such handguns have aerodynamic projectiles and a certain amount of rifling. Muskets do not. Admirable attempt at comparisons, but a handgun cannot be realistically compared to a smoothbore musket beyond an approximation, as you say.

You will note that to achieve expansion of the bullets in such cases a hollow point is necessitated. Even if you were to put a hollow point on a musket ball, it wouldn't work, since musket balls aren't spin stabilized and there would thus be no guarantee that the projectile would be facing the right way around when it hit something.

The musket ball isn’t intended to burst open a la a hollow point shell, far from it. But there have been a few cases of rounds in medical reports which I have scanned through over the course of my research that indicate that such a event did, rarely, occur. And with often horrific consequences. But they intention was to remain a solid ball when it hit the target.

Anyway, it breaks down like so; a musket has a muzzle velocity of 300 m/s or less. Actually, since each soldier is counted upon to measure his own powder charge down the muzzle and each charge is hand-wrapped, shot to shot velocity is going to be somewhat variable, but we'll go with 300 m/s since it's a nice round figure.

Second, we take the approximate ballistic coefficient of a 500-700 grain musket ball of .11, and we plug this all into the ballistics program of choice.
and we find out that at any reasonable engagement distance, no, musket balls are going at about the same speed at modern pistol bullets are during modern pistol engagements.

Very pretty maths, and seemingly correct too (though it's been several years since I studied maths, so I have no doubt I am rather rusty ). But a musket ball loses speed rather quickly in flight. I'm sure a pistol shot would do also, but not to the same degree (Wellington and Napoleon were hit several times by spent musket balls without serious injury (protected by woolen greatcoats usually).
Musket balls were usually at the very least .35 calibre, not .11. A Brown Bess had a .75 calibre, and a .710 ball (on average).

What is this mysterious "shock" you speak of? It smells suspiciously of the benighted pre-Facklerian era of terminal ballistics when smelly men sat around campfires and told ridiculous lies.

Shock, funnily enough, is the same thing you speak of which 'turns' the nervous system off. Trauma, if you will. The kinetic energy of the projectile is transferred to the target. A spherical musket ball would, and indeed does, transfer more of its energy quicker (to the target) than a modern round, mainly because of the low muzzle velocity, thus the ball has less overall momentum. A modern round is travelling faster, and thus retains more of its energy as it travels through the target. I'm not saying that the musket ball would be more deadly in all cases than a modern round, but a musket ball was usually deadly when it hit, because even if the initial wound did not kill the target, the septacaemia caused by the ball itself, the cloth it carried into the wound, or the shock transferred to the surrounding flesh and organs around the wound, probably would be.

In short, a musket ball will make a remarkably unexciting wound that looks like a tunnel through the flesh that's about the same diameter as the hole in the end of the musket what caused it.

You are forgetting that musket engagements took place at very close ranges. A musket ball hitting a torso would usually have enough power to reach internal organs. But, because of the low muzzle velocity and general aerodynamics of the ball, it would not usually have enough velocity to cause an exit wound. Thus, the ball will reach the vital area of a human's anatomy, but stay there. It will not travel in a straight line - it could be deflected on another course by muscle-mass, even, which creates an effect akin to modern rounds 'tumbling' when they enter a human body. Now I know that an exit wound is the greater injury (than an entry wound), but think logically.

But a modern round often carries on through the body - thus carrying with it a still considerable amount of kinetic energy that was not, therefore, transferred to the target. A musket ball (on average), would not do this, instead transferring all its energy to the target in the short amount of time it takes muscle, flesh and bone to bring a musket ball to a stop. Trauma is the largest factor in gunshot wounds, albeit followed closely by blood loss and septacaemia (I can't spell this for the love of God, I apologise ). The 'shock' I talk about is the situation of the body once this trauma has been transferred to the surrounding muscle mass and bodily systems. You said yourself a gunshot wound can shut down the nervous system - large trauma does this. This is 'shock'. Even if it does not cause death (usually by heart attack or simply causing bodily systems to shut down – respiratory and nervous being the two main ones), it will cause lasting damage.

A musket ball wound can be very deadly. Bayonet wounds will only be deadly if they hit something vital, which is often actually quite hard when the target is wearing a thick woolen greatcoat and bearskin upon their head. And of course trying his equal best to kill you at the same time.
Many Napoleonic soldiers survived many stab wounds, usually by lancers; and many who were killed by stabbing wounds were found with an inordinate number – Ponsonby, following the charge of the Union Brigade at Waterloo, was found with seven lance wounds. Obviously the first six were not fatal, or at least, not immediately fatal.

[thatguy]

Hrmm, I just noted this post:
"I'd agree that in a one on one fight, sword would beat spear heavily,"

Do you have any idea how utterly wrong you are?

Depends on what type of saword, if the swordsmen is armed with a sheild or not, depends on the spear, its length, if a sheild can be held, the skills of the use, rogue elements etc etc.
I always like the fact you can grab the enemies spear haft, while he cant grabe your sword (well he can...but would hurt..and again depends on the blade)

It also depends on skill of the user, and posistioning.
The spearman has the advantage aslong as he keeps the swordsman infront of the spear, but if the swordsman gets inside the spearmsn reach, the spear becomes useless....cant hack with the spear, you'd hit him with the shaft, cant stab cos he's to close.
All the swordsman needs to do is stab you.
Its like a man with a knife against a man with a broadsword...the man with the broadsword will win if he can keep the knifer at swords width, but if the knifer gets toe to toe with the broadswordist, the guy with the broadsword IS dead.

Of course, this also comes down to one of my favourite sayings:
"In theory, practical and theory are the same, in practical no two things are more different"

[Ojf]

I prefer the Bayonet, since you can use the Bayonet or the bottom bit of your gun, what's it called, the bit what you put into your shoulder when you aim?

[Serious Spamurai]

Musket balls were usually .35 calibre, not .11.

I thought they were 40-75 :hmmm:.


+EDIT+ just measured the one I've got and it's about 3/4 inch, so 75, must be brown bess, but I'm sure most were larger than .35


As for the Sword-Bayonet thing. I'm sure I read somewhere that the Zulus' short spear with a long blade, more like a short sword, gave them a large advantage over their neighboring tribes, who used longer spears.

[Spartacus the Irish]

I thought they were 40-75 :hmmm:.


+EDIT+ just measured the one I've got and it's about 3/4 inch, so 75, must be brown bess, but I'm sure most were larger than .35

Sorry, there should be an 'at least' before the .35. Thanks for spotting it! The Brown Bess had a 0.71 ball and a .75 calibre, the 1777 Charleville a .66-.69 calibre.

[Furious Mental]

"I'm suspicious in general of quantitative, post facto battlefield wound analysis. How do we know that there weren't a lot of men wounded by bayonets because bayonets tended to be used in such a way that they just killed outright?"

Bayonets were more likely to be used in a way that killed outright - most people stabbed with a bayonet were stuck in the kidneys when their side broke and tried to flee the melee. Most of those killed in the melee had simply had been shot at point blank range.

[Spartacus the Irish]

Bayonets were more likely to be used in a way that killed outright - most people stabbed with a bayonet were stuck in the kidneys when their side broke and tried to flee the melee. Most of those killed in the melee had simply had been shot at point blank range.

Any evidence for this?