Are there any real historians left who actually understand how duals and group battles were fought because the entire ancient weapons community seems as retarded as a tai chi master trying to beat a professional MMA fighter.I mean surely in a real fight nobody is even going to attempt playing 5D chess as if they can reliably respond with optimal movement Y when the opponent does optimal movement X and then clash like a bunch of anime characters? Any sane person will try to stay as far away from the opponent as he can and therefore will choose the longest and pointiest kind of thing he can find to hit & run unless......there are Darwin award winning reasons like customs and honor that force one hand behind your back and say en garde or something. A second reason for the seeming lack of teaching actual survival skills in combat is because it threatens the powers that be so they've made up all sorts of safety rules to turn martial arts into a dance class.Am I overlooking something or has humanity truly lost the skill to fight with non-projectile weapons?
>>18629523>Are there any real historians left who actually understand how duals and group battles were fought The historians don't understand it and don't care. That's a subject of Anthropology, specifically the study of primitive cultures.
>>18629523>I mean surely in a real fight nobody is even going to attempt playing 5D chessThey did. The treatises we have from the late medieval period show it whole the time. Now mind you that's duels for you. In battle you're just focusing on wrecking the enemy quickly and brutally, but when said enemy is focused on you he will actually be able to apply fencing techniques against you and the most basic of them were specifically developed to make sure someone who just uses the simple brutal strike style wouldn't be able to kill you.Think about this as you would about trench raids in ww1. All sides trained their soldiers how to fence with bayonets but in the trenches instead of a rifle with a bayonet on top these very soldiers used improvised maces and shovels used as axes. Bayonet had long reach and could be used to avoid being poked by similar long stick with a blade at the end/sabre with some finesse but here you most likely attacked an enemy that didn't know you would run into him and your gameplan was to hit him in the head and hope it disables him right after.
>>18629523Melee battles are and were a sweaty uncoordinated shitfest. That's probably why most deaths occurred when the enemy's lines of defense were already broken and they were fleeing the battle.
I know how people talk about modern warfare losing all honor but I can't help but think about how brutal and horrible pre gunpowder war is. If you fail you will be cut open with your guts spilling out and bleeding to death on the battlefield. At least a bullet is quick, a soldier now just dies or lives and it takes a single second. Imagine being slowly cut to pieces pre gunpowder. Hit with maces and hammers too. That's brutal. And because of how lethal guns are conflicts now last way less and less people need to be conscripted to die. A modern nation wins or loses quickly (except ukraine, but that whole can of worms is because of drones). In the past, even if all your initial soldiers were killed in battle, your king would just conscript you and all the teenager boys he could find with the hope that giving you more swords and pinty sticks is enough to miraculously turn the tide. Wars lasting 100 years. Fuck, horrible
>>18629629What period are we talking about. Like early modern? Cause at least in the Middle Ages wars were a lot smaller in scale and tended not to involve mass mobilisation of the population like that
>>18629523Winning was the best guarantee of survival as being run down like dog by your enemies light cav was actually more dangerous than fighting at the front of the melee.So no people werent cowardly shits. They were cunning killers, wielding the best weapons and armor they could afford and could imagine. I mean the romans used shortswords to beat Pike, and spear empires every day. Win the battle stay alive.
>>18629565Do you mean that the more scientific component of archeology that studies bones and nearby artefacts is more valid than the ancient descriptions of battles? As far as Google AI is a valid source, it confirms that ancient battles were indeed more about signaling with restricted and ritualized skirmishes than actual survival of the fittest competitions. Perhaps that means like modern wars are fought now? That basically also means that "real" combat has never even existed because some form of culture, albeit primitive, has always restricted raw survival?
>>18629523>Are there any real historians left who actually understand how duals and group battles were fought I'm pretty sure historians have been arguing over exactly this for about 100 years now. See also: overarm vs underarm spear grip in a hoplite wall.
>>18629692Isn't the most likely explanation for the overarm vs underarm debate that both techniques were used depending on the situation?
>>18629523>there are Darwin award winning reasons like customs and honor that force one hand behind your back and say en garde or somethingFencing is based on smallsword fighting, which was basically the self-defense martial art of the early modern era. You used a sword and nothing else because that's all people could realistically be arsed to carry all day. At the beginning daggers were a popular off-hand weapon because it was the closest feasible replacement for a shield but people eventually realized that the optimal survival strategy was to turn your body sideways to minimize the target you present and maximize your sword's reach. This meant one hand wasn't doing anything, and it became popular to put it behind the back for balance. It would be a rather silly way for armored warriors to fight on the battlefield, but you can't wear a full harness to work and you don't want to be lugging a shield around everywhere too.
>>18629629>And because of how lethal guns are conflicts now last way less and less people need to be conscripted to dieLol the timeline of warfare is the exact opposite. Mass conscription is a gunpowder thing. It's nuclear weapons who caused the most recent decline in wars.
>>18629665I mean that the only comparative source for how pre-modern battles were conducted are to be found in the primitive cultures that survived until the 19th and 21st century. The study of those falls under the field of Anthropology, not history.Military history has, in fact, a long and fabled history of not giving a damn about how the stabbing was done in detail, other than as material for ribaldry about the ancients.
