In a six-part series on his blog, Roman military historian Bret Devereaux took a close look at the Siege of Gondor in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, the final movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Looking at the logistics of moving the Army of Mordor to Minas Tirith is actually a great way to introduce some of these problems in more depth. They say ‘amateurs talk tactics, but professionals study logistics.’ Well, pull up a chair at the Grown-Ups Table, and let’s study some logistics.
The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast — an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city.
The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul — apparently as a single group — and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?
In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load — and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.
I admit I did not have time to read this whole thing this morning, but posts like these are some of my favorite things online. See also Rome, Sweet Rome, A People’s History of Tattooine, and some of my logistical questions about Mad Max: Fury Road. (via studio d radiodurans)
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