“When 35 yards separated the two forces, the British line erupted in flame, and a blizzard of musket balls dropped Frenchmen by the dozens. The French first rank fired wildly, then the column began to deploy into its own line under cover of a blue gunsmoke haze, to the chilling sound of ramrods scraping the insides of barrels as the well-drilled British reloaded.
Frenchmen clambered over the dead and dying and spread left and right in a desperate attempt to increase their frontage and firepower. And then another volley, and another, all within a minute, shattered their formation to fragments. The British swarmed forward, yelling and screaming, with bayonets leveled, but few of their surviving opponents waited around to be transfixed.
Time and again this scenario was played out on the military stage afforded by the Iberian Peninsula in the years following 1808, until the steadfast British soldier achieved final victory over the armies of Napoleon....
...In 1814, British Army Col. George Hanger voiced an oft-quoted criticism of Brown Bess accuracy: “A soldier’s musket, if not exceedingly ill bored (as many are) will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards; it may even at a hundred; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him; and as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you may as well fire at the moon and have the same hope of hitting your object.”...
...In combat, smoke, confusion, noise, exhaustion, fear, and the unpleasant sensation of being fired at as well as firing, dropped the hit ratio of musketry fire much lower than controlled tests. One authority of the day opined that one needed to fire a man’s weight in musket balls at him to hit him. Estimates vary somewhat, but most conclude that the chances of a fired musket ball hitting an enemy soldier during the Napoleonic Wars were between two and five percent. At the battle of Vittoria in the Peninsular campaign, it was estimated that 3,675,000 musket balls were fired to inflict eight thousand casualties.”
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2015/08/05/revolutionary-war-weapons-the-brown-bess-musket/
“Today we think of the infantryman using his rifle, and in a worst case scenario, falling back on his bayonet as a last resort. However, in the 18th century the musket was used to pave the way for the use of the bayonet. It was the bayonet that was the real primary weapon. As it has been said, the musket is a good handle for the bayonet. There’s a lot of truth to that statement.”
https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/07/the-inaccuracy-of-muskets/
Thanks for the interesting post!