Vanquished: Crushing Defeats from Ancient Rome to the 21st century (General Military)

320 Pages·2009·94.62 MB·English

by  Mir Bahmanyar

VANQUISHED
CRUSHING DEFEATS
from ANCIENT ROME
to the 2 1 CENTURY
st
MIR BAHMANYAR
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Osprey Publishing,
Midland House, West Way, Botley, Oxford OX2 OPH, United Kingdom.
443 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, USA.
Email: [email protected]
© 2009 Mir Bahmanyar
All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or
review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be addressed to the Publishers.
Every attempt has been made by the publisher to secure the appropriate permissions for materials
reproduced in this book. If there has been any oversight we will be happy to rectify the situation and
a written submission should be made to the Publishers.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978 1 84603 327 8
Mir Bahmanyar has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this book.
Page layout by Myriam Bell Design, France
Index by Margaret Vaudrey
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro
Maps by Peter Bull Art Studio
Originated by PPS Grasmere Ltd
Printed in China by Worldprint
09 10 11 12 13 109 8 7 65 432 1
In each of the maps in this book, blue denotes the victor, and red the vanquished.
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C O N T E N TS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6
INTRODUCTION 7
CANNAE, 216 BC 14
ZAMA,202 BC 45
THE TEUTOBURG FOREST, AD 9 74
ADRIANOPLE, 378 90
PLISKA, 811 102
HATTIN, 1187 118
TANNENBERG, 1410 133
NORDLINGEN, 1634 145
JENA-AUERSTADT, 1806 153
THE ALAMO, 1836 173
JUGDULLUCK, 1842 185
CAMERONE, 1863 211
LITTLE BIG HORN, 1876 223
ISANDLWANA, 1879 233
OPERATION DINGO, 1976 245
GROZNY, 1994-95 256
QALAT-JANGI, 2001 268
CONCLUSION 280
NOTES 288
BIBLIOGRAPHY 303
INDEX 313
A C K N O W L E D G M E N TS
I should like to thank Ruth Sheppard, Emily Holmes and Michelle Ricci for without
them this book would never have been finished.
Special thanks to my contributors on this book:
Odin Benitez, who loves all things Byzantine and is an expert on many other eras
unknown to mortal man, for writing with such great care and attention to detail on
Adrianople and Pliska.
Matthew Rigdon for his terrific work on Jena-Auerstadt, the epic Napoleonic
battle which reinvigorated the Prussian military and its staff most notably among
them the great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz.
Ethan Reiff, who may have been a colonial war correspondent or British officer
or perhaps even an Afghan warlord or mullah in his previous life, for Jugdulluck.
Last but not least Giacomo Ghiazza, my long time artist friend, for his
beautiful sketches.
All of them came to my rescue. Their contributions and insights have made
this a far better book. Any mistakes or oversights are of course mine.
Mir Bahmanyar, Los Angeles
I N T R O D U C T I ON
I was discussing the current state of the modern Western military with a good friend
of mine who had participated in the combat parachute assault on the Rio Hato
military airfield, Panama, in 1989 while serving with the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger
Regiment. Our discussion concluded with a criticism of the American senior military
leadership, or more specifically, its lack of leadership from the front. It is shocking
to consider how inconclusive modern wars have become compared to those of history,
and how actions promising to be "battles of annihilation" instead turn into quagmires
of drawn-out stalemates and compromise. How did the United States, the most
powerful country on earth, fail to achieve decisive victories on tactical and strategic
levels? From this discussion of very modern military history was born the idea for this
book, a book examining battles of annihilation, the ultimate conclusive action, and
why they occur so infrequently in modern warfare.
Although large numbers of people have been killed during war in the 20th and 21st
centuries, few battles of annihilations have been fought since the middle of the 20th
century. Outside of a large-scale conventional war or a state-led genocide against a
vastly technologically inferior people, battles of annihilation are now mainly found in
history books. Today's wars are fought in urban or mountainous environments, waged
primarily by non-uniformed personnel against conventional forces. Guerrilla fighters
worldwide can easily intermingle with the local populace or retreat into inaccessible
areas, only to reemerge when suitable making it difficult to destroy a guerrilla force in
combat. Conventional forces often desert when facing overwhelming firepower, as was
seen in the case of the Iraqi Army during the two Gulf wars.
Currently, the interests of public image and perhaps the desire of a few to reduce
collateral damage, prevent complete obliteration of cities in Iraq or the Occupied
Territories such as Palestine, unlike the strategic bombing campaigns against civilian
targets utilized during World War II. Still, "annihilation" occurred most frequently
in the 20th century not in conventional battles involving regular troops, but through
actions against civilians. These events were mainly acts of genocide, from the
concentration camps built by the British to hold the Boers, through the Turkish
genocide of more than one million Armenians, to the most infamous mass murder,
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VANQUISHED
the Holocaust (Judeocide) during World War II. These types of "actions" are the
"Knight, Death and the
Devil" by Albrecht Durer modern "battles of annihilation," though one side is often unarmed, untrained, and
(1471-1528), shows the possibly even unaware a battle is being fought.
true face of war. (Anne S.K.
Military history is littered with decisive campaigns, battles, or sieges between
Brown Military Collection,
Brown University Library) regular armies seeking a conclusive battle, and when those engagements ended with
INTRODUCTION
one side obliterated, the commanders, who were often right in the main battle line,
died with their men. In some societies, defeated commanders, after realizing all was
lost, sought death for their failures rather than face punishment - the defeated
Roman commanders Paullus at Cannae and Varus at the Teutoburg Forest are two
examples. Nearly a hundred senators died at Cannae. Hannibal, the great
Carthaginian commander, fled when all was lost at Zama, but he was there in
command, finally committing suicide after years of being hunted by Roman agents.
One cannot imagine such things nowadays. When more conventional battles of
annihilation have occurred in recent years (i.e. between two conventional armed
forces), very few senior military commanders were present on the battlefield and
perhaps this absence of leadership is part of the reason that conclusive battles are
now rare.
Vanquished focuses on a selection of battles where the commander of one side got
it right and won an overwhelming victory, or where the other side got it terribly
wrong. Although "annihilation" implies a focus on very high casualties, within at least
one of the armies present and quite often in both, one should of course be wary of a
simplistic tallying of dead to judge a victory. Victories cannot always be judged by
numbers, or other traditional methods of evaluating them - a battle of annihilation
could include one force managing to destroy the enemy's morale completely, even
though by some evaluations they might be considered to have lost the fight. In
general terms, however, a battle of annihilation such as those in this book requires one
side to destroy the other completely, at least in terms of combat ability. The broader
context, of course, can make the victory or defeat more complex. For example, most
people will agree that the battle of the Alamo in 1836 was a complete victory for the
Mexican forces, yet it served as such a potent rallying cry for the Texians that it pretty
much won the war for them. Cannae, fought more than 2,000 years ago, is still
considered by many to be the greatest of all battles of annihilation and its impact on
Prussian and German militarism was significant, yet Hannibal, the victor on the
battlefield, lost the war.
It is unfortunately rather easy to forget when writing or reading about these battles
the misery and horror wars inflict on people and in particular on the men who fight
them. The casualty numbers for some of the battles included in this book are almost
incomprehensible, with the result that the experience of the individual, or the true
human cost of the battle, is at times hard to consider. Chris Cocks' Fireforce: One
Man's War in the Rhodesian Light Infantry is a wonderful addition to a handful of
meaningful war literature that includes such notable authors as Paul Fussell, Eugene
Sledge, and Guy Sajer. His after-battle thoughts might well have been those of the
survivors, on either side, in any number of the battles in this book:
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VANQUISHED
It was just a big adventure which slowly began to turn sour when I discovered that
upwards of forty thousand people had been killed in the conflict. "What the f*** was it
all for?" That is the bitter sentiment generally heard today and I cannot even try to
answer. In 19771 was just a young man - a boy, and in all wars it is always the youngsters
who are caught up in the fights of the fathers - not of their own making.1
War is hell and yet as journalist Chris Hedges points out with the title of his excellent
book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. It is a sobering thought.
Carl Philipp Gottlieb
von Clausewitz (1 780-
1831), was arguably the
greatest philosopher in the
history of warfare and his
unfinished manuscript,
On War, attempts to
analyze the tangible and
intangible elements of war.
His thinking was influenced
by his military experience;
he was captured during the
battle of Jena-Auerstadt.
(Author's Collection)
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INTRODUCTION
Deciding which battles of annihilation to cover in this book was not an easy task.
Months were spent researching and two books in particular are noteworthy: David
Eggenberger's An Encyclopedia of Battles -Accounts ofover 1,560 Battles from 1479 BC
to the Present and Thomas Harbottle's Dictionary of Battles from 743 BC to the Present.
The list of battles underwent many revisions; often a battle of annihilation turned out
not to be such or was simply a complete fabrication. The often cited battle of
annihilation fought at Cajamarca, Peru, in 1532, pitting Spanish soldiers against the
Incan king and his personal attendants, seems instead to have been the slaughter of
unarmed Incans. The ground battle of Longewala in 1971 between Pakistani and
Indian forces seems to have been completely fabricated by the victorious Indians.
Other times a lack of scholarship in English prevented a battle from being included
including the battle of Xinkou in the second Sino-Japanese War.
The limitations of the book meant that it was impossible to include all the battles
of annihilation through history. Those included have been selected to provide a variety
of types of battle of annihilation, showing both similarities between battles centuries
apart, and also fundamental differences in how crushing defeats have come about.
BATTLES IN TH E BOOK
N
11