Swedish pikemen

[maciek]

When looking for OOB's of GNW Swedish armies one can find information that not all regiments carried pikes duing the entire war. I also seems that the later period the bigger part of Swedish regiments is composed of musketeers only.
I think that it would be important to determine the ration of pike armed regiments for different period of war.

[maciek]

For example, here:
http://www.wfgamers.org.uk/resources/C1 ... ngborg.htm
one can read that at Helsingborg only 1/4 of Swedish regiment was pike armed.
Unfortunatelly, no source is cited.

I hope that in this thread, with a little help of our Swedish friends we would be able to find more material about this.

[Tacitus]

During the king's absence in Turkey there was indeed a widespread abandonment of the pike in favor of all-musket regiments in the Swedish army. This was then stopped and reversed when Karl XII returned to Sweden 1715.

I am not familiar with any complete survey of pike distribution in the Swedish army but there are pieces of information here and there. Let's start with what Lars-Eric Höglund wrote in his book about Swedish uniforms. The following "indelta" regiments are explicitly mentioned as not having pikes in 1710:

Uppland, Östergötland, Närke-Värmland, Västmanland, Dalregementet, Österbotten, Björneborg (1711/1712) and Åbo (1712).

The enlisted Saxon regiment which fought at Helsingborg did not have pikes either according to Höglund. Only Jönköping and Hälsinge are explicitly mentioned by him as having pikemen.

Also present at that battle were Södermanland regiment which according to the work by the Danish General staff did not have pikes in the battle of Gadebusch. Furthermore, it seems like Kronoberg only had muskets in august 1710 when a company asked for replacements for damaged equipment (including 138 holsters for muskets).

Something that complicate the picture is that the Dalregiment was actually issued pikes when it was restored after Poltava, but its colonel asked to have them replaced with muskets in a letter from January 18 1710 (a request that was granted and thus explains why Höglund report it as an all-musket regiment).

The same thing happened to Kalmar regiment whose colonel asked January 3 1710 to have his 365 pikes replaced with muskets. This request was also granted but it is unclear if the new equipment was delivered before the regiment participated in the battle of Helsingborg (February 28).

Battle of Helsingborg

What all this means is that of all eleven Swedish infantry regements participating in the battle of Helsingborg, one regiment had pikes (Jönköping), one regiment was in the process of replacing the pikes with muskets (Kalmar), four regiments did not have pikes (Uppland, Östergötland, Västmanland and the Saxon regiment), and two regiments probably did not have pikes either (Södermanland, Kronoberg). The last three regiments (Älvsborg, Uppland's femmmänningar and Småland's femmänningar) were older regiment who stayed in Sweden during the disastrous Poltava campaign. They probably had pikes since Älvsborg had pikes in Gadebusch together with Västgöta-Dal which also had stayed at home during the first half of the war.

Battle of Gadebusch

The battle of Gadebusch in 1712 has been covered by the Danish general staff's work "Bidrag til det Store Nordiske Krigs Historie". They mention that only five regiments had pikes (Östergötland, Hälsinge, Västgöta-Dal, Älvsborg och Västmanlands regementen). The other five were all-musket (Elbing, Stralsund, Närke-Värmland, Södermanland and the Dalregiment).

It is noteworthy that Östergötland and Västmanland did not have pikes in 1710 but had them in Gadebusch (according to a hundred year old Danish work, an equally old Swedish work only stated that Uppland lacked pikes in the battle of Helsingborg).

Elbing and Stralsund had been used as garrison regiments and as a general rule these type of regiments were all-muskets throughout the war.

Afterwards

With the king back in Sweden an order was issued January 30 1716 that the pike should be restored in the army. The above mentioned colonel of the Dalregiment who had replaced his pikes with muskets early in 1710 protested against the decision and referred to experiences in the battle of Gadebusch as reason to not have pikes. Ironically the battles of Helsingborg and Gadebusch convinced the Danish king to reintroduce the pike in the Danish army. The Danish officers were however sceptical and resisted the change so the pike was soon gone forever. Though it may be possible that the Danes were armed with pikes in the battle of Stresow 1715 and the Swedes were all-musket!

After the death of Karl XII the ratiuo of pikes was reduced to one fourth. However during the summer of 1719 regiments were again being converted to all-muskets (for example Södermanland regiment which participated in the batlle of Stäket the same year). As late as November 24 1719 a royal resolution confirmed that pikes were to be carried by every fourth men. The Guard did not abandon the pike until the 1730:s.

[maciek]

Thank you very much, Tacitus !!!

[maciek]

Tacitus, I've just realised that all the information you posted above was available on your invaluable website.
I shall use Google tranlator more often.

[Tacitus]

The information about Helsingborg and Gadebusch can be found in my website, but not the other stuff. So right now this thread might be the most complete source about Swedish pikes during the GNW that is available on the Internet.

There is by the way a Polish source that have very valuable information about Swedish pikes. The Swedish officer Johan Michael Campenhausen (1680-1747) went into Polish service and wrote a book about pikes: Chwała i apologia kopii i pik, (Kalisz, 1737). He praises the pike as a very effective weapon for the Swedes, which terrified the opponents so much that they often fled before any actual cold steel fencing could occur. I have been told that this book states that a Swedish pike was about 5,5 meter long (= 9 Polish elle + a 15-20 cm long pikehead).

Additional information about pike distribution that I have is that Västgöta tremänninge regiment sent one of its battalion to Livonia for garrison duty in 1704 and became all-musket. At the time of the Scanian campaign 1709-1710 it was back in Sweden but had not got its pikes back while the other battalion still had them. The whole regiment was sent to strenghten the Naval base at Karlskrona when the Danes re-entered the war.

When the Närke-Värmland tremänninge regiment was raised in 1700 it was only issued matchlock muskets (without bayonets!). This may have been common practise for all tremänninge regiments since they were originally intended to stay home in Sweden while the field army left to fight overseas. Närke-Värmland and other tremänninge-regiments were however shipped to Livonia already in the spring of 1701 and were then equipped with pikes. The above mentioned battalion of Västgöta tremänninge regiment that stayed home all the time was apparently also issued pikes.

And finally concerning my website. I have promised that I was going to translate parts of it to English during the autumn, but that has obviously not happen. I have been pushing the project forwards in time over and over, but it is now my top priority so hopefully there will soon be an English version. I am actually going to start tomorrow (even though that was exactly what I said to my self yesterday and the day before that... )

[Dfogleman2]

This is great information. Thanks, Tacticus.

[maciek]

Can we assume that all battalions formed from POWs and all garrison regiments were also fromed from musketeers only ?

[Tacitus]

The short answer is: I do not know because the information about pike distribution is so fragmentary. But here comes the long answer:

Since pikes were of little use when defending a fortress, garrison regiment did not have them. But the fortresses generally had a large arsenal of weapons so it should not have been a problem to give them pikes when they were assigned for field duty. Kalmar castle, located in a provincial town far removed from the battle fields, had enough pikes in the autumn of 1709 to equip three regiments. The little evidence I have put forward in this thread seem however to suggest that the garrison regiments remained all-musket even in the field. But that may have been due to a choise made by a few individual colonels who believed that pikes were obsolete weapons.

The officers who led the Swedish regiments after Poltava had in most cases not experienced the successful battles in the Baltic and Poland. Some of them had on the other hand fought in the War of the Spanish Succession. The above mentioned colonel of the Dalregiment (Magnus Julius de la Gardie) who requested to replace the pikes in 1710 and protested against the decision to reintroduce them, had in fact previously served in the French army. These different experiences may have led them to believe that pikes were obsolete and thus made them willing to exploit the king's abcense to "modernise" the army.

Other officers such as Johan Michael Campenhausen (and of course the king himself) who had seen the pikes in action and winning great victories were naturally more willing to keep the pikes. This means that the variation could have been very great and it is not easy to make any assumptions based on this limited sample.

As far as the POW-regiments are concerned, I only know that the Saxon regiment led by Schommer did not have pikes when it got new uniforms in 1710. It did not even have swords which is indicative of an Swedish government who did not trust them enough to give them the best equipment. The lack of confidence was however mutual. Straelborn's Saxon battalion surrendered to the Danes at Fjelkinge January 1710 after putting up little resistance, all because they feared that they were going to be sacrifised in an effort to cover the Swedish army's retreat. Also a substantial amount of Scanian cavalrymen deserted the Swedish army in that engagement and joined the Danes instead, thus making Fjelkinge the absolute low point of the Scanian campaign as far as the Swedes are concerned.