Borodino 2002

Friday Lecture:
Bob Coggins:
Napoleonic Unit Frontages
and True Linear Scale

by Russ Lockwood


Any in-depth discussion of numbers can cause serious difficulties in lectures. Add in a few formulae and you have the potential to lose audience members. And if you're going to discuss frontages, scale, and formations, you can bet you have to talk about numbers. Fortunately, Bob Coggins handled the entire flow of information, data, and interpretation smoothly as he took the audience on a ride over converting theoretical manuals to battlefield reality and tabletop wargaming.

One of the problems with Napoleonic formations is that the parade-ground drill that features straight lines and specific gaps degenerates in combat as soldiers tend to huddle together for "protection." The officers and NCOs often had to dress the ranks, not only feeding in troops from rear ranks to replace losses, but also to keep the proper distance between the various formations. Coggins said that frontages in battle could shrink up to 25% as the outer troops bunched inward and some troops lagged behind.

This brought him to a portion about frontages and incuded a variety of formula. In short, if a miniature figure on the tabletop is 3/8" across the front, and given the various French drill book numbers, the ground scale should be 1" = 40 yards if you wish one 15mm miniature figure to equal 79.5 actual men, and 1" = 30 yards for a one 15mm figure = 60 men ratio.

However, that's only the horizontal calculations. Coggins' depth calculations show that most rules sets mistate depth of such infantry formations by up to 250%--although he notes that cavalry and artillery formations are much closer. Which led him to note that if you intend to position a rule set as "historical," the set must maintain the correct frontages and depth.

This causes all sorts of problems when you consider maneuvers such as passing lines through other lines, and a far greater sin, losing the effect of cavalry vs. infantry and artillery vs. anyone. In essense, he contended that cavalry has been crammed into too small a space and artillery effectiveness has been overestimated.

In addition, the map scale as laid out on the tabletop exacerbates such problems as the frontage decreases without proportionally decreasing the depth. As a result, most wargames tend to be slugging matches that ignore the flanks. This is often remedied by "artificial" rules that pit "favorite armies" (like the French or British) against "less favorable armies" (like the Spanish or Russians). Thus, firepower tends to be exaggerated for the British, and morale increased for the French while the other armies serve as more cannon fodder than anything else.

More Borodino 2002 Napoleonic Conference

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