cavalry wheeling

[RichT]

I'd say:

1) If your unit has to change its frontal facing as part of your move, should this consume any part of your movement allowance, and if so, how much?

Yes, and a lot. Always assuming the rules have literal movement, manoeuvre, etc, not abstractions. Ideally, there might be a choice - turn quickly and lose cohesion, turn slowly and retain cohesion. Decisions are always good (though in this case, they may just add complexity).

2) Should a unit be able to change its facing during the enemy's move, and if so, how much, when and how?

Depends on the rules (and on level of abstraction). If movement rates are set intelligently, there's no need to react during the enemy's move since the move/distance scales will handle this (broadly - if it takes cavalry 2 mins to move 100 yards, and 2 mins to turn 90 degrees, then cavalry less than 100 yards away will arrive at an exposed flank before the target can turn to face them, so if cavalry move 100 yards in a turn, there's no need to allow reactions during the enemy's move).

[Patrick Waterson]

This ties in with the question of timescale and ground scale interrelationships.  Given that tabletop wargaming started life as an attempt to attain some form of tactical realism (as opposed to a sort of abstract dice-based entertainment using figures), if we are to have meaningful tactical imperatives on the tabletop this implies a timescale of a few minutes per move in which units have limited manoeuvre capability and players have to make meaningful decisions about what to do with it.

This resulted in the typical 1970s wargame rules being bsed on a 'bound' of 2-3 minutes, whereas nowadays the trend seems to be longer turns with more abstraction, which leaves the time consumed in wheeling as something of a curiosity for a historian rather than a critical consideration fora wargamer.

That said, there are a couple of points of cavalry handling technique which could reduce the time a formation spent wheeling.

1) Moving at reduced speed - cavalry rarely travelled Hollywood-style at the gallop, moving instead at a walk or trot most of the time.  This left a considerable margin of speed in hand to permit some subunits and indeed individuals within a subunit to travel faster than others when executing a wheel.  If moving at the trot, which I would assume to be the default battlefield speed, a wheeling unit could take its time from its central subunit, with those on the inside of the wheel slowing to a walk and those on the outside getting up to a canter.  A wheel taking its cue from the centre would thus proceed more slowly than one taking its cue from the inside man.  Exact dressing would not matter until the manoeuvre was completed, at which point it could swiftly be resumed as the unit travelled at a trot.

2) Trained men and trained horses - once men and mounts know their places in a formation, they will work to keep those places and if temporarily displaced will rapidly resume their customary positional relationships.  This would be of material assistance in rapidly straightening out distortions caused by manoeuvring as in 1) above.

These factors would benefit well-trained and experienced troops (and born-in-the-saddle tribal types), who would  - or should - have considerably less of a penalty for such evolutions than raw and/or poorly-trained troops.  There will still be a penalty, which can be measured as the delay imposed on any troops who have to slow down during the evolution.

Ideally, there might be a choice - turn quickly and lose cohesion, turn slowly and retain cohesion. Decisions are always good (though in this case, they may just add complexity).

Less well-trained/less capable troops might well be allowed this choice: wheel quickly and lose cohesion or keep cohesion and wheel slowly. The veterans/experts would tend to get the best of both worlds.

[Mark G]

It all seems so logical when you spell it out, Pat.

It seems strange that there is absolutely no evidence to support that in the ancient era, and directly contradictory evidence from every other period of human history.

I wonder why that is.

[Erpingham]

I'm not sure which part of Patrick's argument mark is referring but I think he has a point about movement speed and timescales.  If we were back in the spurious accuracy days of fixed physical and time scales, we may need to know things in more detail to game them (although in fact we'd have probably extrapolated from the same 19th century manuals, which Patrick doubts are equivalent to ancient techniques).  With a more fluid set up, we can abstract. 

I think the risk in the argument is everything would fit in a longer timeframe so we don't need to allow for it.  In that case, we wouldn't need set move distances because our forces could move anywhere on the field and back in the longer time frame.  Instead, we should see the longer, more fluid move, as a period of time during which things happened but not all at the same time and not all taking the entire time.

I've already said what I think we should model; a degree of difficulty that makes bodies of troops hard to wheel, an ability of regulars to do this in good order but less regular troops to risk getting in a mess.  I'm not sure "born-in-the-saddle tribal types" would be automatically good at wheeling.  I'm not convinced they put a premium on ordered lines to start with, so making them form rigid linear formations which pivot on an axis would be pretty unnatural for them.  But perhaps something else was meant?

[Patrick Waterson]

I'm not sure "born-in-the-saddle tribal types" would be automatically good at wheeling.  I'm not convinced they put a premium on ordered lines to start with, so making them form rigid linear formations which pivot on an axis would be pretty unnatural for them.  But perhaps something else was meant?

Indeed: the likes of Scythians, Huns, Numidians and Moors - not to mention Mongols - were noted for the skill and rapidity of their manoeuvres, something that no regular troops, however well-drilled, could hope to match.  Like a flock of birds, they seem to have brought shoal-type manoeuvring to a fine art.

I think the risk in the argument is everything would fit in a longer timeframe so we don't need to allow for it.  In that case, we wouldn't need set move distances because our forces could move anywhere on the field and back in the longer time frame.  Instead, we should see the longer, more fluid move, as a period of time during which things happened but not all at the same time and not all taking the entire time.

I would agree: the key limitation on battlefield movement is not how far or how fast troops can move, but how well and accurately their movement can be organised.  In many, perhaps most, armies there will be a great deal of 'hurry up and wait', which consumes time and movement allowance.  This, used as a design principle, would make movement dependent upon a composite of command ability and troop training, with the former manifested as a potential allowance which is transmitted through (or hindered by) the training/experience (or lack of it) of the troops.

Here the mechanisms of WRG 7th Edition are interesting: on a timescale of about 15 minutes per turn, Marches are used to cover distance quickly until one gets within 240 paces of the enemy and preclude any finer form of movement that turn.  This represents the ability to get anywhere on the battlefield in the absence of the enemy (although if a unit is pointing in the wrong direction, getting it pointed the right way involves a time-consuming wheel ...).  At or within 240 paces, one uses Approach moves to close the distance and Counter moves to react to them, following which those who desire or are too enthusiastic to do otherwise launch Charge moves.  The Charge is a bonus move resulting in contact (or evasion by the target) and represents the extra bit of movement when things quicken up as one closes with the enemy.  All in all, WRG 7th Edition is something of an education in battlefield movement and time/activity scaling.

It seems strange that there is absolutely no evidence to support that in the ancient era, and directly contradictory evidence from every other period of human history.

I wonder why that is.

You mean the gunpowder era, with its artillery and massed gunpowder firearms ... perhaps there might be a reason for a change in formations and techniques?

That said, the musket and pike era featured reiter cavalry, who operated by delivering missiles using circulating files in much the same way as the Romans seem to have done.  They went out of fashion when defeated by shock cavalry, which may be an interesting reflection on the Roman change to lance-armed cavalry in the 3rd-4th centuries AD.

[RichT]

The trouble with 1970s tactically realistic rules is that - as shown in this thread - we don't have enough concrete knowledge of the tactical realities to model them accurately, so all those rules' fiddliness and complexity ended up modelling was a fantasy - or to be more charitable, a theory. The dice based abstract entertainments do not attempt to model (or fantasize about) the tactical details, but do successfully model the overall effects (such as better quality troops being more effective in battle). Plus maybe they have some small chance of preventing wargaming bcoming the sole preserve of late middle aged men with over-fond memories of the 1970s...

[RichT]

Gunpowder notwithstanding, I think there are very strong reasons for believing that ancient cavalry moved and manoeuvred (and in particular, wheeled) in ways very similar to cavalry of other better known periods. I believe we all broadly agree about that don't we? With lots of allowance for tribal types, hairy barbarians, etc etc doing things differently (as they always have). And also recalling a comment I read somewhere or other about the Napoleonic drill for forming square - that "I never saw anything half so regular take place in a real battle". The fact that a major benefit of wedge/rhombus is facilitating manoeuvre (as well as, ahem, cutting through enemy formations) is an indication that manoeuvre was otherwise hard, but that's not a great revelation.

[Patrick Waterson]

Gunpowder notwithstanding, I think there are very strong reasons for believing that ancient cavalry moved and manoeuvred (and in particular, wheeled) in ways very similar to cavalry of other better known periods.

Would anyone like to enumerate these 'very strong reasons'?  They would seem particularly germane to this discussion.

[Mark G]

We have done Pat,

Try re reading with an open mind, instead of skimming preparatory to the latest bout of Waterson wisdom.

[Patrick Waterson]

We have done Pat,

Try re reading with an open mind, instead of skimming preparatory to the latest bout of Waterson wisdom.

Humour me, please, by restating them clearly.

[RichT]

Gunpowder notwithstanding, I think there are very strong reasons for believing that ancient cavalry moved and manoeuvred (and in particular, wheeled) in ways very similar to cavalry of other better known periods.

Would anyone like to enumerate these 'very strong reasons'?  They would seem particularly germane to this discussion.

Well I do think they have been stated clearly quite often, plus are self evident in some cases, and the trouble with stating them clearly again is that we all know where it leads - endless point by point argument and counter argument (but with little actual reasoning or evidence, and lots of airing of pet theories), until in ten or so pages time we end up arguing about the meaning of a single word somewhere or other and get bored and wander off to re-hash some other wearily overdone topic.

But that said, just to humour you, and as it's a Friday, I'll try to set out the arguments as I see them, in the hope that it may be useful information and maybe won't lead to another I said you said session. Not with any intention of changing your mind about anything, Patrick, but just as information, so you know why I and others think what we think. 

So:

1) The problem of moving bodies of cavalry in close order across terrain, as efficiently as possible and with minimum disorder (which we can take as read as militarily desirable) hasn't changed over the centuries, so while different solutions might have been found at different times (such as the wedge, which AFAIK isn't common in other periods), the fundamental problem and therefore the fundamental solution are unlikely to be very different.

2) There is no evidence that ancient cavalry manoeuvred in some fundamentally different way from cavalry of other periods; while there is little evidence (but see below) of how they did manoeuvre, in the absence of evidence to the contrary our starting position should be that similar problems were met with similar solutions. While different theories could be devised, in the absence of any evidence to support them, or any reason to prefer them to the default position, they remain just interesting theories, and cannot supplant the default position.

3) Such evidence as there is for wheeling in the Hellenistic tactical manuals may apply only to infantry, but it is reasonable to assume, in the absence of contradictory evidence, that it would apply to cavalry also, and as formations are described as turning like a single body, which seems to mean wheeling in the way we are familiar with from other periods, it is reasonable to suppose that this is how cavalry wheeled also.

4) Byzantine tactical manuals (so far as I know them) also don't give precise details but seem to describe sub units (bandon size, around 300 men) wheeling as above, as single bodies, and larger formations wheeling by bandons aligning on each other, which is what we would expect from other periods also.

5) The wedge and rhombus are a way to ease the wheeling of a formation as a whole by following the leaders/edges; there is no suggestion that this involved wheeling by files (for example) nor that it replaced wheeling by files in square/oblong formations - the whole point of wedge/rhombus seems to be that it is an improved way to wheel the unit as a body.

6) People with practical experience (such as reenactors) of moving formations on horseback come up with similar solutions.

I could probably add more if I had to.

Does that clarify things?

[aligern]

Richard, I think you missed the 'globus'  or blob. This is IIRC referred to in Maurice and there is an article by the brilliant Philip Rance which features it.  I recall that Maurice thinks its OK for one small unit, not for a full regiment. M's description of the Avar battle line has them in something more blob like, but in a long line of units of varying sizes...presumably retinues. Blobs just follow the flag and arte easy to turn about and move right or left. With flag and commander at its head it would rapidly look like a wedge.  If the flag group moves around the edge then everyone else just turns their horse, if the flag group advances and turns there is no difficulty in a small unit wheeling.
However, I am pretty certain that the globes is specifically not the way a large force of Roman cavalry moves because M says so and thus, given that they are marshalled by squadrons in a line 7 or eight ranks deep and thus approx 40 men wide they must move in squadrons to wheel , form column, move off, then halt and move into line again from the head of the column. All very 18th century. However I suggest doing this in front of the enemy is highly unlikely and that at the distance the army deploys into battle line the units are arrayed in lines and do not do any fancy manoeuvres.
One cavalry manoeuvre we do know about is the Ancient German advance , throw javelins and make a single wheel and move off.
Roy

[Erpingham]

Richard, I think you missed the 'globus'  or blob. This is IIRC referred to in Maurice and there is an article by the brilliant Philip Rance which features it. 

Is it Drungus, Δροῦγγος and Δρουγγιστί – a Gallicism and Continuity in Roman Cavalry Tactics?

[RichT]

Thanks - and now read! Very interesting.

To partly summarise - Rance sees a continuity in use of non-linear cavalry formations, as opposed to the linear or oblong formations of the main cavalry battle line, from the Hellenistic wedge, though the Roman cuneus or globus to the Late Roman and eventually Byzantine drungus - all being words for non-linear, less formally deployed groupings of (usually) cavalry designed for rapid movement and manoeuvre and used particularly for ambushes, outflanking, exploiting gaps etc (and for defence against the same).

He quotes Mauriuce (Strat 3.5.63-69): "It is necessary to draw up and train the unit not only in a linear formation - for this happens to be useful only for a main engagement or a charge - but also to deploy it in drungi and for it to charge in a straight line and in different circling manoeuvres, first in withdrawals and counter attacks, then in surprise raids against the enemy, and furthermore in giving rapid support to those in need."

(Strat 4.5.7-8) "deployment in a full battle line is impressive and more effective and better ordered and engages in safety, [but] it is slow and not easily manoeuvred when required, as it has only one purpose. Deployment in drungi has the opposite character, for it can both easily conceal itself in ambush, for which a small location suffices, and quickly manoeuvres according to requirements."

I'm reminded not only of line v. wedge, but of phalanx v. maniple and line v. column.

[Erpingham]

Thanks - and now read! Very interesting.

Yes, an excellent steer from Roy.  Much wider relevance to what we were talking about than appears on the surface.

It does provide some late Antique support for the ideas expressed about the pros and cons of rigid formations and more informal ones.  And perhaps to wonder about the role of globus/drungus style in the cavalry games as observed by Hadrian.