"GNW army composition/ratio?" Topic

I've been working on some GNW Russians and I'm not quite sure what a fairly standard unit ratio would be. If I have 12 infantry units/battalions, how much cav and arty should I have? My guess is 4-6 regiments of dragoons, but I don't know. I don't have any idea about artillery pieces. Same question for the Swedes.

Google search "Battles of the GNW" and you will find the OOB which gives you the relations

If the answer was that obvious, I would not be here asking the question.

Well, that's a good way to get lots of positive responses!

Without knowing what sources you have, or where you've looked, it is a bit difficult to possibly give you new info.

As a very general rule – may 1/3 to 1/2 as many cavalry units as foot. As for guns? Don't know what your game scale is, (gun unit size – section? battery??). Maybe 1/8 the number of infantry units.

There. I already spent more time answering this than a search online would have taken, and would have provided a ton more detail.

I appreciate the info.

No, you did not give me more info than a quick on-line search would have provided. I have done several searches and I could not come up with the info you just gave me. Again, if I was easily able to get this info from a quick Google search, I would not be here asking for help.

The Russians sometimes fielded 'flying columns' (armies of lots of cavalry & a few mounted infantry) or armies with little cavalry defending some strong point or when a 'flying column' was operating (i.e. the rest of the army). But as an 'average' for the Russians I think that 4 to 6 cavalry units is about right for 12 infantry units, assuming that the units are about the same size. But remember that 1 or 2 of the units should be Cossack/Kalmuck light cavalry.

The artillery is impossible to say without knowing the gun scale of the rules. Usual artillery ratios for this period are around 1 to 2 real guns per battalion. So work out whatever that is in your rules.

To fight these you will need to outnumber the Swedes heavily. The Swedes will have near the same number of cavalry as the Russians have dragoons – say 3 or 4 units of the standard size. But they would be heavily outnumbered in infantry so 2 to 4 infantry, they could have up to 6 infantry if the Russians have serious defences, etc. Artillery to the same kind of ratio generally. But the Swedes tended to be all or none in artillery. So they would tend to have either 0 or lots.

Thank you very much.

I googled "Great Northern Wars Order of Battle". 2nd entry:

link

30 seconds.

Been there. Under info on the Russian army, it has one Russian and allied contingent OOB for all of the GNW. Is the OOB typical or atypical? I don't think it is wise to create an army based on one OOB.

Check out the GaPa yahoo group. Better yet, buy Arnfelts Armies of the GNW OOB's.

The site mentioned has more Russian OOB's but they appear to be in the wrong section.

Look here link link and link

You can also get other OOB's via here link

I think that it is difficult to get any kind of 'typical' army from OOB's. Each real battle is different and has special circumstances & so tends to be 'atypical'.

According Höglund et alii, Peter's army had in 1701 2 guard units, 28 regiments of dragoons and 48 regiments of infantry, plus one artillery regiment.

Those figures rose up to the end of the war to 105 regiments of infantry and 37 regiments of dragoons.

Each infantry regiment had 12 companies, with about 1,000 men (on paper strength, of course). Dragoon regiments had 5 troops each, with a strength per regiment between 800 and 1,000 men. By 1704, the strength of Dragoon regiments was raised up to 1,200 men, plus 2 3pdrs per regiment.

According those figures, it would be fairly accurate to suppose a ratio 2.5 to 3:1 infantry to cavalry (not counting auxiliary cavalry, i.e. Cossacks). For your army, I would say that something between 6-8 Dragoon regiments and 1 Cossack regiment would be very accurate.

I read in Englund's Battle that Shook Europe that the Russians had almost 300 guns at Poltava, but he didn't differentiate between calibers, and I guess that most of them were regimental 3 or 2pdrs.

I hope this helps you a bit.

Every battle is different (very different) but my recommendation for a generic unit ratio between infantery and cavalry would be 50-50 for the Swedes and 75-25 for the Russians.

In the battle of Poltava the Russian infantery consisted of 61 batallions with a combined strenght of 30 500 men (42 bat. participated in the main battle). The Russian cavalry consisted of 93 squadrons (of which 69 participated in the main battle). Estimates of the cavalry's strenght varies from 10 000 to 18 000 men. But I consider the low estimates to be more plausible. The number of cannons vary between 72 to 127 in my litterature (which include Englund, but I might have missed a mention of 300 guns on some other place, the OOB however says that 102 guns were carried by the field army).

The Swedish infantery in the same battle had 20 battalions with a combined strength of about 10 000 men (12 bat. participated in the main battle). The cavalry consisted of 154 squadrons with a combined strenght of about 12 000 men (109 squadrons participated in the main battle). The Swedes only carried four 4-pounder cannons to the main battle and left 28 guns in the bagage and an unknown number at the Poltava siegeworks.

Martinsson

You are probably right on the number of Russian guns. I was quoting from memory and surely mixed the numbers.

A.

I am not sure Poltava is really that typical as a battle but recent works have given more details and increased the numbers of Russians there.

link

The above book gives the Russians 86 battalions that fought with others in supporting roles. Of which 42 (53 if you include the 3rd line) were involved in the final battle. 152 1/2 or 157 1/2 regular cavalry squadrons plus again more that did not fight. 117 1/2 regular squadrons fought in the final battle. 180 or more guns of which 126 were involved in the final action.

alincoln--Yes, a little counter-intuitive to go to the Swedish Army page to get a Russian OOB!

Thanks to all. You have been a great help.

link

Copy and paste the above address into your web browser and you will reach a Swedish site (the above should also translte for you) that I used to build my GNW Swedish and Russian Armies. Also, Check out his Blog that can be linked to from the site.

Even better, it turned up as a link when I submitted it…enjoy

Really Nick Dorrell, three sockpuppets (alincoln1981, jwbooth1981 and karamstafapaska) and you managed to use all three in this one thread. Aren't you the least bit embarrassed by your shameful self-promotion of your website and book? Your desperate need for recognition is truly pathetic. The only person that I have found that recommends your book and website is YOU through one of your sockpuppets. Very,very sad!

karamustafapasha

It is very hard to select one Swedish-Russian battle and call it "typical". But both Narva and Poltava had the unit ratio of 75 % infantry and 25 % cavalry in the Russian army. The ratio of dragoons in the Russian army was larger in the smaller battles than in the bigger battles. But in those battles there is a great uncertainty about the extent of which the dragoons fought on horse. For example, in a recently published book about the battle of Lesnaya (1708), the two co-authors (one Russian and one Swede) completely disagree on whether the participating Russian dragoon regiments fought on foot or on horse.

Regarding the issue of the Russian army being bigger than previously thought, I am actually reading a new book about the battle of Poltava (written by a Russian-Ukrainian historian who worked on the battlefield museum in Poltava). I just skipped ahead a few chapters to check what he wrote about the Russian strength. He report 73 battalions with 31 730 men and two additional regiments further away from the battlefield. Add to that the Russian garrison in Poltava(which I did not count in my previous post) and I guess we reach the same number of batallions as in the Nicholas Dorrell's book which you linked to. But while there seem to be more battalions the number of soldiers is more or less the same.

A different story is with the cavalry, which the Russian-Ukrainian historian (Valerij Moltusov) estimate to be more than 20 000 men strong (30 regiments), and he is not including six regiments that were placed further away from the battlefield. He does not mention the number of squadrons and that is a number that can vary depending on if you count four or five squadrons per regiment (my previous post counted four).

Unfortunatly Moltusov does not do any detailed number chrunching to explain how he came up with more than 20 000 dragoons. Two of my Swedish books have on the other hand done just that. The first is an oldie (Generalstabsverket from 1919) and it estimate the dragoons to have been about 10 000 men. The second one is a lot more recent (from 2000) and written by a man fluent in Russian who has personally studied the Russian sources. He estimate the dragoons to be somewhere between 10 000 and 14 000 men strong. So from my point of view, I am still inclined to believe that the Russian cavalry were about the same size as the Swedish and thus the Russian unit ratio would remain in the region of 75-25.

Martinsson:

On the typical battle I think you are right but I would guess that you need to add in light cavalry as well to your 75/25? But I actually meant Poltava was not that typical as a battle because of the troop mix & situation.

The Lesnaya book sounds interesting – do you have a link for it? What language is it in? The book I mentioned says that the Russian dragoons used a mixture of mounted/dismounted at this battle.

The Ukrainian book also sounds good but I suspect not in English? Do you have a link for that?

On the other book and numbers it appears that there are Russian sources which give real numbers for the Russian units at Poltava and also additional units to other sources. These seem to be first published from around 2004. They give specific numbers for units – so Kievski Dragoons had 898 men while the Kievski infantry regiment had 1218 men.

For the infantry it is difficult to say how this matches up with the Ukrainian book but it says 86 battalions with a total around 39,000 men plus some militia. But the cavalry seem the same or at least very similar. There are around 36 regiments in basically 6 groups of 6 regiments. 5 of these groups are directly involved in the battle and have between 23 and 28,000 men, with 5,000 or maybe more light cavalry.

Given the way the battle went I would guess there were different ratios of inf/cav at different stages of the battle and depending on how you define the forces involved.

karamustafapasha

Yes, the light cavalry is not included in the 75-25 or in the Swedish 50-50, but that is because they were never supposed to be used in the actual battle.

The books I refered to are all unfortuneatly in Swedish. They were published by a historical book club called SMB ( smb.nu ) and they were only sold to SMB-members. I am not a member because their books are expensive and even though they are supposed to be exclusive I can always by them later on the used book market. Anyhow, the Lesnaya book was written 2009 by Pavel Konovaltjuk and Einar Lyth with the title "Vägen till Poltava – Slaget vid Lesnaja 1708". The other book was written by Valerij A. Moltusov 2010 with the title "Poltava 1709 – vändpunkten". It was specially adapted for Swedish readers and based on a Russian book he published the year before.

The idea that suddenly in 2004 it was discovered that many more regiments and larger unit sizes were present in Poltava, struck me first as very odd. But actually, the Lesnaya book was a similar story. Previously it was thought that the Russian and Swedish armies were about evenly matched in numbers. But that was just because the Russians had deliberatly "cooked the books" and underreported their real strength. The actual numbers were revealed in the book to have been 13 000 in the beginning of the battle with additional 5 000 men arriving in the middle of the battle. This means, since the last Swedish regiments arrived in the evening, that the Russian army was effectively twice as large as the Swedish army.

I know that the Russians tried to inflate the size of their victory at Poltava by producing a Swedish OOB that put all Swedish regiments present in the Ukraine with their full paper strength in the final battle line (plus one completely imaginary regiment). This did not fool the historians but were they just as succesful in deflating the Russian army's size at Poltava as they were at Lesnaya?

Thanks Martinsson. It is a shame that the books you can only get these books from this club :(

I think that you are right on the 'cooking the books'. This is certainly what is said in the book and the numbers there are like you suggest for Lesnaya. It is the same for other actions covered by this book, the Russian forces are updated. From what I can tell the 'uncooking' is still going on so there may be more updates in the future on this.