Pike and Shot Tactics 1590–1660 (Elite, 179)

Sometimes in history it is not the general progress being made that is the most striking, but the re-discovery of things old and the impression that they can have on modern thinking. With the "Pike and Shot Tactics" you see how the classical education of some of the military thinkers of the time wandered back to ancient times, and how tactical adaptions of the Romans and to an extent the Greeks were rebuilt using the advanced weaponry of the period. The Dutch, the Swedes and the Spaniards all took lessons from one of the most successful armies of antiquity and produced successful systems of their own with various additions to adapt them to the times in which they were used. I, needless to say, enjoyed the book because of its general information, but also for its insight into the base tactics which took the great captains of this period to glory. It will be interesting to see what is next in the Elite series. This one is worth having.

I really enjoyed this book. It really helped me to understand the tactics and just the basic flow of battles of this era. I’ve quite a few histories of warfare in this era such as Delbruk’s “The Dawn of Modern Warfare”, and this book is a great visual companion piece.

The concept for this book was great, and the raw material was also excellent. The diagrams, primary sources, and pictures were all excellent.And that is where it stops being a good book.Here are my critiques, all of which are equally important, so they are not in any order of priority:1) The material was not organized. If you want to know how Gustavus Adolphus conducted military tactics, you would have to read about 10 different spots in the book. Why? Because the author would use a term of art in one spot, but no explanation for what it meant. In another spot, you'd see him quote directly from a primary source, but give no interpretation of half the words that all have unique meanings. In another spot, when reading about the Spanish Tercios, you would find 3 definitions explained for words that were used in primary sources earlier in the book involving the Swedish King, Adolphus. Then, in a fourth spot, you would find a marching order, reproduced, for Gustavus, but you would have no explanation whatsover as to the nomenclature or notations. Then, in a fifth spot, when reading about the English Civil War (nothing to do with Gustavus) you would find explanations for SOME of the nomeclanture. In other words -- not easy to read.2) As mentioned above, some of the diagrams had some explanations. But most had none. There is a diagram of a field artillery piece, with some narrative on the surrounding pages about the general importance of field artillery and how one general used it once to assist the pike. But in the diagram itself, there are the letters A-M, corresponding to each different piece of the field artillery and some barrels next to it. But NO EXPLANATION OF WHAT A, B, C, etc actually are. None. I read the whole book at least 4 times already. And nowhere does it ever tell you what the "a" part or "b" part or "C" part is. Just a reproduction from another source. Same with most diagrams. VERY POOR EDITING. Its a nice illustration, but it has ZERO value to you unless you can find the original source in another book that actually TELLS YOU what those letters mean. Otherwise, you don't know what each part of the artillery is.3) The book must repeat itself several times. They will tell you how innovative Maurice of Orange was in his modernization of the Dutch military, how he used it to great effect against the Spanish in the 80-Years War, and how he was just so awesome and amazing. But they don't actually tell you SPECIFIC TACTICS he used, EXCEPT if you read the QUOTES from the primary sources. And they are written in very old English, or sometimes just in Dutch, and you are left to figure out for yourself what it really meant. The easiest primary sources to read (and this is not saying much) were the ones written by English General Monck. His diary snippets were at least somewhat understandable and had a context to them that made them make sense. The rest were just sort of thrown in there as if to brag "hey, we found primary sources! SEE!!!" Hey- I can use Google SEarch and read those copyright-expired sources myself too! But the point of buying and Osprey guide book is to have some GUIDANCE in interpreting those arcane texts.4) As a corollary point, most of the information you want as to ACTUAL pike and shot tactics you will simply have to read the primary sources to find. And those can be legion. If you want any sense of evolution of tactics, effectiveness, etc, you won't get much here.Now, why am I giving it 2 stars instead of 1? Because it is a decent INTRODUCTORY book for people who have NO CLUE about nothing. But honestly, you could probably get just as much information from Wikipedia. For free. The only value to this book is that it puts a lot of terminology into one place, and has some nifty pictures.5) One more thing - a lot of the diagrams are nice, but they are so small-scaled that you can't read the fine print in them. So, you have lots of marching orders and battle deployments in the diagrams, but you can't read the notations in the ones that do have them. Maybe 10% of the diagrams were actually useful on the face of it, and another 10% were useful once you read the whole book a few times and got the hang of the terminology. You do actually learn how to read the notations, but only if you know where to find it in the narrative. And then, you take notes, and use your notes to go back over the diagrams you didn't understand the first time.VERY POOR EDITING BY OSPREY!!!!! And honestly, since all the primary narrative was basically copy/pasted from 16th, 17th and 18th century texts, with a few bits of "he was amazing" thrown in to link the copy/pasted primary sources, I am not sure what Osprey's job here was. The "illustrator" didn't illustrate a damn thing. He just copy/pasted primary source diagrams or pictures (all with copyright expired content), and the narrative or text was also copy/pasted from copyright-expired primary sources. So, all Osprey had to do was EDIT and INTERPRET and PRESENT in an ORGANIZED and CLEAR way.I would recommend using Wikipedia and start with the words "pike and shot" and then look up "muskets" and "Gustavus Adolphus" and "Maurice of ORange" and I think you will probably use the in-line links and citations and find a lot more, and better, information. Why?Wikipedia has STANDARDS and it deletes stuff that is poorly worded. Or others come along and fix it. Osprey has no standards. I will never buy another Osprey book again. They wrote some other crap too about the English Civil War, and they are not even worth the "illustrations." Why? YOU CAN GET ALL OF IT ON YOUR OWN FOR FREE ELSEWHERE. They offer no original content. They are merely aggregators of copyright-expired content and pictures and text and then find ingenious ways to make it hard to understand, splicing it up in disorganized ways, and then slap a price-tag on it.Not worth buying.

This is a well written and well researched historical work. It holds the reader's attention in a compelling manner. Easy to read book. A must for all military historians, miniature war gamers, reenactors, and uniformologists, especially those who are Renaissance Eraaficionados. Of general interest to all historians and antiquarians.

Ich will es dem Buch nicht anlasten, dass eine solch umfangreiche Thematik mit so wenig Platz auskommen muss. Doch eigentlich würde die dreifache Seitenzahl noch zu wenig sein, um hier alles unterzubringen, was sagenswert wäre. Zum Glück stellt Osprey Qualität über Quantität, so das vier Sterne gerechtfertigt sind.

This book was written primarily for use as a reference book for English Civil War regiments. Some other material is in this book, but I thought the ECW societies were the targeted audience for this.

Well written and informative. This is a good book for those interested in Thirty Years War miniature wargaming. Lots of good diagrams of formations and evolutions. A good "nuts and bolts" primer.

Very good book. Adequate introduction to period tactics. Not specific to ECW, or TYW. Covers the period as opposed to a specific conflict.

From the author's Last Word on page 62:"Contemporary evidence for any battle in this period is fragmentary, whether from surviving accounts, from records of pay, muster or supply, or from battlefield archaeology. Essentially, we have pieces of a puzzle but will never have all of them. One advantage in understanding battlefield tactics from the contemporary commander's perspective is that it is possible to understand what he intended to do on the battlefield and what he had trained his men to do, and to use this to expand our interpretation of other records and evidence".I have been trying to understand what actually went on on the battlefield in the 16th and 17th centuries for about 30 years, and it I still find it fairly obscure. here you have as clear an account as you will find.The chapters areThe Contemporary General's PerspectiveThe Spanish ArmyThe Dutch ReformsThe Thirty Years' WarThe Swedish InterventionThe English Civil WarYou will note the chapter subjects only take us up to the late 1640s. It is safe to assume there are no major new developments until after 1660.The colour plates are reasonably good - there's not much you can do with deployments, but the inclusion of little vignetes of the troops involved liven them up no end. The plates areThe Dutch Battalion and firing systemBrigade Deployment: Danish Army, 1625 (diagram with a vignette)The Swedish Brigade, 1630Swedish Formation at Pfaffenhofen, 1633English Royalist formation at Edgehill, 1642Spanish and French formations at Rocroi, 1643English Royalist and Parliamentarian formations at Naseby, 1645Cavalry DeploymentThe B&W illustrations are also a reasonable selection.Further Reading:The best description I have found of contemporary battlefield activity is/are "The Commentaries of Sir Francis Vere", who commanded the English forces in the Netherlands at the end of Elizabeth I's reign, He was at the Battle of Nieupoort and the Siege of Ostend. These are available in C.H. Firth's  STUART TRACTS 1603 - 1693  and are an invaluable source, quite readable. A biography is also availabe -  The Fighting Veres: Lives of Sir Francis Vere and Sir Horace Vere . Exercise of Arms: Warfare in the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648) (History of Warfare) The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 (History of Warfare) Elizabethan Military Science The Swedish Intelligencer. Wherein Out of the Truest and Choysest Informations Are the Famous Actions of That Warlike Prince Historically Led Along, f An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army 1585-1702 Henry VIII's Military Revolution: The Armies of Sixteenth-century Britain and Europe (International Library of Historical Studies) Jeremy Black -  A Military Revolution?: Military Change and European Society, 1550-1800 (Studies in European history)  - Pages 10-12:"The battles of the Thirty Years War, unlike some of the famous encounters in the Italian wars, were not generally determined by different tactics and weaponry. Instead their results reflected differing experience and morale and if forces were fairly evenly matched in terms of veterans they were either inconclusive encounters or determined by other factors such as terrain, the availability and employment of reserves and the results of the cavalry encounters on the flanks which, if conclusive, could lead to the victorious cavalry attacking their opponent's infantry in flank or rear, as happened at the Spanish defeat at Rocroi (1643). Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, a German prince who served Sweden in 1630-5 before transferring with the army he had raised to French service, won a number of battles by outmanoeuvring his opponents, outflanking them and attacking them from the rear. At Jankov (1645) the Swedes under Torstensson were initially unable to defeat the Austrian force, which was also about 15,000 strong, but finally won as a result of outmanoeuvring their opponents and attacking them from the rear. The Austrians lost their army, the Swedes benefited from tactical flexibility of their more experienced force.Indeed victory commonly went to the larger army and the more experienced force rather than to that which had adopted Dutch-style tactics. At Rocroi there were 24,000 French to 17,000 Spaniards; at the White Mountain (1620) 28,000 in the army of the Catholic League against 21,000 Bohemians and German Protestants; at Nordlingen (1634) 33,000 Catholics to 25,000 Protestants; at Breitenfeld Gustavus Adolphus outnumbered his opponents by 42,000 to 35,000. Breitenfeld was the largest battle, in terms of manpower, of the war and exceptionally so for a conflict in which field armies were rarely more than 30,000 strong and the creation of larger forces posed major logistical problems. Lutzen (1632), where the two forces were about the same, each 19,000 strong, was partly for that reason essentially inconclusive.The Saxons at Breitenfeld adopted the Dutch tactics of small units deployed in relatively narrow formations, but they broke when the Austrians attacked. Ernest, Count of Mansfeld, a leading anti-Habsburg general of the early years of the war, also adopted Dutch tactics without conspicuous success. Victory tended in general to go larger armies, especially if more experienced, as the Spaniards, Swedes, Weimarians and some of the Austrian and Bavarian units were. Saxe-Weimar rejected the Dutch tactics and in the late 1630s used his heavily cavalry-based army, which was essentially self-sustaining, to fight in an aggressive fashion. Thus, consideration of the battles of the period suggests that Roberts' stress on new infantry tactics is misleading." STUART TRACTS 1603 - 1693The Fighting Veres: Lives of Sir Francis Vere and Sir Horace VereExercise of Arms: Warfare in the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648) (History of Warfare)The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 (History of Warfare)Elizabethan Military ScienceThe Swedish Intelligencer. Wherein Out of the Truest and Choysest Informations Are the Famous Actions of That Warlike Prince Historically Led Along, fAn Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army 1585-1702Henry VIII's Military Revolution: The Armies of Sixteenth-century Britain and Europe (International Library of Historical Studies)A Military Revolution?: Military Change and European Society, 1550-1800 (Studies in European history)

An interesting book tackling the changes in tactics during the period. I came at this with little understanding of the significance of the topic. The book set out the developments using period illustrations, extracts of drill booksshowing formations as well as period descriptions. It is a complex study and the period extends from the 80s war between Dutch and Spanish, the 30 years war and the wars of the three Kingdoms (ECW). I feel I need to read it again to get the most out of it.I wanted to look further into the topic and found there was no bibliography but several titles were mentioned in the text. I have now read Nieuwpoort 1600 by Bouko De Groot which covers in some details a significant battle and a review of that book has kindly included some period writings which with my copy of Barret will help my understanding.If you are interested in the tactics of the period this is a good place to start but a bibliography would help.

I have several Osprey books in printed format and a few in the Kindle format. The kindle books suffer from poor formatting of the images and this one is the worse. One of the joys of the Osprey books are there own illustrations but in this instance it is almost impossible to view them, they are set at a vertical angle to the text and when selected they lack definition and as the the text explaining what is being illustrated is not displayed with the image it is hard work trying to make sense of the illustration and you have to turn your head at a angle to view the image as turning the device to panoramic does not solve the issue. As this book is about the deployment of armies the illustrations are a key ingredient, this is shoddy work I have seen self published books with better formatting and for a lot less money. I will not buy any more Osprey titles in the Kindle format

If you are looking for a decent starting point on this topic then Keith Roberts' book will suit you. He is covering 70 years of active military development and will not therefore catch everything that the more knowledgeable expert would. The text is supported by some very effective artistic full colour realisations of the various formations (from Swedish Brigades to the battle of Naseby) and lots of black and white contemprary illustrations. I do recommend that those with a new interest in the topic look at the work of the painter Pieter Snayers. Snayers' life was almost coterminous with this book's period and his battle paintings include much of value.

The author provides us with a comprehensive surveys of the tactical theories that dominated the period in succession. In the end however I cannot say I clearly understand how real fighting was; What I miss more is some detail about the weapons and their use: what was the rate of fire of the various types of individual fire arms? what was the caliper and the effectiveness of field and siege guns? Etc.