Yes, but it's also a question of the terrain and the opponent. In thickly wooded terrain (i.e. the whole of North America in the Colonial period, except for cleared farmland) you won't find large bodies of men forming up against one another. The ranges were much shorter, and the tactics different.
The thick woods and short range and guerilla tactics all point to a fast firing short range bow, yet they chose guns.
And while there weren't huge lines of men on a clear field, along the roadway or wherever the troops were marching, yes, they did form up. Of course this forming up when marching through the woods and getting attacked was a mistake, they woudl have been better off scattering off the road and diving for cover, and basically using the same indian style fighting against the indians. But they didn't, they fell back to what worked on the continent, and got shoulder to shoulder with eachother. This was the same tendancy that the 'swamp fox' used against the british in the revolutionary war.
To cite another PBS show, they recently did one on the 'war that made america' refering to the french and indian war, where they had many examples of the brits forming up even in small numbers.
Also, as you point out, the Indian bows had far less range and power than the English longbow.
as you point out, the ranges were much shorter, thick woodlands and all, hence the greater strenght of the longbow vs flatbow was pretty irrelevant, you didn't need the strenght to shoot 300 yards max in a long arching trajectory, 100 yards woudl be a long shot. Hence, again, the benifit of guns which had a longer max range (regardless of how innacurate they were at individual targets beyond 50 yards, those primitive lead balls were capable of going fargher than arrows, and the first part of getting a successful hit is getting the projectile TO the target) is irrelvant. The armor punching power of guns was also irrelvant as the troops of the time wore cloth. As I say, this all adds up to supposedly favoring bows, at least bows as invisioned by some people I tend to disagree with.
I stick by my argument that the Indians were correct to use guns, because even at these close ranges, bows were too inaccurate for selecting and hitting individual targets, and too weak, hence they used guns.
A large number of the early Colonials did, in fact, use longbows: but given the immense amount of time needed to attain and retain competency, a firearm was by far the easier choice.
I've never heard this before, can you point me in the direction of more information?
Japanese fighting wasn't on the same lines as Western warfare. It was far more individualistic (champion vs. champion), and the entire samurai class wore armor - something not found in European warfare. Tactics were very different too. Japanese bows were also relatively short-ranged.
Again, I am going to disagree. While there was a lesser degree of formation and marhing in unison and all that, they were still large bodies of men clashing into eachother. And no, only the upper crust, equivalent to the european knight, (the samurai) that had armor, and it was leather and laquer (sp?) not metal, so it wasn't like you needed a gun to punch through it. There were many bushi of class other than a samurai, who were full time professional fighting men, just not of that higher class and not entitled to bear the daisho (katana and wakazashi) Below them were the ashigaru, peasants with minimal training, who made up the bulk of armies. These ashigaru are exactly the people who got teppo guns and decimated archery units. And regarding Japanese bows, they were in fact quite long range. They were using composite bows, a superior technology that never really spread to the west, in both their Yumi (very similar to the english longbow) and the Dai-kyu, which was in size about the same as a longbow, but as it was designed to be used from horseback, the two arms of the bow were of very different size, you held it on the bottom thrid, not at the middle. When Europeans first made contact with japan, they noted the extreme range and accuracy of japanese archers (again, refering to volley fire), yet in just a short period, the tepo gun armed troops ruled the roost.
Not with the smoothbore muskets and their predecessors. Accurate aiming with a Brown Bess (the ultimate development of the flintlock smoothbore musket) was impossible, due to inaccurate barrels and balls that didn't fit the bore. Beyond 70-80 yards, you'd be lucky to hit a man-size target! Infantry fire was therefore used as massed volleys against an opposing formation, and opposing units would often get within 50 yards of one another before letting fly.
Yet it was these very same inaccuate guns that drove the bow from the battlefield. It wasn't like bows were just leaving the world stage when Naepoleonic or even revolutionary war style muskets were taking their place (both smoothbores). Bows had exited the world stage, at least on the modern european battlefield quite some time before rifled firearms found their way into the hands of troops.
Yes, beyond 70-80 yards, with a smoothbore you would be lujcky to hit a mansized target...but that was still 30 yards farther than a bowman could hit a mansized target. But the truth was, neither group was firing at mansized targets, they were firing at masses of men, and just as the smoothbore guns opened up the range at which individuals could be targeted, it also opened up the range at which masses could be targeted. It took a lot less training to bring smoothbore fire to bear against an opposing mass of troops at 200 yards. Further, longbows jsut weren't able to toss arrows beyond the 300 yard mark. Smoothbores, no matter how innacurate, at least had a chance of 'getting lucky' and pegging an enemy at that range, and wiith enough men firing, those small chances add up. Of course, it was more effective to march 100 paces closer than to sit just outside of 300 yards and burn gunpowder and inflict a few casualties.
When you add that these guys who could barely hit a man sized target at 75 yards only shot the gun in practice probably 5 times, it makes you wonder what could have been accomplished if armies had been willing to invest money in gunpowder and lead for practice, just like traditional bow troops. Further, armies had long ago figured out that if you cannot point straight ahead and hit a distant target, pointing it up in the air will get you more range...yet this same tactic was never moved over to smoothbore musketry. Aside from telling the line to fire at the hats at 200 yards, knowing it woudl hit in the chest, no method of extreme arching trajectory was ever practiced by gunners. Take a look at buffalo rifles, with an arching trajectory, they are pushing a mile in range and still able to hit a 5ftx5ft target. A smoothbore is a hell of a lot less accurate, but the ball flies at about the same speed. No way a smoothbore musket could hit a 5x5 target at a mile, but what about a 50ftx50ft at half a mile? With practice and observation, it should have been possible. It's just that these techniques were never really implimented with guns. With a smoothbore, you jsut train the guy to point straight ahead, pull the trigger, and reload. The gun, being so different than bows, and superior on the battlefield even in the limited way they were used, it just never occured to the powers that be how much more these instruments were capable of. I think this is reflected in how even with smoothbores (because not everyone had rifles in the colonies, plenty of hunting and shooting was done with smoothbores) colonialists who spent their lives hunting were sure outshooting the british at long range...and by that I mean selecting individual man sized targets at the 100 yard mark, because these hunters never thoguht of practicing arching volley fire to engage troops at 500+ yards, even if the tool was capable of doing it.
Of course, even once it was established that some of the earliest post civil war rifles were capable of volley fire reaching the 1 mile mark, the technique was rarely used.
