Physiological effects of wearing armour and heat

[Ed]

Certainly the weight/heat was a contributory element to the loss at Hattin which wrote finis to the First Crusade. But isn't this sort of a given? I mean to say that even a modern soldier, if fully burdoned and exposed to the heat, would doubtless cease to be an effective fighter.

This little snippit shows that serious heat related disorders have 3 times the incidence of wounding in Iraq. And that is within a modern army!

BTW, I read in my searches that the load amedic carries is 65 lbs(!)

Assuming medical air transport is an indicator of serious wounds, injuries, or sickness, these data can also be described as follows:

* 6,273 seriously wounded;
* 6,430 seriously injured in non-hostile events (e.g. vehicle accidents)
* 17,662 seriously ill (e.g. serious heat prostration)
* A total of 30,365 seriously wounded, injured, or sick – all causes.

http://www.cdi.org/program/document....intversion.cfm

Serious stuff indeed.

ETA I just noticed that heat related illness is one of the disorders counted among the 17000.

[Atlantia]

What a great idea for disucssion.

I wonder, we know the details of the armour itself, the construction the articulation, joints, vents etc.
Has there been any studys of the evolution of the undergarments/padding and whether there were deliberate differences in materials or construction for summer/winter/ warm and cold climates?
Wearing metal armour in a hot sunny climate when you've come from wet cold ole England must have been unbearable.
I wonder what the surface temperature of the shiny metal must have been?
Would they have tried to shade the knights? Cloaks? Umberellas? ;-)
Would the metal be painted even?

[fearn]

Hi Jim,

Great question, with a bunch of angles to explore.

The problem isn't just the metal, it's the quilted gambeson that was often worn under the mail or plate to act as cushioning against impacts.

I suspect there's something we're not getting. I'm not disputing Ed's numbers at all, but there's something we're not understanding. For one thing, the season for wars was typically the warm season, not the cool season. If overheating was a critical problem, why weren't they fighting in the fall after the harvest? The other things was that, so far as I remember, the heaviest plate was worn in Italy, because they needed protection against crossbow snipers in urban warfare (sound similar to Iraq?).

While the medievals placed less value on human life than we do, the patterns of armor wearing make me think that either a) conditioning allowed the warriors to deal with the heat load imposed by their armor, or b) there's something we're missing in armor design that allowed the warriors to be cooler than expected. I'd specifically note that we should be looking at the padding, as well as the metal.

Perhaps we should also check in with the SCA folks? They've been fighting in replica armor for years.

Great topic!

F

[Jim McDougall]

Thank you very much guys! I really appreciate your comments and observations, and it does seem this is a subject we could give some attention to.
While certainly this is not a problem isolated to armies of any certain period, and of course is certainly a problem in modern armies in qualified degree, but I wanted to address how much attention was given to it in the period of our studies.

My son in law fought in Iraq, and he is particularly susceptible to heat, and upon returning actually never even mentioned the heat, though he was in considerable combat situations. As far as I recall from the military (its been over 40 yrs!), the general full pack was around 60 lbs. The specific command I recall hearing most was 'take your salt tablets!' and I did see a number go down with heat prostration in training with temperatures well over 100 degrees. It is my impression that in modern times, the technology has offered not only awareness of these issues, but made efforts to use various resources to help alleviate the problem.

I know that armour was often burnished, russeted or even painted in order to prevent rust and corrosion, but I am not certain of those being applied to reduce heat. It does seem that, as Atlantia mentioned, cloaks or draped coverings were worn over armour as seen in illustrations, but again, I do not know whether this was artists license, fashion enhancement or indeed intended to reduce heat.

In desert regions, it is known in relatively modern times armies did cover the hilts of swords in leather to prevent glinting steel revealing positions and the heat from suns glare in handling the weapon. I once had a British M1908 cavalry sword (called the Allenby sword for the Commander in the Palestine campaign in WWI)with the huge bowl hilt covered in leather. In early Mexico, the sabres on the frontier had hilts and scabbards covered entirely in leather.

But back to the medieval armour, I think Fearn has a great point, the heavy padding that was worn, seems certainly to not only comfortably (?) support the heavy mail, but protect the wearer from the incredible heat it must have carried. I know that out here in the desert southwest, during the summer, I have burned my hands in inadvertantly grabbing items that have been in the sun (learned quick to wear gloves!).
I recall a rather grim story of a British officer who survived the tragic and immortal 'Charge of the Light Brigade' but later died in India of a heatstroke from the metal plate placed in his skull.

Best regards,
JIm

[fernando]

Alow me to put my empyrical spoon on this plate .

Originally Posted by Ed

... BTW, I read in my searches that the load amedic carries is 65 lbs(!)

I was a medic in the Mozambique guerilla warfare. In our case the gear, a nurse bag, weighed no more than some 10 lbs. Even so we were lucky to be provided with a native servant to carry it. All we had to bear was the rifle and ammunition, like the other troopers.
The heat in campaign is terrible, specially for 'civilized' guys out of their usual tempered habitat.
I saw tactical operations being interrupted, due to fatigue caused by heat. I even saw a nc sargent criticaly handing his gun and ammunition belt to the servant, to resist marching under heat fatigue.
Thirst comes along; when you finaly find a puddle, with suspect whitish water full of tadpoles, you don't even give the medic time to desinfect it.
But human condition, after intense training, can endure the hardest accomplishments; in the same manner military comandos or rangers can resist infinitely worse conditions than ordinary troops, so certainly the medieval knights trained themselves quite hard before going into battle inside those iron cans.

Originally Posted by fern

...The problem isn't just the metal, it's the quilted gambeson that was often worn under the mail or plate to act as cushioning against impacts ...

Sometimes things work in the inverted way. I have read that:
To counter the heat, many knights wore a surcoat underneath their armour to insulate against the metal which under the heat of the Sun, would have literally burned their skin.
Still is a riddle for the contemporaneus common man, how those guys resisted critical heat endurance. Maybe many a times they droped down before the job had ended .
Fernando