This is good as it's showing the tension of of sailing into the attack and
everyone's just waiting to see what's going to happen
and now the Greek fire.
Okay, so this is the wild fire being used very much like
the use of of Greek fire in the siege of Constantinople.
The difference is that that Greek fire had to be preheated so it couldn't be sort
of spread on the water and then lit. It would be heated and then
sprayed out of the siphon so you had to sort of put it on little ships.
So the Byzantines used little thing called a drum on and they would sail it up.
And nor does it explode quite like this it's hard to get materials
that energetic that will explode when they've been spread out on water
but visually it's beautiful and is very dramatic and that's what we want in a TV show.
But in general in terms of the naval tactics,
it's very much like the first siege of Constantinople and the difference that
they're not showing here is about the currents and winds in that siege
in Constantinople the the Arab fleet was sort of calmed in the currents as they
were trying to pass in front of the city and the Byzantine fleet
darted out of what's called the Golden Horn and attacked them both with
fire ships and then with Greek fire.
So here we're just getting the visuals of the wild fire exploding
and it is like the destruction of that fleet.
But it's done in its own its own style to be visually much more
dramatic and leaving out all the boring details of which way the water currents are going,
which way the wind is blowing and one of the problems in
for the Greeks in using Greek fire is that it's a very short-range weapon
and you needed the wind and the sea state to be blowing in a particular direction and particularly calm to make it work.
Here it just looks like this sort of amazing war winning weapon.
Why wouldn't you be using this all the time if it's this effective?
In real life Greek fire was a much more limited weapon
although in its first few uses it was likewise quite dramatically successful.
Stannis's is carrying on with a landing despite having taken huge casualties
which you probably wouldn't do because an attack requires
a superiority ratio over defender especially when you're attacking a fortified place.
So, going ahead is probably not sensible but may make sense
if he thinks that there is a vulnerability in the sea walls for instnace
that it's easier to attack from the sea than it is from the land.
Historically this is how Constantinople was taken in
1204 was an attack from its sea walls amd not from its immense land walls.
Now one thing that always sort of gets me is the use of flaming arrows in TV shows
which you just don't do in real life - it slows the arrow down,
you don't get to shoot as far but it looks nice so they like using flaming arrows.
The defenders are of course quite sensibly chucking rocks and pots of
burning things down at them which is all very realistic.
And now the forces go out to fight them on the beach.
I don't know why you would bother because they can't get up the walls
so just shoot them down sitting outside the walls.
You know, defensive positions are defensive positions for a reason.
Here come the ladders, here come the escalade ladders.
They might've wanted to have those when they started attacking you can sometimes take
a fortification by assault but you have to move fast before they can move forces
around from the part of the walls that you're not attacking to defend the part you are.
So you have to go quick and running up to a wall and then going,
'oh golly we need some ladders' is probably a bit too late.
Ah, Using their boats as shields is a pretty clever.
So now we have some sensibleattempts at assault from Stannis.
Battering rams and ladders, that's all historically spot-on.
This is an important scene because you see all the defending Lannister soldiers
are starting to mill around and be uncertain.
And this is why leadership is so important in that period is
especially something as complex as a defense of a fortified place,
the men have got to be in the right place and they have to know what's going on.
In any battle a victory or a loss is more of a thing in the mind than it is a thing on on the battlefield,
and these men are looking defeated and this is
where the King, where the leader has to do his job.
This is where they earn their pay is to motivate those men.
That's a definition of leadership is to make men do something they might not otherwise do.
Joffrey has got none of that and Tyrion does.
Tyrion's attack on the outside of the walls is good in part because
one of the things about medieval forces - now here it all just sort of looks like a melee
but best way to sap the morale of a force you're attacking
is to take them from the flank or the rear.
In part because it's difficult to turn an entire army to change direction and have them continue fighting.
So here they're pinched against the walls,
they've been taken from the flank it's exactly what you want to do
especially if you've got less force and you're defending.
Ramsay Bolton - on top of being horrendously despicable, he really is good at
getting inside people's heads and here he's using that to his advantage on the battlefield.
Now here Ramsey's decision to fight outside Winterfell makes sense because he's got
superiority of a force.
So better to meet outside the castle walls and fight.
This is really irresponsible of Snow to try and save his brother even though
he's clearly the center of gravity for his army and Ramsay knows that if he can
dislocate Jon Snow from his army then his army is much more vulnerable.
They're not gonna have a commander and so it makes a lot of sense from Ramsay Bolton's point of view.
Jon Snow riding single-handedly towards the Bolton's is...
it's not a thing, great drama but tactically speaking not a thing.
Vulnerability of horses to arrows.
Jon Snow finally realizing what a mess he's in.
And one thing they've got here is the destructiveness of archery which actually a lot of armies didn't figure
out until the late medieval period.
And of course then the big wall of bodies that they continue to fight.
This has been noted on a few defensive battles.
Most notably Thermopylae where the Spartans are defending
and the Persians are being stacked up in walls in front of them.
The interesting thing here is that there is no...
there is no command of this battle.
Jon Snow's just running and it's just a big melee in the middle
and because he's not actually commanding, poor Jon Snow is getting put into a pocket.
And there's no tactics here, it's just groups of men running at each other screaming.
And now they're in a pocket - this has happened most notably the Battle of Cannae.
Hannibal killed something like 50,000 Romans by feigning a retreat in the middle
and then flanking them on both sides and then it was just the rest of the day
just cutting men down and the problem when you're put in a pocket like that
is only the people on the outside can fight and everyone else who's ganged up in the middle
is just waiting their turn to die.
Here Jon Snow crushed in the mass of men.
This must have been what it was like to be a Roman at Cannae as they were being
slowly destroyed over the course of a day.
And now here come the cavalry.
The riders of the Vale have lances which is the superior weapon if
you're fighting from horseback because you can actually get the most out of the momentum of the horse.
And there the Bolton's are destroyed by the cavalry.
And here's the problem that Ramsay Bolton has is
he's lost all his force outside of the castle and now he doesn't really have anything left significantly to defend.
So it's always a trade-off.
So he fights outside the battle because he reckons he's superior and he reckons he can defeat Jon Snow.
If he kills Jon Snow, Jon Snow is the center of gravity for...
for that army then he wins.
But he's traded off the ability to defend his defended place, his castle.
It's probably something we we miss out of discussions is a lot of medieval warfare
is how religious they were and going back to ancient times and into the medieval period,
there were a priest or priests that were a big part of warfare
both to motivate men to justify them on why they had to do such an abhorrent thing
as killing lots of other people, so actually having this sort of religious component here is not unusual.
I'm not sure why you would send the Dothraki charging.
What are they charging at?
What are they going to accomplish and how does it fit into the plan?
I'm not sure that makes sense.
You have this asset, this mobility and it's a shock capability.
Why would you commit it first?
No in a battle you want to let the other side commit first.
If they commit first then you can see what their what their plan is and there's a balance.
You want to keep initiative so you want to keep freedom of maneuver
and you want them to to commit themselves to a course of action first.
So sending off your largest shock capability in the first instance against an enemy you don't know the size and shape of...
doesn't strike me as good thinking militarily.
And they're all dead.
At the outset of a battle taking a risky move like that
and then losing that would be a huge morale deficit for for your own forces.
Your great big super horsemen are wiped out.
You don't even see it - you see a few stragglers run back.
What's that going to do to the morale of everyone else?
Again, if your plan is just to fight them, I don't see a plan here.
You be better off waiting in the in the castle walls.
Why start with a maneuver and then just sort of stand in wait?
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Brienne is saying fall back and one of
the dangerous thing in any contact battle is the withdraw.
Generally that's where most casualties would happen in an ancient medieval warfare
is when you break because most of your armor is designed to fight from the front,
your shields face front and most of the defensive plate is at the front.
Soon as you turn your back you can't defend yourself
and so in medieval battles where one side breaks that's where 80% of the casualties would happen.
So here they're withdrawing through a gap in these fire trenches to defend the city.
Probably good thinking knowing the dislike of your enemy to fire.
On the other hand those trenches might have been a good thing to do before
the battle to try and disrupt them, break them up, make them more manageable.
What you want to do is defeat an enemy in detail so you want to defeat them a bit at a time,
especially if you're slightly under strength compared to them.
You don't want to fight them all at once, you want to break them up so you can
destroy one bit of at a time and that's where obstacles are good.
Obstacles are good at breaking up an enemy, disrupting his formation.
And now the Unsullied are showing that they're actually disciplined, they're keeping their line,
they're retreating carefully and this is the advantage of having
really well-trained professional infantry is they can do things like that.
They can withdraw in contact and keep formation.
Now we talk in modern military discussion of trying to identify and target the enemy's center of gravity.
The center of gravity is the balance point and if you knock that out
then the enemy's ability to continue fighting is seriously compromised.
Now here you would have hoped that the battle plan up to this point might have
shaped the battle so they could attack the Night King but they haven't.
It's just kind of been a melee up to this point and it's only now that
Jon Snow and Daenerys are trying to target the center of gravity which is the Night King.
If they take him out the zombie army ceases to exist.
So the whole point should have been to try and target him, isolate him and target him from the beginning.
So Arya killing the Night King,
nice little swordplay move there dropping the sword.
But yeah, going after the center of gravity trying to to kill the opponent general is certainly again a trope of historical fighting.
Usually harder than it would seem.
Often that's done by some sort of trickery.
A good example is the Battle of Hastings.
As soons as Harold is dead then the Saxon ability to continue to fight is gone
because their king is gone.
The zombie army is literally melting away
and you don't have something quite so literal but lots of examples over time
where when the leader dies the the army that he's leading not literally melt away
but at least figuratively all just sort of 'alright that's done we're out of here'.
But actually wars are made up of the behaviors and actions of
tens of thousands of normal people who aren't big heroes or aren't big leaders
and here they're just extras dying in the background but you know we have to
remember that wars are about real people and real lives.