The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  Over a period of five years, Pyrrhus fought and won a series of battles against the Romans in Italy. But each battle got a little bit harder. In the first, at Heraclea, the Greeks faced a Roman Army of around 50,000 men; Pyrrhus had only half that number, but he also had a secret weapon – twenty war elephants. At first, the elephants were a tactical triumph. Few Europeans had ever seen one before and they caused widespread panic in the troops as they stampeded the Roman cavalry horses. Pyrrhus was able to defeat the much larger Roman Army, but at a price. Up to 13,000 of his men were killed in action.

  After Heraclea, Pyrrhus marched north, hoping that many Italians, unhappy with Roman domination, would rebel and join his cause. But he had badly misjudged the situation. The Italians had grown used to Roman protection from enemies and only a handful rose up to join Pyrrhus.

  Pyrrhus fought the Romans again, but this time the shock value of the elephants had gone. The Romans had learned that if they simply stood aside, the elephants would charge harmlessly past. As they went by they jabbed them in their sides and trunks with short throwing spears, which panicked the elephants, causing them to go on the rampage trampling all over their own troops.

  Another innovative Roman counter-attack was their use of flaming pigs. Supposedly, the Romans tarred pigs with pitch, set them alight, and sent them in the general direction of the elephants, causing them to stampede.

  Pyrrhus won the battle, but again lost many of his best men.1 In fact, he had lost two-thirds of his Army during the fighting and had little to show for his efforts.

  His career as a general came to an end two years later when he was storming the city of Argos and a woman dropped a roof tile on to his head.

  If Pyrrhus had done his homework, he would have known that the use of war elephants was a two-edged sword. In 162 BC, Eleazar Maccabeus was fighting at the Battle of Beth-Sechariah in a battle between the Jewish Maccabeans and Greek forces when he dashed underneath an elephant and speared the beast in the stomach in an attempt to bring it to its knees to dislodge the rider. He killed the animal instantly, but it promptly fell on him and crushed him to death.

  Bravest Attempt to Defeat an Enemy with a Tin of Biscuits

  Brigadier-General Sir Charles MacCarthy inherited a tricky situation when he was appointed Governor of Africa’s Gold Coast in 1821. Two local rivals – the Fante and Ashanti tribes – were at each other’s throats in a territorial dispute. Matters got completely out of hand when the Ashanti executed a Fante serving in a British garrison for insulting the Ashanti king, Osai Tutu Kwadwo. MacCarthy responded with a British declaration of war against the Ashanti Empire.

  MacCarthy, described by a military historian as “a decent, proud, but stupid man” had fatally underestimated the power of the Ashanti. Starting with a force of 6,000 men, he divided it into four columns. The plan was for the four groups to converge and then surprise the enemy with overwhelming force. It fell apart when MacCarthy’s own force, numbering 500, found themselves up against 10,000 Ashanti while the other columns were ten miles away.

  MacCarthy had a brainwave: he instructed his men to stand to attention while his band struck up “God Save the Queen” in the belief that this would scare the Ashanti into running away. It didn’t.

  A ferocious battle ensued, MacCarthy’s thin line of troops bravely holding their own until their ammunition ran out. He called on his stores manager Charles Brandon to break open the reserve ammunition. As the Ashanti warriors closed in, Brandon unscrewed the ammunition boxes only to find they were full of biscuits, not bullets.

  The Ashanti overran and massacred the British force. The wounded MacCarthy shot himself rather than face capture and torture. They cut off his head, ate his heart, then converted his skull into a drinking cup and used his jawbones as drumsticks. It took another fifty years of intermittent warfare to subdue the Ashanti.

  King Harold: Runner-Up at Hastings

  When Halley’s Comet appeared in 1066, the Anglo-Saxons saw it as a portent of doom. They weren’t wrong. Before the year was out, there were two dead kings, two invasions and three major battles, including the most important military defeat in English history.

  The Battle of Hastings was one of those rare armed conflicts that decided the fate of nations, wiping out overnight an Anglo-Saxon civilization unique in Dark Age Europe for its wealth, art, literature and its longevity. But it could just have easily have gone the other way. The English lost not because they were outfought by a superior enemy but because of a series of poor decisions and a run of very bad luck.

  The English crown, the oldest in the world, was forged in the tenth century when the kingdom of Wessex was gradually transformed by conquest into a kingdom of England. From the start, the new nation was beset by constant feuds over power and territory. The king was usually chosen by a witan, or great council. They selected someone who commanded respect and was not necessarily of royal lineage. In effect, they chose the best man for the job, although that usually meant a close relative of the deceased king. The witan, however, didn’t always agree, which meant that the succession was easily wide open to deadly dispute. From 828 when Egbert, former King of Wessex, was recognized as the first king of all England until 1066, England had twenty-one kings, each with an average reign of just over eleven years. Violent death in office reduced the mean age of death to thirty-seven, only a year longer than that of the average serf.

  In January 1066, Harold Godwinson, the new King Harold II, inherited the English crown in highly controversial circumstances. The old king Edward the Confessor had died childless. The non-royal Harold, related to Edward only by marriage to his sister, was chosen by the witan to succeed because it was apparently Edward’s dying wish that he should do so, but there were no witnesses.

  Harold was only one of several legitimate contenders. The most dangerous of these was William “the Bastard”, Duke of Normandy, a distant blood relative of Edward “the Confessor” and the illegitimate son of Robert I of Normandy and a tanner’s daughter. He was descended from a much-feared Viking warrior called Hrolf Ganger, better known to history as Rollo, a goliath of a man who was said to be so huge that there wasn’t a horse strong enough to take his weight. William had inherited Rollo’s Viking temperament and then some. His idea of fun was skinning his enemies alive then chopping their hands off.2

  William of Normandy was also a dangerous Viking with a grudge. According to William’s chroniclers, in 1064 Harold was sailing down the English Channel (for reasons not known to modern historians) when his ship blew off course and he was forced to land in Normandy. William took Harold prisoner and persuaded him – or possibly tricked him – into swearing support for William’s claim to the English throne. Harold did as he was told, the story goes, but then forgot all about it when he got back home and, when the old king Edward died, had himself crowned King of England.

  If the story about Harold swearing an oath was true (not everyone agrees that it was) then William had some justification for his attack. All the same, the oath was given under duress and there were several others who had a much closer blood claim to the throne than William of Normandy. The dying King Edward either didn’t know about the oath or did not regard it as binding because he named Harold as his rightful successor – an event that even the Normans acknowledge to have occurred.

  When William heard about Harold’s accession, he was furious, and decided to press his claims by force of arms. His noblemen, however, were reluctant to embark on a foreign invasion, so he took his cause to the Pope, citing the broken oath and stories about how Harold was defiling churches. Once he had the Pope’s blessing, the noblemen flocked to William’s banner. He raised an Army, built a fleet and prepared to set sail for England.

  Harold steeled himself for an invasion. He sent at least one spy to keep an eye on developments in Normandy but the man was captured and brought before William. Instead of brutally killing the spy, as one might expect of a renowned psychopath, William released him back to England with instru
ctions to tell Harold, “If he has not seen me in one year, he may rest secure for the remainder of his reign.”

  Harold’s Army sat on the coast all summer waiting for William to attack, but luck seemed to be on this side. Wind direction prevented William from sailing and Harold knew that he was unlikely to gamble on a winter invasion. By September, Harold was ready to pack up and go home. Then news came that his treacherous half-brother Tostig had allied with the King of Norway, Harald Hardrada, and had landed an Army in the north of England. Harold had to leave the south coast undefended and race north to fend off another invasion.

  The English and the Viking armies clashed at Stamford Bridge near York. It was a crushing victory for Harold, but at a price. The fighting had considerably weakened his forces and his men were tired. Meanwhile, William’s luck had changed. The wind that had kept his impressive fleet at berth had turned. With the bulk of the English Army at the other end of the country, William was able to land unopposed on the beach near Hastings on 28 September. Unluckily for Harold, in anticipation of William’s attack, he had left a garrison to guard the more obvious landing berths at Romney and Dover.

  After the battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold rested for just two days, then he and his remaining troops had to slog some 200 miles south again, pausing only at Waltham Abbey to pray for victory. This was his second big mistake. He was hoping to surprise the Normans by returning quickly, but he had taken heavy losses and the bulk of his Army was exhausted. By choosing not to rest before he travelled back down to Hastings, or to give his warriors a chance to divide up the spoils of their recent victory, he alienated some of his supporters and there were many desertions.

  Harold’s brother, Gyrth, urged him to stop off in London and wait for reinforcements, and in the meantime burn all the land between William’s Army and the capital. This would effectively keep William penned in at the coast because he would not be able to bring an Army and their horses through a wasteland. Gyrth also tried to persuade Harold to allow either himself or their brother Leofwine to lead the Army at Hastings while Harold held a second Army in reserve to defend London.

  But Harold wouldn’t listen; flushed with victory from Stamford Bridge, he wanted to attack quickly. Overruling his brother’s plan for a second front meant that in the event of an English defeat at Hastings, London would be undefended and at the mercy of the Norman Army.

  At this point, William had the tactical advantage. Most sources agree that Harold’s Army was slightly bigger but the Normans were far better equipped militarily. Harold had predominantly foot soldiers at his disposal armed with old-style Anglo-Saxon battleaxes. William had infantry and archers, but he also had chain-mailed mounted knights charging with couched lances. Harold also made the mistake of choosing to engage the enemy close to their own supply lines. By the time his troops got to Hastings, they were already exhausted. William, meanwhile, had time to consolidate his position, stealing crops and razing the area to feed his troops. It was in his best interests to fight a tired Harold as soon as possible.

  Facing such difficulties, Harold had little choice but to fight a defensive battle. He took up a position at the top of Senlac Hill, relying on the much-vaunted English shield-wall, behind which his infantry could stand and let the Norman cavalry break themselves.3

  At first, Harold’s tactic was a great success. Wave after wave of Normans charged up the hill, hurling themselves against the well-defended ranks of soldiers hiding behind their shields, only to be repelled. Meanwhile, the English rained down a barrage of stones, javelins and maces, inflicting heavy casualties among the Norman ranks. At one point, the Normans looked like fleeing the battlefield on rumours of William’s death, until he rallied them by raising his visor and showing his face.

  Against all the odds, it looked as though Harold would win after all. He now held all the tactical aces. After nine hours of fighting, the two sides had battled almost to a standstill. Sunset was approaching, at which point they would have had to call a halt for the night. In the morning Harold would be able to call on reinforcements and a defensive victory would have been all but assured the next day. All he had to do was keep his discipline and hold his position.

  It is at this point that the history of the battle becomes murkier. According to tradition, the Normans charged up the hill again, but this time they feigned a retreat. The Saxons, thinking that the enemy was finally on the run, charged after them. It was only when they were off the hill that they realized they had been tricked. William’s cavalry appeared in a swiftcounter attack. Harold’s foot soldiers, their advantage lost, were soon massacred. According to the Bayeux Tapestry, Harold was killed by an arrow through his eye but a contemporary report says that he was brutally dismembered by Norman broadswords.

  This is what happened according to the Bishop of Amiens: “The first Norman knight split Harold’s chest, driving the point of his sword through the king’s shield. The gushing torrent of blood drenched the Earth. The second knight struck off his head below the helmet and the third stabbed the inside of his belly with a lance. The fourth cut off his leg and carried it away.”

  By the time they had finished with Harold, even his wife couldn’t recognize him and they had to get his mistress, Edith Swan-neck, to identify him by some intimate marks on his body.

  The orthodox version of the battle – with William winning through a series of clever, staged retreats which lured the Saxons down from their vantage point and on to flat ground, where the Norman cavalry would have a clear advantage – is very much open to doubt. The Battle of Hastings was more fully documented than almost any other battle that took place in western Europe in the Dark Ages because it was recognized even at that time that it was an event of huge historical importance. The problem for historians is that, almost without exception, the accounts were all written by the winning side and were highly flattering to William, congratulating him on his tactical abilities.

  In fact, far from being a battlefield genius, he was strategically inept because despite having been berthed for over a month before the battle, he failed to secure the high ground. For William to have organized staged retreats on a mass scale with an entire Army would have been difficult if not impossible, and would have required mass coordination and superb timing. It is more likely that some Normans fled and others recovered the situation. But still the Saxon line should have held. As the tide turned against them, the survivors drew together, thereby exposing their flanks. The deciding factor was Harold’s death, which broke morale.

  So Harold’s defeat was far from inevitable. Of course, he had no way of knowing that he would be subject to two invasions within a few weeks of each other and so could not have known that he would need to modify his strategy accordingly. If the wind had not blown in the wrong direction at the wrong time, he would not have had to face two invasions at all. His troops would not have been exhausted or depleted and he probably would have been able to repel the Normans and gone on to live a long and peaceful reign.

  But Harold was still the bookies’ favourite to win. The odds were always against the invader of a country, especially when the invasion is by sea and the defender is prepared for it. The English had the high ground, a larger force and were fighting in an area they were familiar with. The Battle of Hastings was lost by Harold’s inability to hang on to an insurmountable tactical advantage, with incalculable consequences for history.4

  As for William, he was just a lucky bastard.

  Worst Military Decision

  The Black Death was the most deadly pandemic in recorded history. It came from Asia and reached Europe in the spring of 1348. By the time it played itself out three years later, up to twenty-five million people had fallen victim to it. The symptoms came on rapidly – swellings under the armpits and in the groin oozed blood and pus and the body became covered in dark blotches. This was accompanied by intense headaches, high temperatures and projectile vomiting. The infected were usually dead within the week.

  The first outbreak i
n England was reported in Dorset in August 1348 and the disease quickly spread through Devon and Somerset, then reaching Bristol, Oxford and followed by London by November. By 1349, it had reached the north of England and had killed at least one-third of the population.

  When the Scots heard that their neighbours were being ravaged by a highly infectious disease, they were delighted. Having suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of King Edward III, anything that undermined the English was worth celebrating. They also assumed that the Scots were naturally immune. Surely the disease was “the revenging hand of God” against the much-hated English. Then someone had a bright idea. Wouldn’t this be the perfect time to invade England?

  In the autumn of 1349, Scottish troops raided Durham. No one seems to have spotted the obvious flaw in their bold invasion plan until the Scottish troops started to drop like flies in their thousands. At this point, they decided it was time to retreat, taking the disease home with them. Within a year, more than a quarter of the population of Scotland was dead.

  “Too far-fetched to be considered.”

  Editor of Scientific American in a letter to Robert Goddard about his idea of a rocket-accelerated aeroplane bomb, 1940. German V2 missiles rained down on London three years later.

  Least Intimidating Declaration of War

  In August 1914, most of Europe was caught up in the Great War. Andorra, a tiny and usually neutral little mountain principality wedged between France and Spain in the Pyrenees mountains, came off the fence and declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany.

  The Kaiser was not unduly worried; in fact, he couldn’t actually locate Andorra on a map. His enemy’s Army, meanwhile, comprised ten part-time soldiers, and with no military budget, and the only ammunition they had were ceremonial blank cartridges. Fortunately for Andorra, no actual fighting ever took place.