Customer Reviews

Imperial Bayonets: Tactics of the Napoleonic Battery, Battalion, and Brigade as Found in Contemporary Regulations

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I thought I knew how units in the Napoleonic era manuvered and operated. I thought that wargames (boardgames) did a correct job on representing reality. Well, I was wrong. If you are interested in how units really manuvered and reacted then Nafzigers book 'Imperial Bayonet' is THE BOOK par excellence. French, Austrian, Prussian, Russian, British, Infantry, Cavalery, Artillery, Skimishers, Rallying points, unit control, you name it. They all get analyzed. There are even illustrations right down to company organisation: where the sergents stands, where the officers and NCOs are, the drummers and last but not least the normal soldiers of the rank and file. Even the space alotted to each soldier is revealed! Read it, just read it. Then go back and throw out you old Napoleonic wargames and hope future wargame designers read 'Imperial Bayonets' and think again. Brilliant, Nafziger, Brilliant!

This excellent book provides a detailed account on tactics in Napoleonic Era and is, in my opinion, highly recommended to everybody interested in this extraordinary epoque.

Details about the drill and maneuver speeds of infantry, cavalry and artillery in the Napoleonic Wars. A must for any Napoleonic wargamer.

The main value of this book is in its compilation and pre-digestion of the drill manuals of the major participants in the Napoleonic wars. It contains very little information about the actual battlefield use of the evolutions. Obviously, the evolutions used in battle are a subset of those discussed in the regulations, but which were used in practice, and why, is not discussed here.

In addition, many of the quantitative analyses are rather suspect, in particular those of cavalry quality and weapons effectiveness. The study of the rates of formation changes, etc., are useful as a rough guide to relative speeds.

In summary, the scope of this book is somewhat narrower than the title might suggest. There is no real analysis of practical tactics, along the lines of why armies did what they did on the battlefield; this is basically a description of the manoeuvers theoretically available to Napoleonic armies. As a convenient reference on the drill regulations of the major powers, however, this book is very useful.

This is exactly the kind of work we need in order to go deeper into the understanding of warfare, tactics and wars: I hope George F. Nafziger will write other books of that kind on other historical periods (before (ancient regime) and after napoleonic wars, renaissance, first world war etc...). It is a perfect complement to more conventional books on the subject. Wargamers will definitely appreciate a lot this incomparable source of information. Historians might like it too, if only because this book gives basic complete knowledge to analyse texts on the battles of that period.

Much of this book consists of Nafziger's mechanical working-out of estimates for the time it would theoretically take to complete various manoeuvres at regulation pace and cadence. There is a great deal of information about the minute details of the regulation evolutions for infantry and cavalry, but little about their actual use, and almost nothing about the actual experience of men in battle.

The many diagrams, while essential, are primitive and sometimes hard to interpret, as some of them fail to distinguish a unit's front from its rear.

Frequent errors in Nafziger's tables and calculations render his data unreliable. Finally, his emphasis seems to be more on finding reasonably plausible estimates of times, distances, and strengths of formations than it is on establishing accurate and reliable history. Where information is missing for one country, he simply uses the values of another. There is a ludicrous section in which he tries to establish a mathematical ranking of the effectiveness of the cavalry of various armies, many of whom never fought each other.

A far better alternative for those interested in history, though about the era just before that covered by "Imperial Bayonets", is Christopher Duffy's "The Military Experience in the Age of Reason".

Nafziger's compilation has usefulness if one wants to know the drill regulations. However, if the reader is looking for what the units actually did in combat, it is better to seek a different quality work that utilizes after-action reports (Scott Bowden's NAPOLEON AND AUSTERLITZ comes to mind). Thus, IMPERIAL BAYONETS will provide a basis of drill knowledge, if that is your objective.

This book to be honest is a bit of a waste of time as the reality of his calculated movement rates are fanciful at best. He gives precise step distances, for whome and where I ask. A 5'2" man, a 6'3" man, across rock and bush covered ground, through sparse woods, ploughed fields, mud etc etc. Its poor on the combat side and low on real facts of battles. It is not even relevent to wargames to be honest because the detail he goes into is not relevent and cannot be transfered to the tabletop.