According to Geoffrey Parker, volley fire was invented twice in the 16th century.
As to the diffusion of this tactic, Geoffrey Parker has provided an examination of the origins and spread of volley fire in Japan and Western Europe. According to Parker (2003, pp. 40–51; 2007), volley fire was invented twice in the 16th century. First, Oda Nobunaga, a Japanese warlord fighting for control of the archipelago, developed the idea of uninterrupted infantry fire by shooting arquebuses in rotating ranks, and successfully used it at the battle of Nagashino in 1575, where Nobunaga’s 3000 men in three ranks delivered volleys that proved devastating for the enemy. Thirty years later, and seemingly unrelated to the Japanese case, the Dutch army be-came the first in Europe to use and perfect this same technique. Parker shows that, thanks to their close reading of works describing Roman military tactics, Counts Willem Lodewjik and Maurice of Nassau came up with the idea of volley fire in 1594,and within six years at most had taught their infantry to practice it in action. In the first two decades of the 17th century, printed works and Dutch-trained instructors taught the armies of other Protestant states to follow suit. Yet, no western army used volley fire in action until the 1620s, with the possible exception of the Dutch at the battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600.
A Contribution to the Military Debate
The Japanese were the first to pioneer offensive firepower down to the company level over melee. Japanese formations under Nobunaga were able to adopt three line rank rotation firing, which although started as a defensive maneuver at the Battle of Nagashino, morphed into an offensive capability by the time the Japanese invaded Korea. In the Battle of Busanjin, the Japanese overwhelmed the Korean defenders with arquebus fire, which allowed their melee troops to advance and scale the walls. At the Battle of Sangju, the Japanese once more used arquebus to provide cover fire for the infantry. At Chungju, Konishi Yukinaga used his arquebus troops to ambush the Korean cavalry.
Contemporary European armies, such as the Spanish army, did not practice volley fire. They fired on the individual level. When the Europeans, the first being the Dutch, did start using volley fire, they were used defensively to wear down enemy troops. Japanese offensive firing tactics were at least half a century ahead of similar European formations.
This is very surprising, given that the arquebus was only introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in 1543. Within half a century, the Japanese were able to produce arquebus which were more sophisticated than their European counterparts. They standardized bores and included efficient cartridges called hayago, which allowed for fast reloading speed. This was achieved by unifying the motion of putting the gunpowder and the bullet into the bore as one singular action.
This drastically reduced the speed which an arquebus could be reloaded and fired. There are a total of five steps.
You can see a Japanese arquebus in action here.
