Tuesday, May 6, 2025

When Canons Are Roaring

 



Walk, trot, canter, gallop... CHARGE.





Cheers,

LSP

20 comments:

LL said...

It's stirring and inspiring. Pikes and cannons!

LSP said...

Exactly, LL! Push a pike. And yes, a DLC tune, obvs.

Beans said...

Back when the BBC was good, they did a miniseries called "By the Sword Divided" about the English Civil Wars and the Restoration.

Action was centered on one noble family in the countryside who were royalists, and dealing with how all the shenanigans and uprisings affected them.

No warts spared. The royalists were just as much bastards as the roundheads. Scottish Levelers and Irish mercenaries. Nobody won. One side just lost more than the other.

The first season dealt with the 1st ECW and the fall of the monarchy. The second season dealt with the 2nd and 3rd ECW and the restoration of the monarchy.

Very watch-worthy. They got everything pretty much right. Clothing, weapons, horse furniture (you can tell how good a historical piece is by how much they pay attention to... horse furniture, bits, bridles, saddles, stirrups and all.)

It's available on the A-zon for the measly price of... BOTCHI BALLS!!! $270 plus taxes. Yikes!!!!

Wild, wild west said...

"Hey diddle-diddle, straight up the middle."

I've never been to a Civil War battlefield without being duly impressed with the gumption required to form up in straight lines and march toward the opposing cannons across open fields. Also, more than just a little horrified. Pickett's Charge, anyone? Yikes. Maybe I think too much......

Beans said...

The tactics failed to stay as advanced as the weaponry. Rifled muskets had a very long and accurate killing range, much further than non-rifled muskets.

We see the same thing in WWI. Tactics that didn't advance since the American Civil War and the Crimean and Boer wars were still in use in 1914. "Oh, it will never turn into a siege war involving strongpoints and trenches, no..."

It's why blitzkrieg caught every other power by surprise. They all expected the war, if it occurred, to be a repeat of WWI/Boer War/Crimean War/any other war. Quelle suprise when someone not any more technologically advanced decides to use tactics involving mobility to win.

Even worse, England should have known what was coming, since they invented blitzkrieg. "What?" Yes. England's Plan 1919, which involved using slow heavy armor followed by infantry going up the middle, while light armor attacks the far flanks to draw off the surrounding enemy while both light and medium armor follow the heavies and exploit the breakout. Troops would be riding in half-tracked trucks or armored tracked carriers to serve as breakout troops. Other carriers would tow or carry artillery or have mounted artillery in order to bring gun support with the breakout. All under an umbrella of fighters and light bombers to interdict enemy planes, attack enemy airbases and strike enemy strongholds and artillery parks. Sound familiar? Say "Plan 1919" with a Prussian accent and it sounds like... Blitzkrieg.

Wild, wild west said...

A trained rifleman's view of the works and lines at Vicksburg is instructive, as are some of the lines at Manassas and indeed, a host of others. I was myself, once, a trained rifleman.......My office used to abut the Pea Ridge battlefield. On spring days I'd occasionally carry a sack lunch out and just sit and look at where they moved......"lunch and learn" they call it in other situations.....

Old NFO said...

I agree with Wild West... I also cannot imagine the horror of the day 'after' Pickett's Charge or the others with the wounded and dead littering the battlefield.

LSP said...

LHE Beans, "back when the BBC was good." Now there's a thing. What utter, unctious, smug, condescending, mendacious, lying, hypocritical, not fit for purpose rubbish.

Me? Totally Royalist, despite its tragic faults.

LSP said...

Mr Wild, I was thinking the very same thing. How did they do that?!? But they did. Stern stuff, eh?

LSP said...

My dear Beans, England, in its wisdom, has disbanded its Navy. They're an island.

LSP said...

NFO, it's beyond outrageous. I won't go on.

Beans said...

The Beeb was relatively good before the social justice warriors took over. "Masterpiece Theater" and "All Creatures Great and Small" and the aforementioned "By the Sword Divided" are excellent examples of what good work the Beeb used to do. "The Goodies," "The Dave Allen Show," "Monty Python" and "Benny Hill." "I, Claudius" being one of the greatest filmed shows ever, as it is used in film school as the perfect example of scene staging, blocking, use of perspective and minimalist camera movement to show the scene.

Heck, old school "Dr. Who" and "Red Dwarf" and both the radio and tv versions of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" were the epitome of good sci-fi.

Now? Bleh.

And for all the warts and farts, yeah, Royalist. I understand the Parliamentarian point of view, but like all leftist revolutions the good soon fell under the sword of the bad. And, yes, the ECW was a leftist war, equality and end of nobility and 'land for the people.' Friggin leftists. Royalist side could and did change, but wasn't really given a chance and royals being human means if you push them too hard they'll dig their feet in.

Other leftist movements from just before the ECW led to the communist colony of Plymouth Plantation after a good portion of Puritans were not so peacefully asked to get out of England or else. Said communist colony, as all communes tend to do, ended in almost failure and only by grasping capitalism with both hands saved any of them (fortunately for my mother's side of the family.)

Beans said...

Ah, England. Complete dumbasses. They might as well sell us their two flat-tops as they don't have the sailors or aircraft to service said ships.

Beans said...

Fortunately, for some degrees of fortunate, the creation of Triage from Napoleon's army saved many lives. Triage back then being the traditional 'Emergency Cases that can be saved get worked on right now go here next to the hospital,' 'Cases that aren't an emergency and can be saved go right there close to the hospital' and 'Yeah, they're dead men waiting to die, they go over the hill downwind where nobody can really see, smell or hear them.'

Combine that with the dead and wounded-soon-to-be-dead animals and all the other smells and it's no wonder that graves details and battlefield cleanup details used to go to the cowards (that being individual people who were labeled cowards and for units that didn't perform valiantly or performed not-at-all) and punishment details.

And nothing much changed for almost a century. One of the strangest evolution of military history was the US' insistence after WWI that we'd find our dead and bury them. We used to do it in the lands where they fell but now we bring them back here. We're still doing it, recovering US servicemen from all the foreign wars we fought in.

Anonymous said...

All episodes of the "By the Sword Divided" are available on YouTube for free. My favourite characters were Minty and Goodwife Margaret. Great cast but 1980s video quality. As Beans says, well worth a watch!

LSP said...

RIP, Beans.

CT Ginger said...

Stupid vanity on both side. Death, destruction and mass stupidity celebrated as honor and valor.

Beans said...

The depiction of a howitzer loaded with nails was fascinatingly horrifying.

One thing I definitely learned was not to put one's magazine within grenade range of one's outer walls. And to fortify said magazine.

Beans said...

The head's been dead for a while, but the body keeps moving. We'll see whether the parasites manage to destroy the body or if measures can be taken to save what's left.

Beans said...

Definitely vanity and stupidity on both sides. By the time of the actual war, there was no middle ground. Either the powers-that-be were hard-line royalists or hard-lined leftist redistributionists. Or suck-asses latched onto the posteriors of the royalists in charge or the redistributionists in charge.

At the beginning there were no physical dividing lines for the most part. Royalists and Roundheads were splattered across the lands side by side, even in the open country or crowded city. In comparison, we, the United States, are much more physically divided for the most part than England was in the early to mid 1600s, more like Spain right before and during the Spanish Civil War (well, except the SCW was nationalist leftists vs international leftists, with the internationals being the countryside and nationalists being the city folk. We have an opposite problem in that our cities are a volatile mixture of national and international leftists while our non-cities are mid-to-right wingers.)