A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  Dead Soviet troops lie among wrecked army vehicles in the ruined city of Kharkov, captured by the German Army in March 1943 after a lightning counterattack orchestrated by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.

  CHAPTER 2

  AGAINST THE ODDS

  The 1896 Battle of Adwa is depicted in this section from an Ethiopian mural painted in the 1960s. The battle resulted in the comprehensive defeat of an Italian colonial army.

  To fight against the odds can mean many different things. It can simply represent a battlefield triumph of a much smaller force over one much greater in size. There are many examples through history where sheer numerical or material advantage has not been enough to secure victory. Against the odds can also describe a battle fought successfully against a famous military juggernaut, whose defeat few would have predicted. When the Mongols were defeated at Ain Jalut by a Mamluk force, few observers would have thought the outcome likely. The Battle of Carrhae was fought against a large, well-organized Roman army by horsemen with military traditions from the Asian steppelands, and most contemporaries would have bet on a Roman victory. The Norse Vikings, who ravaged northern Europe in the early medieval world, carried a terrifying reputation before them, yet at Edington in southern England and Clontarf near Dublin, their conquests were halted in their tracks.

  Against the odds has yet another sense as well. There can be many factors that stack the odds against one side or the other, whether it is material advantage, reputation, topography or betrayal. In most cases, the side with the odds stacked heavily against them, for whatever reason, loses the battle. But in other cases the menace of overwhelming odds can evoke a response – better planning, greater determination or outstanding courage – to compensate for adversity. Few would have imagined that the small garrison at Rorke’s Drift could hold out against a Zulu army, but the embattled men found reserves of desperate bravery to help them to do so. Soldiers or sailors with nothing to lose can evidently, under the right conditions, find the means to obstruct an enemy confident of victory. Indeed, high odds in your favour may even be an inhibiting factor if they induce overconfidence, careless operational thinking or a lack of the necessary psychological pressure to push that advantage home.

  Guerrilla leader Fidel Castro drives into the Cuban capital, Havana, following the victory of his irregular forces over the larger and better-armed Cuban army.

  An imbalance of resources or men can be misleading, since there are cases where sheer numbers manifestly fail to give the advantage. The vast numbers facing the British-Egyptian expeditionary force in the Sudan in 1898 were overcome by fire discipline and machine guns. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary fighters on Cuba in 1958 had none of the sophisticated weaponry available to Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, but they prevailed in large part because the government forces they faced suffered from a loss of morale in the face of widespread popular hostility to the regime and the crumbling confidence of the dictator himself.

  Technical or moral factors can play an important, even decisive, part in tilting the balance back when, on paper, forces seem unevenly matched. This phenomenon is common in the development of asymmetric warfare during the course of the twentieth century, in which a notionally powerful state finds itself unable to bring that power to bear effectively against an elusive or determined enemy. This imbalance was evident in the struggles to liberate areas from colonial rule or post-colonial dictatorship. French failure in Algeria and Vietnam in the 1950s, for example, was not a product of military weakness in any formal sense, but a result of popular hostility to colonialism and growing uncertainty among the French people about whether empire was any longer worth the military cost of defending it. The United States has enjoyed the world’s largest military budget for decades, but that has not made it any easier to project that power in Vietnam or Somalia, or in the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan. Here, too, the odds against smaller and less sophisticated forces can be compensated for by a variety of factors that inhibit the full exercise of power by the dominant state. It is possible to be too powerful as well as too weak. Nuclear weapons might well have transformed the war in Vietnam but they were unusable given the prevailing political situation; drone strikes are supposed to wear down the resistance of Al Qaeda but they have failed to halt the terrorism and invite wide condemnation. The 4,000-year history of battles shows that an apparently weaker or outnumbered force can, under the right circumstances, achieve much against the odds.

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  No. 17 THERMOPYLAE AND SALAMIS

  August 480 BCE

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  The Greek victory over the vast invading army and navy of the Persian emperor Xerxes in the late summer of 480 BCE is one of the great legends of the classical world. The famous 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, led by their king, Leonidas, has for centuries been a model for courage and discipline seldom exceeded in the modern age – and is now the subject of a blockbuster film. Though this was a battle lost, it was a costly victory for the Persians, and almost immediately following it, the huge Persian fleet, three times the size of the combined Greek vessels, was shattered at the great naval battle of Salamis. Greek independence was saved and Persia finally pushed back into Asia.

  The odds were stacked overwhelmingly in the Persians’ favour, for Xerxes could mobilize the soldiers and ships of his many vassal states. The Greek chronicler Herodotus, writing some forty or fifty years after the battles, numbered the Persian army at 1,700,000. Modern calculations suggest 180,000, including camp followers, and perhaps 130,000 soldiers, marines and sailors in a fleet that Herodotus numbered at 1,207 vessels, a figure more readily accepted today than his statistics on the army. The Greek alliance – those city-states in the peninsula not yet vassals of Persia – could muster only a fraction of this manpower, though in general they were more heavily armed and armoured than Persian soldiers. The Greeks depended on a navy that was for the most part newly built. The Athenian leader Themistocles had persuaded the citizens to use rich new supplies of silver, discovered at the mines of Laurium, 60 kilometres (40 miles) from Athens, in 483 BCE, to fund the building of a large fleet of trireme ships to guard against a Persian invasion. Athens had around 200 triremes by the time Xerxes began the invasion three years later; the rest of Greece supplied perhaps 170–80 ships.

  Xerxes’s strategy was simple. He would march his huge army into Greece, supported and supplied on the seaward flanks by his fleet, until he had defeated any city-state not sensible enough to send him the gifts of water and earth indicating submission. Unlike the failed invasion at Marathon ten years earlier, Xerxes bridged the Hellespont at the modern Turkish Straits so that his army could march overland to its objective. The Greeks met in council at Corinth in 481 BCE to decide their strategy. The Spartans and Corinthians favoured defending at the Isthmus of Corinth to guard the Peloponnesian peninsula. Themistocles, his arguments reinforced by a brand-new fleet, argued that the Persians could easily envelop the defending Greeks by landing troops from their fleet behind them. His strategy was to find a site further north to halt the Persian army while the Greek fleet engaged the Persians and cut off the army’s source of supply. With reluctance the others agreed, though the Spartan king would only take 300 men with him as they sailed north. The Persians swept into Macedonia and Thessaly in the summer of 480 BCE and marched south towards Athens. The Greek army, around 10,000 men, withdrew to the pass at Thermopylae, only 15 metres (50 feet) wide at its narrowest point, and the only road south for a large army. The Greek fleet positioned itself at Artemisium on the flank to keep the Persian ships away. A sudden gale on 26 August wrecked between 200 and 400 of the Persian ships, which were lighter and less seaworthy than Greek ships. The two fleets clashed inconclusively on 30 August, but according to Herodotus, a second gale that night scattered and destroyed more of the Persian ships.

  That same day, the Persian army tried to break through at Thermopylae, only to find that the few thousand Greeks, with the 300 Spartans at their core, could hold the narrow p
ass with their longer spears and heavier armour, while the Persian archers could not find room to manoeuvre effectively. But on 31 August, Xerxes was told of a narrow gorge that led through the hills beside Thermopylae and dispatched his 10,000 crack troops, the ‘Immortals’, to navigate the path and attack the Greeks from the rear. Leonidas sent most of his forces south to escape destruction, and with just 1,400 men he came out for a final battle with the vast Persian army. They all died where they stood, fighting, according to Herodotus, with ‘their hands and teeth’ when their swords and spears were lost.

  German artist Wilhelm von Kaulbach painted an imaginative version of the Battle of Salamis in 1858. Kaulbach (1804–74) was famous for his paintings of scenes from world history.

  Themistocles received news of events at Thermopylae in the camp at Artemisium, and ordered the fleet to sail south at once. They arrived a few days later in the straits by the island of Salamis, which lay opposite Athens and the Piraeus. Xerxes’s army marched through Attica, sacked Athens, and reunited with the Persian fleet at the city’s port. The Greek allies argued about the next step: the Spartans, whose admiral Eurybiades commanded the fleet, wanted to withdraw once again to the Peloponnese; Themistocles pointed out that this would allow the Persians to land forces wherever they wanted and insisted on staying at Salamis to engage the enemy fleet. Themistocles won the day and the outcome at Salamis showed that his strategic thinking, as the Athenian historian Thucydides later wrote, ‘displayed genius in the most unmistakable way’. Yet arguments between the Greek allies continued until, on 23 September, the Persian fleet arrived at the mouth of the narrow Salamis Strait.

  The ancient accounts do not make clear why Xerxes sought a battle when the Greek fleet could have been blockaded. Modern views suggest that the Persian emperor wanted to avenge the losses to his fleet by one decisive battle that would salve his pride. On the day of Salamis, he set up a throne on Mount Aegaleus overlooking the Strait to watch what he expected to be a decisive victory. The Greeks still had an estimated 360 ships. The Persian fleet, though still vastly greater, now contained only an estimated 600–800 vessels after the earlier losses. The Persians drew up the fleet in three ranks on a north-south axis in open sea, but the ships then had to turn sharply to the west to enter the narrow straits in much smaller lines, and here their numerical superiority was no longer an advantage – it was the naval equivalent of Thermopylae. The Greeks, according to the chronicles, sang a paean before they sailed, which put the stakes clearly before them: ‘Forward sons of the Greeks… Now is the fight for everything.’

  The details of the battle itself remain frustratingly sketchy. To encourage Xerxes to attack, Themistocles sent a messenger to the Persian camp with false news that the Greeks were intending to flee, but the lines of Greek ships, drawn up north to south across the narrow channel, instead did the equivalent of what Leonidas’s Spartans had done, luring the Persian ships on, then moving out to ram and board them. The disadvantage of greater numbers soon became evident. The Persian ships crashed into each other, lost formation, and even, it seems, attacked each other in error. It is possible to picture the water full of a mess of drowning men, capsized ships, the debris of broken oars, the wounded and dying. The heavier Greek vessels were at an advantage when it came to ramming, while their more heavily armed marines could be deployed more easily on a narrow battlefront. Persian ships tried to escape and instead became entangled. The Greek marines disembarked to finish off isolated groups of Persians who had struggled to shore. Herodotus has Greek ship losses at 40, but Persian losses at 200 sunk and more captured. Whether these figures are precise or not, the Persian defeat was real enough.

  According to Aeschylus, who served at Salamis, Xerxes ‘shrieked aloud’ at the sight of the disaster, ‘rent his clothes’ and ordered a retreat. Salamis was a decisive battle, entirely against the odds, and it demonstrated how sea power, properly exploited, could, in the right geographical circumstances, compensate for any weakness on land. Fortunately for the Greeks, Themistocles turned out to be a strategic genius. A smaller Persian army returned in 479 BCE, but was shattered at the Battle of Plataea, while the Persian fleet was finished off the same year at Mycale. Even more than Marathon, the victory at Salamis saved Greece and opened the way to the extraordinary flowering of classical Greek culture that followed.

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  No. 18 BATTLE OF ZELA

  1 August 47 BCE

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  Every schoolchild knows the phrase made famous by Julius Caesar: ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ – ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. However, the battle at which he is supposed to have uttered the immortal words is all but unknown. At the town of Zela (now Zile in modern-day northern Turkey), Caesar’s legions faced a very much larger enemy on the very site where, 20 years earlier, a Roman army had been comprehensively beaten. The Battle of Zela was a much riskier venture than Caesar’s brief epigram suggests, but in the end it was indeed a short, sharp victory for the Roman side.

  The battle was prompted by events during the civil war that had raged between Caesar and Pompey (his erstwhile colleague in the First Triumvirate). The war ended with Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus and his subsequent murder in 48 BCE on the orders of Ptolemy XIII, one of two claimants to the throne of Egypt. Caesar arrived in Alexandria shortly after Pompey’s death and began a notorious affair with Cleopatra VII, the other claimant to the throne. After summoning Roman reinforcements and allies from the garrisons of the Middle East, Caesar defeated Ptolemy, and Cleopatra became queen (as co-ruler with her younger brother Ptolemy XIV). With Egypt secure as an ally, Caesar left with just 1,000 men to settle affairs in the Roman provinces in the Middle East and Anatolia, where some of the local rulers had supported Pompey. One province in particular took his attention. While the civil war distracted Roman commanders, Pharnaces II, who had been installed by Pompey as king of the Crimea, arrived in Anatolia to claim back the kingdom of Pontus, taken from his family by the Romans a few years after the first Battle of Zela. Pharnaces defeated Caesar’s local commander Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, seized the region, castrated and enslaved all Roman citizens and murdered Roman tax collectors. This was a challenge Caesar could not allow to go unpunished.

  A statue of the Roman general Julius Caesar stands in the corner of the Piazza Tre Martiri in Rimini. The statue was presented to the city by the dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933. Mussolini’s Fascist movement often used heroic imagery from ancient Rome.

  As Caesar approached, Pharnaces tried to buy him off with the offer of his daughter and a heavy golden crown in return for the right to rule his ancestral lands, but Caesar was not to be appeased. The details of the battle that followed are scanty. The number of men on each side is at best an estimate: perhaps 20,000 with Pharnaces, while Caesar brought four badly depleted legions, one composed of local troops from neighbouring Galatia, which Caesar had compelled the ruler, Deiotarus, to provide as penance for supporting Pompey. It is likely that the seasoned troops with Caesar were greatly outnumbered. Pharnaces made camp on a hilltop at Zela, confident that he would repeat the victory over the Romans won by his father Mithridates in 67 BCE. Caesar was camped 8 kilometres (5 miles) away, but during the night of 31 July moved his force to the opposite side of the valley from Zela to await the probable battle. While Caesar’s troops began to fortify their hilltop, Pharnaces moved to catch them unprepared.

  The chief account of the battle, in The Alexandrian War, was written by an anonymous Roman officer. According to this source, Pharnaces massed his forces together, including a cohort of scythed chariots, and set them off down the hill to cross the valley floor and rush up the far slope towards the Romans. Caesar thought this was simply a display, since no sane commander would send his troops and horses uphill to fight a battle, but the enemy rolled on until the chariots reached the surprised Roman line. Caesar hastily assembled his legions and showers of javelins blunted the impact of the first wave of chariots. Despite the confusion and the unequal numbers, the discipli
ned Roman army drove the enemy back, killing and capturing a great many, until they reached and occupied the camp at Zela. Pharnaces fled back to the Crimea where he was later killed in a fight with one of his governors. Caesar, it must be assumed, had the tactical skill and inspiration lacking in the two Roman commanders already defeated in Pontus, though too little is known of the battle to be certain of how the odds were overcome, save the tactical ineptitude of the tiring charge uphill against veteran Roman legionaries.

  Caesar wrote to a correspondent in Rome after the battle that he had come and seen and conquered, a phrase borrowed, so it is thought, from the Greek philosopher Democritus. The campaign against Pharnaces completed the pacification of Asia Minor. Caesar sailed back to Italy, where he landed in September 47 BCE. Three years later he planned another major expedition to the east to punish the Parthians for the defeat of Crassus at Carrhae, hoping to take 16 legions and 10,000 archers and cavalry with him. Shortly before he was due to depart, on 15 March 44 BCE, he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a group of men alarmed by his appointment as ‘Perpetual Dictator’. Though Caesar fought back, these were odds even he could not overcome.

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  No. 19 BATTLE OF EDINGTON

  May 878

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  Anyone travelling along the railway line that links Exeter to London will notice shortly after Westbury a large white horse laid out in the chalk of a shallow hillside. It is said to commemorate the site of the Battle of Edington fought between the West Saxon King Alfred and the forces of the Danish leader Guthrum, though the truth of the story is elusive. The Saxon victory has always been seen as a defining moment in English history, when the future of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom was finally saved from the apparently irresistible encroachment of the Vikings. Little is known in detail about the battle itself (or if it even took place at Edington) but it came to symbolize the end of this stage of Viking conquest, a time when all the dice had seemed loaded in their favour.