Pike (weapon)

A modern recreation of a mid-17th century company of pikemen. By that period, pikemen would primarily defend their unit's musketeers from enemy cavalry.

A pike is a pole weapon, a very long thrusting weapon used extensively by infantry both for attacks on enemy foot soldiers and as a counter-measure against cavalry assaults. Unlike many similar weapons, the pike is not intended to be thrown. Pikes were used by European troops from the early Middle Ages[1] until around 1700, and wielded by foot soldiers deployed in close order. While the soldiers using such spears may not have called them "pikes", their tactical employment of these weapons ran along broadly similar lines.

Contents

Design

Pike square img 3655.jpg

The pike was an extremely long weapon, varying considerably in size, from 3 to 6 metres (10 to over 20 feet) long. It had a wooden shaft with an iron or steel spearhead affixed. The shaft near the head was often reinforced with metal strips called "cheeks" or langets. When the troops of opposing armies both carried the pike, it often grew in a sort of arms race, getting longer in both shaft and head length to give one side's pikemen an edge in the combat; the longest pikes could exceed 6 m (22 feet) in length. The extreme length of such weapons required a strong wood such as well-seasoned ash for the pole, which was tapered towards the point to prevent the pike sagging on the ends, although this was always a problem in pike handling. It is a common mistake to refer to a bladed polearm as a pike. Such weapons are more generally halberds or glaives.

The great length of the pikes allowed a great concentration of spearheads to be presented to the enemy, with their wielders at a greater distance, but also made pikes unwieldy in close combat. This meant that pikemen had to be equipped with a shorter weapon such as a sword, mace, or dagger in order to defend themselves should the fighting degenerate into a melee. In general, however, pikemen attempted to avoid such disorganized combat, at which they were at a disadvantage. To compound their difficulties in a melee, the pikeman often did not have a shield or had only a small shield of limited use in close-quarters fighting.

Tactics

First rank with pikes defending upwards and second rank protects the first with horizontal pikes
First rank with pikes in horizontal position and second rank protecting upwards

On the battlefield pikes were often used in "hedgehog" formations, particularly by troops such as rebel peasants and militias who had not received a great deal of training in tactical maneuvers with the weapon. In these, the troops simply stood and held their pikes out in the direction of the enemy, sometimes standing in great circles or squares with the men facing out in all directions so that the enemy was confronted by a forest of bristling pikeheads, and could not attack the formation from the sides or rear.

Better-trained troops were capable of using the pike in an aggressive attack, each rank of pikemen being trained to hold their pikes so that they presented enemy infantry with four or five layers of spearheads bristling from the front of the formation.

As long as it kept good order, such a formation could roll right over enemy infantry, but had its own weaknesses – as the men were all moving forward, they were all facing in a single direction and could not easily turn to protect the vulnerable flanks or rear of the formation, and the huge block of men carrying such unwieldy spears could be difficult to maneuver, other than for straight-forward movement.

As a result, such mobile pike formations sought to have supporting troops protect their flanks, or would maneuver to smash the enemy before they could themselves be outflanked. There was also the risk that the formation would become disordered, leading to a confused melee in which pikemen had the vulnerabilities mentioned above.

Though primarily a military weapon, the pike could be surprisingly effective in single combat, and a number of 16th-century sources explain how it was to be used in a duelling situation; fencers of the time often practiced with and competed against each other with long staves in place of pikes.

Ancient use

Macedonian phalanx

Although very long spears had been used since the dawn of organized warfare (notably illustrated in art showing Sumerian and Minoan warriors and hunters), the earliest recorded use of a pike-like weapon in the tactical method described above involved the Macedonian sarissa, used by the troops of Alexander the Great's father, Philip II of Macedon, and successive dynasties, which dominated warfare for several centuries in many countries. The formidable wall of spearpoints gave pause even to the legionaries of Rome, but after several fierce contests the legionary style of warfare overthrew the Macedonian phalanx, and the pike faded from use in European warfare until the Middle Ages.

Medieval revival

In the Middle Ages, the principal users of the pike were urban militia troops such as the Flemings or the peasant array of the lowland Scots. For example, the Scots used a spear formation known as the schiltron in several battles during the Wars of Scottish Independence including the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, and the Flemings used their geldon long spear to absorb the attack of French knights at the Battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302, before other troops in the Flemish formation counterattacked the stalled knights with plancons. Both battles were seen by contemporaries as stunning victories of commoners over superbly equipped, mounted, military professionals, where victory was owed to the use of the pike and the brave resistance of the commoners who wielded them.

These formations were essentially immune to the attacks of mounted men-at-arms as long as the knights obligingly threw themselves on the spear wall, but the closely-packed nature of pike formations rendered them vulnerable to enemy archers and crossbowmen who could shoot them down with impunity, especially when the pikemen did not have adequate armor. Many defeats, such as at Roosebeke and Halidon Hill, were suffered by the militia pike armies when faced by cunning foes who employed their archers and crossbowmen to thin the ranks of the pike blocks before charging in with their (often dismounted) men-at-arms.

Medieval pike formations tended to have better success when they operated in an aggressive fashion. The Scots at the Battle of Stirling Bridge (1297), for example, utilized the momentum of their charge to overrun an English army while the Englishmen were halfway through the process of crossing a narrow bridge. And then, at the Battle of Laupen (1339), Bernese pikemen overwhelmed the infantry forces of the opposing Habsburg/Burgundian army with a massive charge before wheeling over to strike and rout the Austro-Burgundian horsemen as well. It was not uncommon for aggressive pike formations to be composed of dismounted men-at-arms, as at the Battle of Sempach (1389), where the dismounted Austrian vanguard, using their lances as pikes, had some initial success against their predominantly halberd-equipped Swiss adversaries. Dismounted Italian men-at-arms also used the same method to defeat the Swiss at the Battle of Arbedo (1422).

Renaissance heyday

Swiss and Landsknecht pikemen fight at "push of pike" during the Italian Wars.
Pikemen exercising during the Battle for Groll.

The Swiss solved the pike's earlier problems and brought a renaissance to pike warfare in the 15th century, establishing strong training regimens to ensure they were masters of handling of the Spiess (the German term for the long pike) on maneuvers and in combat, the Swiss having also introduced marching to drums for this purpose. This meant that the pike blocks could rise to the attack, making them less passive and more aggressive formations, but sufficiently well trained that they could go on the defensive when attacked by cavalry. German soldiers known as Landsknechts later adopted Swiss methods of pike handling.

The Scots also still used pikes heavily by now, but were dropped in masses after ineffective use after a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Flodden.

Such Swiss and Landsknecht phalanxes also contained men armed with two-handed swords, or Zweihänder, and halberdiers for close action against both infantry and attacking cavalry.

The Swiss were confronted with the German Landsknecht who used similar tactics as the Swiss, but more pikes in the more difficult deutschen Stoss (holding a pike that had its weight in the lower 1/3 at the end with two hands), which was utilized in a more flexible attacking column.

The high military reputation of the Swiss and the Landsknecht again led to the employment of mercenary units across Europe in order to train other armies in their tactics. These two and others, who had adopted their tactics, faced off in several wars leading to a series of developments as a result of these confrontations.[2]

These formations had great successes on the battlefield, starting with the astonishing battlefield victories of the Swiss cantons against Charles the Bold of Burgundy in the Burgundian Wars, in which the Swiss participated in 1476 and 1477. In the battles of Grandson, Morat and Nancy, the Swiss not only successfully resisted the attacks of knightly foes, as the relatively passive Scottish and Flemish infantry squares had done in the earlier Middle Ages, but also marched to the attack with great speed and in good formation, their attack columns steamrolling the Burgundian forces, sometimes with great massacre.

The deep pike attack column remained the primary form of effective infantry combat for the next forty years, and the Swabian War saw the first conflict in which both sides had large formations of well-trained pikemen. After that war, its combatants – the Swiss (thereafter generally serving as mercenaries) and their Landsknecht imitators – would often face each other again in the Italian Wars, which would become in many ways the military proving ground of the Renaissance.

Contemporary Japan experienced a parallel evolution of pole weapons, and the attempted Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. The Mongols' footmen wielded long pikes, fought in tight formation, and moved in large units to stave off Japanese cavalry.[3] The Japanese style of warfare was, however, generally fast-moving and aggressive with far shallower formations than their European equivalents. The Naginata and Yari became common weapons for Japanese ashigaru foot soldiers (who sometimes used extremely long yari) and dismounted samurai due to the greater reach than swords, which samurai also carried. Naginata, first used around 750AD, had a curved sword-like blade on a wood shaft with a metal counterweight, often spiked; it was used more with a slashing action and forced the introduction of sune-ate (shin guards) as cavalry battles became more important. Yari were spears of varying lengths; the straight blade usually had sharpened edges, sometimes protrusions from the central blade, and fitted to a hollowed shaft with an extremely long tang. Around later half of sixteenth century, pikemen holding pikes with length of 4.5 to 6.5 m (15 to 22 feet) or sometimes 10 m became main forces in armies. They formed lines, combined with arquebusiers and short spearmen. Pikemen formed two or three row of line, and were forced to move up and down their pikes in unison under the command.

Finally, the rise of firearms and artillery in the sixteenth century made the big pike columns vulnerable to being shot down despite their awesome close-combat power. The decline of the combat column of pikemen was starkly displayed at the terrible Battle of Bicocca in 1522, for instance, where arquebusiers contributed to the heavy defeat of a force of Swiss pikemen.

Pike and shot

In the sixteenth century, the Spanish sought to develop a balance between the close-combat power of the pike and the shooting power of the firearm. They developed the Tercio formation, in which arquebusier or musketeer formations (or even longbowmen, in an English variation) fought on the flanks of the pikemen, in formations sometimes resembling a checkerboard.

These formations, eventually referred to as "pike and shot", used a mixture of men, each with a different tactical role – the shooters dealt out casualties to the enemy, while the pikemen protected the shooters from enemy cavalry and fought if the Tercio closed in hand-to-hand combat. As a result, the tercio deployed smaller numbers of pikemen than the huge Swiss and Landsknecht columns.

The Tercio proved more flexible and eventually prevailed over the grand pike block, its mixed formation became the norm for European infantrymen, and the percentage of men who were armed with firearms in Tercio-like formations steadily increased as firearms advanced in technology. In the late sixteenth into the seventeenth century, smaller pike formations were used, invariably defending attached musketeers, often as a central block with two sub-units of shooters, called "sleeves of shot", on either side of the pikes.

During this period the pike was typically 4.5 to 5.5 metres (15 to 18 feet) in length.

End of the pike era

Swiss guardsmen armed with pikes and halberds

After the mid-seventeenth century, armies that adopted the flintlock musket began to abandon the pike altogether, or to greatly decrease their numbers. The invention of the bayonet provided an anti-cavalry solution, and the musket's firepower was now so deadly that combat was often decided by shooting alone. Through the Napoleonic era the spontoon, a kind of shortened pike with side-wings, was retained as a symbol by some NCOs; in practice it was probably more useful for gesturing and signaling than as a weapon.

In such an environment, pikemen grew to intensely dislike their own weapon, as they were forced to stand inactive as the combat went on around them as the opposing musketeers dueled, feeling that they were mere targets rather than soldiers, and that they were adding nothing to the battle raging around them. There are examples of pikemen throwing their weapons down and seizing muskets from fallen comrades, a sign that the pike was on the wane as a weapon.

An English Pikeman (1668), with steel cap, corselet, and tassets.

A common end date for the use of the pike in infantry formations is 1700, although such armies as the Prussian and Austrian had already abandoned the pike by that date. Other armies, such as the Swedish and the Russian, continued to use it for several decades afterward (the Swedes of King Charles XII in particular using it to great effect until the 1720s). During the American Revolution, pikes called "trench spears" made by local blacksmiths saw limited use until enough bayonets could be procured for general use by both Continental Army and attached militia units.

As late as Poland's Kościuszko Uprising in 1794, the pike reappeared as a child of necessity which became, for a short period, a surprisingly effective weapon on the battlefield. In this case, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, facing a shortage of firearms and bayonets to arm landless serf partisans recruited straight from the wheat fields, had their sickles and scythes heated and straightened out into something resembling crude "war scythes". These weaponized agricultural accouterments were then used in battle as both slicing weapons, as well as makeshift pikes. The peasant "pikemen" armed with these crude instruments played a pivotal role in securing a near impossible victory against a far larger and better equipped Russian army at the Battle of Racławice on April 4 of that year.

Improvised pikes, made from bayonets on poles, were used by escaped convicts during the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804.

Indeed, as late as the Napoleonic Wars, at the dawning of the 19th century, even the Russian militia (mostly landless peasants, like the Polish partisans before them) could be found carrying shortened pikes into battle. As the 1800s progressed, the obsolete pike would still find a use in such countries as Ireland, Russia, and China, generally in the hands of (as usual) desperate peasant rebels who did not have access to firearms. John Brown planned to arm a rebel slave army in America largely with pikes.

One attempt to resurrect the pike as a primary infantry weapon occurred during the American Civil War when the Confederate States of America planned to recruit twenty regiments of pikemen in 1862. In April 1862 it was authorised that every Confederate infantry regiment would include two companies of pikemen, a plan supported by Robert E. Lee. Many pikes were produced but were never used in battle and the plan to include pikemen in the army was abandoned.

Shorter versions of pikes called boarding pikes were also used on warships – typically to repel boarding parties – as late as the third quarter of the 19th century.

It is to be noted that the great Hawaiian warrior king Kamehameha I had an elite force of men armed with very long spears who seem to have fought in a manner identical to European pikemen, despite the usual conception of his people's general disposition for individualistic dueling as their method of close combat. It is not known whether Kamehameha himself introduced this tactic or if it was taken from the use of traditional Hawaiian weapons.

The pike was issued as a British Home Guard weapon in 1942 after the War Office misinterpreted a letter from Winston Churchill saying "every man must have a weapon of some kind, be it only a mace or pike". However, these hand-held weapons never left the stores after the pikes had "generated an almost universal feeling of anger and disgust from the ranks of the Home Guard, demoralised the men and led to questions being asked in both Houses of Parliament"[4]. The suggestion of using pikes made from old Lee-Enfield-rifle-bayonet blades in a modern industrial war was indeed one of the War Office's stranger wartime follies.

Pikes live on today only in traditional roles, being used to carry the colours of an infantry regiment and with the Company of Pikemen and Musketeers of the Honourable Artillery Company.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Verbruggen, Art of Warfare, 151
  2. ↑ W. Schaufelberger, Der alte Schweizer und sein Krieg ISBN 978-3719309800
  3. ↑ Deal, William E (2007). Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. Oxford University Press. pp. 432. ISBN 978-0195331264. 
  4. ↑ "Home Guard Pike". The Home Guard. http://www.home-guard.org.uk/hg/pike.html. 

References