>early firearms were inaccurate and took very long to reload,

Aztecfag here, during the conquest of mexico, the spanish used the harquebus to great effect while the aztecs only used the bow.

There werent that many gunners in the spanish expedition, 17 or something like that.

You can see incoming arrows. You can block arrows with a shield and you'll be fine. Armor of the day was specifically designed to stop arrows, so the Aztecs were hard pressed to out-shoot the spaniards.

If you fire a matchlock into a crowd of a thousand people, someone is gonna go down. You cant block it with a shield, your armor wont help you, and you cant even see it. The psychological impact of that alone would be terrifying.

The japanese very quickly adopted guns to replace bows after the portugese introduced them.

>>1613700
>How true is that meme?

Not very.

Most bows were also of limited range, and of dubious lethality (hard to tell if it's lack of accuracy or lack of penetrating power as armor kept up with missile weapons). I can't seem to find it at the moment, but if you have some time, you should really look up the Battle of Towton, I know there are a couple of articles online which break down force composition.

You had tens of thousands of longbowmen shooting at each other for 2 hours. They did not wipe each other out; like most battles of the era, it was decided in the melee and made devastating by the post-rout chase. To get there though, you have to work out percentages of shots fired that hit and killed someone at around 1%; otherwise, the longbowmen wipe out everyone and nobody else engages.

People, and I'm not really sure why, HUGELY overestimate the lethality of bows.

>Were there any battles in history where one side was using massed bowmen and the other had massed gunners? Was there any occasion where the bowmen won?

Not that I'm aware of, but they did probably exist, especially out in China.

>>1614248
>People, and I'm not really sure why, HUGELY overestimate the lethality of bows.

This. You can survive an arrow much more easily then a bullet. Bullets are much faster and deform, or even fall apart on impact, inflicting horrific wounds (early, ball shaped lead bullets even more so then modern ones). An arrow on the other hand just makes a relatively small hole. It also can't pierce heavy plate armor and shields. Basically, if you get hit by an arrow, you have a much better chance of survival then from a bullet.

>>1613700
Oda Novunaga at Nagashino. There was another instance in the middle east that I can't quite recall, it involved Jannissaries against an elite troop of horse archer if memory serves me correctly. In both instances the people using bow got smashed. Admittedly, Nobunaga's time period is no longer the early times of muskets, but it is assumable that they were only really employed en masse when commanders felt they were good enough to trash bows. Surely there was a time when they were inferior, much like artillery at its birth, but they caught up extremely quickly.

>>1613700

Guns were better than bows almost as soon as they gain widespread use. They were inaccurate, and they did take a long time to reload, but concentrated volley fire was devastating for anybody on the receiving end.

>>1613700
What doesn't make sense to me, honestly, isn't the uselessness of bows in the early period of firearms. Every army at that stage still used armour and shields to some extent. What I can't understand is why in the Napoleonic era, for example, bows were not more seriously considered or more seriously challenging to fight against. This was a period where armour was limited to cuirassiers and shields were practically non--present. The majority of soldiers had simple soft uniforms. Thus, the penetrative ability of a musket is not relevant. Since being hit by a musketball or an arrow makes it equally impossible to fire a musket any more, why were bows not favoured for being longer range and faster-firing?

>>1614851

Because by that point the skillset to fire bows had been out of use with the general population for a couple of centuries, and it would require wholesale re-acquisition across a society to develop such skills.

Plus, by the 19th century, guns had advanced hugely from say, the 15th-16th centuries. A Model 1777 was pretty accurate and deadly at 80 meters, which was really pushing it for a bow at any rate.

>>1614851
>takes years of training to get a skilled bowman
>takes a day of training to get an adequate musketeer

>>1614851

Training somebody to use a bow isn't something you can do on a whim. It takes a long, long time to get somebody to the point where they can use a longbow effectively. Building up the arm strength required is a length process.

So no. You can't really have a situation where a general says "you know, we've been using guns for a while, but I'm thinking bows might be better in this situation, let's use them" because it just takes too damn long to train a man to use a bow.

As soon as the switch to guns was made, nobody ever looked back. Logistics trump everything in war.

>>1614851
Muskets are not as inaccurate as people make them out to be, they're simply less accurate in comparison. Its not unreasonable to expect to hit a man sized target under 100 meters, and by Napoleonic times they had some troops issued with rifled muskets which would improve the odds of hitting a man under 100 meters substantially.

The issue with anything shooting a round ball is that round balls slow down fast, and once their velocity drops under a certain threshold which I forget they start to wobble off the point of aim even worse.

You can imagine a muskets accuracy less like a cone and more like a bell that starts opening up at around 80-100 meters.

Smoothebore muskets you could point center mass under that velocity threshold and chances were good he's going to go down hit somewhere.

Rifled muskets were actually accurate enough to really AIM, but with round shot you lose velocity fast like I mentioned above.

It wasn't until Minie balls that you could really aim for a guy 300 yards away.

>>1614851
Unless they're on the walls, a unit of archers are really vulnerable to cavalry, while a unit of gunners are more easily mixed into pikemen or given bayonets to turn them into a deadly anti-cavalry force.

>>1614904
>Training somebody to use a bow isn't something you can do on a whim. It takes a long, long time to get somebody to the point where they can use a longbow effectively. Building up the arm strength required is a length process.

This isn't really true. You could spend just as much time training a skilled marksman with a bow as you would with a gun, and for using a warbow you didn't have to take more than a month or two for someone already hardy who already has the arm strength and back for it from years of farming or sailing. Plus this was irrelevant in a time where you didn't just conscript peasants and give them weapons you bought for them. You didn't train archers or musketeers, you recruited them from local archery or musket hunters, amateurs, and mercenary veterans.

>>1614851
>What I can't understand is why in the Napoleonic era, for example, bows were not more seriously considered or more seriously challenging to fight against.
Bows were still being used by Russian auxiliaries in the Napoleonic wars. They didn't perform very well.

https://bowvsmusket.com/2015/02/27/baron-marbots-encounter-with-mounted-archers-at-dresden-and-liepzig-1813/

Even without armor, a musket is a superior weapon to a bow. The relatively flat trajectory and fast projectile gives the musket a much longer effective range.

>>1614891
>>1614904
Harquebusers/musketeers received much more formal training than archers ever did. Formal military training as we know it was actually invented in response to the need for matchlock musketeers to be well-trained. Matchlocks were more dangerous to their users than the enemy if their users weren't trained well, and the loading procedure was complex, as were the various formations and evolutions the soldiers had to learn.

>>1613700
Musket inaccuracy is overplayed. They were not rifles sure but you could expect to hit a man sized target consistently at 50 yards, reasonably at 100 yards and possibly at 200 yards. The real down side of muskets were reload times and for this reason they were protected by pikemen first and later on when bayonets came into play they themselves that charged into melee after a volley or two. Even before bayonets see Karl XII for example and the Caroleans firing a salvo as they advanced and then rushed into melee to strike a decisive blow.

Another big factor is you need years of strength training to be able to use a war bow effectively and efficiently, it also put such a stress on the shoulders often times longbowmen had deformed shoulders and asymmetrical muscle development, while musket training is considerably shorter and less demanding physically and at the same time musket regiments were more flexible and could be deployed both in range and in melee which they often got involved in both. Bowmen are also completely vulnerable to cavalry while charging a musket formation head on is often suicidal.

>>1616074
Baron de Marbot about Leipzig 1813.
>This reserve came from beyond Moscow and included in its ranks a large number of Tartars and Baskirs, armed only with bows and arrows.
>I have never understood with what aim the Russian government brought from so far and at such great expense these masses of irregular cavalry, who having neither sabres nor lances nor any kind of firearm, were unable to stand up against trained soldiers, and served only to strip the countryside and starve the regular forces, which alone were capable of resisting a European enemy.

Off-topic, but I suspect the reason the Russians did this was not just because it was cheap but also because it was an effective way of getting reducing the ethnic minorities.
Simply trow them in battle and let a better equipped enemy kill them.

>>1614891
Years to train bowmen is a meme, it doesn't take long to learn at all. Trained and physically powerful men are needed for your cavalry and men at arms and aren't wasted on bowmen. On the one hand you have the super elite bowman belief and on the other you have historians believing dumb shit like 70% of the English infantry on the battlefield being bowmen at the same time.

The touted longbow was also so effective that the french didn't bother to copy it in a hundred years even though its credited with responsibility for all English victories.

File: The Death of John Talbot.jpg (75KB, 494x733px)

75KB, 494x733px

>>1613700
>Were there any battles in history where one side was using massed bowmen and the other had massed gunners?

Castillon

small arms don't matter now and didn't matter back then.
if you had large guns, you won whether you were slinging rocks or using muskets. if you didn't, you lost.

>>1613700
I know Kentucky rifles were pretty accurate.