On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Kevin Elliott wrote: > My original point was about the more general topic of unit tactics > during the revolution. Disciplined formation fighting and volley > fire is THE way to win large scale musket engagements. Any other way > gets you clubbed to death by weight of fire. A pet peeve of mine is > the implicit assumption that seems to have been nailed into out > public school children (including me) that the british tactics in the > revolutionary war basically boiled down to "they were stupid idiots". > A more careful reading of history shows this to be simply untrue.
I had a problem with this line since probably about 4th grade. Now, I grew up in the day when it was okay to go run around in the woods divided up into teams of yanks and krauts and reenact our various uncles recollections of the Battle of the Bulge, some of us using using captured Mausers or uncle Bill's Springfield sans bolts as our toys. The rich kids had Johnny Eagle toy guns and some others Mattel. That aside, we'd go out and "re-enact" and come home and ask questions of our warrior fathers and friends warroir fathers and get corrected a lot. Our Dad's Uncles and such told us about smoothbore, some of us got to shoot them. Compared with our .22s at summer camp, you couldn't hit crap with these things. We were told that to use cover and concealment and pick off the enemy was just fine, but in order to Win The Day, you had to go toe to toe with him on the battlefield and beat him down. That in essence, what we were being taught in school was crap. What do kids today do? How do they learn to war?
