Wars and ConflictsΒ permalink
Night Attacks
This discussion has been closed.
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Message 1.Β
Posted by stalti (U14278018) on Tuesday, 4th January 2011
why in history are there no night attacks that have determined the course of battles
ie agincourt - the night before - the english archers send 500000 arrows into the french (unarmoured) camp and then go for it
etc etc
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Message 2
Posted by VoiceOfReason (U14405333) on Tuesday, 4th January 2011
Battle of Prestonpans
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Message 3
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011
Guadalcanal
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Message 4
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011
In part I would suggest that this was because people used to have a true sense of the battle as a genuine proving ground.. Modern "common sense" seems to assume that the purpose of a battle or a war is to kill the enemy. It is not. It is to prove a point which is which of two sides, in Star Wars terms, can say that "The Force" is with them. And this meant more than any mere temporary advantage seized by opportunism , trickery, accident or worse.
So the "Battle of Budge Budge" might be given as evidence..
It was during the Seven Years War that the Eyre Coote expedition was sent up to deal with the aftermath of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Sailing up the Hooglie River the force approached the fort of Budge Budge, an enemy stronghold. There was some preliminary skirmishing by scouting parties, and the force was settled down for the night, ready to attack the fort the next day.
According to the official account in the middle of the night one of the sailors, perhaps having celebrated too heavily the fact that the real sailing part of the expedition was over, stumbled up the slope towards the fort, singing and swearing, and armed with a pistol. He thus was able to capture the fort single-handed, for the enemy had discreetly withdrawn. The next day he was severely disciplined by Sir Eyre Coote, and mumbled drunkenly that he would never capture a fort for anybody again for as long as he lived: and Coote observed with regret that the capture of the fort had been achieved "with no honour" for anybody.
Of course the night time, or the early hours, could be used in order to outmanoeuvre the enemy and achieve an advantagious deployment- this may have happened at the Battle of Hastings, when William of Normandy advanced to Senlac Hill, where Harold Godwinson felt that he had established a strong position, and it certainly happened at Blenheim where the French forces were amazed to see Marlborough's forces walking across the marshes attacking from an unexpected direction. It also featured when Wolfe passed Quebec and scaled the Heights of Abraham.
Killing in war, however, was not sheer murder. Before Quebec in one of the preliminary battles there was an incident when a French soldier killed one of his own Indian allies who was about to finish off and scalp a wounded British soldier. A massive Highland Seargeant Major was allowed to rush forward, pick up his wounded colleague and carry him down to safety in the British boats.
But ours seems to be an age that has little grasp of honourable conduct.
Cass -
Message 5
Posted by TimTrack (U1730472) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011
The problem with night attacks is controlling your men.
Glencairn mentions Prestonpans. Well, I trump that with the infamous night march before culloden, which ended up contributing to the government's victory :
Or, perhaps less well known, the night attack by Monmouth at Sedgemoor :
Controlling men in battle, specially before the advent of modern communications, was difficult enough. Doing it at night was almost suicidal.
The OP mentions the archers at Agincourt. However, archers can only hit what they can see. At night, they can't see anything. Such a move on the French camp would require, I suggest, an all out assault by men at arms, in hand to hand combat., which would not be playing to the English strength in archery. -
Message 6
Posted by arty macclench (U14332487) on Wednesday, 5th January 2011
erm, El Alamein?
and an entirely random selection of a few more :
"Pegasus Bridge" (Orne Canal) Normandy) 1944
Tel el Kebir Egypt, 1882
Long Island 1776
Paoli Tavern 1777
Mount Longdon }
Two Sisters } East Falkland 1982
Mount Harriet }
Wireless Ridge }
East Falkland 1982
Tumbledown }
All the latter involved British infantry making night approaches, some very quite complex (not least by glider in 1944) and except for Long Island were followed by night fighting.
Apart from the Pegasus Bridge coup de main (Merville comes to mind,too) these were actions fought by brigade or division-sized forces. None could be said to have affected history - except for Alamein- but that does not reflect on the achievements of the troops and commanders involved.
Although, after his victory on Long Island General Howe missed the opportunity to defeat Washington decisively and and bring the American rebellion to an early end. (Washington's successful night attack on a Hessian brigade at Princeton three months later had a disproportionate effect on the early war in America).
At Paoli in Pennsylvania, Major Gen Sir Charles Grey (later Earl Grey of the tea) ordered his men to advance with unloaded muskets and use the bayonet alone. His order that they remove the flints as well was rejected by his colonels but earned him the sobriquet of 'No Flints Grey' nonetheless. The British brigade attacked an American encampment and put to flight a whole division, cutting a swathe through the rebels whose fire gave away their positions, and were accused of massacring wounded and unarmed prisoners.
The so- called 'Paoli Massacre' also gave rise to apocryphal tales of British regiments wearing red feathers in their hats to identify themselves as the culprits.
A similar furore followed a night attack pursued with equal ruthlessness on Mount Longdon in 1982.
Night fighting appears to be something that suits the British well, although the Boer War saw two particularly disastrous attacks at Magersfontein and Spion Kop when, after successful night marches, dawn revealed the British to be in disastrously exposed positions. -
Message 7
Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Thursday, 6th January 2011
It was purported that King Harold intended to launch a night attack on William's Hastings camp, hence William standing his guard to all night, but the Norman scouts were keenly observant and the battle then took place the next morning at...Battle (Senlac/Santlache).
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Message 8
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 6th January 2011
Man Alive
I can well believe that King Harold might have thought about a night attack.. But he had already showed his dishonourable Godwinson traits at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.. No wonder he rushed down South and off to face William before news of the way that he had defeated Harald Hardrada and Tostig without "doing battle" as any strong and confident King would have done.. Falling upon the invader by surprise and massacring as many as could be when they were not battle ready, was no proof that Harold was the kind of King that England needed. The King who would stand in the way of the invader and demand that he should withdraw or come to do battle, and lose.
It seems that Harold then tried to remedy the situation by doing the honourable thing at Hastings. There he drew up his forces on a "place of slaughter" across William's path inland.
But according to the French Chroniclers he had also had to do some last minute accommodation to rectify another earlier failure. The English "professional" warrior was expected to be prepared to lay down his life for his leader, because the leader had provided him with an easy and privileged life with all "the joys of the hall".. Hence the English Great Hall and its rowdy banquetting feasts. Apparently the night before Hastings Harold threw a feast, which seems to be quite a stupid thing to do, almost as stupid as Hardrada and Tostig allowing their men to "stand-down" as invaders in a foreign land. The Norman Chroniclers note that "their" forces spent the night in Holy Vigil, as knights did in order to make peace with the God of Battle- just in case.
Of course Harold had only patched things up with Edwin and Morcar in the summer, by marrying their sister (?) and had not had much time to really build up a loyalty to himself as King. No doubt veterans of his Welsh Campaigns were a different matter, but perhaps they had not benefitted as much as they might have hoped from having "their man" become the King.
Perhaps this would me more appropriate for the "Pot-Bellied English" thread, but such a feast would seem to be doubly stupid.. Those who feasted were going to have sore heads etc the next day. And the massed fyrd, who would not have been feasted, would have been put clearly "in their place" and would have passed the kind of disagreeable night familiar to those of us who have spent nights under canvas with much partying in the immediate vicinity.
Cass -
Message 9
Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Friday, 7th January 2011
You're right, that unprovoked anti-Godwinist (and laughably inaccurate anyway) tirade, presumably in reply to my post above, would be more appropriate elsewhere.
I am not staunchly wedded to Harold or William's claims, but merely raised 1066 as an example in response to the OP- "Night attacks".
I think you enjoy the sight of your own screen name and lengthy posts, often diverting. -
Message 10
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 7th January 2011
Man Alive
Not really .. I often think how George Stephenson must have felt sinking all those faggots into that marshy stretch- Shap Fell was it?-- in order to make a road bed to bring the Great Experimental Railway from Liverpool to Manchester.. They just sank without trace-- until they finally did not.. And I believe that the line still runs on those foundations.
Cass -
Message 11
Posted by White Camry (U2321601) on Friday, 7th January 2011
arty,
The American commander at Paoli was "Mad" Anthony Wayne, who evidently learned well from his bitter experience. Two years later he led an identical attack against a British fortified camp at Stony Pt., NY.
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Message 12
Posted by TimTrack (U1730472) on Friday, 7th January 2011
I have to agree with Man-Alive. Casseroleon's view of the battle does not match anything that I have ever seen. Nor does his romanticised version of how battles were fought.
Harold's army caught the Vikings spread out on two sides of a bridge and took every possible advantage of the situation,as any good commander would have and should have.
Returning to the point about night attacks. Perhaps Harold's decision not to mount an attack at night on the Normans was influenced by the fact that they had to fight a battle then force march south. The English, pot bellied or otherwise, do need a little sleep now and then. -
Message 13
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 7th January 2011
Tim Track
Re Harold rushing down towards Hastings:
He had the choice to stay and recover in London, when he came down from the North- and he was advised by his brothers to do so.. He decided not to do so because according to the AS Chronicle it took a long time for the loyal forces to assemble..
I have read historians who ascribe this to the difficult travel conditions in that age.. But contemporary opinion would have judged the gathering by contemporary standards-- In other words they were slower than they should have been, and every parent knows why children drag their feet when they are being taken somewhere that is being imposed on them.
Cass -
Message 14
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Friday, 7th January 2011
As for my ideas about warfare in a the modern age, which we traced back in the usual need to find historical precedent and models, this is an extract that is largely based upon and Article written by Dr. Julian Huxley during the Second World War:
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More generally Huxley criticised the simplistic way that scientific theory had been seized upon by politicians, notably in an article on "War as a Biological Phenomenon."(1942):-
"Darwin's principle of Natural Selection, based as it is on constant pressure of competition or struggle, has been evoked to justify various policies in human affairs. For instance, it was used, especially by politicians in late Victorian England, to justify the principles of laissez-faire and free competition in business and economic affairs. And it was used, especially by German writers and politicians from the late nineteenth century onwards, to justify militarism. War, so ran this particular version of the argument, is the form which is taken by Natural Selection and the Struggle for Existence in the affairs of the nations. Without war, the heroic virtues degenerate; without war, no nation can possibly become great or successful.
[But]..War is a rather special aspect of competition between the members of one species- what biologists call "intra-specific competition". It is a special case because it involves physical conflict and often the death of those who undertake it, and also because it is physical conflict not between individuals but between organized groups... And recent studies..have resulted in this rather surprising but very important conclusion- that intra-specific competition need not, and usually does not, produce results of any advantage to the species as a whole." (page 62)
Hence, he explained, in Nature a male of a species may invest enormously in those features that enhance its chances of mating with as many females as possible, staking all on its competitiveness in a mating season. But while this does pass on the genes that will breed the next generation, it does not necessarily pass on the best genes for the long-term surival of the species, not least because such polygamous males have no emotional investment in their mates or offspring.
And as for the "organised conflict of war :-
"War waged by small professional armies according to a professional code, was at least not a serious handicap to general progress. But long-continued war in which the civilian population is starved, oppressed, and murdered and whole countries are laid waste, as in the Thirty Years War- that is harmful to the species; and so is total war in the modern German sense in which entire populations may be enslaved and brutallized, as with Poland or Greece to-day, whole cities smashed, like Rotterdam, the resources of large regions deliberately destroyed, as in the Ukraine. The more total war becomes, both intensively, as diverting more of the energies of the population from construction to destruction, and extensively, as involving more and more of the countries of the globe, the more of a threat does it become to the progress of the human species. As H.G. Wells and many others have urged, it might even turn back the clock of civilization and force the world into another Dark Age. War of this type is an intra-specific struggle from which nobody, neither humanity at large nor any of the groups engaged in the conflict, can really reap any balance of advantage, though of course we may snatch particular advantages out of the results of war." (pages 65-6)
Cass -
Message 15
Posted by arty macclench (U14332487) on Friday, 7th January 2011
'Mad'? he was bleeding furious.....
In fact, only a fortnight after Paoli Tavern - commonly referred to at the time as 'Wayne's Affair' by both sides - Wayne's Pennsylvanian troops had an opportunity for revenge. They formed part of an attacking column that burst out of the autumn mist one morning as the 2nd Light Infantry piquets were standing to in the lines at Germantown outside Philadelphia. Allegedly crying 'Have at the Bloodhounds! Revenge Wayne’s affair!', they caught the British off balance and a number of 'Light bobs' were bayoneted without quarter as they fell back.
Later, Wayne wrote: "Our people remembering the action of the night of the 20 Sper near The Warren pushed on with their bayonets- and took ample revenge for that night’s work- the Rage and Fury of the soldiers was not to be restrained for some time- at least not until great numbers of the enemy fell by our bayonets. - .."
A propos the OP, at Germantown Washington's ambitious plan required his force to advance in three separate columns marching by night to converge on the British. It was probably too much for his army at that stage of the war.The timing went awry and two columns ended up firing on each other in the thick mist and Washington was let down by his subordinate commanders but his plan nearly succeeded. The success at Stony Point two years later showed how much had been learned. The restraint of the American Light Infantry in not putting the British garrison to the bayonet was also made much of at the time. -
Message 16
Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Wednesday, 19th January 2011
The battles of Otterburn (1388) and Stratton (1643) were both night attacks.
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Message 17
Posted by arty macclench (U14332487) on Wednesday, 19th January 2011
Wasn't Otterburn more of an 'over run'?
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Message 18
Posted by LongWeekend (U3023428) on Wednesday, 19th January 2011
stalti
As others have said, the main problem with night attacks is command and control, particularly in the pre-radio, pre-night vision system ages.
This tended, as recently as the Falklands, to limit night attacks to assaults on fixed positions with exploitation boundaries that could be identified in the dark. The Falklands night attacks were designed to take advantage of the better training of British Forces (the same thing, incidentally, applied in the first stages of Operation Compass in the Western Desert in 1940).
Launching the first phase of a major attack at night allowed the advantage of the cover of darkness while permitting the full weight of artillery and air support to be brought to bear once daylight came. This was the concept behind the opening of the Alamein battle, but it failed because the attackers did not make sufficient progress during the night phase and were still bogged down in the minefields when daylight came.
Night can be just as disorganising for the attacker. Spion Kop is an obvious example, where the British assault troops did not know, in darkness, that their objective was overlooked by another feature. The Battle of Kidney Ridge (which was strictly speaking a night advance, not a night attack) in fact took place over 1000 yards from Kidney Ridge proper, because the Rifle Brigade got its approach march wrong. Ironically, this put them in what turned out to be a more tactically crucial position.
LW -
Message 19
Posted by arty macclench (U14332487) on Thursday, 20th January 2011
Kidney RIdge. I am currently trying to get to grips with the situation at Alamein. It seems most features of the battle field, while identifiable as ring contours on the map, were little more than folds in the ground.
Were features like Kidney Ridge selected as objectives because they gave tactical advantage to the Axis defenders and having been occupied as such needed to be reduced or were they the focus of attacks because simply because the 8th Army needed clear objectives to aim for and being identifiable on the map, they could be marched towards by compass bearing by night or day?
Presumably there was an advantage for the Axis in NOT occupying points that could be identified as infantry/armour objectives or artillery/airforce targets- or had they already burned that card by creating a static defense line? -
Message 20
Posted by Anglo-Norman (U1965016) on Thursday, 20th January 2011
Another example of a decisive night action was the Battle of Les Mielles (21st-22nd October 1651). Parliamentarian troops under General-at-Sea Robert Blake and Colonel James Heane successfully stormed the beach at Les Mielles, Jersey, in an amphibious assault using landing craft, starting at 11pm. Although they were aware of the Parliamentarian presence the Royalists were taken by surprise by the timing of the assault. It was a skilled bit of combined ops by the New Model Army and English Navy, and broke the Royalist field forces. Thanks to Les Mielles the Royalists were unable to prevent the Parliamentarians moving inland and systematically neutralising the now isolated fortifications.
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Message 21
Posted by arty macclench (U14332487) on Thursday, 20th January 2011
"an amphibious assault using landing craft,"-
'Zooks! There's an image -
Message 22
Posted by LairigGhru (U14051689) on Friday, 21st January 2011
Desert Storm in 1991 commenced at night, I seem to recall. It gave our forces a crucial technical advantage at the outset of hostilities because they were equipped with night vision equipment.
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Message 23
Posted by Nielsen3 (U14417619) on Friday, 21st January 2011
Yet, as LongWeekend and others put it, 'the main problem with night attacks is command and control, particularly in the pre-radio, pre-night vision system ages.'
Moving large - or even small - numbers of troops around in the dark craves a lot of good organisation, else someone is bound to end where they oughtn't.
(In real action this might be THE place to put a sign on freshly 'educated' officers, 'NOT wanted on voyage', during exercizes this would be just the place to get utterly lost, and have an experienced NCO 'explain' where and how! - This does the troops' morale lots of good - Sorry for the beginning of a rant. ) -
Message 24
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Sunday, 23rd January 2011
I don't know that they necessarily affected the course of a battle but the site
which is a history of the 28th (Maori) Battalion says:
Rushed back into the line at Minqar Qaim on 26 June 1942, the New Zealanders were soon surrounded by the 21st Panzer Division. Only a desperate breakout saved the day. After smashing through the German lines in a surprise night attack, with Māori bayonets again to the fore, they dashed 160 kms back to the safety of the Alamein Line.Β
During the NZ (Maori) Wars, the Maori defenders would sometimes use their pa (fortifications) as a place to retreat to or tempt the English to besiege and would then use the night-time to escape underground to build a new pa to the frustration of the English attackers. Sometimes a delaying tactic, sometimes a form of resistence.
Caro. -
Message 25
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Monday, 24th January 2011
One of the most decisive naval battles of all time - Aboukir Bay - was fought almost entirely at night.
See also the initial Japanese naval attacks on Port Arthur.
Consider, further, Rodney's "Moonlight Battle" - his decision to engage in a "general chase" brought on a melee where the command and control element was largely eliminated, as he had effectively turned his captains loose to act upon their own initiative.
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