Late 19th century warfare: Little Bighorn and Isandlwana

[Dd714]

Originally Posted by Jorge ChemE

One of the facts that impressed me about Little Bighorn is that Indians or American Natives were even better armed than Federal army so basically Cluster's forces chances relied solely on their experience but seems this was not enough to face a superior American native forces.

As for Isandlwana I read British Empire technology was vastly superior compared to zulus, they even had a couple of artillery and a rocket launcher. Most of the zulu warriors only had spears and self-made shields, although some of them carried old-fashioned fire weapons. In one occasion I read when zulu warriors ran out of ammunition, they took whatever they find inflicting severe injuries to British soldiers. I wonder how good were zulu warriors at shooting with fire weapons. It seems, however, than in a melee combat they were a real threat as their physical constitution should have been impressive.

Edited. As for the capabilities of native americans in melee combat, can someone give me insights about how native americans fought in this period in melee combat if they even dare to use melee combat?

Yeah at Isandlwana some of the zulus had rifles. By all accounts they were terrible shots. They also captured rifles from the dead british soldiers and used them later at Rorke's Drift and inflicted some casualties (this is also shown in the movie "Zulu").
The physical condition of the Zulu warrior could not be matched. The British had horse cavalry to move fast. For Zulus - the warrior WAS the cavalry and could move just about as fast and far.

For native american combat - one can probably write books about it. Tactics varied from tribe to tribe but basically they fought in hordes in quick melee strikes. Basically, a raid to take slaves or hides then split. The western tribes excelled in mounted combat, I would suspect however most of the movie westerns have it wrong where they show horseback indians circling a camps and taking shot with bow and arrow. I suspect they dismounted when getting within rifle range and used the terrain to get up as close to the enemy as possible without getting shote, and then take them on as a horde rush with melee weapons.

[Dd714]

Originally Posted by grad_student200

Religiously, it appears the Native Americans and Zulus saw their victories as a type of "Divine Retribution" for colonization which was inevitable. But the defeats at the time were reminders to the limits of white supremacy gone too extreme. Many bigots back then had thought that such defeats were practically impossible against "inferior" indigenous tribes. But in those two battles they were wrong. Historians have pointed out that this failure to validate white supremacy in those events has led to obsessive analyses of battlefield forensics to an extreme level to this day. White supremacy in the late 1800s came in the form of "eugenics".

The Zulu Kingdom had it's own form of eugenics. Let's not get into the "noble savage" misconceptions and put some balance here. I don't want to get into too much detail on this topic but let's not forget Zulu's were expanding their kingdom just like the British and the Boers in the early to late 19th century. The Zulu kingdom conquered all of southern africa, massacring or chasing all the other tribes out in a mass immigration that resulted in the death of 1 to 2 million natives. That's not a misprint - millions died. You don't here about this much but it pretty much upended the native population of Southern Africa, depopulating entire regions. It was chaos. Even the "white supremacy" of British expansion can't account for that much impact. Finally what you saw is the two kingdom's finally running into each other - the British Kingdom and the Zulu Kingdom. Conflict was inevitable.
Many natives fought with the British and were happy when the Zulu's were finally defeated.

[Listener2307]

Aware? Was the world aware of Little Big Horn?!
Hell, yeah! ......... See, Little Big Horn occurred in June, 1876, right? And it took a week or so for word to get back to Washington.


Word got back just in time for ........... The July 4, 1876 celebration of the Centennial. It was talked about in every city in America and around the world. Sitting Bull could not have picked a worst time to win a battle.
The entire Indian nation paid a price for that victory.