I’ve had plenty of gripes about the large-scale battles fought in the Game of Thrones series and how unrealistic many of them have been. In fact, plenty of people, including those in this article, are piling on the Battle of Winterfell, calling it unrealistic. Contrary to my previous complaints about such battles in the series, I’m here to explain how this was actually kind of a well planned battle overall considering the tight circumstances the heroes faced.

As should be done whenever planning any great victory, the first thing to do is assess what you know about the enemy and fully understand your own forces. I’m sure that the collection of bad asses at Winterfell did just that.

Let’s recall that over the course of the series, the various good people involved in this battle have gathered various bits of information and intelligence about the Night King and his army. They know that the Night King commands a handful of generals and a whole mass of undead soldiers. The two groups can be differentiated by the simple fact that the King and his generals generally look well-groomed and often wear cool armor whereas his army is made of up shambling mounds of rot in various stages of decay. All kidding aside, the good know that if you kill a general that many if not necessarily all of the zombie things with him crumble into pieces. Now an astute observer might have noticed that the “crumbling thing happening” may only occur with zombies that are in some way connected with the freshly killed general. While we as viewers and readers might know the reason, the heroes can only correctly guess that there is some connection between the action and the result. But what is more important is that killing the generals will yield great gains and killing the Night King may eliminate the entire threat completely.

They also know something of the forces arrayed against them. They know that the Night King has a huge shambling army at his command and they form a sort of amorphous blob. But they are not dispersed completely at random. They move in line generally with their leaders and don’t stray too far from them in any direction. The enemy has some form and predictable movement.

What do they know about the Night King? They’ve made an educated guess that his current priority while not necessarily his ultimate goal, is to kill the Three Eyed Raven, Bran Stark. Therefore they predicate all their plans on the fact that the Night King will move his army in a straight line at Bran. The Night King has never struck me (and hopefully the heroes) as particularly intelligent so much as he is single-minded and of constant unrelenting purpose. He’s like a force of nature.

The Night King slowly moves towards what he wants. He kills that which is in his way, incorporates the dead in his army, and continues forward. His killing of Vesirion wasn’t particularly spectacular. He simply saw a dragon, pulled out his spear and threw. When it died he made it part of his army. He realized it could breathe fire so he used it to bring down the wall. Then he kept moving towards Bran. Nothing here stems from genius decision-making. In addition, neither he nor his generals nor his army of zombies is made up of skilled fighters. Watch their individual fights and tell me if you see any spectacular moves. You can’t. The dead just plod along killing in straight forward ways. So Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion and so on probably know this.

They also know that the Night King has a dragon that breathes a powerful blue flame. That will be an over riding threat in their planning. This dragon and the Night King’s ability to throw deadly spears far enough to kill a flying dragon (which Jon figured out last season) are a two pronged threat to Daenerys’s dragons.

Finally, Jon’s unlikely band of scouts saw the direction the Night King and his army were moving in towards Winterfell. They pretty much can figure out the Night King’s objective, distance, direction of movement, speed, and size. In fact they correctly predicted how quickly the army of the dead would arrive.

What do the good heroes have? They have the Dothraki heavy cavalry horde, the Unsullied infantry army, a handful of warrior bands with a mix of infantry and bow, two dragons, some catapults, a castle to defend and a few hero types. Some one might dispute my characterization of the Dothraki as heavy cavalry since they and their horses lack armor. However, their tactics are heavy cavalry tactics. Charge in with the goal of stampeding and dispersing the enemy while you swing your heavy swords at them. While they are outfitted like light cavalry to an extent, they behave as heavy.

What are the options the heroes have? One, they could disperse everyone and just leave Bran in the castle and ambush the Night King on their own. But that leaves them with a single option for success and if it fails then there’s nothing more to be done. Plus an ambush while the Night King has his army around him might not be feasible. Two, you could put an army in his way and try to kill him the old fashioned way with brute force. If that doesn’t work, you can still try to ambush him at the tree. That gives them at least two chances at success. Three, they could all leave the continent and let Cersei take care of the Night King. But you know how tied the Starks are to their homeland so that’s not happening. (I thought of a fourth option later. Keep an ambush party near the tree, Spread out the rest of the army in hiding. When the Night King is close to the tree then use some signal, maybe a dragon flame, to have the army surround and charge the dead army. This may then draw the army from the Night King, maybe, and the heroes can deal with him mano a mano. That’s a risky plan though and probably not going to work.)

So here we have it, the heroes have to figure out how to put their army in between the Night King’s army and Bran long enough to get the Night King close enough for them to see and then blast him with dragon fire. How then to array their forces? They decide to put the Dothraki, the bands of swordsmen, and the Unsullied side by side with the bowmen in the castle, the catapults behind the infantry and cavalry, and the heroes in front leading the various elements. Let’s consider then how best to use each force if their goal is to slow down the Night King and give someone, perhaps the dragons or a hero, the chance to get at the Night King when he draws near which he will have to at some point to get to Bran.

The catapults are where they need to be. (Note: I didn’t realize initially they were in the front of the infantry.  They should have been behind them. Unless there wasn’t enough space to put them between the front line and the wood barrier assuming the heroes wanted to keep the front line backed up close to the wood barrier to get behind it quicker.  In the end though it didn’t matter.) They can’t be moved quickly and their only job is to lob fireshot at the enemy. The Unsullied are positioned as a blocking force in front of the main gate. That seems pretty solid. The Dothraki are in the open where they would be best suited. They need space to operate. Now I’ve read two arguments that this was a bad move.

One argument is that the forces should have been put into the castle and they should resist a Night King siege. I see numerous problems with this. First, the combat power of the forces at hand are not best suited to siege warfare (that is defending castle walls) plus crowding them all in together will reduce how many of them can have a fighting effect at once. The enemy army is made up of generally slow shambling dead people who use their hands or random weapons to fight. They charge thoughtlessly at an opponent en masse. The fighters in the hero’s army need space to use their weapons, curved swords and layers of spears. To maximize effective use of their abilities, they need space, they need to be out in the open. Admittedly, having some kind of obstacles on the flanks could have helped but they can’t really choose their terrain here. (Perhaps they could have made a stand in the woods nearby to make it harder for the undead to be effective in massing but the heroes would have had trouble maintaining cohesion and situational awareness too.)

The good guy’s plan if flanked appears to be to retreat into the castle, once their forces are probably smaller at this point. Also keep in mind that Jon has lived through an attempt to hide in a fortified area against the undead army and it assuredly does not work. Yes, that stronghold was protected by a wall of logs and Winterfell has stone walls but the undead can form mounds to get over the walls. They would then pour on the heroes like cockroaches. And if in fact the Night King decided to siege the castle (unlikely considering his previously described characteristics), how long would the good guys survive crowded together with limited food? (Sansa already told us they don’t have enough food to last long.) They would eventually have to bust out and how effective would they be streaming out of a few gates to attack the Night King? Not very effective at all.

It has also been argued that the wall of spiked timber should have been farther out and that the hero forces should have been behind the wall of fire to start with. My problem with this is that the wall requires a great deal of timber and a great deal of labor to build. Trying cutting down that much timber in the cold. Not only is the work much more difficult physically, how easy is it to fell so many trees when they are near frozen too.   I was already a bit leery to accept that they were able to build the wall they did but to build one of even large perimeter might have strained believability. They probably built as much as they could in the 24 or so hours they had available. In addition, the fighting power of the Dothraki would have been reduced considerably if they were simply to stand behind the wall of fire and kill undead as they crossed over. Moreover, cramming them all together even by the walls or in the castle opens up a new problem. If the undead dragon comes barreling in spraying blue fire, they would be a nice compact target to destroy in one fell swoop. Hopefully your own dragons could keep him at bay but if not, everyone is fried meat. As it is, open space is actually the heroes’ friend in this situation.

Another suggestion has been made that the heroes should have created a maze of obstacles to channelize the undead and make them easier to kill by reducing their ability to swarm from all directions. Yes that would be great but where do you get the material to create obstacles big enough to do that? You can’t just create major obstacles from thin air. Perhaps the dragons could have clawed out ditches after heating the frozen ground with their fire breath. It might have worked to slow down the undead army a bit but it would have tired out the dragons. A possible option but one I’m not sure would have made any appreciable difference in the final tally. Maybe the dragons had been busy helping carve out that big spike ditch and pulling up the trees to get it done. Either way there are a lot of could haves and would haves that still require limited labor and limited accessible material resources.

A quick aside about hiding the women and children in the crypts. A good idea. Keep them out of the way. The other option would have been to disperse them into the forest to hide until the battle was over but I don’t think anyone would agree to send their loved ones out into the wilderness with the undead everywhere.

Now on to the progress of the battle. The battle starts with everyone nervously waiting for the commencement of hostilities. Seems realistic enough. Maybe 0.01% of them has fought an undead creature before. Melisandre comes by and lights the Dothraki blades on fire. Who in their right mind would think that a Dothraki horde suddenly blessed with flaming blades would sit still waiting for the approach of the enemy? While tactically foolish, it’s not unrealistic to imagine them seized with a berserk fury causing them to recklessly charge forward. No one commanded it but no one could really stop it either. Do you think Jorah Mormont could have calmed them down? No way. So he just went with it, probably knowing it was foolhardy.  This is part of the vagaries of battle especially when one ally is crazed for battle. I don’t know if Melisandre wanted the battle to start early so that she could die by dawn or if she simply didn’t realize what effect her magic would have.  (Thinking about this some more, the Dothraki were probably a huge blood sacrifice to the Lord of Light; their blood shed under the flames granted by and of R’hllor.  Then Arya was oddly compassionate to Beric right before Melisandre seemed to pass on some knowledge and perhaps power to Arya to defeat the darkness, cold and death of the Great Other represented by the Night King.  Then Melisandre’s death as the dawn comes after defeating the Great Other makes perfect sense.)  Either way, as tactically terrible as what happened was, I think it was a realistic look at the fact that people and not machines are fighting this battle. We see plenty of mistakes and such like this in real medieval battles too.

My one gripe with this scene was the catapults. Actual catapults can only fling stones a few hundred feet at best. How were these Winterfell catapults flinging stones out in a high arc half a mile or further? A minor but annoying point. Not that they would have been effective either way. Catapults are deigned to both smash the enemy and inspire fear. As we know with the undead army, they neither feel fear, nor suffer too much from having a few dozen smashed and burned.

So off the Dothraki go only to disappear little by little. So much for that army but nothing about that charge seems unrealistic. I know someone might ask why the dragons didn’t follow them out to help with the attack. Let’s remember the previous two points about the Night King being able to fling deadly spears long distances and that they have an undead dragon to worry about. The plan was not to charge way out front but to keep the dragon’s close in to protect the armies and then strike the Night King. The Dothraki probably messed up that plan but luckily Jon and Daenerys didn’t do anything as reckless. Flying out into the darkness behind enemy lines against an enemy that is probably ready to take down the dragons does not seem smart. Especially if you might be worried that the generals can sling their spears just as well as the Night King can sling his spears at the dragons.

The dragons have two useful capabilities, slowing down the enemy army and vaporizing the Night King. There is no point in sending them out where they will be at huge risk of death when they can be more effective close in with the rest of the army. In addition, having the dragons mow down the enemy close in can help preserve the morale of the good army. Maybe the best point of attack would be when they are about 100 yards or so apart. Definitely striking the rear of the enemy army when contact has been made between the two lines is the latest time you want to use them.

The undead army finally arrives and the battle became an old fashioned dependable infantry clash. Now one thing I wonder about is whether Jon or any others realized what a suicide mission this was for so many of their people. The real goal was to simply hold until the Night King got close. Many would die and Jon and the others knew this but they didn’t say anything. Perhaps they were simply hopeful. They had given their people dragon glass weapons. Plus the dragons were now brought in close to friendly lines, destroying as many of the undead their handy little mouth-fires could roast.  Surely all that would preserve some lives.

However, the Night King’s wall of snow was unexpected and a nice little twist that the heroes couldn’t have predicted and had trouble dealing with. This turned the battle back in the villain’s favor and the undead army had the upper hand while Jon and Daenerys were lost in the blinding snowstorm. The two tried to find each other and the enemy in the blinding snow and I don’t know what else they might have been able to do except to try and find a way out of that mess.  Perhaps some contingency planning and exercises in anticipation of a possible blinding snowstorm might have helped but they did only have 24 hours or so to get ready.

Eventually the hero forces were decimated, and they made an admirable orderly retreat back behind the firewall. You can see once they tried to light it how cold it was outside. Thankfully Melisandre and a burst of adrenalin got it started. She’s better than tinder any day. An interesting point about the wall is that the undead eventually opened a couple channels across it and stormed in through these channels. That was actually favorable to the heroes. Now that their forces were so much smaller they could still operate effectively in the narrow channel between the fire wall and the castle walls. They could force the undead into unfavorable space conditions. The undead could not swarm from all directions now. They could only come from a limited number of directions. A smart move from the dead would have been to cover the whole fire but they are simple-minded and simply swarmed across when they had a few openings available. At first the heroes more easily dealt with this smaller trickle of undead however, the undead numbers were too great for that good luck to last.

Of course things got worse and they retreated back into the castle. A few interesting points here. One suggestion had been made that they should have had pitch ready to pour on the undead. Not a bad idea but pitch must be made and kept hot. Pitch requires burning timber and keeping the pitch hot requires even more burning timber. We’ve already seen that all the spare timber was probably used for the fire wall.  Plus we were shown how hard it was to keep flames going in that cold. The availability of pitch would have been a problem. Secondly, and on a positive note, the winding halls of the caste allowed the heroes to more effectively battle the undead because again the undead could not swarm in those tight conditions. However at this point the dead were mainly following the lead of the Night King and headed for the orchard and Bran. It was also suggested putting dragon glass on the top of the castle walls to make them unclimable (a word?) for the undead. But remember that the Night King has an undead dragon which could blow down the walls like nothing. Plus how much extra dragon glass did they have after making their weapons.

This is basically when the main battle ends and becomes a personal fight between the heroes and the Night King and we know how that went. And here is where I am left with one last gripe and one last observation about the battle. With all the regular army dead now, the Game of Thrones will basically be resolved by having a Dungeons and Dragons type party of high level adventurers fighting an army of 20,000 or so. Cool. But I still don’t know what that weird spiral symbol the Night King liked meant. And that’s not cool.