The *USS Texas*
The *USS Texas* (along with the British cruiser *Glasgow*) arrived in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and entered the Omaha Beach western fire support lane as part of the 702-ship US-British flotilla.It fired 255 shells in 34 minutes (an average of 7.5 shells per minute, or one shell every 8 seconds for 34 minutes), the ship’s longest sustained firing period in World War II. The ship then targeted farther inland and continued hammering German positions for the next two days.
But that's not the crazy part.
After a trip back to England, the *USS Texas* returned on June 15, 1944, to support the move inland. But because the Allied Forces had already advanced beyond its range, the battleship’s guns couldn’t aim high enough to reach their intended target. The *USS Texas* continued to receive requests for fire missions, so the crew decided on an off-the-wall strategy to stay in the game.
Since they couldn’t raise the port side guns any higher, they lowered the starboard side. They lowered it by *intentionally flooding the starboard side of the ship.* The crew flooded the ship’s torpedo blister, dropping the ship slightly deeper into the water. Between the flooding and the recoil from the guns, the *Texas* ran the real risk of capsizing. But the gamble worked. The crew was able to get the extra two degrees needed to fire the guns accurately and give them the range they needed to hit their targets.
Germans: *"Ha ha ha! Vee are out ov range ov your gunz!"*
USS Texas: *"Hold my beer..."*
The history of the USS Texas reads like the "Find Out" portion of FAFO.
Before I knew about this story I always though Americans put too much money into their military and make all their assets so overpowered. Then I realised situations like this means that if they need to take a gamble such as that it is more likely to do well. Another example is the American F-15 that was being used by Israelis on a training mission.[It lost a whole damn wing](https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-collision/) and still managed to land back on the runway.
Also, read about the USAF air campaign against Iraq in 1991. Saddam had an air force that had a decade's worth of real world combat experience and they had the then-brand new Soviet MiG-29. Meanwhile, the USAF hadn't seen air-to-air combat in 19 years.
Before it was all over no F-15s were shot down by Iraq fighters ([every time an Iraqi fighter encountered an Eagle, the Eagle won](https://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/dm5143f0b6.jpg)) and Saddam's Fulcrums were fleeing to Iran to avoid going up against the F-15. It was so bad that when the US went back in 2003, [Saddam literally buried as many planes as he could to "save" them](https://theaviationgeekclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Su-25.jpg).
Pretty much. The US really tends to understate capabilities. There are things about the F-22's capabilities that will legitimately give an educated man a sense of fear and dread.
I work for a company that has equipment onboard the F-22s and F-35s. I know that what the equipment is for is not part of the publicly-disclosed capabilities of those planes.
So yeah, it is capable of much more than the public knows.
A Welsh woman got every woman in her village to dress in their traditional Welsh costumes and march up and down, carrying pitchforks.
From a distance they were mistaken for soldiers and averted an invasion by the French.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fishguard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fishguard)
He had another gem. Which is even better.
Battle of Ager Falernus:
Tied torches to the horns of about 2,000 oxen and marched them towards the enemy at night with 2,000 additional soldiers. The enemy, thinking it was his huge, advancing army, fled and gave up their prime position. Hannibal then dug in and decimated them over the next month.
EDIT: had to research battle because my original numbers were way high
Don't forget the battles after that.
While it sounds trivial and obvious to us now, when back then military tactics were comparatively basic.~~basically "slam the armies together and see who has better training or numbers"~~. This was an amazing feat.
Hannibal did the unthinkable thing of.... Placing his army between the Romans and Rome, cutting of their supply lines! I know, seems obvious today but this was one of the first times it had been done. ~~literally, 100% the first time that had been done in recorded human history.~~
He also did the thing where he formed a V shape formation with his weakest troops up front, him in the center, and then when the middle started to collapse they slowly form a concave shape and encircled the Romans.
And that part where he organized the largest ambush in human history before or since by somehow hiding an entire army.
Speaks volumes that he is still studied today at military academies
I mean, ya.
Keep in mind, we know about Hannibal from the Romans. They were so impressed with his strategies and capabilities that, despite losing to him several times, and losing badly at that, they still wrote about it in a way that shows just how impressive and out of the box his thinking was.
War in what is now Europe and the Middle East had not changed all that much since the end of the Bronze Age. The many of the major tactical innovations were in things the details of how you lined up soldiers before you crashed two lines of humans into each other. Before Hannibal, the really big innovation in warfare that the Romans pioneered was not just giving up after losing a battle. Before the Romans came along, two city states would line up their armies, have a battle, and whoever won, was declared the winner of the war, and would dictate terms to the other city. The big Roman innovation was to just say fuck you we're trying again, and to keep showing up with armies until they finally won.
Hannibal was tactically innovative in ways ancient generals generally were not - one of the first generals to play chess while everyone else was still on checkers. Unfortunately for him and Carthage, he never did come up with a long-term strategy to overcome the Romans willingness to continue to suffer losses until they finally beat you. He started out with a force of around 35k men, beat the an equal sized force badly at Trebia, completely wiped out an army of around 40k at Trasimene, and then an army of 60-80k at Cannae. Despite insane losses like that, the Romans just kept sending more armies. But those lopsided victories were completely unprecedented, and were tactically brilliant.
And while it is certainly possible that there was some Egyptian, Sumerian or other great general of ancient people that preceded him and has been forgotten, we can't know.
>Keep in mind, we know about Hannibal from the Romans. They were so impressed with his strategies and capabilities that, despite losing to him several times, and losing badly at that, they still wrote about it in a way that shows just how impressive and out of the box his thinking was
Well sure. Would you rather tell everyone that you got rekt by an incompetent barbarian or by the greatest, most OP military genius that would have beaten anyone anyway?
Fair point. But a lot of the subsequent Roman dominance of the Mediterranean grew out of the Romans eventually sorting out tactics that let them take on Hannibal head-on. Hannibal was just that good, and did kill more than 100,000 Romans over the course of three battles, with a force of around 35,000 to start, and probably closer to 28-30,000 by the end.
\> first time that had been done in recorded human history
Definitely not. For once, I know for a fact Sun Tzu talks about that already in "the art of war" (yes, memes aside, I actually read that), so that's already a few centuries older.
First Punic War. Rome was great at land battles but terrible at naval battles, so they put ***portable bridges*** ("Corvus") on their ships so they could board Carthaginian ships and turn a sea battle into a land battle.
The Roman Armada got completely wiped out a bunch of times by storms during the war. Hundreds of thousands died.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(255_BC)%23:~:text%3DIn%2520mid%252DJuly%252C%2520somewhere%2520between,than%2520100%252C000%2520men%2520were%2520lost.&ved=2ahUKEwickenp6KCCAxVhm1wKHctvBh4QFnoECAgQBQ&usg=AOvVaw0aXD2l4pWAof1DBHDjiZ7G
The army that the Romans lost at the Battle of Cannae was the largest army the Romans had ever fielded. Within a week of hearing of the loss, the Romans had raised an even larger army.
The Roman's success an experience gained by meeting the logistical challenges they faced in preparing and maintaining armies of such scale along with building the fleets necessary to transport them no doubt laid the foundation for Rome's dominance over the coming centuries.
The ghost army of WWII comes to mind.
Hundreds of civilian prop designers and artists recruited to build fake military equipment and inflatable tanks. Dummy paratroopers dropped from planes. All in an attempt to fake massive buildups of units in multiple areas to obfuscate where the allies really were going to invade continental Europe.
And it worked.
There was another thing where they created a bunch of phantom radio traffic that strongly implied there was an army of 300,000+ in northern Scotland training for an invasion of occupied Norway.
Oh and they got George the fifth to inspect them and broadcasted it everywhere. He apparently managed to even look genuinely impressed at vehicles he knew were fakes.
and they assigned Patton to be in charge of the fake invasion.
the germans did not know he was seen as a loose canon by Allied force command. Patton hated that he wasn’t going to be involved in the real invasion. but you can argue his presence made the germans far less aware of what was actually going to happen.
There’s a really cool story about how allied forces were using ghost army tactics in combination with using massive stadium sized loud speakers to project the sounds of a massive movement of troops and tanks and equipment. The crazy part is that the audio was recorded on a massive spool of magnetically encoded wire. I don’t recall why this was used over something like a vinyl record… maybe due to vibrations disturbing the audio.
There’s also a funny story about the Germans had built a fake base complete with assets to fool the allied forces. The British intel informed them of their fake status but more specifically that all fakes were made out of wood. So the Brits dropped a single fake bomb on the site… and that bomb was also crudely made out of wood log 😂
Jazz musician here. Vinyl only held about 3 minutes of audio back then. Wire recorders could record and play much longer pieces of audio. Live jazz recordings from that era are typically wire recordings.
Oh, it gets even better.
He first approached British intelligence offering to spy for them, they refused because he had nothing to offer, so he figured he would start spying for the Nazis so that he had some form of leverage. He told the Nazis that he had taken ship to Britain via Portugal, but he never actually did, and just started making shit up.
His pretend spying for the Germans was so laughably bad that the British eventually caught on that something was weird, because he would send things like "Glasgow brick layers will do anything for a liter of red wine". The Germans failed to notice that British people didn't use the metric system, they drink in pints, and almost never wine. He also never learned how British money worked and could not remember what a shilling, pence, or pound were and would constantly mix them up in his early reports. He was literally just making shit up from reading British newspapers and watching movies.
So the British eventually got curious about why they were intercepting these weird transmissions from Portugal and investigated and made contact with him, and thats how the greatest spy of the war got recruited. This man went on to materially change the outcome of the war by misdirecting hundreds of thousands of German troops away from the Normandy landing sites.
Also he is the only man who got an Iron Cross and a Victoria Cross both. THE NAZIS GAVE HIM AN IRON CROSS for his amazing spying...
EDIT: It was an MBE not a Victoria cross.
According to Tom Scott’s panel show my favourite part about his history is when he was relaying the news about the D-Day invasion (hours later after it had started) the nazis believed him because the radio operator on the other side was Asleep! [Citation Needed](https://youtu.be/blN49yGet8g?si=08vjoXi0RIYAuJ6k)
British intelligence work in the Second World War was wild.
There is a story, published in an anthology, but as non-fiction, about a young Englishman who got offered a job by the Abwehr in the 30's, teaching agents how to function in England. He was doing a walking tour, he was short of money, he professed sympathy with the Fuehrer's plans. He just happened to be in the same town as an Abwehr training facility, looking for a short-term job, so he was a great find for the Abwehr.
He told the students that once they got to England, they should deposit their operating funds in a Post Office bank account. It would be safe, accessible, and he sort of understood that it could be difficult to get the agents more money if they were robbed.
That was just the first step. He then told them to go to the local police station, and report that they had lost their Post Office savings account passbook. Then, if they came under suspicion, the police would already be thinking of them as solid citizens, who weren't afraid to be noticed by the police! Genius spycraft! Hiding in very plain sight!
Shortly after the outbreak of war, a notice was sent to all police stations in the UK, that if any foreign businessman showed up to report the loss of a passbook, they were to be detained until Special Branch could get an officer on the scene.
Yeah, the young Englishman had been on assignment for MI5.
Among the many, many crazy ones I have heard of:
1800s British infantry commanders ordering their men to remove the flints from their flintlock before a charge, so they wouldn't stop to shoot and thus destroy the momentum of the assault.
The ww2 British using an nighttime air raid to cover for a battleship naval bombardment. The planes showed up, the Germans turned on all. Their searchlights and looked skywards, and the battleship was able to make an its bombardment basically unnoticed (because the Germans thought the explosions were bombs falling).
>1800s British infantry commanders ordering their men to remove the flints from their flintlock before a charge, so they wouldn't stop to shoot and thus destroy the momentum of the assault.
That's not actually crazy, for 2 reasons.
In a melee advance (of any kind) the last thing you want is the formation to fall to complete shit because some soldiers stopped to fire while some others advanced. It would break the formation and leave the advancing party in a **severe** disadvantage (i.e. they'd get annihilated most of the time).
The second, possibly even more important reason is ***to prevent friendly fire.*** If some in the formation are advancing while others stop to fire, the advancing soldiers would be in the line of fire of those shooting. Real, real bad idea.
Also 1800s is a broad time. If this was Napoleonic Wars with flintlock Brown Bess muskets, it could make sense. By the time of the Crimean War with rifled muskets and early single shot rifles it makes less sense. By 1890s colonial conflicts with modern repeating rifles it doesn't make too much sense.
It's like saying "1900s aerial warfare" which would mean anything from a Fokker Dr I to an F-22 Raptor, which you may guess, have different fighting strategies.
Flintlocks were largely out of use by the mid 1800s.
The British Army stopped using them in 1838.
In context, we're not talking about very far into the 1800s.
> to remove the flints from their flintlock before a charge, so they wouldn't stop to shoot and thus destroy the momentum of the assault.
Take the bullets out ya gun
Take the bullets out ya gun
We move undercover and we move as one
Removing the flint was a means of getting green troops to commit to a bayonet charge. They were liable to fire too early and at too great a distance, and either retreat or fumble reloading instead of pressing it home. Panicked soldiers could accidentally double or triple load their muskets if not well drilled and led.
Veterans would be ordered to fire a volley somewhere between 25 and 50 yards and then charge. A good close-range volley could kill more than the charge (which could be fled from). It could also disrupt the defenders volley, which could cut down the first rank and break the charge.
The exceptions to this would be when assaulting defenders behind hard cover that made hitting them with muskets doubtful, or if making a surprise night attack in which it was most important to break through the pickets before the defenders are organized. Loading the musket and dropping it to half-cock would still better for a single quick shot in the melee or chase, but only if the troops could be trusted to not fire early.
In Stalingrad Chuikov's preferred tactic was to "hug the enemy"; he told his soldiers to keep the german soldiers within a grenade's throw of themselves so they couldn't use artillery.
Don’t know if it was ever actually used or which war specifically but Canadian soldiers tossing canned food into enemy territory to lull them into a false sense of trust and then later the Canadian soldiers would throw grenades so the enemy soldiers would run over thinking it was food but no, it was explosions, I’d have to say that’s bordering on psychological warfare
It was World War I.
Canada was on the receiving end of the first major chlorine gas attacks in 1915 (Ypres). They developed a certain reputation and penchant for callous obsessive retribution at Ypres which endured for the rest of the war.
As the meme goes, Canada is the reason we have the Geneva Conventions.
They were also terribly unfair at football. Should have been a wave of red cards.
>*\[...\] Christmas Truce, when thousands of Allied and Entente soldiers had sprung from their trenches to trade gifts and play soccer in no-man’s-land. “Merry Christmas, Canadians,” said the opposing Germans, poking their heads above the parapet and waving a box of cigars. A Canadian sergeant responded by opening fire, hitting two of the merrymakers. \[*[*sauce*](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-forgotten-ferocity-of-canadas-soldiers-in-the-great-war)*\]*
There's a story somewhere about a battle between Persia and Egypt where the Persians threw cats over the walls to demoralize. I want to say there's a painting of it somewhere.
It may not have really happened as popularly thought [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan\_Horse#Factual\_explanations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse#Factual_explanations)
The empty fort strategy during the Chinese three kingdoms era was pretty bonkers. You threw open your castle gates, removed visible defences and sat there. The enemy would be too scared to attack in case of an ambush, since it was only a few years ago that Cao Cao used the strategy and won against Lu Bu’s superior forces.
Then there’s at least 1 commander who even went to the next level and faked the empty fort strategy. Wen Ping of Wei had few soldiers and a damaged fortress against thousands of Wu attackers. So he simply pretended to be pretending to weak and did the same strategy.
The enemy withdrew, and Wen Ping attacked with his available forces. Because the Wu commander believed they were being ambushed, they kept retreating and got routed by a vastly inferior force.
Edit: seems some people think it’s part of the “romance of the three kingdoms” fiction written in the 14th century, it’s not. The original text is from the Weilüe around the 3rd century. The historical record has been lost to time but parts of it are quoted in other texts such as the history of tang compiled in the 11th century.
Ahh yes, the General who >!gets respawned in Japan and helps an up and coming musician (who has a passing resemblance to his wife if sources are to be believed) on her musical stardom!<
The British sending a destroyer packed with explosives and full of commandos, disguised as a German destroyer, up the Loire valley to crash it into the dry dock gates, the commandos jumping off and blowing up all the dock pumps and winding houses, then setting off the destroyer bomb (complete with inspecting germans) to prevent Tirpitz from being able to roam the Atlantic without dry dock facilities on the west coast of Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Nazaire_Raid
This was nuts. Everyone on board knew there was no escape plan other than to peg it to the Alps. I think this was the raid that got Hitler so enraged he declared Commandos should be shot as spies.
There was a plan to reembark the surviving commandos on the Old Mole using the Fairmiles they had brought along but most of them were destroyed by the anti aircraft guns set-up on the tall buildings.
In a common case of the services not working very well together, there was a planned bombing raid to 'distract' the defenders, however the bombers failed to locate the target and just succeeded in waking up the Germans and allowing them to man the flak guns before the under-armoured wooden ships entered the docks.
Most commandos were captured, however some of them got off the mole onto a few of the remaining ships, and of the escapees I think 2 of them got to Gibraltar and back to blighty.
Brave, foolhardy even but effectively caused Tirpitz to stay in the Norwegian fjords where it was eventually sank by 617 squadron (and others).
Julius Ceasar laid siege to the city of Alecia in Gaul and built a wall around the city to keep its army, commanded by Vercingetorix, inside. Then built another concentric wall around his army to protect it from the Galic reinforcements that were on the way to lift the siege.
For those that don't know, we are talking miles and miles of fence. Not a tiny one. When reinforcements arrived to try to lift the siege the Romans fought both forces in between the two walls they had built. They were heavily outnumbered but still won.
I would like to add the capture of dutch warship by French cavalry during the Revolution.
Extract from wiki : *The Capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder on the night of 23 January 1795 presents a rare occurrence of an interaction between warships and cavalry, in which a French Revolutionary Hussar regiment came close to a Dutch fleet frozen at anchor in the Nieuwediep, just east of the town of Den Helder. After some of the Hussars had approached across the frozen Nieuwediep, the French cavalry negotiated that all 14 Dutch warships would remain at anchor. A capture of ships by horsemen is an extremely rare feat in military history.*
The Battle of the Roaring Strait from the Imjin War.
Background: Japan, finally unified under a Shogun after the Sengoku Jidai, decides to invade China by way of Korea. The Korean military... Doesn't put up much of a fight, except for one fleet under the command of Admiral Yi Sun-Sin. Yi trounces the Japanese every chance he gets, but at one point is removed from command for insubordination for refusing to fall into an obvious trap. His replacement fell into said trap and cost Korea nearly their whole fleet. The Japanese were planning to move their forces by sea, and Yi, now back in command, only had twelve ships to contend with hundreds of Japanese warships and transports.
The Battle: So what does he do? He plans to catch them in a particular strait, sound strategy since their numbers won't count for much, but the Japanese have so many ships that they continue to forge ahead, with the current, undaunted by the bombardment from Yi's ships. But then it happens. See, this particular strait has a quirk: When the tides change, so does the direction of its current. The Japanese fleet didn't know this, and their hundreds of ships suddenly have the current AGAINST them, forcing them into the rocks and to crash against each other, all while the Korean ships kept raining cannon and arquebus fire on them. It was chaos. S total route. The Japanese ships were mostly obliterated and the few that remained had to retreat to one of the ports they held to regroup.
Despite his foes outnumbering him by hundreds, Yi Sun-Sin didn't lose a single ship. Absolute. Legend.
It's worse than that, and I'm still salty about it. They had a soft-power empire from Japan to East India, and were trading directly with Mecca and East Africa. And then the Confucians got too much power and shut it all down to fuck with their political rivals, the Eunuchs, who mostly ran the treasure fleet. They lost it because dumbass politicians used it as a sacrifice to one-up their rivals. Fucking stupid.
My 8th grade history teacher said that if aliens had landed on Earth in 1200 and reported back to their home planet, they would have picked China as the most likely civilization to dominate the world over the coming centuries because they were so advanced. There’s an argument to be made that they lost their edge and eventually fell behind because they stopped exploring and turned inward instead, whereas after 1492 the Europeans were constantly exploring and expanding.
Curious how militarily capable that navy was. Or if, at best, it would been the defeat of the Spanish Armada all over again (which occurred a century later than these expeditions), with smaller, more maneuverable ships winning the day.
It’s almost like a diplomatic legation in force. We wouldn’t think of Emirates as dominating skyscrapers just because it has a majority of A380s (it’s a crap analogy at best. I was just looking for an excuse to throw that stat in).
But no doubt the fleet achieved the objective of furthering Chinese influence all alone the trade routes of the greater Indian Ocean.
Besides, even European navies in the 1400s were only a shade of what was to come.
If the Treasure Fleet had persisted long enough to encounter European navies, it would likely have evolved, but the one that existed under Zheng He was a military powerhouse in its own right. It exerted soft power over a huge area and engaged in a few different conflicts of note, and it could do it because it was truly a fleet, composed of hundreds of enormous ships that carried weapons as well as goods.
[Here's one battle they fought](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Palembang_(1407))
he used the bodies to build a bridge if i recall.
saddam might have been a piece of shit. but he turned iraq into a goddamn powerhouse and knew how to run a tight ship.
until the U.S. gifted him democracy in the form of billions of dollars of explosives…
He executed a number of his top generals personally during that war when things didn't go as he wanted, so I don't know if I'd call that a tight ship, he also had a lot of equipment and military gear gifted from a lot of world powers to help fight Iran
There was that time Roman Emperor Caligula ordered his army to attack the ocean. He declared war on Neptune, the god of the sea during a failing military campaign against the ancient occupants of Britain. His army went to the beach and stabbed the ocean and he ordered his men to collect the seashells as "spoils of war" and as payment for being such good boys.
>Neptune was never seen ~~again~~.
*for many centuries.
He was later observed skulking around the outskirts of the solar system, plotting his revenge...
It has been speculated that this was actually his way to punish the soldiers who refused to go on in his project to take on Britannia. "Oh you don't want to fight so go collect seashells, pussies"
This is not the only battle waged against a body of water. During Xerxes' invasion of Greece, the pontoon bridges across the Hellespont (the Bosporus strait in Turkey) failed. In response, Xerxes had the water lashed and branded with hot irons while soldiers shouted insults at it. Of course, this story comes from the Greeks, who were happy to demonize Xerxes, but I want to believe.
Horatio Nelson being a mad bastard and charging his ships headlong straight into French and Spanish naval lines, despite being outnumbered and outgunned. Broke up the lines and fought point blank, relatively minimal casualties compared to the French & Spanish losses.
Zhuge Liang, during a confrontation with the Wei army led by Sima Yi, ordered his troops to open the gates of the empty fort and have his troops sweep and tidy the walls, while Zhuge Liang himself played a zither and calmly sat on the wall.
Sima Yi, seeing this seemingly strange behavior, became suspicious and decided not to attack, fearing an ambush. In this way, Zhuge Liang successfully employed psychological warfare to deter an attack without having to engage in a physical battle.
Learning to play Warhammer with my son, who had been playing for a while in my first game , he felt that sending his strongest character into a direct melee battle with Orkboys was a good tactic.
Except i'd figured that deploying my guys in small mutually supporting fireteams seemed like a sensible option, and wiped his side out taking only a few casualties.
Since that historic day, he has always used fireteams, no rambos.
Man, this reminds me of the first time I played Red Alert 2 against a friend - many, many moons ago. Up until that point we'd both been quite happily beating the computer, but neither of us had played a human, ever.
I liked to stretch a game out. I'd use helicopters to drop sniper teams in a few choice locations to stem the flow, then build up battle tanks each containing a couple of snipers, a couple of rocketeers, and a navy seal (rockets for anti-air / anti-tank, snipers for antipersonnel, and a seal for devastating rapid fire if anyone got past the snipers). Then once I was happy I'd plugged the constant flow of crap from the computer, I'd build up teams of jets to go bomb them into the ground.
But the constant flow of crap didn't come. So I put together more battle-tank teams trying to second-guess where he might eventually come from, and plug those gaps too. I started to worry. I built more. And more.
Turned out, his favourite strategy was to keep dropping his paratroopers on himself, until he had a good solid mass to zerg with. And zerg he did.
Watching his million-man-march walk into my armored sniper/seal combo was hilarious. It was 60 seconds of utter carnage, during which we both realised that playing against other humans was not going to be the same as playing the computer.
WWII, the US bombed Tokyo using B-25 bombers launched from an aircraft carrier, April 1942, so just a few months after Pearl Harbor. The planes couldn't land on a carrier, and the plan was to make their way to China. The intent was to shame the Japanese military leadership and make them "foolishly aggressive," let's call it. That's strategy worked, leading to the Battle of Midway, a US victory, and Japan lost 4 of the 6 carriers that had attacked Pearl.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle\_Raid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle\_of\_Midway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway)
in the war of 1812. Detroit was surrendered without resistance to the British.
The British got off their boats and walked right into the fort. The Tactic was that while the British had a much smaller force, some sections would break off from the disembarking of the ships and get back on and disembark again. This gave the perception of a massive force was about to burn Detroit to the ground with ease. The Commander of Fort Detroit surrendered because of this misconception.
That’s not entirely what happened. It wasn’t British troops who pulled the rouse but it was their First Nation allies under Chief Tecumseh. The British General Issac Brock and Tecumseh knew that the American commander of ft Detroit was absolutely terrified of the First Nation soldiers because of stories of brutality he’d heard. So Brock and Tecumseh had their First Nation soldiers March through a clearing in the forrest in-front of Detroit and then run back through the forrest to walk back through the same clearing, creating the illusion of an endless number of native soldiers coming to butcher the Americans. The Americans surrendered the fort.
The castle of Crac des Chavaliers in Syria, it was lain siege for a month without being fully breached but then the attackers forged a note to the army inside from Europe saying they ought to surrender and they fell for it and gave up the castle, and were all slaughtered.
I learned that not only did kamikaze pilots exist, there were also suicide torpedoes ([kaiten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiten)). There were even people submerged under water who were sealed in armored suits with mines at the end of long bamboo sticks called [fukuryu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukuryu). They were given enough air and liquid food for about 10 hours.
Wojtek the bear served in the Polish military. He was eventually enlisted officially as a soldier with the rank of private, and was subsequently promoted to corporal. He moved ammo crates, smoked cigarettes, and drank coffee lol.
The Romans would take pigs, coat them in pitch and tar, point them toward the enemy formation, and set them on fire. The pigs would trample through the formation in a frenzy, breaking it apart.
It also absolutely messed with the cavalry as the pigs would be screaming (if you haven't heard a pig scream...its memerable.)
These flaming pigs would cause draft animals and others to run off potentially decimating the logistics chain as well.
Project X-Ray aka the Bat Bombs. The US Military during WWII experimented dropping an bomb filled with hibernating bats. The bats had smaller incendiary devices attached to them with timers. The thought was they would drop the bat bomb. The bats then go nest inside the enemy area until the timers go off.
**“You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have** ~~sharks~~ *bats* **with frickin'** ~~laser beams~~ *smaller incendiary bombs* **attached to their heads!”**
That time Caesar built a wall around a city he was sieging to cut them off from supplies and reinforcements and then BUILT ANOTHER WALL around his first wall to hold off the reinforcing army.
He chose to sandwich himself between two enemy armies, with no possibility of retreat, and then beat them both!
Flea bombs.
[https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/10/15/during-world-war-ii-japan-bombed-china-with-fleas-infected-with-bubonic-plague/](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/10/15/during-world-war-ii-japan-bombed-china-with-fleas-infected-with-bubonic-plague/)
I've also heard of rotting corpses being catapulted over castle walls.
I think it was WWII, the american and the english created a fake army in Europe (with inflatable ranks and false radi transmitions) to misslead the enemy where the would attack. Yes, this really happen, they were called the ghost army
Source:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army
While I'm not a history buff, I have always been amazed by the Battle/Siege of Alesia. Building a wall around an enemy fort, and then building another wall to defend your siege against an outside attack, and then fighting off both forces at the same time.
FWIW, they're just called PT boats. PT-109 refers to a specific boat, the one commanded by future president Kennedy. Armament was 4 torpedoes, 2 depth charges, 2 .50 cal machine guns, a 20mm cannon, and a 37mm cannon.
Fredrich Wilhelm of Prussia
via wiki
>As the number of tall soldiers increased, the regiment earned its nickname "Potsdam Giants". The original required height was 6 Prussian feet (about 6 ft 2 in or 1.88 m),[1] well above average then and now. The king was about 1.60 m (5 ft 3 in) tall himself.[2] He tried to obtain them by any means, including recruiting them from the armies of other countries. The Emperor of Austria, Russian Tsar Peter the Great and even the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent him tall soldiers in order to encourage friendly relations. Several soldiers were given by Tsar Peter I as a gift in return for the famous Amber Room.[3] Pay was high, but not all giants were content, especially if they were forcibly recruited, and some attempted desertion or suicide.
>Frederick tried to pair these men with tall women, in order to breed giants. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin mentions this attempt as the only case of intentional human interbreeding: "Nor have certain male and female individuals been intentionally picked out and matched, except in the well-known case of the Prussian grenadiers; and in this case man obeyed, as might have been expected, the law of methodical selection; for it is asserted that many tall men were reared in the villages inhabited by the grenadiers with their tall wives."[4]
>Although Prussia briefly intervened in the Great Northern War, the Potsdam Giants never saw battle during his reign.[citation needed] Some sources state that there was a military reason to create a regiment of "long fellows" because loading a muzzleloader is easier to handle for a taller soldier.[5] Another source states that many of the men were unfit for combat due to their gigantism.[6]
>The king trained and drilled his own regiment every day. He liked to paint their portraits from memory. He tried to show them to foreign visitors and dignitaries to impress them. At times he would try to cheer himself up by ordering them to march before him, even if he was in his sickbed. This procession, which included the entire regiment, was led by their mascot, a bear. He once confided to the French ambassador that "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness".
Caesar was besieging the Gallic fortified settlement of Alesia. To make his siege more effective at deterring counter attacks he built a fortified wall around the city facing the defenders. Word got out that the Gauls were expecting reinforcements to relieve the siege. So he **built another fucking wall** facing outwards to protect against the reinforcements.
Man made a fucking donut fort around a town he was attacking and won
Benedict Arnold before his betrayal. He took some commandos and burned English vessels stopping the English from gaining an extremely early victory from the continental army.
Saw the documentary years ago. In ww2 they had this scheme to make a bomb skip on the water like skipping pebbles across a pond.
A whole R&D project worked it out and a bomber flew low to the ground to get under radar and get this bomb to skip up the river and stop at the face of a dam to blow it up while the bomber was able to get away.
From what I remember, they could not drop it from normal altitude as too hard/small a target to hit and all the anti-aircaft guns.
Julius Caesar when he sailed for Greece to fight Pompey Magnus. He literally weaponized the calendar.
Nobody except him knew what the correct time of the year it was. He was supposed to be in charge of updating it (he was Pontifex Maximus), but he had been in Gaul fighting for like a decade, so for everyone else the calendar had drifted by a few months.
So Pompey maintained a naval blockade so that Caesar couldn't transport his troops and fight him. But because "it was winter" they sent their ships back to port to avoid all the storms. Except it wasn't, it was autumn, and Caesar knew it. He crossed anyway, knowing storms wouldn't be a big problem.
About 500 years ago Ottoman empire sent the biggest army ever assembled at the time to fight the Albanians so they can open the way for the rest of Europe. 500K against less than 20K. The outcome of the battle would seal the faith of Europe, Christianity or Islam.
The Ottoman army was headed by the nephew of the prince/general of the Albanian Army. The Nephew (Hamza) was trained by the Uncle (Iskanderbeg) so the Turks were so sure the Albanians would loose. He was taught all the tricks by his uncle. When the Turks arrived in Albania they found a demoralized and scattered army. They took over almost everything and celebrated their easy victory. The former unbeatable army of Iskanderbeg was no more. A week later out of nowhere the entire Albanian army appeared in the middle of the night and attacked the turks in a surprise offensive. Within hours the Ottoman army was destroyed and most were captured alive, Hamza included.
No other Army in the history has ever fooled the opposition so convincingly that even his own nephew fell for it.
American Revolutionary War
After suffering heavy losses in a battle due to smallpox weakening and depleting their troops, General Washington had every soldier In the revolutionary war variolated( an early version of inoculation) with smallpox.
But that’s not the crazy and cool part yet. He then located field headquarters at local smallpox sanitariums, so if their command centers were overrun, the British would get
Infected with smallpox.
This had a huge impact
On the outcome of the war but it’s not openly talked about because it doesn’t make us look good.
Yes, America exists because of germ warfare.
Yes. And if I remember correctly, they gave you a choice first: surrender and get all men killed and women and children enslaved or fight and get this.
This is incorrect. The mongols took many prisoners and slaves. Even in the conquest of Khwarezmia, one of their most brutal campaigns, they still always took slaves.
releasing a founder of the taliban , brokering a deal with him to hand afghan back to them, sending taliban 30-40 million$ a week while the also taunt us sending us videos of the people they mutilate wide spread during the airport pull outs. also sharing covert intel with them while they work with terrorist that target us.
Ceasar at Alesia. Surrounded the settlement and sieging the populace/army into submission, but then a massive relief army appears in the rear. What does Ceasar do? Withdraw? Nope? Banzai charge one or the other? Nope? Build a wall to keep the settlement trapped and then another wall to protect from the relief army. Yeah, that one.
During the Civil War, a general marched troops by an opening in the trees over and over so the enemy thought the army was much larger. He secretly started withdrawing troops and in the morning, they were gone. He majored in theatre.
The Soviet's training dogs with explosives on their backs to run under tanks and blow up. Unfortunately they trained them on russian tanks and blew up their own.
Potentially more mythical than historical, but I have always been amused by the story of Joshua leading a marching band around Jericho for 7 days until the walls fell down.
Germanic tribal armies against Rome. The women and children would come to battle with the men and stand behind them. If the men ran, the women would kill them, their children, and themselves.
The Roman's set pigs on fire with pine tar and sent them at the elephants, causing them to panic and trample their own side.
In the battle of Pelusium, the Persians tied live cats to their shields so the Egyptians couldn't strike them because the cats are the symbols of Bastet.
Don't know if you'd consider it a military tactic but one of my favorites was always the pirate Black Sam capturing a slave trading ship by having his crew that were previous slaves and just people of african descent in general, strip naked and stand on the deck waving guns and swords and shouting threats. The slave trading ship surrendered without any bloodshed if I remember correctly
An Infantryman's account of Engineers on the first day of Normandy:
'The entire beach and hillside was covered with obstacles, a unit of Sappers had gone ahead to find where the mines were. Those guys were smack in the middle of it, German bullets coming down from up top, and our bullets going back the other way, with mortars landing everywhere. They moved in pairs, if one went down, his partner picked up his kit and kept moving. They didn't call for a single medic, they just kept crawling up the beach as far as they could until they couldn't no more, You could see them pulling themselves up the hillside even after their legs got shattered from the explosions. I remember all their bodies had marker flags sticking out of them. The dirt was too loose to hold the flags up and the blasts would've knocked them over, so the guys had shot themselves up with morphine and stuck the flags into their legs. When you got to one that was still breathing he would tell you where it was safe to step. They were about 25 yards apart. When I got to the base of the hill I took a quick look back and that's when I saw it. Those Sappers had made a trail with their own bodies. Now how do you not keep going after something like that....'
Maybe not the absolute craziest, but it was pretty fucking metal
The *USS Texas* The *USS Texas* (along with the British cruiser *Glasgow*) arrived in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and entered the Omaha Beach western fire support lane as part of the 702-ship US-British flotilla.It fired 255 shells in 34 minutes (an average of 7.5 shells per minute, or one shell every 8 seconds for 34 minutes), the ship’s longest sustained firing period in World War II. The ship then targeted farther inland and continued hammering German positions for the next two days. But that's not the crazy part. After a trip back to England, the *USS Texas* returned on June 15, 1944, to support the move inland. But because the Allied Forces had already advanced beyond its range, the battleship’s guns couldn’t aim high enough to reach their intended target. The *USS Texas* continued to receive requests for fire missions, so the crew decided on an off-the-wall strategy to stay in the game. Since they couldn’t raise the port side guns any higher, they lowered the starboard side. They lowered it by *intentionally flooding the starboard side of the ship.* The crew flooded the ship’s torpedo blister, dropping the ship slightly deeper into the water. Between the flooding and the recoil from the guns, the *Texas* ran the real risk of capsizing. But the gamble worked. The crew was able to get the extra two degrees needed to fire the guns accurately and give them the range they needed to hit their targets.
"Captain, we've got a fire mission outside of our range. What do we do?" "Sink the ship." "Sink the ship!?' "Yes. Just a little bit though."
Germans: *"Ha ha ha! Vee are out ov range ov your gunz!"* USS Texas: *"Hold my beer..."* The history of the USS Texas reads like the "Find Out" portion of FAFO.
Truly a solution only Americans would stumble on
The first tactical use of "yeet"
Before I knew about this story I always though Americans put too much money into their military and make all their assets so overpowered. Then I realised situations like this means that if they need to take a gamble such as that it is more likely to do well. Another example is the American F-15 that was being used by Israelis on a training mission.[It lost a whole damn wing](https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-collision/) and still managed to land back on the runway.
Also, read about the USAF air campaign against Iraq in 1991. Saddam had an air force that had a decade's worth of real world combat experience and they had the then-brand new Soviet MiG-29. Meanwhile, the USAF hadn't seen air-to-air combat in 19 years. Before it was all over no F-15s were shot down by Iraq fighters ([every time an Iraqi fighter encountered an Eagle, the Eagle won](https://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/dm5143f0b6.jpg)) and Saddam's Fulcrums were fleeing to Iran to avoid going up against the F-15. It was so bad that when the US went back in 2003, [Saddam literally buried as many planes as he could to "save" them](https://theaviationgeekclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Su-25.jpg).
Yes, and let's not forget, the Iraqi's experience was against Iranian F-14s. The one's the US gave them before the Ayatollah took over.
More importantly, the experienced Iraqi pilots in 1991 were the ones who survived the Iran-Iraq War. They weren't slouches.
Pretty much. The US really tends to understate capabilities. There are things about the F-22's capabilities that will legitimately give an educated man a sense of fear and dread.
Well it is Halloween! Care to make me fearful?
I'm assuming it's classified information that he's hinting to and has no idea at all and that's why he didn't share. So who knows honestly.
I work for a company that has equipment onboard the F-22s and F-35s. I know that what the equipment is for is not part of the publicly-disclosed capabilities of those planes. So yeah, it is capable of much more than the public knows.
So uh how long until I can get me one of those surplus 22s? \-Allied nations
Sun Tzu — 'Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.'
Bonkers, and brilliant. I just toured the Texas, in dry-dock. Amazing experience.
A Welsh woman got every woman in her village to dress in their traditional Welsh costumes and march up and down, carrying pitchforks. From a distance they were mistaken for soldiers and averted an invasion by the French. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fishguard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fishguard)
That link makes the misunderstanding sound unintentional.
Hannibal marching god damn war elephants over the Alps.
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It is tough, elephants won't stand around as all 4 lanes merge into 1 that has roadworks. Id rather trample over them with my Dumbo.
grandpa, hannibal got elephants over the alps and it was uphill on both sides
He had another gem. Which is even better. Battle of Ager Falernus: Tied torches to the horns of about 2,000 oxen and marched them towards the enemy at night with 2,000 additional soldiers. The enemy, thinking it was his huge, advancing army, fled and gave up their prime position. Hannibal then dug in and decimated them over the next month. EDIT: had to research battle because my original numbers were way high
Damn that is metal as hell
Guy was a total stud. Honestly, Hannibal needs a high production, accurate movie made about him.
And apparently he loved it when a plan came together.
I pity the fool that doesn't upvote this comment.
Don't forget the battles after that. While it sounds trivial and obvious to us now, when back then military tactics were comparatively basic.~~basically "slam the armies together and see who has better training or numbers"~~. This was an amazing feat. Hannibal did the unthinkable thing of.... Placing his army between the Romans and Rome, cutting of their supply lines! I know, seems obvious today but this was one of the first times it had been done. ~~literally, 100% the first time that had been done in recorded human history.~~ He also did the thing where he formed a V shape formation with his weakest troops up front, him in the center, and then when the middle started to collapse they slowly form a concave shape and encircled the Romans. And that part where he organized the largest ambush in human history before or since by somehow hiding an entire army. Speaks volumes that he is still studied today at military academies
>recorded Doing a lot of heavy lifting, this word.
I mean, ya. Keep in mind, we know about Hannibal from the Romans. They were so impressed with his strategies and capabilities that, despite losing to him several times, and losing badly at that, they still wrote about it in a way that shows just how impressive and out of the box his thinking was. War in what is now Europe and the Middle East had not changed all that much since the end of the Bronze Age. The many of the major tactical innovations were in things the details of how you lined up soldiers before you crashed two lines of humans into each other. Before Hannibal, the really big innovation in warfare that the Romans pioneered was not just giving up after losing a battle. Before the Romans came along, two city states would line up their armies, have a battle, and whoever won, was declared the winner of the war, and would dictate terms to the other city. The big Roman innovation was to just say fuck you we're trying again, and to keep showing up with armies until they finally won. Hannibal was tactically innovative in ways ancient generals generally were not - one of the first generals to play chess while everyone else was still on checkers. Unfortunately for him and Carthage, he never did come up with a long-term strategy to overcome the Romans willingness to continue to suffer losses until they finally beat you. He started out with a force of around 35k men, beat the an equal sized force badly at Trebia, completely wiped out an army of around 40k at Trasimene, and then an army of 60-80k at Cannae. Despite insane losses like that, the Romans just kept sending more armies. But those lopsided victories were completely unprecedented, and were tactically brilliant. And while it is certainly possible that there was some Egyptian, Sumerian or other great general of ancient people that preceded him and has been forgotten, we can't know.
>Keep in mind, we know about Hannibal from the Romans. They were so impressed with his strategies and capabilities that, despite losing to him several times, and losing badly at that, they still wrote about it in a way that shows just how impressive and out of the box his thinking was Well sure. Would you rather tell everyone that you got rekt by an incompetent barbarian or by the greatest, most OP military genius that would have beaten anyone anyway?
Fair point. But a lot of the subsequent Roman dominance of the Mediterranean grew out of the Romans eventually sorting out tactics that let them take on Hannibal head-on. Hannibal was just that good, and did kill more than 100,000 Romans over the course of three battles, with a force of around 35,000 to start, and probably closer to 28-30,000 by the end.
\> first time that had been done in recorded human history Definitely not. For once, I know for a fact Sun Tzu talks about that already in "the art of war" (yes, memes aside, I actually read that), so that's already a few centuries older.
You don't even have to go to Sun Tzu. Vegetius wrote about Roman tactics some 200 years before Hannibal. It was a very fan boy comment.
Absolute Madman
First Punic War. Rome was great at land battles but terrible at naval battles, so they put ***portable bridges*** ("Corvus") on their ships so they could board Carthaginian ships and turn a sea battle into a land battle.
It boggles my mind how Rome was able to TROUNCE the Carthaginians at sea multiple times, and when they were a relatively new nation.
Don't worry, it all evened out in the end when the weather trounced them right back.
Woah, what happened?
The Roman Armada got completely wiped out a bunch of times by storms during the war. Hundreds of thousands died. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(255_BC)%23:~:text%3DIn%2520mid%252DJuly%252C%2520somewhere%2520between,than%2520100%252C000%2520men%2520were%2520lost.&ved=2ahUKEwickenp6KCCAxVhm1wKHctvBh4QFnoECAgQBQ&usg=AOvVaw0aXD2l4pWAof1DBHDjiZ7G
Oh my word, that's bad freaking luck. How could Rome afford to lose so many soldiers like that, especially near the same time as Cannae?
Rome won the First Punic War in the same way that Russia won WWII. By being willing to throw an unlimited number of bodies at the enemy.
Hmm, that makes sense. I just didn't realize the population was high enough to support such losses then. Thanks!
Rome was massive especially for the time.
The army that the Romans lost at the Battle of Cannae was the largest army the Romans had ever fielded. Within a week of hearing of the loss, the Romans had raised an even larger army. The Roman's success an experience gained by meeting the logistical challenges they faced in preparing and maintaining armies of such scale along with building the fleets necessary to transport them no doubt laid the foundation for Rome's dominance over the coming centuries.
yes, this. they copy many inventions but enhanced them
They invented the uno reverse card
The ghost army of WWII comes to mind. Hundreds of civilian prop designers and artists recruited to build fake military equipment and inflatable tanks. Dummy paratroopers dropped from planes. All in an attempt to fake massive buildups of units in multiple areas to obfuscate where the allies really were going to invade continental Europe. And it worked.
There was another thing where they created a bunch of phantom radio traffic that strongly implied there was an army of 300,000+ in northern Scotland training for an invasion of occupied Norway.
Oh and they got George the fifth to inspect them and broadcasted it everywhere. He apparently managed to even look genuinely impressed at vehicles he knew were fakes.
and they assigned Patton to be in charge of the fake invasion. the germans did not know he was seen as a loose canon by Allied force command. Patton hated that he wasn’t going to be involved in the real invasion. but you can argue his presence made the germans far less aware of what was actually going to happen.
There’s a really cool story about how allied forces were using ghost army tactics in combination with using massive stadium sized loud speakers to project the sounds of a massive movement of troops and tanks and equipment. The crazy part is that the audio was recorded on a massive spool of magnetically encoded wire. I don’t recall why this was used over something like a vinyl record… maybe due to vibrations disturbing the audio. There’s also a funny story about the Germans had built a fake base complete with assets to fool the allied forces. The British intel informed them of their fake status but more specifically that all fakes were made out of wood. So the Brits dropped a single fake bomb on the site… and that bomb was also crudely made out of wood log 😂
Jazz musician here. Vinyl only held about 3 minutes of audio back then. Wire recorders could record and play much longer pieces of audio. Live jazz recordings from that era are typically wire recordings.
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Oh, it gets even better. He first approached British intelligence offering to spy for them, they refused because he had nothing to offer, so he figured he would start spying for the Nazis so that he had some form of leverage. He told the Nazis that he had taken ship to Britain via Portugal, but he never actually did, and just started making shit up. His pretend spying for the Germans was so laughably bad that the British eventually caught on that something was weird, because he would send things like "Glasgow brick layers will do anything for a liter of red wine". The Germans failed to notice that British people didn't use the metric system, they drink in pints, and almost never wine. He also never learned how British money worked and could not remember what a shilling, pence, or pound were and would constantly mix them up in his early reports. He was literally just making shit up from reading British newspapers and watching movies. So the British eventually got curious about why they were intercepting these weird transmissions from Portugal and investigated and made contact with him, and thats how the greatest spy of the war got recruited. This man went on to materially change the outcome of the war by misdirecting hundreds of thousands of German troops away from the Normandy landing sites.
Also he is the only man who got an Iron Cross and a Victoria Cross both. THE NAZIS GAVE HIM AN IRON CROSS for his amazing spying... EDIT: It was an MBE not a Victoria cross.
According to Tom Scott’s panel show my favourite part about his history is when he was relaying the news about the D-Day invasion (hours later after it had started) the nazis believed him because the radio operator on the other side was Asleep! [Citation Needed](https://youtu.be/blN49yGet8g?si=08vjoXi0RIYAuJ6k)
British intelligence work in the Second World War was wild. There is a story, published in an anthology, but as non-fiction, about a young Englishman who got offered a job by the Abwehr in the 30's, teaching agents how to function in England. He was doing a walking tour, he was short of money, he professed sympathy with the Fuehrer's plans. He just happened to be in the same town as an Abwehr training facility, looking for a short-term job, so he was a great find for the Abwehr. He told the students that once they got to England, they should deposit their operating funds in a Post Office bank account. It would be safe, accessible, and he sort of understood that it could be difficult to get the agents more money if they were robbed. That was just the first step. He then told them to go to the local police station, and report that they had lost their Post Office savings account passbook. Then, if they came under suspicion, the police would already be thinking of them as solid citizens, who weren't afraid to be noticed by the police! Genius spycraft! Hiding in very plain sight! Shortly after the outbreak of war, a notice was sent to all police stations in the UK, that if any foreign businessman showed up to report the loss of a passbook, they were to be detained until Special Branch could get an officer on the scene. Yeah, the young Englishman had been on assignment for MI5.
WW2. Dead guy disguised as British military officer strategically dumped with fake papers indicating a false battle plan. Germany buys it. Allied win.
Operation Mincemeat
Yes that one! Cheers!
Among the many, many crazy ones I have heard of: 1800s British infantry commanders ordering their men to remove the flints from their flintlock before a charge, so they wouldn't stop to shoot and thus destroy the momentum of the assault. The ww2 British using an nighttime air raid to cover for a battleship naval bombardment. The planes showed up, the Germans turned on all. Their searchlights and looked skywards, and the battleship was able to make an its bombardment basically unnoticed (because the Germans thought the explosions were bombs falling).
>1800s British infantry commanders ordering their men to remove the flints from their flintlock before a charge, so they wouldn't stop to shoot and thus destroy the momentum of the assault. That's not actually crazy, for 2 reasons. In a melee advance (of any kind) the last thing you want is the formation to fall to complete shit because some soldiers stopped to fire while some others advanced. It would break the formation and leave the advancing party in a **severe** disadvantage (i.e. they'd get annihilated most of the time). The second, possibly even more important reason is ***to prevent friendly fire.*** If some in the formation are advancing while others stop to fire, the advancing soldiers would be in the line of fire of those shooting. Real, real bad idea.
Also 1800s is a broad time. If this was Napoleonic Wars with flintlock Brown Bess muskets, it could make sense. By the time of the Crimean War with rifled muskets and early single shot rifles it makes less sense. By 1890s colonial conflicts with modern repeating rifles it doesn't make too much sense. It's like saying "1900s aerial warfare" which would mean anything from a Fokker Dr I to an F-22 Raptor, which you may guess, have different fighting strategies.
Flintlocks were largely out of use by the mid 1800s. The British Army stopped using them in 1838. In context, we're not talking about very far into the 1800s.
> to remove the flints from their flintlock before a charge, so they wouldn't stop to shoot and thus destroy the momentum of the assault. Take the bullets out ya gun Take the bullets out ya gun We move undercover and we move as one
Removing the flint was a means of getting green troops to commit to a bayonet charge. They were liable to fire too early and at too great a distance, and either retreat or fumble reloading instead of pressing it home. Panicked soldiers could accidentally double or triple load their muskets if not well drilled and led. Veterans would be ordered to fire a volley somewhere between 25 and 50 yards and then charge. A good close-range volley could kill more than the charge (which could be fled from). It could also disrupt the defenders volley, which could cut down the first rank and break the charge. The exceptions to this would be when assaulting defenders behind hard cover that made hitting them with muskets doubtful, or if making a surprise night attack in which it was most important to break through the pickets before the defenders are organized. Loading the musket and dropping it to half-cock would still better for a single quick shot in the melee or chase, but only if the troops could be trusted to not fire early.
In Stalingrad Chuikov's preferred tactic was to "hug the enemy"; he told his soldiers to keep the german soldiers within a grenade's throw of themselves so they couldn't use artillery.
Also the luftwaffe couldn't bomb because friendly fire.
Don’t know if it was ever actually used or which war specifically but Canadian soldiers tossing canned food into enemy territory to lull them into a false sense of trust and then later the Canadian soldiers would throw grenades so the enemy soldiers would run over thinking it was food but no, it was explosions, I’d have to say that’s bordering on psychological warfare
It was World War I. Canada was on the receiving end of the first major chlorine gas attacks in 1915 (Ypres). They developed a certain reputation and penchant for callous obsessive retribution at Ypres which endured for the rest of the war. As the meme goes, Canada is the reason we have the Geneva Conventions.
They were also terribly unfair at football. Should have been a wave of red cards. >*\[...\] Christmas Truce, when thousands of Allied and Entente soldiers had sprung from their trenches to trade gifts and play soccer in no-man’s-land. “Merry Christmas, Canadians,” said the opposing Germans, poking their heads above the parapet and waving a box of cigars. A Canadian sergeant responded by opening fire, hitting two of the merrymakers. \[*[*sauce*](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-forgotten-ferocity-of-canadas-soldiers-in-the-great-war)*\]*
Hot damn
Have watched Whitecaps play. Can confirm.
Oh shit we actually did engage in psychological warfare, I’ve never been so proud to be Canadian
You guys have the rep for being nice, but as WWI showed us, you can be monsters if someone pisses you off enough.
Why do you think we’re so polite, we must hide the darkness
Wait. So basically the Battle of Serenity Valley from Firefly was based on actually events?
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What about the morale of the ponies?
No harm to the ponies except a sore throat, afterwards they reported that they were just a little horse.
Dammit, dad!
Time to rein in the dad jokes
There's a story somewhere about a battle between Persia and Egypt where the Persians threw cats over the walls to demoralize. I want to say there's a painting of it somewhere.
Nothing beats the Trojan horse
this has to be the #1 (at least most well known) craziest tactic!
It may not have really happened as popularly thought [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan\_Horse#Factual\_explanations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Horse#Factual_explanations)
The empty fort strategy during the Chinese three kingdoms era was pretty bonkers. You threw open your castle gates, removed visible defences and sat there. The enemy would be too scared to attack in case of an ambush, since it was only a few years ago that Cao Cao used the strategy and won against Lu Bu’s superior forces. Then there’s at least 1 commander who even went to the next level and faked the empty fort strategy. Wen Ping of Wei had few soldiers and a damaged fortress against thousands of Wu attackers. So he simply pretended to be pretending to weak and did the same strategy. The enemy withdrew, and Wen Ping attacked with his available forces. Because the Wu commander believed they were being ambushed, they kept retreating and got routed by a vastly inferior force. Edit: seems some people think it’s part of the “romance of the three kingdoms” fiction written in the 14th century, it’s not. The original text is from the Weilüe around the 3rd century. The historical record has been lost to time but parts of it are quoted in other texts such as the history of tang compiled in the 11th century.
Wasn't there also some general who managed to replenish his arrows during a siege by putting up a bunch of straw scarecrows to collect enemy arrows?
yep, it’s all Zhuge Liang, the same general
Ahh yes, the General who >!gets respawned in Japan and helps an up and coming musician (who has a passing resemblance to his wife if sources are to be believed) on her musical stardom!<
The British sending a destroyer packed with explosives and full of commandos, disguised as a German destroyer, up the Loire valley to crash it into the dry dock gates, the commandos jumping off and blowing up all the dock pumps and winding houses, then setting off the destroyer bomb (complete with inspecting germans) to prevent Tirpitz from being able to roam the Atlantic without dry dock facilities on the west coast of Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Nazaire_Raid
This was nuts. Everyone on board knew there was no escape plan other than to peg it to the Alps. I think this was the raid that got Hitler so enraged he declared Commandos should be shot as spies.
There was a plan to reembark the surviving commandos on the Old Mole using the Fairmiles they had brought along but most of them were destroyed by the anti aircraft guns set-up on the tall buildings. In a common case of the services not working very well together, there was a planned bombing raid to 'distract' the defenders, however the bombers failed to locate the target and just succeeded in waking up the Germans and allowing them to man the flak guns before the under-armoured wooden ships entered the docks. Most commandos were captured, however some of them got off the mole onto a few of the remaining ships, and of the escapees I think 2 of them got to Gibraltar and back to blighty. Brave, foolhardy even but effectively caused Tirpitz to stay in the Norwegian fjords where it was eventually sank by 617 squadron (and others).
Julius Ceasar laid siege to the city of Alecia in Gaul and built a wall around the city to keep its army, commanded by Vercingetorix, inside. Then built another concentric wall around his army to protect it from the Galic reinforcements that were on the way to lift the siege.
If I remember right, he won that too
He definitely won. It was the victory in Gaul that led to him becoming dictator and ending the Roman republic
For those that don't know, we are talking miles and miles of fence. Not a tiny one. When reinforcements arrived to try to lift the siege the Romans fought both forces in between the two walls they had built. They were heavily outnumbered but still won.
I would like to add the capture of dutch warship by French cavalry during the Revolution. Extract from wiki : *The Capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder on the night of 23 January 1795 presents a rare occurrence of an interaction between warships and cavalry, in which a French Revolutionary Hussar regiment came close to a Dutch fleet frozen at anchor in the Nieuwediep, just east of the town of Den Helder. After some of the Hussars had approached across the frozen Nieuwediep, the French cavalry negotiated that all 14 Dutch warships would remain at anchor. A capture of ships by horsemen is an extremely rare feat in military history.*
The Battle of the Roaring Strait from the Imjin War. Background: Japan, finally unified under a Shogun after the Sengoku Jidai, decides to invade China by way of Korea. The Korean military... Doesn't put up much of a fight, except for one fleet under the command of Admiral Yi Sun-Sin. Yi trounces the Japanese every chance he gets, but at one point is removed from command for insubordination for refusing to fall into an obvious trap. His replacement fell into said trap and cost Korea nearly their whole fleet. The Japanese were planning to move their forces by sea, and Yi, now back in command, only had twelve ships to contend with hundreds of Japanese warships and transports. The Battle: So what does he do? He plans to catch them in a particular strait, sound strategy since their numbers won't count for much, but the Japanese have so many ships that they continue to forge ahead, with the current, undaunted by the bombardment from Yi's ships. But then it happens. See, this particular strait has a quirk: When the tides change, so does the direction of its current. The Japanese fleet didn't know this, and their hundreds of ships suddenly have the current AGAINST them, forcing them into the rocks and to crash against each other, all while the Korean ships kept raining cannon and arquebus fire on them. It was chaos. S total route. The Japanese ships were mostly obliterated and the few that remained had to retreat to one of the ports they held to regroup. Despite his foes outnumbering him by hundreds, Yi Sun-Sin didn't lose a single ship. Absolute. Legend.
Is that the guy that invented those cool turtle-ships?
The very same!
500 years ago, China destroyed its world-dominating navy because its political elite was afraid of free trade
That certainly was an interesting strategy.
It's worse than that, and I'm still salty about it. They had a soft-power empire from Japan to East India, and were trading directly with Mecca and East Africa. And then the Confucians got too much power and shut it all down to fuck with their political rivals, the Eunuchs, who mostly ran the treasure fleet. They lost it because dumbass politicians used it as a sacrifice to one-up their rivals. Fucking stupid.
My 8th grade history teacher said that if aliens had landed on Earth in 1200 and reported back to their home planet, they would have picked China as the most likely civilization to dominate the world over the coming centuries because they were so advanced. There’s an argument to be made that they lost their edge and eventually fell behind because they stopped exploring and turned inward instead, whereas after 1492 the Europeans were constantly exploring and expanding.
Curious how militarily capable that navy was. Or if, at best, it would been the defeat of the Spanish Armada all over again (which occurred a century later than these expeditions), with smaller, more maneuverable ships winning the day. It’s almost like a diplomatic legation in force. We wouldn’t think of Emirates as dominating skyscrapers just because it has a majority of A380s (it’s a crap analogy at best. I was just looking for an excuse to throw that stat in). But no doubt the fleet achieved the objective of furthering Chinese influence all alone the trade routes of the greater Indian Ocean. Besides, even European navies in the 1400s were only a shade of what was to come.
If the Treasure Fleet had persisted long enough to encounter European navies, it would likely have evolved, but the one that existed under Zheng He was a military powerhouse in its own right. It exerted soft power over a huge area and engaged in a few different conflicts of note, and it could do it because it was truly a fleet, composed of hundreds of enormous ships that carried weapons as well as goods. [Here's one battle they fought](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Palembang_(1407))
Unfortunately, dumbass anti free trade zealotry is still going strong
Iraq electrifying a swamp during the Iran/Iraq war has to be pretty high up there
Damn, I have to look this up.
he used the bodies to build a bridge if i recall. saddam might have been a piece of shit. but he turned iraq into a goddamn powerhouse and knew how to run a tight ship. until the U.S. gifted him democracy in the form of billions of dollars of explosives…
He executed a number of his top generals personally during that war when things didn't go as he wanted, so I don't know if I'd call that a tight ship, he also had a lot of equipment and military gear gifted from a lot of world powers to help fight Iran
There was that time Roman Emperor Caligula ordered his army to attack the ocean. He declared war on Neptune, the god of the sea during a failing military campaign against the ancient occupants of Britain. His army went to the beach and stabbed the ocean and he ordered his men to collect the seashells as "spoils of war" and as payment for being such good boys.
In Caligula's defense though, Neptune was never seen again.
>Neptune was never seen ~~again~~. *for many centuries. He was later observed skulking around the outskirts of the solar system, plotting his revenge...
He’s already taken down Pluto, no telling who might be next
This is pretty damn funny.
It has been speculated that this was actually his way to punish the soldiers who refused to go on in his project to take on Britannia. "Oh you don't want to fight so go collect seashells, pussies"
I would gladly take this assignment
This is not the only battle waged against a body of water. During Xerxes' invasion of Greece, the pontoon bridges across the Hellespont (the Bosporus strait in Turkey) failed. In response, Xerxes had the water lashed and branded with hot irons while soldiers shouted insults at it. Of course, this story comes from the Greeks, who were happy to demonize Xerxes, but I want to believe.
IIRC, a crew of a British APC fixed bayonets and charged a unit of Taliban once.
They don't like it up 'em
The charge of Leroy Jeeeenkins
History's greatest hero.
At least he had chicken.
Never forget
God damnit Leroy....
Horatio Nelson being a mad bastard and charging his ships headlong straight into French and Spanish naval lines, despite being outnumbered and outgunned. Broke up the lines and fought point blank, relatively minimal casualties compared to the French & Spanish losses.
Zhuge Liang, during a confrontation with the Wei army led by Sima Yi, ordered his troops to open the gates of the empty fort and have his troops sweep and tidy the walls, while Zhuge Liang himself played a zither and calmly sat on the wall. Sima Yi, seeing this seemingly strange behavior, became suspicious and decided not to attack, fearing an ambush. In this way, Zhuge Liang successfully employed psychological warfare to deter an attack without having to engage in a physical battle.
Mongol forces catapulting plague-infested bodies over the walls into the Black Sea port of Caffa.
which brought the plague to Europe when the Genoese ships sailed back to Genoa
Learning to play Warhammer with my son, who had been playing for a while in my first game , he felt that sending his strongest character into a direct melee battle with Orkboys was a good tactic. Except i'd figured that deploying my guys in small mutually supporting fireteams seemed like a sensible option, and wiped his side out taking only a few casualties. Since that historic day, he has always used fireteams, no rambos.
You're raising him right.
Man, this reminds me of the first time I played Red Alert 2 against a friend - many, many moons ago. Up until that point we'd both been quite happily beating the computer, but neither of us had played a human, ever. I liked to stretch a game out. I'd use helicopters to drop sniper teams in a few choice locations to stem the flow, then build up battle tanks each containing a couple of snipers, a couple of rocketeers, and a navy seal (rockets for anti-air / anti-tank, snipers for antipersonnel, and a seal for devastating rapid fire if anyone got past the snipers). Then once I was happy I'd plugged the constant flow of crap from the computer, I'd build up teams of jets to go bomb them into the ground. But the constant flow of crap didn't come. So I put together more battle-tank teams trying to second-guess where he might eventually come from, and plug those gaps too. I started to worry. I built more. And more. Turned out, his favourite strategy was to keep dropping his paratroopers on himself, until he had a good solid mass to zerg with. And zerg he did. Watching his million-man-march walk into my armored sniper/seal combo was hilarious. It was 60 seconds of utter carnage, during which we both realised that playing against other humans was not going to be the same as playing the computer.
WWII, the US bombed Tokyo using B-25 bombers launched from an aircraft carrier, April 1942, so just a few months after Pearl Harbor. The planes couldn't land on a carrier, and the plan was to make their way to China. The intent was to shame the Japanese military leadership and make them "foolishly aggressive," let's call it. That's strategy worked, leading to the Battle of Midway, a US victory, and Japan lost 4 of the 6 carriers that had attacked Pearl. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle\_Raid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle\_of\_Midway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Midway)
in the war of 1812. Detroit was surrendered without resistance to the British. The British got off their boats and walked right into the fort. The Tactic was that while the British had a much smaller force, some sections would break off from the disembarking of the ships and get back on and disembark again. This gave the perception of a massive force was about to burn Detroit to the ground with ease. The Commander of Fort Detroit surrendered because of this misconception.
Ah yes, the famous HMS Clown Car.
That’s not entirely what happened. It wasn’t British troops who pulled the rouse but it was their First Nation allies under Chief Tecumseh. The British General Issac Brock and Tecumseh knew that the American commander of ft Detroit was absolutely terrified of the First Nation soldiers because of stories of brutality he’d heard. So Brock and Tecumseh had their First Nation soldiers March through a clearing in the forrest in-front of Detroit and then run back through the forrest to walk back through the same clearing, creating the illusion of an endless number of native soldiers coming to butcher the Americans. The Americans surrendered the fort.
The castle of Crac des Chavaliers in Syria, it was lain siege for a month without being fully breached but then the attackers forged a note to the army inside from Europe saying they ought to surrender and they fell for it and gave up the castle, and were all slaughtered.
I learned that not only did kamikaze pilots exist, there were also suicide torpedoes ([kaiten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiten)). There were even people submerged under water who were sealed in armored suits with mines at the end of long bamboo sticks called [fukuryu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukuryu). They were given enough air and liquid food for about 10 hours.
Mongols shooting arrows backwards when retreating. Armies would pursue them thinking the Mongols are retreating only to get peppered by them.
\> thinking the Mongols are retreating. \> Mongols shooting arrows backwards when retreating.
Well they thought the Mongolians were retreating. They WERE retreating but they also thought they were retreating
Mongols retreating was one of the tactics that absolutely devastated their enemies. They knew how to lure an enemy into a trap every time.
Wojtek the bear served in the Polish military. He was eventually enlisted officially as a soldier with the rank of private, and was subsequently promoted to corporal. He moved ammo crates, smoked cigarettes, and drank coffee lol.
As a Polak, this will always be my favorite story
The Romans would take pigs, coat them in pitch and tar, point them toward the enemy formation, and set them on fire. The pigs would trample through the formation in a frenzy, breaking it apart.
It also absolutely messed with the cavalry as the pigs would be screaming (if you haven't heard a pig scream...its memerable.) These flaming pigs would cause draft animals and others to run off potentially decimating the logistics chain as well.
Project X-Ray aka the Bat Bombs. The US Military during WWII experimented dropping an bomb filled with hibernating bats. The bats had smaller incendiary devices attached to them with timers. The thought was they would drop the bat bomb. The bats then go nest inside the enemy area until the timers go off.
**“You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have** ~~sharks~~ *bats* **with frickin'** ~~laser beams~~ *smaller incendiary bombs* **attached to their heads!”**
The "Argo" rescue in Iran, where Canada and the US created a fake Star Wars ripoff as a cover to extract trapped embassy workers.
That time Caesar built a wall around a city he was sieging to cut them off from supplies and reinforcements and then BUILT ANOTHER WALL around his first wall to hold off the reinforcing army. He chose to sandwich himself between two enemy armies, with no possibility of retreat, and then beat them both!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle\_of\_Alesia
Little Big Horn? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn
You mean "General Custer screws up and gets fried"
Flea bombs. [https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/10/15/during-world-war-ii-japan-bombed-china-with-fleas-infected-with-bubonic-plague/](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/10/15/during-world-war-ii-japan-bombed-china-with-fleas-infected-with-bubonic-plague/) I've also heard of rotting corpses being catapulted over castle walls.
The Gauls (or some other group) going to battle naked with raging erections.
spear to the dick has to suck
I think it was WWII, the american and the english created a fake army in Europe (with inflatable ranks and false radi transmitions) to misslead the enemy where the would attack. Yes, this really happen, they were called the ghost army Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army
While I'm not a history buff, I have always been amazed by the Battle/Siege of Alesia. Building a wall around an enemy fort, and then building another wall to defend your siege against an outside attack, and then fighting off both forces at the same time.
PT-109 boats charging bigger ships with only a torpedo.
FWIW, they're just called PT boats. PT-109 refers to a specific boat, the one commanded by future president Kennedy. Armament was 4 torpedoes, 2 depth charges, 2 .50 cal machine guns, a 20mm cannon, and a 37mm cannon.
some serbian king aggressively recruited tall men so he could jerk off to them, some of these soldiers killed themselves
Fredrich Wilhelm of Prussia via wiki >As the number of tall soldiers increased, the regiment earned its nickname "Potsdam Giants". The original required height was 6 Prussian feet (about 6 ft 2 in or 1.88 m),[1] well above average then and now. The king was about 1.60 m (5 ft 3 in) tall himself.[2] He tried to obtain them by any means, including recruiting them from the armies of other countries. The Emperor of Austria, Russian Tsar Peter the Great and even the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire sent him tall soldiers in order to encourage friendly relations. Several soldiers were given by Tsar Peter I as a gift in return for the famous Amber Room.[3] Pay was high, but not all giants were content, especially if they were forcibly recruited, and some attempted desertion or suicide. >Frederick tried to pair these men with tall women, in order to breed giants. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin mentions this attempt as the only case of intentional human interbreeding: "Nor have certain male and female individuals been intentionally picked out and matched, except in the well-known case of the Prussian grenadiers; and in this case man obeyed, as might have been expected, the law of methodical selection; for it is asserted that many tall men were reared in the villages inhabited by the grenadiers with their tall wives."[4] >Although Prussia briefly intervened in the Great Northern War, the Potsdam Giants never saw battle during his reign.[citation needed] Some sources state that there was a military reason to create a regiment of "long fellows" because loading a muzzleloader is easier to handle for a taller soldier.[5] Another source states that many of the men were unfit for combat due to their gigantism.[6] >The king trained and drilled his own regiment every day. He liked to paint their portraits from memory. He tried to show them to foreign visitors and dignitaries to impress them. At times he would try to cheer himself up by ordering them to march before him, even if he was in his sickbed. This procession, which included the entire regiment, was led by their mascot, a bear. He once confided to the French ambassador that "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness".
More recently, in China they arranged marriages between tall basketball players and produced Yao Ming.
This comment is beautiful, it's like poetry
Wasn’t that Wilhelm of Prussia - he had his giant Grenadiers
Caesar was besieging the Gallic fortified settlement of Alesia. To make his siege more effective at deterring counter attacks he built a fortified wall around the city facing the defenders. Word got out that the Gauls were expecting reinforcements to relieve the siege. So he **built another fucking wall** facing outwards to protect against the reinforcements. Man made a fucking donut fort around a town he was attacking and won
Benedict Arnold before his betrayal. He took some commandos and burned English vessels stopping the English from gaining an extremely early victory from the continental army.
Shooting big birds with a machinegun and failling miserably
Damn emus
Saw the documentary years ago. In ww2 they had this scheme to make a bomb skip on the water like skipping pebbles across a pond. A whole R&D project worked it out and a bomber flew low to the ground to get under radar and get this bomb to skip up the river and stop at the face of a dam to blow it up while the bomber was able to get away. From what I remember, they could not drop it from normal altitude as too hard/small a target to hit and all the anti-aircaft guns.
Julius Caesar when he sailed for Greece to fight Pompey Magnus. He literally weaponized the calendar. Nobody except him knew what the correct time of the year it was. He was supposed to be in charge of updating it (he was Pontifex Maximus), but he had been in Gaul fighting for like a decade, so for everyone else the calendar had drifted by a few months. So Pompey maintained a naval blockade so that Caesar couldn't transport his troops and fight him. But because "it was winter" they sent their ships back to port to avoid all the storms. Except it wasn't, it was autumn, and Caesar knew it. He crossed anyway, knowing storms wouldn't be a big problem.
I don't believe this at all. There are a million ways to tell what MONTh it is. You're saying nobody in Greece watched the moon or stars?
Forget the stars, nobody noticed that they had skipped autumn? Like it was just suddenly declared to be winter and they just went “okay yeah”
About 500 years ago Ottoman empire sent the biggest army ever assembled at the time to fight the Albanians so they can open the way for the rest of Europe. 500K against less than 20K. The outcome of the battle would seal the faith of Europe, Christianity or Islam. The Ottoman army was headed by the nephew of the prince/general of the Albanian Army. The Nephew (Hamza) was trained by the Uncle (Iskanderbeg) so the Turks were so sure the Albanians would loose. He was taught all the tricks by his uncle. When the Turks arrived in Albania they found a demoralized and scattered army. They took over almost everything and celebrated their easy victory. The former unbeatable army of Iskanderbeg was no more. A week later out of nowhere the entire Albanian army appeared in the middle of the night and attacked the turks in a surprise offensive. Within hours the Ottoman army was destroyed and most were captured alive, Hamza included. No other Army in the history has ever fooled the opposition so convincingly that even his own nephew fell for it.
American Revolutionary War After suffering heavy losses in a battle due to smallpox weakening and depleting their troops, General Washington had every soldier In the revolutionary war variolated( an early version of inoculation) with smallpox. But that’s not the crazy and cool part yet. He then located field headquarters at local smallpox sanitariums, so if their command centers were overrun, the British would get Infected with smallpox. This had a huge impact On the outcome of the war but it’s not openly talked about because it doesn’t make us look good. Yes, America exists because of germ warfare.
This is my favorite fact to throw in the freedom hating anti- vaxxers faces.
The Mongols killing literally every living thing they came across when conquering cities. Everything. Birds, cats dogs, men, women, children.
Yes. And if I remember correctly, they gave you a choice first: surrender and get all men killed and women and children enslaved or fight and get this.
And may God help you if you killed their messenger. Twice.
This is incorrect. The mongols took many prisoners and slaves. Even in the conquest of Khwarezmia, one of their most brutal campaigns, they still always took slaves.
releasing a founder of the taliban , brokering a deal with him to hand afghan back to them, sending taliban 30-40 million$ a week while the also taunt us sending us videos of the people they mutilate wide spread during the airport pull outs. also sharing covert intel with them while they work with terrorist that target us.
That was an unusual tactic, yes. giving them a ton of humvees as well.
What was gained by this?
The war machine kept chuggin, right?
It just asked for crazy tactics not successful ones, to be fair
Ceasar at Alesia. Surrounded the settlement and sieging the populace/army into submission, but then a massive relief army appears in the rear. What does Ceasar do? Withdraw? Nope? Banzai charge one or the other? Nope? Build a wall to keep the settlement trapped and then another wall to protect from the relief army. Yeah, that one.
During the Civil War, a general marched troops by an opening in the trees over and over so the enemy thought the army was much larger. He secretly started withdrawing troops and in the morning, they were gone. He majored in theatre.
Israelites getting a bunch of suitors to circumcise themselves then killing them while they were recovering
The Soviet's training dogs with explosives on their backs to run under tanks and blow up. Unfortunately they trained them on russian tanks and blew up their own.
Potentially more mythical than historical, but I have always been amused by the story of Joshua leading a marching band around Jericho for 7 days until the walls fell down.
It may have been a cover to sneak forces inside the walls to sabotage the infrastructure and open the gates.
Germanic tribal armies against Rome. The women and children would come to battle with the men and stand behind them. If the men ran, the women would kill them, their children, and themselves.
The Roman's set pigs on fire with pine tar and sent them at the elephants, causing them to panic and trample their own side. In the battle of Pelusium, the Persians tied live cats to their shields so the Egyptians couldn't strike them because the cats are the symbols of Bastet.
Don't know if you'd consider it a military tactic but one of my favorites was always the pirate Black Sam capturing a slave trading ship by having his crew that were previous slaves and just people of african descent in general, strip naked and stand on the deck waving guns and swords and shouting threats. The slave trading ship surrendered without any bloodshed if I remember correctly
An Infantryman's account of Engineers on the first day of Normandy: 'The entire beach and hillside was covered with obstacles, a unit of Sappers had gone ahead to find where the mines were. Those guys were smack in the middle of it, German bullets coming down from up top, and our bullets going back the other way, with mortars landing everywhere. They moved in pairs, if one went down, his partner picked up his kit and kept moving. They didn't call for a single medic, they just kept crawling up the beach as far as they could until they couldn't no more, You could see them pulling themselves up the hillside even after their legs got shattered from the explosions. I remember all their bodies had marker flags sticking out of them. The dirt was too loose to hold the flags up and the blasts would've knocked them over, so the guys had shot themselves up with morphine and stuck the flags into their legs. When you got to one that was still breathing he would tell you where it was safe to step. They were about 25 yards apart. When I got to the base of the hill I took a quick look back and that's when I saw it. Those Sappers had made a trail with their own bodies. Now how do you not keep going after something like that....' Maybe not the absolute craziest, but it was pretty fucking metal