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10/25/2018
The Battle of Agincourt and the AirLand Battle Doctrine
It’s the 603rd Anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, so let us revisit this post form a few years ago.
Vastly outnumbered, trapped and in close terrain, facing hunger and disease, your flight to safe harbor cut off, what do you do? Attack. And win.
Henry V’s stunning defeat of the French on October 25, 1415 is famous to most folks as the setting of the oft quoted Saint Crispin’s Day speech by Shakespeare. But military historians also have long studied the battle as an example of how to fight outnumbered and win.
Henry V, already King of England, also claimed the title of King of France. As with so much else in the Hundred Years War, that claim was disputed. English kings had long claimed dominion over swaths of the French coastline. And truth be told, Henry V’s claim to the French crown was more an opening bargaining position, leverage to gain concessions from Charles VI. Charles VI, while willing to make concessions, wasn’t willing to grant the entirety of the lands Henry sought. France had been chipping away at English held lands in France for decades. Conceding any more than necessary seemed foolish.
Negotiations having failed, Henry V launched a campaign to regain control of the port town of Harfleur. From August to early October, Henry’s forces besieged and later occupied the town. With the end of summer, the traditional campaigning season, Henry decided to retire his back to England. Disease had weakened his ranks, and the poor weather approaching would only worsen that situation. But rather than redeploying directly from Harfleur, Henry decided to “show the flag” throughout Normandy, reminding the locals that he had an army that could travel the region at will, and depart from Calais.
The French had moved to raise an army to challenge Henry. While this force was not ready in time to relieve the siege of Harfleur, the French saw an opportunity to run Henry to ground and destroy his force.
After about two weeks of maneuvering, the French finally succeeded in blocking Henry’s route of escape to Calais. Near the village of Agincourt, the French held the northern end of a small gap in the woods. To get home, Henry would have to fight.
Henry had a force of roughly 1500 “men at arms”- that is, armored knights fighting as heavy dismounted infantry. In addition, he had approximately 7000 longbowmen.
The French were far more numerous. Historians were a bit less fastidious back then so estimates vary widely, but it is generally accepted the French had around 10,000 men at arms, and several thousand archers and crossbowmen.
English doctrine at the time would normally have dictated that Henry stand of the defensive and allow the French to attack him. That had been the tactic at Crecy. And given that Henry’s force had been forced marched some 250 miles in two weeks, and was already weakened by disease, Henry probably would have preferred to defend. But the French, having blocked Henry’s route, were in no great hurry to attack. If they could keep him contained just a day or so longer, additional overwhelming forces could arrive and strike his forces in the rear. In military terms, this is a “double envelopment.” The destruction of Henry’s forces would be almost guaranteed.
Henry, realizing French offers of negotiations were a delaying tactic, seized the initiative. He attacked. But no headlong charge, this. Henry moved his line forward to a natural choke point between the woods, where the field was only about 750 yards across. He halted here with his flanks secured by the woods and arrayed his men-at-arms in line. Meanwhile, his longbowmen, arrayed on either flank, advanced to within range (about 300 yards) of the French. The French planned to scatter the English archers with a cavalry attack, but were caught off guard by the English advance. As soon as the English archers reached their positions, they dug in long pointed spears, or palings, at a low angle to ward of any cavalry charge (similar to what you may have seen in Braveheart). In range, the archers began their volleys.
The French were thus baited into joining the battle. The French cavalry charge was disorganized and lacked weight. The cavalry was unable to turn the archers flanks because of the thick woods, and unable to penetrate the line due to the archers palings.
With the failure of the cavalry charge, the French main body advanced to join the battle. They faced two main challenges. First, the open field had recently been ploughed, making any movement slow and arduous. Having volleys of arrows falling upon them didn’t help any. Second, the first echelon of French men-at-arms was so large on such a narrow front that men were crowded together so tightly there wasn’t room to swing a dead cat, let alone a broadsword. When the French cavalry retreated from its rebuff against the archers, it fell back through the first of the French main body, causing further confusion.
When the first French echelon finally reached Henry’s forces, is was more a mob than a military formation. And it paid a price. While it had some success in pushing Henry’s line back, it failed to penetrate the line. The second echelon of French forces arrived and simply ended up stacked up behind the first. On such a narrow front, they simply couldn’t get through the crowd to reach the English. Soon they too lost their formation and were a milling mob. Having marched hundreds of yards over muddy terrain wearing heavy armor, French forces were badly fatigued. Still, the sheer weight of the assault would have eventually worn down the English. But Henry’s forces had one counterstroke left.
The English archers, having exhausted their supply of arrows, surged forward from their positions. Abandoning their longbows for swords, they slammed into the French flanks and a melee ensued. Unencumbered by armor, and swifter of foot without armor, they were able to quickly kill, wound or simply topple over thousands of the French men-at-arms. Knocked into the mud wearing 60 pounds of armor meant just getting back on your feet was an almost impossible task. They had little choice but to surrender and beg quarter.
Henry’s forces had decisively defeated the first two waves of the French attack. Thousands of prisoners had been taken. But there was still a third echelon of French forces, and even it outnumbered the English. Normally, captured men-at-arms were held for ransom. A knight who captured two or three French knights could look forward to receiving enough ransom to offset his costs of serving his king, and still probably have enough for a tidy profit. But Henry still faced that third wave of Frenchmen, who appeared to be gathering for their own assault. Accordingly, he ordered all prisoners put to the sword. This was an unpopular decision, but within the accepted laws of war at the time. A relative handful of the most noble blooded prisoners were spared, mostly as droits of the crown.
Seeing the utter defeat of the first two waves, the remaining French forces quit the field and fled to safety. The battle was over.
It was a decisive victory. But Henry’s immediate objective remained unchanged, to return to England. In less than a month, Henry would be in London, hailed a conquering hero. The military victory solidified his political force at home. Further, it reinforced in Continental minds the English superiority at arms. The defeat also caused great dissention amongst the various factions in France. This dissention would mean future expeditions to France would face an enemy that lacked unity and were easier to defeat or discourage.
Fast forward almost 600 years, and you’ll find that NATO faced some of the same challenges as Henry.
The NATO powers were greatly outnumbered by the forces of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Similarly, the for the NATO forces, retreat wasn’t really an option, though for different reasons. Normally, an outnumbered force would look to trade space for time, attriting the enemy in a series of small battles, but never being pinned to one battlefield, always retreating before they could be destroyed. But politically, NATO forces had to hold the line as far forward as possible. Besides, as big as Western Europe is, there is only so much room to retreat before Soviet forces would have reached the Atlantic.
In the post-Vietnam era, GEN William DePuy and other thinkers were striving to develop a doctrine that would allow the outnumbered Western powers to fight outnumbered and win. They started with a careful consideration of history. I don’t know for a fact that they studied Agincourt, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t come across it at some point. One of the things they did learn, however, was that outnumbered forces, even overwhelmingly outnumbered forces, seemed to win just about as often as they lost. What did the winners have in common? Quite often, they had what the authors of AirLand Battle Doctrine came to call “agility.”
Agility is far more than the physical quickness we might think of, such as an outstanding running back. That was an imp0rtant component, to be sure. But the other part was an ability to see and evaluate risks and opportunities faster than the opposing force. Henry was quickly able to grasp that the terrain at Agincourt offered him an opportunity to nullify the French advantage in numbers. The French, on the other hand, wasted any opportunity their delaying tactics provided to shape the coming battle. Henry’s force was far more agile, both in the mental sense, and in the physical sense of his longbowmen not being overly burdened.
AirLand Battle doctrine saw a scenario where a US division might have to defeat as many as nine Soviet divisions. By carefully choosing where to meet the Soviets, they could force them to become congested along narrow fronts, providing a rich array of targets for US tanks, while also striking deep with artillery to prevent follow on echelons from lending their own weight to the battle. Artillery, attack helicopters, and air strikes, much like the archers of old, would sow confusion among following Soviet forces. It’s not an accident that the AH-64D Apache is nicknamed “Longbow” as they were intended to slip along the flanks and attack the second echelon of Soviet forces before they joined the battle.
And while artillerymen and Apaches couldn’t fall upon the flanks and fight hand to hand, every US division and corps commander would constantly be looking for the opportunity to slip a brigade into position to slam into an unguarded Soviet flank, especially when he could bloody their noses by making them attack positions strong enough to cause congestion and confusion.
There’s a hoary old saying that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. And at the strategic level, that’s true to some extent. But that doesn’t mean the professional ignores tactics. At the operational and tactical level, where the fighting is actually done, the professional soldier, to some extent, just has to take it on faith that his logistics train will keep up. Accordingly, he must be more tactically proficient than his foe, and equipped with a doctrine that emphasizes his strengths and exploits his enemy’s weaknesses. A careful study of history shows there is rarely something new under the sun.
As to Shakespeare’s most excellent speech in Henry V, and its powerful message on morale, moral strength and the Band of Brothers, perhaps we’ll cover that in our birthday message next year.
The Battle Off Samar
For two decades prior to World War II, both the Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States Navy assumed any war in the Pacific would culminate in a decisive battle in the waters off the Philippines archipelago.
B0th navies built their fleets, their doctrine, their weapons, and their training around this assumption. And in late October, 1944, that battle was joined, the largest naval battle in history, The Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Spread over three days, and hundreds of thousands of square miles, it was a decisive defeat for the IJN. But on the 25th of October, one portion of the battle was very nearly a catastrophe for the US Navy, and only by the dint of extraordinary heroism and sacrifice was disaster averted.
In mid 1944, having consolidated the capture of the Marianas island chain, the Navy actually argued to bypass the Philippines, and instead invade Formosa.* But shipping and a shortage of available Army troops meant any invasion of Formosa would be delayed an unacceptable length of time. With the resources available, an invasion of the Philippines was practical. Further, GEN MacArthur strongly argued that the US had a moral obligation to fulfill his promise to return. The Philippine people, and all other Asian nations, he argued, would never forgive the US for a failure to attempt to liberate conquered peoples.
GEN MacArthur won the argument. The next objective in the Pacific would be his target. But President Roosevelt was loathe to place either MacArthur subordinate to ADM Nimitz, or ADM Nimitz under MacArthur. And so were sewn seeds of disunity of command.
Under Nimitz, VADM Halsey lead the Third Fleet in direct support of the invasion. But the actual invasion forces were under the US Seventh Fleet, which was under GEN MacArthur’s command.
The IJN plan to counter the invasion was, as so many of their plans, a complex one that divided the Japanese fleet into three forces, the Northern Force, the Center Force, and the Southern Force.
Northern Force was centered around the remnants of the Japanese carrier fleet. But the air wings of the fleet had been ground to a nub months earlier in the Great Marianas Turkey shoot, and so the force carried only a paltry 108 planes. It was, in actuality, a sacrificial decoy force, intended to draw Halsey and his stupendously powerful Fast Carrier Task Force away to the north.
The rest of the Japanese plan was for the Center force to pass north of Samar, and for the Southern Force to pass through the Surigao Strait, and for both to fall upon the lightly defended invasion forces at Leyte.
It didn’t turn out that way. The Center Force was attacked during the day of October 24th by Halsey’s carriers, and forced to turn back. The Southern Force, harassed by submarine and air attack was later annihilated in the Surigao Strait by waves of destroyer torpedo attacks and a masterful battleship and cruiser gun line in history’s last “Big Gun” naval battle.
The decisive victory had been won! Except, it hadn’t.
In the waters to the east of Samar, under the Seventh Fleet, three groups of small escort carriers were providing close air support to the troops ashore, and a Combat Air Patrol over the invasion fleet. Escort Carriers, known as CVE, were jokingly said to be Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable. Based on converted merchant hulls, they lacked many of the survivability measure of warships. Armed with a single 5”/38 gun on the stern, and with an airwing of about two dozen FM-2 Wildcat and TBM Avengers, they were well suited for their role supporting invasion forces.
Three groups of six CVEs were operated in support of the invasion, with the call sign “Taffy.” Taffy 3 was the northernmost group, under RADM Clifton A. F. Sprague.** In total, Taffy 3 had those six carriers, and an escort of three Destroyers (DD) and four Destroyer Escorts (DE).
At 0637 on October 25, 1944, a scout pilot from Taffy 3 was astonished to spot a massive Japanese force coming round Samar and headed right for Taffy 3. The Center Force, under ADM Kurita, turned back the day before, had countermarched and resumed its mission. The thirteen fragile ships of Taffy 3 now faced a force of four battleships, six heavy cruisers armed with 8” guns, two light cruisers armed with 6” guns, and eleven destroyers. Taffy 3 was doomed. No force could withstand such an onslaught.
Instantly, RADM Sprague made a series of decisions, every one of them correct. First, he called for help, especially from the other escort carrier groups. Second, he immediately turned away from the Center Force and ran as fast as his carriers could go. And third, he began launching every plane he could to throw at the Japanese. And fourth, he had his ships begin laying as much smoke as possible. While US ships used radar fire control, the Japanese fleet was still restricted to optical fire control.
An escort carrier had a maximum speed of about 18 knots. Every ship in the Japanese force was at least 10 knots faster, and many were twice as fast. Sooner or later, the Japanese would be able to run down the carriers.
The escorting destroyers and destroyer escorts place themselves between the carriers and the oncoming armada. USS Johnston, under the command of CDR Earnest Evans, immediately turned to make a torpedo attack on the Japanese. Soon the destroyer USS Hoel joined, and the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts as well. All three would soon be sunk with heavy loss of life. But the combined efforts of these three ships and the others of the escort, the furious air attacks by Taffy 3’s planes and those of the other escort groups staved off complete disaster.
In the end, ADM Kurita’s heavy cruisers first slowed, then sank the escort carrier USS Gambier Bay.
An 8-inch salvo from either Japanese cruiser Tone or Chikuma straddles the burning U.S. escort carrier Gambier Bay on October 25, 1944 during the Battle off Samar. The Japanese cruiser can be faintly seen in the center right of the photograph.
But the storm of fire from the escorts and the American planes cost the Japanese three heavy cruisers sunk, and three badly damaged. ADM Kurita, with victory within his grasp, took counsel of his fears. He recalled his force and attempted to make good his escape.
In just over two hours,the Japanese had inflicted 1000 fatalities upon Taffy 3, and sunk four ships.
But as historian Samuel Elliott Morrison notes his history of the battle, ADM Kurita’s failure was a very minor tactical victory when he should have inflicted a major operational defeat upon the US Navy. The IJN in October 1944 was a spent force. The role of the Center Force was a suicide mission. Had he persisted, he could have further battered Taffy 3, and far more importantly, he could have fallen amongst the invasion forces and done unimaginable slaughter to them.
While Taffy 3 escaped annihilation at the hands of ADM Kurita’s Center Force, it’s ordeal that day was far from over. Possibly the most fear inducing weapon the Japanese fielded in the war made its debut an hour later. For the first time, the Kamikaze corps would dive their planes to their doom, and their targets were the thin decks of the carriers of Taffy three. USS Kalinin Bay would suffer ghastly damage, and the USS St. Lo***, already badly damaged by gunfire, would succumb to a Kamikaze.
In the dark days of the summer and autumn of 1942 during desperate fighting in the Solomons Islands, US Navy ships, equipment, doctrine, leadership and training were often overmatched by their Japanese counterparts. Two years later, under some of the most trying circumstances imaginable, young sailors, many who had never been to sea before a few months before, performed magnificently, a feat of gallantry and bravery that has few, if any, rivals in US Navy history.
Should you be interested in learning more of this battle, I strongly recommend Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer, and Samuel Elliot Morrison’s The Two Ocean War.
*Now known as Taiwan
**In an historical oddity, the southernmost group was under RADM Thomas Sprague, no relation to Clifton
***USS St. Lo was originally commissioned USS Midway, but that name was “clawed back” for the CVB class carrier CVB-41. Sailors say it is bad luck to rename a ship.
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