Reddit reviews The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme

Historian John Keegan wrote about exactly that- dying soldiers and horses tend to try to climb on top of each other, for support, for mutual defense, or just for comfort in their last moments. Before you know it, you've got a pile, which subsequent waves of attackers and defenders have to try to climb before they can get to their opponents. Then they start dying on top of the piles, making them higher (an armored corpse is an unstable fighting platform and increases your chance of dying, he points out). If you have two or three piles of bodies close by, the gap tends to get filled in by more bodies. And before you know it, wall of bodies, which can trap one of the armies by creating a kill zone they can't get out of.

Ramsey knew this. That was the point of the burning flayed men on saltires. It was to show range to the bowmen. Ramsey let Rickon run towards the Stark army, but waited until Jon was in position to kill him. He knew when Jon was in position because he knew exactly how far away the flayed men were. The fires also helped show wind direction. I'm sure Ramsey had another plan if Jon had refused to take the bait, but… like Sansa said, Ramsey is pretty good at getting into your head and pushing all the buttons in the way that will hurt you the most. Well, was.

Read Keegan's analysis of the battle of Agincourt to get a better feel for the Battle of the Bastards: https://www.amazon.com/Face-Battle-Study-Agincourt-Waterloo/dp/0140048979

Agreed. Lots of the WWII books from the 80's and 90's very much bought into the superior Wehrmacht narrative. Michael Reynolds "Steel Inferno: 1st SS Panzer Corps in Normandy" was one of the first "serious" books I read about Normandy and it really hit home on the "inferior" nature of Allied tanks, the superiority of training and leadership of the SS soldiers, and that the Allies prevailed through numbers. It wasn't Wehrby in the sense that the author had a hard-on for the SS, but it was part of the school of thought that developed from the 80's revisionist works like Carlo D'Este book "Decision in Normandy", which made the notion the Allies won purely through superior material and manpower central to its thesis.

My fourth year university seminar paper was on the historiography of Anglo-Canadian armor in the Battle of Normandy, and you can see how many of the Wehraboo idea's came out of the literature of the late 70's and early 80s, though they existed in more "military" circles prior to that (NATO really got off in the 50's and 60's on getting the former German commanders to give them tours so they could "learn their secrets" on how to defeat enemies with superior manpower and resources - apparently forgot these guys lost).

It wasn't until the 2000's you started to get books like John Buckley's "British Armour in the Normandy Campaign 1944" or Stephen Hart's "Montgomery and Colossal Cracks: The 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944-45" or Terry Copps "Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy" the reevaluated the Anglo-Canadian performance in Normandy against the Wehrmacht and SS in a better light. I'm less familiar with the historiography of the US army in WWII.

But the stuff that Wehraboo's spout was pretty mainstream only 2-3 decades ago. That is why the History Channel stuff is so bad, since the HC stopped doing serious documentaries in the early 2000's for the most part, so what HC documentaries remains on youtube tends to reflect where the school of thought was at that time. For all intents and purposes, the stuff on this subreddit is an outgrowth of the recent round of revisionism that occured in WWII history, which is revisionism against the previous round that occured around the 80's, which itself was revisionism from the post-war works (and there are different kinds of revisionism as well, for example post war works tended to be very strategic looking where as the revisionism of the 80's brought in a lot of the ground level stuff from interviews with veterans - John Kegans work "The face of battle" was really important in starting the trend of getting the experiences of soldiers recorded in WWII history books)

1. The Face of Battle by John Keegan
   
2. 9/10
   
3. War, History, Tactics
   
4. A look at three historical battles (Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme), and the troops that fought in them. A remarkably human look at battle that delves into human psychology, tactics and more.
   
5. The Face of Battle: Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Face-Battle-Study-Agincourt-Waterloo/dp/0140048979

You'll never go wrong with John Keegan

For those interested in a good read about The Somme, check out John Keegan's The Face of Battle.

https://www.amazon.com/Face-Battle-Study-Agincourt-Waterloo/dp/0140048979

Concepts of courage on the battlefield change with the technology and its use in warfare. John Keegan has written two books that touch on this - The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command

I read that civilians came around at night after the battle of Waterloo looting corpses and the wounded and even murdering some of them first.

I suggest reading this for anyone interested in first hand accounts from the Napoleonic wars

I highly recommend reading the Agincourt chapter of John Keegan's "The Face of Battle". Keegan talks about what a French soldier would have experienced on an individual level, something that was largely absent from discussions of warfare before Keegan wrote this book in the early 1970s.