Talk:Battle of Kolín

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Untitled[edit]

Strays from NPOV near the end, placing blame for the defeat. Needs references and better cross-linking, and maybe a map. -- Medains 07:32, 17 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Famous remark by Fred II[edit]

Pardon me for the mess on the "view history" page; the reference and notes sections needed to be added, and I had to struggle with it for awhile. 36hourblock (talk) 21:08, 24 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Guns don't crew themselves[edit]

This is a source of continuous frustration to me: the numbers of Austrians stated to be participating, namely 53,790, is simply the sum of Clodfelter's figures for the numbers of infantry plus cavalry only. Not only does this imply spurious accuracy (4 significant figures! Did nobody report sick that morning? Bodart quite reasonably rounded it to 54,000), but more importantly it ignores the fact (and Bodart ignored it as well) that 154 guns don't crew themselves. I've been trying to establish some good 'norms' for artillery force manning, because this problem runs through most pages on battles from 1500 to 1900, but a figure of 15–30 per gun appears to be reasonable. I hasten to add that I'm not an expert in this particular period, but I imagine that there would be 20–30 horses per gun, given the numbers of caissons they had in the later Napoleonic times, and it takes a lot of people just to look after that number of horses, not to mention the numbers of specialists, e.g. ammunition handling and blacksmiths. So would anyone object if we assumed a minimum of 2,000 gunners, and raised the Austrian total to 56,000? This does however raise another issue that I couldn't resolve in the time I had available: did the Austrians still have regimental artillery in this period, and if so, could the crews for the lighter guns already be counted in the infantry total, given that they might be cap-badged as infantry? People who know more about this period than I do really need to resolve this issue, but my view is that a breakdown of guns by shot weight for typical armies of the period might help.

I hasten to add that this still doesn't count any command staff, engineers (though probably only a few dozen in this period?) and any specialist logistics (if there were any outside the artillery). – Wally Tharg (talk) 11:40, 8 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]