Lately I've been on a big Old West book-wise, especially as it relates to fighting Indians. What could the US and settlers have done differently in regards to equipment and tactics that would've improved their combat performance?
>in b4 hurrr muh smallpox blankets
Anti-Indian Warfare in North America
Angel Lee
Henry Robinson
Cavalry.
A willingness to get in close and go hand-to-hand.
Juan Turner
Adolph Metzger slew several indians by beating them to death with his bugle after running out of ammo for his carbine at the Fetterman Fight in which his patrol was massacred. I like to imagine what he could've accomplished if he'd been equipped with a thick gambeson, coat of mail, lever-action rifle and good broadsword.
>pic related, it's the fucking bugle
Carter Rivera
A while back, Ian and Carl were talking about lever actions being the assault weapons of their day. They said they were thinking about doing a historical fantasy video where they apply modern squad tactics to Old West weapons and analyze how effective they could be. Don't know if anything ever came of it.
Owen Gonzalez
According to Herman Lehmann's 9 Years Among the Indians, the account of his capture and subsequent rise to sub chief amongst the Apache, indians were using bows and arrows right up through the 1880's. Why didn't the army reintroduce armor?
Ian Carter
>improved their combat performance?
well, we could have tried to not be the good guys.
We tried to often to assimilate the Indians, or give them a "good deal"
We should have just killed them all.
Cry Havoc and Let Loose The Hounds of Hell
John Mitchell
Probably because it'd been so long since armor had seen use among civilized people. Pretty crazy to think that US military was probably prepping for combat against future weaponry development, when in this case they could've possibly had an advantage by going back in time in that regard.
Asher Brooks
That and they operated in a desert. Even the Spaniards, who still wore armor, ditched it when they started to pacify Northern Mexico and the Southwest. They instead used heavy padded cloth vest, especially towards the latter part of their rule.
Second part is that even after 400 years of Indian warfare, the US army still though in terms of fighting a European opponent instead of the various indigenous nations.
Blake Collins
Right? It's a shame to think of what might've been if the army had adopted a mixture of old and new. The thought of an armored cavalryman armed with the latest and greatest repeating weaponry in the 1870's makes my peepee tingle.
David Price
That makes sense but it wasn't all desert. There was plenty of fighting in Wyoming and Kansas. But I get what you're saying
Carson Collins
cough on them
Matthew Sanchez
>The thought of an armored cavalryman armed with the latest and greatest repeating weaponry in the 1870's makes my peepee tingle.
The French still had Cuirassiers all the way into the opening months of WWI
Connor Gutierrez
More repeating rifles (Henrys, Spencers, and otherwise) and less trapdoor springfields.
Oliver Reyes
shit nigga, we killed like 95% of them and took the entire goddamn continent, what more do you want?
Luis Cook
The other 5%.
Caleb Carter
>entire continent
Remove reservations.
Lincoln Hill
More biological warfare. The Huns realized how deadly it was
Benjamin Reed
Would have been great against natives, guess the French didn't imagine white men would fight white men in a civilized century
Xavier Thompson
>Within a few weeks, most French regiments stopped wearing the cuirass, as it served no real purpose in this new war.
t. wikipedia
why do you armorfags always post the dumbest things.
Blake Wood
That describes the late 1800s in eastern europe.
>russians still march around with mosins and chainmal
>Turks wearing armor fight Russia with Winchester
Ayden Baker
The whole fucking war with the Seminoles was a mistake and should have simply never have happened and to the extent that it did happen.
Jackson Fisher
Nah, everyone knew WW1 was kicking off before it did. Hell, it wasn't that long before that Prussia beat France and went about forming Germany.
There was just a lot of archaic ideals and thoughts in European militaries, especially when it came to modern equipment. It took them quite a while to realize "no, literally everything, 100% everything we think we know about war is wrong because machineguns". In training, the people who realized "hey I can just set up on a hill/fortified position and kill literally EVERYONE in seconds" were chastised for being ungentlemanly. Because when confronted with reality, officers who had been trained to fight a prior century's war decided to ignore reality and rely on their (no longer relevant) training. It sounds ridiculous, but it was a different time with different ideas that hadn't quite caught up to their own technology.
Benjamin Cruz
The natives were simply better fighters. The technology and disease was on the side of the Europeans but they didn't think in terms of forests, deserts, jungles, and swamps. If you look at battle casualties Indians killed something like twice as many fighting men. The problem was they had a quarter of the population and couldn't always fight in the woods.
Owen Diaz
>Lately I've been on a big Old West book-wise, especially as it relates to fighting Indians.
What books, OP?
Joseph Smith
You've lost me, we're not saying armor was a good idea in WW1 against modern industrial countries with machine guns and artillery, we're wondering if that type of armor could've been effective against aboriginal archers
I think this was true a lot of the time, especially for soldiers since there was no standardized training at the time. Unless you happened to be in a high speed cavalry unit with a good commander you were fucked. But you had plenty of mountain men who could and did fuck up Indians on their own terms, and according to Herman Lehman Apache did NOT want to screw around with Texas Rangers. I've wondered if someone could've figured out a SF-type selection for soldiers before heading out West how much better the regular army could've done.
Adam Williams
Surprising to see that Jow Forums is so ignorant they need to be reminded of this.
en.wikipedia.org
Go through those notes. There's some good PDFs to be had where artillery figures out they can use indirect fire, and plant lanterns on the hilltops to bait fire, then use counterbattery fire against dumbdumbs who were still trying direct fire.
Thomas Allen
R o b e r t R o g e r s
Rip in peace.
Easton Watson
Blood Meridian got me interested in the first place, which is funny cause I didn't like the that book, but then from there the novel of The Outlaw Josey Wales, Scalp Dance by Thomas Goodrich, 9 Years Among the Indians, and 6 Years With the Texas Rangers by Jim Gillet.
John Lopez
I was gonna say, battle of the somme did prove the effectiveness of machine guns, but first by showing the over reliance on artillery. The artillery, mangled no man's land, and machine guns created an environment no soldier or general had experience for. Gas attacks were also a new paradigm
Adam Phillips
Give this one a try. There isn't much fighting in it, but it was all written by a guy who was there, in his own words.
amazon.com
Julian Robinson
Nice, I'll pick it up. I forgot the memoirs of Bernal Diaz del Castillo. He was a swordsman under Cortez in Mexico, he has many interesting insights fighting the Natives, I love his storytelling style.
Leo Cruz
You fucking pussy
Angel Collins
That's fuckin' Hot. The 1911 was made dor horde back riding right? I only guess that cuz the trigger is so light as to not be disturbed by the riding.
Same as like the 1861 colt navies trigger and rough seas
Bentley Martin
*for horse
Mason Bennett
Levi Gonzalez
I desperately need pics of this
Dominic Cooper
en.wikipedia.org
>They used chainmail or bechter armour to protect the upper body, karwasze sometimes with gauntlets, secrete, buckler shields, polish szabla, reflex bow, gunpowder weapons such as: flintlock pistols, arquebus or muskets and early carabine.
Good God why couldn't we have been importing Polish cavalry to fight Indians and arming them with braces of Colt Walkers
Samuel Diaz
Jesus fuck pick an era and location people. Are we talking about the Injun Wars on the east coast during the late 18th century or the later wars against the plains nations in the 19th century? Both locations and time periods require very different tactics.
Joshua Clark
They just did a video on making 44-60 from 44-70 brass didn't they? So it should be soon hopefully.
Ryan Perry
Don't forget that the Brits also had experience of going up against machineguns and quickfiring light artillery , backed by rapid accurate rifle fire, from the Boer Wars.
David Taylor
Cuirassiers are the last troops you want to send against light cavalry raiders. The best response to light cavalry has always been light cavalry.
Probably because even back in the day when armour was still in heavy use, the people tasked with raiding, scouting and fighting enemy light horse hardly wore any. The fight is like 0.1% of the time spent on such a mission, the rest is riding hard to catch the fuckers. You might as well ask why the Libyans didn't just chase all the raiding Chadian toyotas down with their t-55s. After all, a tank will rape a technical in a fight.
Cameron Parker
The panczerny were HEAVY cavalry - noblemen who fought in pretty much the same manner as the hussars on the battlefield, as lancers and each with a bunch of subordinates/servants. That list of equipment is what they usually owned, not what they would have on them at all times. You don't want to carry all that shit while chasing a bunch of cossacks who stole your sheeps, so they probably didn't.
Camden Miller
issue better ammo and more lever action rifles
use better scouting and skirmishing tactics
wew lad
that's some brutal shit
Chase Russell
Cooper Gomez
Except that was only an Americanism and most of Europe still had a lively armour industry (unlike swordmaking which gradually declined) which was used to protect cavalry and static positions from shrapnel and fragmentation as well as pistols up until the end of WWI. The gap petween armour being used and armour being not used in some fashion in history is less than a lifetime with the discovery of modern ballistic plates.
Some soldiers in the American Civil War bought armoured breastplates but declined wearing them either due to heat or due to being accused of cowardice.
Alexander Roberts
If you could have, you would have
You could not.
Henry Brown
Physically and industrially we were perfectly capable of it, but even back then there were a lot of cucks sucking injun dick back East in the newspapers. They didn't get the real accounts of massacres, torture and gang-rape that occurred on the frontier because the government didn't actually want to wipe them all out. Quakers and ex-abolitionists especially spent a lot of effort shaping public opinion, and then you had straight up traitors who sold Indians guns even while conflict was going on who should've been hanged.
Ian Diaz
Let's say from 1840's-1880's
Brayden Cox
Trapdoor Springfields did just fine after we switched to brass ammo instead of copper.
Hell, a lot of Indians even used them. Geronimo was a big fan of the .45-70 and he used one during the later years of the Apache wars.
Liam Richardson
THIS RED SON OF A BITCH IS SLAUGHTERING WETBACKS AND BASICALLY YOU'RE FUCKING STUPID
Caleb Bell
I'm white (and 1/64th Shoshone) yet would unironically go back in time to the day the Mayflower landed in order to give to my Shoshone ancestor half the contemporary functional global arsenal of M1 Garands & 30-'06 ammunition plus enough machines & materials to make a great much many more (figure they'd get a decent start on weapon propagation early in the colonization effort) solely to keep America out of both World Wars so that Germany may win.
Benjamin Martin
>America was the deciding factor of WW1
Dominic Robinson
>plate-armored neoknight
>repeating rifle
>plate-armored clydesdale or equivalent horse
>supported by squares of armored heavy rifle infantry carried and supported by artillery-trailering armored carriages pulled by armored clydesdales or steam powered
>each carriage carries a gatling gun
What would have been required for this to happen? Early discovery of Uranium leading to Uranium-powered steam locomotives?
This is getting amazing in my mind....
Nicholas Cox
>saved