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58 Battle of Lake Peipus (#ub8e4670d-a524-5f57-a661-5d8f8cffe318)
59 Fall of Tenochtitlán (#uf7f785af-6755-5927-ba12-4a5aca4d7172)
60 Battle of Blenheim (#u4bdd828c-dbe0-5247-927c-3029e7b43663)
61 Battle of Hohenfriedberg (#u268c3de3-96e1-5691-b3ec-d2bbe7633034)
62 Battle of the Plains of Abraham (#ud309a66c-650a-5149-b2dd-0a3019643f97)
63 Siege of Yorktown (#u2de0154f-c1fd-5d7f-9057-df9491f29655)
64 Battle of the Little Big Horn (#u6a2b4a7e-4f9a-5255-9487-58e324bb5727)
65 Battle of Alam Halfa (#ud40e23c0-a1f5-56ba-9b4e-5764816c98db)
66 The Normandy Invasion (#u4ad733c8-ca98-5bea-841a-ea0d5941455e)
67 Operation Bagration (#udb401f54-1f28-521b-994a-984b3f46c92f)
68 The Six Day War (#uc8c74b1a-3daf-5d9a-8bd7-fad5fea7464d)
69 Tet Offensive (#ua25541a8-2dda-55e1-aab6-875aa1721228)
Chapter 5: Courage in the Face of Fire (#u10b02968-20e9-5107-acd9-8db20d3120d1)
70 Battle of Marathon (#ub600cd75-2c4f-5a8b-adb2-be868b5f2d0c)
71 Battle of the Catalaunian Fields (Châlons) (#u5166ba80-6c4e-51af-8d19-319251ca7e51)
72 Battle of Poitiers–Tours (#ue0c3d644-10f4-5808-8047-bbd453ec473a)
73 Battle of Lechfeld (#ua2a39129-7383-51c7-84f8-e2697c5eafed)
74 Battle of Arsuf (#u48aacf10-da28-5064-9708-22edebdcf226)
75 Battle of Borodino (#u8067198b-b32b-5a87-8ede-a192e8503ceb)
76 Battle of Leipzig (#ud33ac80c-7b9c-5adc-9c70-0573adf6d748)
77 Battle of Navarino Bay (#u266544aa-8c66-5041-9dc0-14c0df107d97)
78 First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) (#u51e2d3c9-cfa9-52d5-ac9e-ac66f28511a4)
79 Battle of Gettysburg (#ufc617fe7-ae58-5b88-815a-fc0f589592b3)
80 Battle of Tacna (#u6be8871a-0971-5fa4-aa7a-93e8f5f729ba)
81 Battle of Verdun (#uf6ff89b3-1c44-5442-b6cc-8f6bc86ab74d)
82 First Day of the Somme (#uf4366543-2787-5579-93af-fede3372b25e)
83 Guadalcanal (#u0928aaa7-74dd-529c-827c-53c6b9df0e30)
84 Stalingrad (#u52eb927a-2862-59f8-959b-351949e7bdf5)
85 Fourth Battle of Monte Cassino (#u659a5227-a091-548f-9578-17cdcb014bd0)
Chapter 6: In the Nick of Time (#ub540fdff-2a38-5db3-8eb4-5743d66e7618)
86 Battle of Kadesh (#u081873c1-a7b1-5af4-9f0d-d47ef143f29d)
87 Battle of Zama (#u888fd301-db94-5263-8d07-cce37d338016)
88 Battle of Adrianople (#ucaa3b7c7-2008-5834-866e-edbb6e6921ef)
89 Fall of Constantinople (#udc5c83b1-4e91-54da-ba59-2e09017a5b8d)
90 Battle of Sekigahara (#ua56a0c1e-b3c7-5217-9a5f-cb8914585ffe)
91 Battle of Marengo (#uc1c9fe98-ad96-5c26-960a-e1accf07b8a5)
92 Battle of Waterloo (#u33b07205-e5d9-55c7-8de8-59d89427f127)
93 Battle of Tannenberg (#u6f1d3aa9-d7f1-594a-9373-28ccd7b52eab)
94 First Battle of the Marne (#u08e42d64-ad2e-5595-9f91-d79f9c693a2e)
95 Defence of Tsaritsyn (#uc4ad636a-4f0c-5c39-94d3-ea6cf51f60d7)
96 Sink the Bismarck (#uf1fdc102-0301-5b2a-ade7-3d0173b59759)
97 Battle of Midway (#u6776ea99-24bd-5094-9edb-24637e98d2f2)
98 Battle of Kursk (#u86f970d2-d040-572e-a84e-9a639c3753be)
99 Battle of Dien Bien Phu (#ueec664a1-fcd4-5158-8294-2bbe9deddbee)
100 Battle for the Falklands (#u112ac3fd-1b9c-5302-b19f-b0a618cb8fa4)
Picture Section (#ud6fdc032-fc9e-53dc-8b3f-bbc16c22f4c7)
Bibliography (#u1c6d948d-1bcd-5e4d-9100-feb9b236bda3)
Index (#ue0406523-fd37-50a9-9af5-f1ed112f115c)
Acknowledgements (#u888ec3c6-34c8-596c-92e1-3b532ff3e973)
About the Author (#u2e356686-78d1-53ca-b79b-14acd2f61fb4)
About the Publisher (#uc39372c3-5e9b-563b-9c62-595c96214cd8)
MAPS (#ulink_ba2c8da1-2d5b-5cf0-8506-4a4bb662b217)
PREFACE (#ulink_1a50a2dd-30d6-5b9c-bfca-30bc05c8d0be)
Choosing just 100 battles from recorded human history is a challenge. Not just because it is necessary to cover a period of almost 6,000 years, but because men have fought each other almost continuously for millennia. Any century of battles has to be arbitrary. Anyone who knows anything about the history of war may be disappointed at what has had to be omitted, but each of the battles described here has something memorable about it. Between them, they tell us something about how the nature of armed combat has changed over time, and also how some things have remained the same, whatever changes in technology, organization or ideas separate one era from another.
It is an old adage that you can win a battle but lose a war. The battles featured here almost always resulted in victory for one side or another, but the victor did not necessarily win the war. Some battles are decisive in that broader historical sense, others are not. The further back in time we go, the more likely it is that an enemy could be finished off in one blow. The wars of the modern age, between major states, involved repeated battles until one side was battered into submission. Some of the great generals of the recent past – Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, Erich von Manstein – were on the losing side but are remembered nonetheless for their generalship. Some on the winning side have all but disappeared from the history books or from public memory.
In many of the battles featured here, the issue is not victory or defeat, but what the battle can tell us about the history of warfare itself. New weapons, new tactics and new ways of organizing armed forces can have a sudden impact on the outcome of a battle. But so, too, can leadership, a clever deception or raw courage. A history of battles through the ages shows that it is not just technical novelty that can make the difference, but the exercise of operational skill and imagination in planning, or qualities displayed on the field of battle itself, many of which are perennial. That is why the book has been divided up into a number of clear themes, which apply equally to the battles of the ancient world as they do to the battles of today.
Many of the descriptions here rely, of course, on contemporary accounts that are contradictory, confusing or plain wrong. Many battles have passed into legend. This means that some of the descriptions are best guesses by historians using all the evidence that is currently available. Tempting though it is to choose the most dramatic account, narratives of battle have to be treated with caution. Even the most modern battles – Stalingrad is a good example – are not free of embellishment or simplification or propaganda. This is perhaps inherent in the nature of the beast. Battles are remembered differently by victor and vanquished, and few people who are in the heart and heat of battle really know what is going on around them.
One remarkable thing about battles is the extent to which they have been recorded as art, from Greek friezes and Roman columns to the monumental paintings of the Napoleonic age or the modernist record of the two world wars. As a result, it proves much easier to illustrate the long history of combat than other aspects of the distant past. Where contemporary art is lacking, later generations have rendered great battles of the past with imagination and power. Each of the 100 battles featured here has been brought to life by the addition of some form of an image.
Imagination is important for the reader, too. No description, however rich, can capture the clamour of battle, the shrieks of the dead and dying, the squeal of horses, the thunder of guns, the smell of fear and the strange, eerie calmness that descends on the bloodstained landscape after the fighting is done. If these cannot be properly conveyed, they should not be forgotten. Battles are not computer games but pieces of living history – messy, bloody and real. That, at least, has not changed in 6,000 years.
Richard Overy
London and Exeter, 2013
INTRODUCTION THE TRUTH OF BATTLE (#ulink_1c321596-8281-5f40-b763-b9edeb648796)
A Japanese soldier, writing in his wartime diary during the Pacific War, confessed that, for all the horrors he confronted daily, the one beautiful thing about fighting ‘is the “truth” that only war can possess’. He was writing not principally about war, but about battle – the truth that soldiers face when they are actually in combat. It is a raw, unmediated truth, for the end point of conflict can be death, injury or surrender for those in combat on either side. No other human activity makes these demands, for they lie at the extremity of human endeavour: kill or be killed, survive or perish, conquer or be conquered. The moment of truth is compelling because there is no obstruction from the outside world between you and the possibility of death. It is a truth that can seldom be veiled because it is there to see in the harsh aftermath of a field or sea littered with corpses, in the silence of the dead and the screams of the dying, the triumphant victors often as battered, exhausted and depleted as those they have defeated. It is a truth that men, and it is almost always men, have faced from the earliest recorded battles in the civilizations of the ancient Near East to the conflicts of the contemporary world.
There is, of course, a distinction between wartime and battle. Wartime describes a state of conflict between two polities, whether tribes, city-states, nations or empires, which continues temporally even when no fighting is going on, and which can be ended by negotiation or truce rather than battle. Many wars drag on for decades, punctuated by numerous battles, some more significant than others. The modern world wars did not last for decades, but their truly global scope, in three dimensions, produced hundreds of individual battles from only a few of which it would be possible to predict the outcome of the entire conflict. Battles are certainly about achieving victory, however hollow it might prove, in defined space and defined time on land or sea (and for the last half-century only, in the air), but they do not necessarily win wars. They have their own distinct historical character as particular events rather than as states of conflict. Simply put, battles involve large bodies of armed men whose principal purpose is to overwhelm the body of armed men opposed to them by killing them, capturing them or forcing them to abandon the field. The reasons why they find themselves on the battlefield are always the product of a particular historical moment. But any study of a hundred battles over recorded history shows that the outcome is almost always decided by the same mix of general characteristics: leadership, raw courage, deception, innovation or, time and again, a moment of good fortune – the legendary cavalry topping the crest of the hill. This time span also makes it clear that there is no optimum battle plan towards which humankind has been gravitating. Though strategists search for the military equivalent of the philosopher’s stone to explain victory in battle, clever tactics, stratagems and novelties, morale or luck have always won battles, even if the technology available has become infinitely more sophisticated. Using battle to study the history of war is a reminder that, at the basic level of armed men pitted against armed men, warfare has changed much less over time than might be expected. This is why so many great commanders have avidly read accounts of battles fought long ago.
It is tempting to assume that fighting is something humans are predisposed towards, either psychologically or biologically, but the archaeological record shows that there have been long periods when human populations exhibited very little or no evidence of violence. Studies of the prehistoric populations of the southwest United States across a 5,000-year period have found no evidence of warfare whatsoever – neither skeletons with tell-tale cuts or broken skulls, or arrowheads lodged in them, nor evidence of stockade defences around the first small villages or settlements. Even after the population became more sedentary and cultural distinctions more marked, the archaeological evidence suggests that there was no organized violence for a further half a millennium. Only with a sharp change in environmental conditions and rising population levels from around 1100 to 1300 CE does evidence of warfare suddenly emerge in the burial record, with the skeletal remains of massacred groups or skulls broken open by weapons.
A rather different pattern emerges in the archaeology of northeast America. Here, evidence from around 5000 BCE of bone damage, weapon traces in skeletons and defensive ramparts shows that warfare seems to have been endemic, only to die out once settled communities were constructed. There are only scant traces of violence for the next 2,000 years; then, at some point after the turn of the first millennium CE, violence suddenly manifests itself on a large scale, evident in the discovery of a pit in South Dakota containing the skeletons of almost 500 massacred men, women and children. Clearly there are important environmental, social or cultural explanations for why humans choose to fight rather than collaborate, or find non-violent resolutions of conflict. The manifestations of violence in prehistoric communities across the Old World are similarly ambiguous. Evidence in pre-state Egypt shows that people were killed using arrows or spears; at Gebel Sahaba in Egyptian Nubia, more than 40 per cent of the burials in a cemetery dated to 12000 BCE have multiple injuries from weapons. In a Stone Age cave in Germany, the severed skulls of thirty-four men, women and children have been discovered, each head broken in by stone axes. In Europe, there is evidence of violence well before settled agricultural communities, which suggests that early nomadic cultures were as likely to be violent as the later, more sedentary ones. Yet here, too, can be found long periods in the archaeological record that show few if any signs of organized conflict or mass homicides.
The fact that violence between human communities over the past 20,000 years has been sporadic and at times uncommon suggests that warfare must have historical explanations rather than evolutionary ones. The early evidence of violence says little about whether these conflicts were battles as they are understood today, or mere raids for slaves and booty, ambushes to prevent encroachments on food or water sources, or ritualized acts of limited or mock violence like that still evident among tribal communities in early twentieth-century New Guinea. The idea of battle as a way of organizing violence in a disciplined way with a particular aim and a specific enemy is, according to the historical record, common only to particular cultures and across particular global regions. A study of the 2,000 years from the second millennium BCE to around 500 CE – the period when battles entered the historical record – has shown that battles were rare in most civilizations and that they were concentrated geographically in a swathe of territory from Mediterranean Europe through the Near East to Southern Asia. Out of 288 conflicts worthy of the name ‘battle’, 94 per cent occurred in this region, including 73 battles in civil wars. China records only two major battles over the same time span. The idea of a battle as a distinct event with its own choreography and rules seems to have been an invention of pharaonic Egypt. It was widely imitated in the Near and Middle East, and taken up with enthusiasm by the ancient Greeks and the Romans.
This is the form of battle that is familiar today and clearly it came to be widely imitated in the millennia that followed. That is not to say that all battles are equal. The exact ways in which battles have been organized and conducted over the past 2,000 years closely reflect specific cultures and prevailing historical conditions, for which anthropology is as useful as history. There have been periods when efforts were made to avoid battle, even when large armies were available. Late medieval Europe saw infrequent battles if deterrence, threats or political cunning could avoid them; eighteenth-century Europe saw a preference for manoeuvre warfare, in which armies were moved around as if on some giant chessboard with the aim to checkmate an opponent rather than force a real fight. Early modern warfare in Southeast Asia was limited by the desire to avoid battle while finding ways of seizing slaves or workers, though this did not exclude occasional conflicts of extreme violence. The refusal to accept battle, even when two armies are only miles apart, as Octavian did at Actium to frustrate Mark Antony, is highly ritualized and relies on what is regarded as culturally acceptable to both sides. Different cultures have evidently defined battle differently, from the sacred ritual surrounding Greek warfare to the utilitarian view of battle in modern warfare.
The one common denominator for all the battles identified from the historical record is the dependence on state or sub-state forms of organization that are capable of raising an army, seeing to its provisioning, and imposing sufficient levels of discipline (with the incentive of loot or the threat of punishment) to ensure that the rank and file remain in place long enough to fight. The capacity to raise an army does not mean a settled and powerful civilization. American Indian tribes could collaborate sufficiently to bring an army of warriors together long enough to achieve what was needed; the Mongol tribal units integrated by Genghis Khan into a completely militarized society represented a loose federation, but it was organized enough to divide men into divisions, battalions and platoons and to provide camels, oxen and carts to move the arrows and the few provisions that the steppe soldiers needed. The other requirement was money, and warfare played a central part in the creation of complex coinage and taxation systems – the cost of warfare was likely to exceed what could be supplied by the potential field force or navy on its own behalf. As battles became more complex with the addition of elaborate equipment and the need for large supplies of ammunition, food or weapons, Western societies came to dominate global warfare, though not exclusively so. They developed states and industrial economies capable of raising the technological and organizational threshold of conflict and applying more managerial values to the battlefield. The result since the eighteenth century was the onset of widespread asymmetric warfare between the West and the rest, though the odds could sometimes be overcome if traditional communities gained access to the new weaponry or if they could surprise their opponent. Increasingly, the only way to conduct modern battle was to borrow the Western way of war, as the Japanese navy demonstrated to devastating effect at Pearl Harbor. Even in this case, old and new mingled together as the bushido values of the Japanese military made surrender impossible, leaving some soldiers fighting to the death in the Pacific War armed only with swords.
If the cultural differences between battles in different eras and regions make it impossible to generalize about the historical circumstances that explain battle, some explanation is needed for the explosion in the number of battles fought over the last 1,500 years. The eighteenth-century English clergyman Thomas Malthus famously described the problems caused by overpopulation, which result in wars, disease and famine, all of which bring population back to levels the local environment can support. Population growth in the prehistoric age necessitated a search for additional resources, such as pasture, game or raw materials. If this coincides with adverse climate change, as seems to have been the case among the prehistoric native populations of the southwestern United States, then communities are compelled to violent competition for new resources. It would be wrong, however, to see this solely as a prehistoric solution. Changes in population levels in the vast Eurasian steppes partly explain the surges of violent migration and raiding from central Asia for hundreds of years in the first millennium CE. One of the excuses given centuries later for Hitler’s wars of aggression was the German search for Lebensraum (‘Living Space’) so that territory and resources could match population size. When Japan found access to additional resources for her overcrowded islands blocked off by the international economic crisis, the solution was invasion of China and, eventually, the seizure of resources and territory in Southeast Asia.
This suggests crude biological or material imperatives that are all too often overlooked or denied when describing human history, but which clearly act at certain historical moments as a driver towards conflict. There is, of course, an important difference between human and animal populations when faced with food shortages, climate change and competition for resources. Human beings are conscious of what they do. War is clearly the product of growing social and political organization, and the evolution of ideologies or cultures that see conflict as justified by defining the enemy ‘other’, whether it is the Persian Empire, the barbarians of the great migrations or the infidels and pagans defined by the mass religions. In the period from the early medieval world, when battles occur almost ceaselessly, religion runs as a clear thread through hundreds of them. When the Sudanese Mahdist forces attacked the British expeditionary force at Omdurman in 1898, they cried out ‘Fight the infidel for the cause of God!’ as they rushed towards the British machine guns. Not all religions have preached virtuous battle, but those that have – in particular Christianity and Islam in all their different guises – see some form of holy war, whether jihad or crusade, as a divine injunction. The political religions of the last century, fascism and communism, preached simply a secular version of holy war, justified by national struggle or the class war. Ideologies, religious or otherwise, were (and still are) capable of exerting an exceptional psychological pressure to accept self-sacrifice for the sake of a cause defined as noble or sacred.
Finally, there is war as a product of hubris. As more organized states or tribal federations emerged, there arose patterns of leadership that conferred upon kings, emperors and tribal chieftains exceptional power to demand fealty and compel service. The result was the emergence of warrior aristocracies whose members combined tough military service with land ownership or other symbols of distinction. In Europe and Asia, these warrior aristocracies dominated for several thousand years; even when larger and more settled political systems emerged, the aristocracies were expected to provide military leadership, rally their own peasants as military levies, and lead them into battle. This was the Prussian model of aristocracy, but it was not exclusively Prussian and can be found in state and sub-state units for thousands of years. Kings and their warrior elites did not need population pressure or religious idealism to fight, though these might have contributed, but fought over rival dynastic ambitions, claims to land through marriage or contract, the pursuit of wealth and empire for its own sake, or simply because that is what warrior elites did. Battle was the reason for their existence. In Frederick the Great’s Silesian wars in the 1740s, sixty noble generals were killed on the field of battle to ensure that Silesia was seized and held to satisfy Frederick’s lust for territory.
All these explanations played some part in the thousands of battles that have been fought across recorded history, even if each has its own particular historical explanation. Nevertheless, what is striking about any history spanning those 4,000 years are the common characteristics that emerge about the nature of battle itself. John Keegan, in his book The Face of Battle, put together a medieval, early modern and modern battle to illustrate how men ‘control their fears, staunch their wounds, go to their deaths’. But the same approach could cover all the battles in history, if there were as full a record from their participants as there has been for the past millennium. Even though battles are fought in a particular historical context and with changing military technologies, it is still possible to acknowledge their common features, and to understand what the face of battle meant for societies as far apart as the early city-states of the Near East and the developed, industrially armed states of the present. The experience of the volunteers, conscripts, levies, slaves or mercenaries who found themselves in battle on land or at sea is a daunting one. They inhabited briefly a special kind of community, cut off temporarily from the rest of the world, in which nothing mattered at that moment except prevailing over the enemy and avoiding their own death – the ‘truth of battle’.
The hardest thing to understand is the willingness to fight when, as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes understood more than 300 years ago, the rational thing to do is to run away. On every account we have from the participants, battle is a deeply traumatizing experience with exceptional levels of risk and danger and the ever-present prospect of death, or, what was often worse, a serious wound that would leave you helpless and in agony on the battlefield, later to be battered or speared or bayoneted to death if your side lost, or untreated and likely to die if they won. For most of recorded history, there was no agreed protection for those who were wounded or taken prisoner, and although prisoner-taking could be one of the benefits of battle, particularly if the prisoners could be made to fight for their captors or used as slaves, there are numerous accounts of mass slaughter, mutilation and torture. The power of the victor over the vanquished is absolute, arbitrary and, at the end of an exhausting and dangerous contest, likely to be brutal. Even the emergence of the Red Cross in the 1860s and the Geneva Conventions covering prisoners-of-war in the twentieth century have not affected the savage fighting in civil wars, nor, in the Second World War, the neglect or killing of millions of prisoners.
For most of those on ancient or modern battlefields, the willingness to fight is dictated by the options available. Social pressure, demands for sacrifice, harsh discipline, respect for comrades – often drawn from the same area or tribe – and temporary loyalty to a cause or a person combine to prevent mass desertion. Most accounts of battle from the ordinary soldier show that the event itself is dominated by a psychological commitment to combat once the point of no return has been reached. After weeks of marching and camping, actual battle can be exhilarating as men are overtaken by waves of pent-up adrenalin. Unsurprisingly, fear also exists widely in battle, yet fear does not debilitate those who fight. William Wharton, an American novelist who served at the front line in Europe in 1944, found that he was ‘scared more than most people’, but he controlled his fear because of his companions: ‘I discover the difference between being scared and being a coward is having other people find out.’ Small-group loyalty has almost certainly been the key to combat in battle because most soldiers and sailors see only a miniature part of the conflict in which they are involved, fighting side-by-side with the few men around them, the battlefield hidden by dust (in early battles), smoke (in later conflicts) or the accident of geography. In hand-to-hand fighting, found in battles across the whole historical span, there is little sense of any order or shape to the battle: the enemy in front of you has to be killed or maimed or he will kill you. At that moment, religious enthusiasm, loyalty to the king or the national ideal become meaningless. Battle is really a description of thousands of small fights for survival, which merge into the single contest once historians give them some narrative shape to explain who won and who lost.
For a large part of 4,000 years of recorded conflict, men have fought because of what they were promised or hoped to find when the enemy, whether on a battlefield or in a siege, is defeated. Looting – whether for treasure, slaves or sex – runs through the accounts of thousands of battles. The huge Ottoman army gathered by Sultan Mehmet II to besiege Constantinople in 1453 may have been attracted to the idea of jihad against the bastion of Orthodox Christianity, but as one observer noted of the repeated and fruitless attempts to storm the city, the soldiers ‘ran towards certain death for booty’. When the city was taken, Mehmet allowed only a day of looting instead of the three customarily allowed under Islamic law, but the eyewitness accounts render a squalid picture of Ottoman soldiers on the rampage, taking anything portable, tying together groups of inhabitants to be dragged off to slavery, raping both women and young boys. Soldiers were often not paid regularly for their service before the last few hundred years (though mercenaries would only fight if they thought they would profit from it with cash, salaries or loot), so they would take any perquisites of war they could find. At Poltava in 1709, Russian troops stripped their Swedish enemies naked on the battlefield, dead and wounded, and took away the boots and tunics as their just deserts. In much classical and early warfare, stripping the dead could provide a moment of good luck, as officers and commanders often took their cash or jewels with them in case they were appropriated in their absence. The capture of the Turkish commander’s ship at Lepanto in 1576 revealed his entire fortune in chests below decks, and the coins and jewellery were distributed among the incredulous marines and sailors who found it.
The possibility of booty was immediate before the professionalization of the military and its support organizations in the nineteenth century. For much of the previous 3,500 years covered by the battles in this book, armies were complex social units, accompanied by women and children, often in large numbers, and a motley crew of retainers, servants and labourers bringing the supplies and guarding any treasure. Wives commonly accompanied the march and awaited the outcome in the baggage train. Other women were brought along, voluntarily or otherwise, to service the sexual needs of the men. Hundreds of women would be employed preparing food, moving supplies, mending uniforms or helping to dig trenches. Ottoman armies numbered by chroniclers in the hundreds of thousands usually contained a whole community of followers, wives and concubines; the core of fighting men was only a smaller fraction of the whole. In Europe, the large train of women had been gradually suppressed by the seventeenth century, partly to allow armies to become more mobile but also on moral grounds. Women came to be excluded from military occupations and were left behind in the garrison towns. Those women who accompanied the army were widely regarded as prostitutes. This explains the savage killing of hundreds of women after the Battle of Naseby in the English Civil War. Puritan soldiers punished the women for their immorality, even though a number of them were the wives of Royalist officers. As women came to be excluded from military life, so battles became a male domain, occasionally invaded by a handful of women who wanted to serve as soldiers (an estimated 30 to 50 in the French Revolutionary Wars, 400 in the American Civil War). In the modern age, the identification of battle as an expression of male identity was a central feature of much pacifist writing by women, most famously in Virginia Woolf’s 1938 critique of posturing manhood, The Three Guineas. Since the First World War, women have once again come to form an important auxiliary arm to the regular forces, but now they are uniformed and organized, and bear no resemblance to the vast baggage-trains of earlier times.
In addition to the prospect of booty, soldiers have also been sustained, or alarmed, by religious symbols, superstitions, visions and omens. There are obvious reasons why appeals to the supernatural were important. Belief in a god or gods or the power of the sacred was common to almost all armies throughout history. Since victory was never certain, soldiers and their commanders searched for some sign that they enjoyed divine protection; indications that the opposite might be the case did not necessarily stop soldiers fighting, but it could be deeply demoralizing. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described arguments in Athens over how to interpret the Delphic Oracle when the priestess predicted that an enemy from the east would bring inevitable woe to the city – ‘from the topmost roofs trickles black blood’ – but that all-seeing Zeus ‘gives a wooden wall’ for ‘divine Salamis’. The pronouncement was difficult to interpret, though it was widely regarded as a signal of impending doom. But the Athenian Themistocles insisted that the wooden wall meant ships, and that the city should spend its accumulated wealth on procuring a new fleet. His view prevailed and the Persian fleet was destroyed at Salamis a few months later. In the later siege of Constantinople, when the fearful Greek population of the city awaited the Ottoman onslaught, there was an eclipse of the full moon that left just a thin lunar crescent, symbol of their Islamic enemy. The inhabitants saw this as a profound omen of the city’s collapse; the Ottoman army rejoiced at such a clear indication of divine favour and a few days later the city was in their hands. Battles were fought by soldiers blessed by priests, buoyed up by favourable auguries and omens, or certain that death in a sacred cause would ensure a life hereafter.
The conditions of most battlefields were such that superstitious expectation offered a thin ray of hope that somehow, amidst the sheer arbitrariness of combat, you might survive where others perished. The context of fighting across the ages has been universally grim. Soldiers often fought after a long march, already exhausted, with bleeding or blistered feet. They were at the mercy of the weather, and mud, rain or snow made a tough assignment tougher still. Dirt, insects, infection and hunger added to a soldier’s routine woes. The anti-hero in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front complains that his experience of war is only ‘despair, death, fear … an abyss of suffering’. The searing stories of the retreat of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Russia in 1812 show what price ordinary soldiers paid for their leaders’ grand ambitions, as well as the civilians unlucky enough to be in the path of a desperate army. In battle, the physical demands are hard for anyone who has not experienced it to grasp. After the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, the defeated Comte de Mérode recorded that he had fought continuously for thirty hours, despite suffering an injured and swollen knee, had had no sleep, no food, and just one swig of water. This could be a soldier’s tale from any battle. ‘Why,’ asks William Wharton, ‘do humans, especially military humans, want to do things the hard way?’ Soldiering before the age of aircraft and long-range artillery was an inefficient way of utilizing manpower that too often had soldiers fighting in a daze of exhaustion, at the end of their tether, bleeding from unnoticed wounds, and all because of what their commanders asked of them. Small wonder that time and again in battle accounts, from swigs of rum before a naval engagement to the half pint of brandy served to Napoleon’s soldiers just before Austerlitz, alcohol is used to revive flagging spirits, to dull sharp fears or to combat the freezing climate.
Heat was just as debilitating as cold and a great many of the 100 battles recorded here were fought in searing temperatures and dry conditions that quickly turned the battlefield into a fog of churned-up dust or sand. The critical resource in all kinds of weather, more important for soldiers than any weapon, was water. It is what every wounded soldier asks for first. A shrewd commander makes sure that the army is camped near a supply of fresh water or that water can be ferried to the battlefield. Richard the Lionheart only won the battle at Arsuf because Crusader ships plied along the coast leading to Jaffa with barrels of water for the exhausted, sweaty Europeans in his army. Even then, men died of heat exhaustion on the way. It is hard to imagine having to fight amidst all the clamour and gore of the battlefield for hours on end with no prospect of water to assuage the debilitating effects of dehydration. American army recruits in the Second World War did ‘water hikes’ to prepare them for the reality of battle, marching 100 kilometres (60 miles) over two days in warm weather with just a 1-litre (2-pint) canteen to last the whole time. ‘My mouth starts sticking to itself,’ wrote William Wharton, ‘my tongue to the top of my mouth, my teeth to my lips, my lips to each other.’
There comes a moment in most battles whose outcome is decided in a day or so of combat when one side or the other senses victory and the other senses defeat. Since most soldiers can see little more of the battlefield than what is immediately around them and are given almost no information in the midst of a battle, the way that sense is communicated comes either from the exhortations of commanders if victory seems likely, or the flight of leaders who realize that they have lost. The effect when a commander flees – as at Bannockburn in 1314 when Edward II turned tail – can be immediately damaging. Flight or surrender is a fast-moving infection. Once it is evident, the willingness to continue fighting evaporates with a startling speed. One of the strangest phenomena in battle is the moment when soldiers, who only minutes before are firing muskets or hacking away at the enemy, realize that they have to save themselves. Of course, surrender was often not an option, and there are numerous accounts of battles ancient and modern in which a unit of soldiers or horsemen is annihilated where it stands, surrounded by a sea of enemies. What that moment of certain death means, when men are observed fighting with a frenetic energy against all the odds, self-evidently cannot be known. But where it is possible to flee, at the exact moment when confidence in the outcome collapses, soldiers do so, sometimes in good order, but in a great many battles in complete panic. They are then pursued, hunted down and butchered. Napoleon’s Imperial Guard at Waterloo hurled themselves into the fray with determination, but shortly after, as Wellington’s lines moved forward, they could be seen on their knees weeping and calling for mercy. Soldiers in flight experience a psychological transformation now that their only concern is to save themselves rather than to protect the group.
For ordinary soldiers, the comprehension that they have won a battle can take time to sink in, partly because a large battlefield is a messy and incoherent whole, in which fighting might continue for longer in one small part while overall victory is assured. The Battle of Austerlitz was essentially won by Napoleon by mid-day, but the fighting did not finish at one end of the field for another four hours. Even commanders often have only a hazy view of how a battle is going. They have relied until recently on primitive forms of communication once battle is joined. Very few armies imitated the Mongols, whose commanders would seek high ground in order to signal with coloured flags to their units about their movement on the battlefield. Navies were better adapted to complex signalling, but even here a naval mêlée could easily mask the overall balance of the battle. Otherwise, even with the advent of radio, it could be difficult to direct embattled units or to be confident that plans were being fulfilled. Victory slowly emerged from the literal fog of war only when the enemy abandoned the field, surrendered, or was surrounded and killed.
Victory in battle is clearly likely to be exhilarating and soldiers and sailors indulge that victory in a variety of ways, though time and again they are evidently too exhausted, too damaged and too thirsty to do anything more than occupy the ground. Organized pursuit of a broken enemy, even if strategically sensible, is risky with exhausted men and in many famous cases failed to materialize. The aftermath of battle can be anti-climactic for the winners, particularly the wounded, who die later in droves after battles ancient or modern, their thankless task achieved at an awful cost. Nor is there any guarantee that once the fight is over, there will be food and water available.The Swedish victors at Breitenfeld had to wait until the following morning before they were given anything to eat or drink. The soldiers who survive know what they have done and will use it to weave their own personal narratives, heroic or otherwise. In earlier battles they were often rewarded at once to avert potential disaffection or mutiny and to maintain discipline among men now liberated from the tension of combat.
However exhilarating victory might be, at least for a bittersweet moment, battles seldom decided a war, and victory in one battle could quickly be tarnished by defeat in the next. Beaten soldiers or sailors returned home understanding the nature of their failure, even if glad to have survived. Japanese soldiers were encouraged to kill themselves rather than remain alive and dishonoured. One young conscript in the 1930s recorded in his diary that he was given a knife by his mother so that he could ritually disembowel himself if he was captured. The homecoming could be a mixed blessing even for the victors. The sailors who helped to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588 were delivered to ports in England a few weeks later with no pay and no means of finding food or shelter save begging. Winning a battle could also be costly for the fortunate commander. The Roman general Flavius Aetius, who defeated Attila the Hun, was battered to death by his jealous emperor in person when he returned to Rome. The victor of Ain Jalut, where the Mongols were finally stopped in their tracks on their way to Egypt, was murdered by jealous officers on his way home. Battle is an event in its own right, with its own history and outcome, but what is made of the battle depends on the wider historical context, political as much as military. Winning in this sense really is only half the battle.
In some cases, battles have been used to serve as symbols or myths to endorse a particular political order or to encourage a shared cultural identity, and have soon assumed a historically abstract character, important for what they might mean for future generations and often surrounded by embellishments that turn the account from historical reality into a comfortable legend. For most ancient and early medieval battles, historians rely on accounts that are literary representations of what might have happened, largely devoid of detail and usually written long after the event. The eleventh-century epic French poem Chanson de Roland was based loosely on a battle that took place at Roncesvalles three centuries before, but its purpose by then was to enshrine notions of Christian nobility in French culture. The famous battle on the ice at Lake Peipus in 1242, where Alexander Nevsky drove back the German invader, was distorted by centuries of myth-making, and in the twentieth century it was adopted as a central motif of Soviet propaganda against the fascist enemy in the Second World War. The Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Somme have become central epic accounts in the search for a British identity, symbols of endurance and courage. Other battles are appropriated as foundation moments – the Battle of the Volturno River in 1860 cemented the unification of Italy; Marengo paved the way for Napoleon’s empire; Actium in 31 BCE became the founding battle of the Augustan age and the triumph of Octavian. There is also a history of how battles have been remembered once they are transformed over time into legend, distinct from the history of the battles themselves.
‘Battle’ as the key element of warfare for at least the past 4,000 years may nevertheless be dying out. The American belief that there is now a fundamental ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA) – prompted by the new possibilities opened up by cyberwar and precise drone strikes – might make battle in a conventional sense obsolete. The exploitation of the ‘cognitive domain’ suggests that enemies could be subject to psychological pressures and threats that produce disorientation and uncertainty sufficient to obviate the need for actual killing. Perhaps the world is about to enter on one of those long periods of tranquillity detected by archaeologists when they examine the hidden record of prehistoric violence. Or then again, perhaps not.
CHAPTER 1 LEADERSHIP (#ulink_54acbf02-c811-5c14-989d-639336914c55)
In our current age, ‘leadership’ is taught as a classroom subject, as if everyone could become a leader if they paid enough attention and did their homework. The history of warfare through the ages should be enough to disabuse us of this illusion. The quality of leadership has varied widely in battle. The fact of command does not turn an indifferent officer into a true leader, any more than a leadership seminar today can turn someone into a leader of tomorrow. Indeed, it is possible for a leader to emerge quite independent of the formal military structures, as the success of Spartacus as leader of the slave rebellion against Rome, or the victory of the iconic Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolution, have both demonstrated. Successful military leaders are usually defined by their successes, but in many conflicts this means success on the battlefield, once, twice or many times, rather than success in war. Napoleon Bonaparte and Erich von Manstein are two such figures whose qualities of leadership are not in doubt, with an impressive list of battle successes, but both faced historical forces that doomed their efforts to eventual failure.
What, then, defines leadership in battle if it is not ultimate strategic or political triumph? This is a difficult question to answer because the nature of battlefield leadership has changed considerably through time. When rulers and generals led their men in person, leadership was based partly on the bravery and fighting skill they displayed as an example to their men. When a leader fell or was killed, the effect on those fighting around him could be disastrous, as it was in the medieval battle of Legnano when the German king, Frederick Barbarossa, fell from his horse in the fighting and disappeared from view. Leaders who ran risks were respected; those who sat prudently on a nearby hill or in their tent relied on lesser commanders to win the loyalty of their troops and sustain their will to fight. In modern wars, the leaders seldom shared the dangers of battle and could be remote from the action. Their skill lay in working out the operational strategy that would secure victory, and their qualities were managerial as well as physical. Even then, knowledge that the leader was there, in contact, was still important. When Napoleon retired hurriedly from the disastrous campaign in Russia in 1812, he doomed his remaining, hopeless troops.
The most distinguished battlefield leaders have been those who combined a grasp of operational reality, a willingness to be imaginative with new technology and tactics, a courage and confidence communicated to those around them, and a willingness to share the dangers of combat. When Alexander the Great went calmly to his tent to sleep on the night before the Battle of Gaugamela, his nervous officers were uncertain how to react. Alexander assured them that victory was certain and, according to the ancient accounts, slept soundly. The overwhelming majority of battles through recorded history suggest that soldiers and sailors fought on the day for their leader rather than for any great ideal, whether religious, political or national. This explains how fighters from very different ethnic or cultural or national communities, often pressed involuntarily into service, could still fight side-by-side against the common foe. The battlefield was a community all of its own in which leaders of whatever kind played a decisive part in holding that community together.
It is obvious in any history of battles that leadership is not a universal quality among military leaders, and many of those on the losing side were poor planners, with little grasp of the battlefield, were overconfident or arrogant in their assessment of the enemy, or were simply lacking in the necessary courage and optimism their forces needed. Such leaders can be found in many of the battles selected here. On the other hand, it was possible to have two leaders of evident quality pitted against each other, where only one could win. The Battle of Hastings perhaps comes closest to that model. It would be difficult to fault Harold for what went wrong that day and no-one would consider it a historical anomaly had he won the field rather than William. This is a reminder that even leadership was seldom enough on its own, which is why innovation, deception, raw courage or good fortune were there to supplement it.
1. BATTLE OF GAUGAMELA (#ulink_73a97260-3b5d-59fe-903f-7fe61b9505f2)
1 October 331 BCE
In October 331 BCE, Alexander the Great destroyed in a single day the power of the largest empire in the Middle East, that of the Persian ruler Darius III. Success had followed Alexander since he took the throne of Macedonia in 336 BCE, but victory over Persia and its allies sealed his legendary reputation as a military genius at the tender age of twenty-five.
Alexander succeeded to the throne following the murder of his father, Philip. Within five years, he had confronted the Persian Empire and its wide network of satrapies (provinces) in Anatolia, the coastal communities along the eastern Mediterranean littoral and in Egypt. He seems to have been an instinctive battlefield commander, though aware of the lessons to be drawn from triumphs of the past and the strategic practices of his father. In 333 BCE, he inflicted a heavy defeat on the Persian emperor at the narrow coastal plain around Issus in northern Syria, but failed to capture him. Alexander had ambitions to become master not only of Western Asia and Greece, but of the entire area that the wealthy warrior empire of Persia had ruled for centuries. In 331 BCE, he set out from Egypt to track Darius down somewhere in present-day Iraq, determined it seems to inflict a decisive defeat on the Persians. According to classical historians, he went armed with news from the oracle at Siwah in Egypt’s Western Desert that he might be the son of Zeus, chief of the Greek gods. This certainly might explain the remarkable confidence that Alexander displayed in the final showdown against a Persian army at least four times larger than his own.
The Macedonian force was still large – 40,000 foot soldiers and 7,000 cavalry – and its movement across hundreds of miles of territory was an organizational feat in its own right. Alexander crossed from Egypt to Syria, where he lingered for some weeks, waiting to hear if Darius was preparing his own army for combat. When news reached him in mid-July of the Persian emperor’s whereabouts, Alexander led his army towards the River Euphrates, intent on his showdown. On the opposite side there were 3,000 of Darius’s cavalry under the command of Mazaeus, but they withdrew southwards, scorching the earth as they went. This was to force Alexander to take the longer northern route past the Armenian mountains then down into the valley of the Tigris, where Darius was already preparing his battlefield near the village of Gaugamela. Stakes and snares were set to halt a cavalry charge; the ground was flattened to enable the 200 Persian chariots armed with sharp scythes to run straight and fast at the ranks of the enemy. Ancient authors talked of one million men in the Persian army, but the number is likely to have been perhaps 200,000, of whom 30,000 were cavalry drawn from all over the empire. Fifteen Indian elephants were to guard the centre of the Persian line.
Alexander captured Persians sent to reconnoitre his force and learned exactly where Darius was. On 29 September, he ordered his army to march off in battle order for a possible night attack on the enemy; sensing their fear as they sighted the 100,000 camp fires of the enemy host, Alexander called a halt on the heights overlooking the ‘Camel’s Hump’, the hill from which Gaugamela took its name. He spent the day exhorting his troops and inspecting the prepared battleground. In the evening he made a sacrifice in honour of Fear, to propitiate the emotion. Then he worked out his battle plan in detail with his commanders, compensating for the strength of the enemy by unconventional means.
On the following morning, 1 October, Alexander woke late, well rested and confident of the outcome – a mood that was intended to inspire confidence in his men. His complex battle-line was drawn up: on the left, a large body of horse and shield-bearers under Parmenion; in the centre, 10,000 of the highly-trained Foot Companions in a phalanx armed with the formidable two-handed 6-metre (20-foot) sarissa spears, flanked by 3,000 shield-bearers (light infantry); and sloping to the right, creating an angled front, Alexander with his cavalry, fronted by archers and slingers. On each wing a ‘flap’ of cavalry was attached, among whom were concealed heavily-armed infantry, which could fall back to protect the rest from encirclement. Behind these were 20,000 reserve infantry, which could be moved forwards to create a large protected oblong.
Managing such a complex battlefield was difficult, as information could only be sent by messenger or trumpet, and thick dust was thrown up by the horses wheeling around on the sandy earth. Alexander’s strategy carried risks should any of the units misunderstand their orders or fail to hold fast. Darius had a simpler plan: to send forward his much larger bodies of cavalry, to decimate the Foot Companions with the scythed chariots, and to scare off the Greek cavalry with the elephants. Around mid-day, Alexander’s army moved onto the prepared battlefield in tight order. What happened next relies on accounts whose authors had a vested interest in painting Alexander’s achievements in glowing colours, but the main shape of the battle seems clear. Alexander moved his cavalry forwards but to the right to tempt the Persian left to follow him, thus exposing the centre and opening up a gap in the Persian line. On rougher ground, the Persian Scythian cavalry charged at Alexander, but were caught up among foot soldiers and archers. Darius released the chariots, but they were subjected to an accurate volley of arrows and sling-shots; those that reached the Macedonian lines were let through, then slaughtered by the soldiers behind. The rest of Alexander’s line was subject to heavy cavalry attack, and might well have collapsed, but Alexander, looking for the gap caused in the Persian centre, wheeled round and charged directly at Darius and his entourage, avoiding the elephants. The Macedonian Foot Companions with their fearsome sarissas and their cry of ‘alalalalai’ surged forwards and Darius, sensing his extreme danger, fled from the scene.
The flight of the emperor seems to have infected much of the rest of the Persian army, which melted away to the south and east. Large numbers of horsemen had succeeded in cutting past Parmenion and rampaged forward to seize Alexander’s baggage camp, where, to their surprise, they met the 20,000 reserves, who overwhelmed and destroyed them. Alexander rode off after Darius but his rearguard fought a ferocious defence and by the time the battlefield could be left behind and the hunt begun, Darius was already far away, fleeing to the mountains and the safety of the city of Ecbatana (Hamadan). The Persian emperor had overestimated the power of sheer numbers and fought a predictable battle; Alexander, by contrast, had made the most of his limited numbers, using them to unhinge the enemy at a crucial moment by careful exploitation of combined-arms tactics. Victory at Gaugamela brought him a reputation in the classical world to match the mythic stories of Achilles or of Hercules. Alexander moved on to Babylon and then the Persian capital at Susa. In so doing, he became, it has been estimated, the richest man in the known world.
