 The battle of Asian color, I don't know how to pronounce this, is probably the most famous battle in the medieval era. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition of Toodalage in Blood, where we learn modern lessons from ancient battles. Humans have been fighting wars since we left the Garden of Eden, and as such we have a lot of data to draw on that we can learn lessons from and hopefully avoid the same mistakes. Today's battle is the battle of Asian core, Asian core, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, it's some French word, and it happened during the Hundred Years War. I will, as always, link a video in the description below that gives a much wider context for the battle to understand the history and the aftermath and the significance and all that stuff, because today all we're going to talk about are the tactics and lessons we can learn from that. So to set this battle up, England comes into this fight with about 8,500 guys, 7,000 of which are longbowmen, which is going to be very important. France comes into this fight with somewhere between 15 and 20,000 guys, a very significant portion of them being mounted knights with the full armor and everything you think of when you think of a medieval knight, and then men at arms just dismounted fully armored, kitted up guys. So a significant size advantage. Now the place where this battle takes place is on this field between two wooded areas. So France ends up lining up up here on a slight incline on a hill, England lines up down here. This field is a very muddy, well trodden field. Think of that picturesque European morning where it's kind of foggy and dewy and the ground is super wet, because again that's going to be a significant factor in this battle. So to open this battle, the armies actually meet the day before, they have a little standoff, nothing happens, they go to bed, they wake up in the morning and they line up. England lines up like this. So they put a bunch of stakes in front of their position, like wooden stakes driven into the ground to prevent cavalry charges because, you know, they're massively unnumbered here and the France has the big venerous knights. They also line up their archer contingents in the woods. So these are wooded areas to the side of this field and they line up several archer contingents on the side. They also have archers interspersed here in their main battle line. England only has about 1500 men at arms in this battle. The rest are all archers. France lines up at the top of the hill. They stand around for a while and England realizes that they're not going to be able to sucker France into attacking, so they have to do something. So England actually picks up all of its stakes, moves all of its guys together and they move forward into bow shot, replant their stakes and then from the wings they start using their archers to attack France. So they've moved within bow distance, which is something around, you know, 300 paces, give or take. 600 years ago in the effective range of the distance weapon is still about 300 meters. Interesting point. As England begins to pepper France with arrows, their knights don't just want to stand there and get shot with arrows, so they decide to charge. Now that goes about as well as you think it's going to. At this point, England actually holds its fire. They stop shooting all their arrows. They wait until the knights are right on top of them and then they all let loose at the same time, shooting at point blank range. At that range with the bow, I mean these bows are probably, you know, 90 to 100 pound draw, so they're not wimpy bows. They punch through a lot of the armor and a lot of the knights are just dead on the spot. The ones that make it, of course, still have to deal with the spikes and then, you know, the guys beyond the spikes. So the knight charge fails pretty miserably. France then sends in their second line of men at arms across, again, remember, this is, you know, 300, 400 yards, whatever, of super muddy field. So you're in full medieval armor trying to move across a muddy field. They, of course, get shot with a bunch of arrows as well and take some casualties. They hit the British line and end up moving the British line back. The British line stabilizes and is able to continue the fight. France sends in a second wave of attack, but because it's a narrow field bordered by the woods, they aren't able to really expand and use their numbers and so they're all packed in here. England uses that just like a good fire sack and they rain arrows in from the sides on the French position. Eventually England runs out of arrows and their archers charge in in a flanking attack on both sides and you have an envelopment there. Not quite a cany with a total envelopment, but three sides. The French attack collapses and they retreat and long story short, the battle is over. Okay, so let's learn some lessons. The first lesson is an overreliance on technology or armor. This is a lesson that continues to need to be learned to this day. France had relied on their armor. They had all their men in arms. At that time the French Knights were considered one of the premier forces in the world because if you fight a group of armored up soldiers who were on horses with armored up horses, that obviously presents some very real problems on how you're going to deal with that. And France had come to rely on that, as specifically in this battle, way way too much. On paper before this battle happened, this battle is entirely in France's favor. They have a bunch of armored guys with a bunch of armored horses and then a bunch more armored guys on foot against a bunch of French guys who some of them are armored but most of them just have bows and are not armored. How do you think that fight is going to go when they meet? And because France over relied on their armor, it led them to make poor tactical decisions because they had looked to substitute a tactic with a technology. Anytime you think that your technology is going to overpower tactics in general, that's a problem. Now, does technology change tactics? Does it make certain tactics obsolete? Of course it does. However, if you ever think that you can just bulldoze something over with technology and disregard tactics entirely, you're going to have a battle of Asian corps. The second lesson is a fire sack. The England here used a fantastic fire sack. They were able to lure France into this position here and then shoot them with arrows on both flanks and from the front creating a fire sack. That's a thing that a lot of eastern armies will attempt to do or set up dummy positions so that you can be fed into this fire sack and now all of a sudden you're taken fire from multiple directions. We should use fire sacks. That's not really an American tactic or doctrine that we really do very often. However, it's something that should be explored in further detail and you should start to think in terms of fire sacks because they are extremely effective. Here you had a significantly smaller force defeat a much larger and much more armored force in major part because they utilize a fire sack so effectively. Terrain matters. It's part of Met T.C. You have terrain weather. That's part of the considerations you need to take for a mission planning and terrain matters significantly. Here it appears that France again to the apparel ignored the terrain. You have heavy wooded areas on both sides of the battlefield. Knights and men at arms obviously aren't going to do so hot trying to trudge through the woods. It's very hard to cavalry charge through thickly wooded areas because the trees break up the momentum. You can't get up to a gallop etc etc. Even if you're just a guy suited up in armor, if you've ever gone hiking through the woods with any weight on you, you understand that can get tiring very quickly and you're not wearing 80 pounds of armor and then looking for a fight. So the woods effectively neutralize a lot of their armor at that time. In addition to ignoring the woods and ignoring their flanks entirely, France ignores the terrain on which they have to actually attack. Again, armor in deep mud even into the modern era doesn't do so hot. You have a significant amount of weight and mud can really make that difficult. Just walking through mud is obviously difficult, let alone when you're weighted down with a bunch of armor. So France ignored both the overall terrain of the battlefield being the woods on the sides and completely ignoring their flanks. They also ignored the fact that they're going to have to advance through mud if they want to attack and doing so in armor is extremely difficult. And it's going to again blunt and slow the momentum of your charge and when that is your main tactic to hit them with a hammer, if you can't swing the hammer very fast, it's not going to be a very good hit. Infantry versus mounted. Again, this is a lesson that still applies today where when you have light infantry in America, we don't do light infantry. However, light infantry here just meaning not carrying a bunch of shit they don't need to carry. When you have light infantry, they're always going to be more mobile, more versatile than not light infantry. Now it doesn't mean they always win battles. That's of course absurd. However, there are a lot more mobility factors at play there. And this example really bears that out. They're able to get into the woods and utilize the woods to their advantage where the mounted adversary is unable to do so. Now, can tanks go through forests and knock down huge trees? Absolutely. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about there are terrains that infantry light infantry can take advantage of in a significant more fashion that all the technology in the world can't give you that advantage and can't allow you to seize and take advantage of that terrain in a way that light infantry can. Don't see the initiative. Perhaps the most important lesson from this battle, England was allowed and I say allowed because France did nothing to dig up their stakes. Imagine having wooden stakes driven into the ground to prevent a cavalry charge digging those up. Everybody's going to pick them up and move forward in order to leave fashion and then come up here and reset up your position. All the while France does nothing. They had crossbows. They had some bowmen. They could have at least shot at them. However, France just did nothing while England sets up on them and then starts to shoot and initiate the battle. Because France ceded the initiative at that point, they have to react rather than act. You always want the enemy to be reacting to you and you do not want to be reacting to the enemy. Here, that is what France did. They completely ceded the initiative in broad daylight and let England do whatever they want unherried. And of course, this led to them losing the battle. A time to hold. There is a time to not shoot in battle. Kind of sounds weird. However, there is a time and England here makes a great example of that where they hold all of their archer fire until the Knights are at point blank range so that they can punch through the armor and deal the most effective killing blow to wipe the Knights off. That night charge was around 750-ish Knights, give or take. 750 Knights versus 7,000 arrows at close to point blank range. You can see how that's going to go. So there is a time to withhold your fire. Now, of course, there's a time for standoff weaponry like howitzers and huge bombs that we drop from planes and all that kind of thing. That's not what we're talking about here. What we're saying is when it's you and your boys in a field, there is a time to not shoot until the enemy is closer. And there are a variety of different reasons for that. Defensive fortifications. Defensive fortifications matter and the more you can manually shape your battlefield ahead of time, the better it's going to go for you. An example here is when England uses these stakes to prevent the cavalry charge. At night, the night before the battle, they of course prepared all these stakes. They dug them in. They had everything ready to go. And then they were able to move that because France did nothing and set it up again. However, when you have defensive fortifications, you can limit the enemy's mobility. And when you are fighting an enemy who is more mobile than you are, being able to limit their mobility is only going to increase your chances of winning. And here, that's exactly what happened. As France had a bunch of knights and horses and England did not, therefore they had a more mobile adversary and England was able to limit their mobility by putting those stakes and blunting any charge. Lastly, goading. There is a time to goad your enemy into making a decision. And here, England was able to do that because they were able to reset up their position and then they were able to start shooting their arrows. They were able to goad France into having to react. And it is always a good thing when you can force your enemy to react the way you want. France reacted exactly how England wanted and they sent their guys across that muddy field in order to try to break England's center. This is what England was hoping for, to lure them into that muddy terrain where they can continue to pepper them with arrows. And again, that's what won the battle here. I hope that was helpful. I hope you're able to learn some modern lessons from this 600-some-year-old battle. Do brave deeds and endure.