11 Most Foolish Battle Strategies of the Past 500 Years

Written by a character that may or may not pop up in my books in progress.

The Eleven Most Foolish Battle Strategies of the Past 500 Years

Professor Spector, History Discipline, Bolingbarke University, CC 3000

Oftentimes in history, battles and wars are won- or lost- on sheer fortune or acts of the gods, whether it is Cancalia avoiding losing Fort Cyrus in 2902 by the aged commander of the attacking unit suffering the fit of apoplexy that ended his life, or the former Gervais (now divided between Spolingharrow and Balsam) having its army decimated by an earthquake in 2991. However, there are many other cases in history where battles have been won by brilliant strategy or lost because of a leader making a halfwit decision. Here are twenty examples in the past five centuries where the fate of a realm was decided by someone’s lack of common sense.

1.     If you rule a kingdom, or in the case of Jadafoquerp are among the oligarchs in charge, make sure you send orders to someone lettered. Or, at the very least, make sure your weak reader of a commander does not have too much pride to ask someone better than he at reading to interpret the orders for him.  Otherwise, you may find yourself losing over 500 of your men. Jadafoquerp learned this the hard way when at war with Thyrsus in the late 2540s.  Huuuume Squee, who led an infantry unit, misread the orders sent by the small group ruling Jadafoquerp as a command to attack Thyrsus’ cavalry force of 2000 with his men outnumbered four to one. This is about as good an idea as launching an attack on a gang of bored and bloodthirsty orcs armed only with a filleting knife and without armor.

2.    When you’re fleeing an enemy force in a desert that knows the desert well, make sure you don’t leave your water supply behind. This is exactly what an army the former Flaanis (now divided between Bingerbonger, East Parquay and the former Wishmay) did during a war with Wishmay in 2586. The panicking Flaanis general, Blugga Yoofipoof, did not think to order his gnomes and humans to grab the water. The Wishmay forces managed to trap the Flaanis soldiers in a valley predictably devoid of water, waiting patiently for three days while over half the Flaanis force perished from thirst until the unit leader surrendered.

3.    Enemy spies can very easily be the bane of any army if they manage to remain undetected. The former Manwaringa (now divided between Cancalia and Rheeding) learned this the hard way in 2609 when at war with Cancalia. Prior to a marine battle, a Cancalian spy, who hid on the ship of the commander of the fleet disguised as a servant who grew up in a boating family, convinced the commander of a Manwaringan fleet that fastening all the ships of the fleet together was an effective method to avoid being  shipwrecked in a thunderstorm. What the “Manwaringan” failed to mention to enable a decisive Cancalian victory was that it is also an effective way to be unable to retreat north or to shore when suddenly attacked from the south and west by enemy forces. This is precisely what ended up happening, and needless to say the battle ended with the unit surrendering to the Cancalians.

4.    The 20^th of April in 2692 will be forever be known in history as an extremely windy day. How do we know this over 300 years later? The skirmish at the border of Balsam and Khar-Phazabough. As is commonly known today, elves fight primarily with longbows and dwarves primarily with war-axes. A battalion leader named Laurelin Leaflin, in direct contradiction to every stereotype in existence pertaining to elven wisdom, decided that the time was ripe for a fresh wave of attack upon the dwarves at the very same time the air was ripe with gale-force winds. His key strategy? A surprise attack by his archers from higher ground. In theory, this was a clever strategy if one does not take the weather into account. In practice, one cannot so easily ignore the weather. Even the best archers among them could not hit their mark in winds strong enough to knock down a halfling, and Laurelin Leaflin succeeded only in wasting his army’s ammunition that day. To this day, Khar-Phazabough enjoys gleefully taunting their elf neighbors about that blunder.

5.    In 2761, a war between the former Ingerith (now part of Holdifax) and the former Kan-Darakis (now part of Dun-Krozahirch) seemingly reached an end when Ingerith’s Queen Netime Wijdan seemingly surrendered to the dwarf-king Hamza Khuder. Knowing of King Hamza’s fondness for drinking, Queen Netime, a known enemy for almost half a decade, offered a gift of Ingerith’s “finest ale” as “a token of my surrender.” The dwarf was so eager to accept the gnome-queen’s surrender and seal the deal that he did not think of having one of his servants check the gift before partaking in his foe Ingerith’s “finest ale.” Even a child can recognize accepting food or drink from a known enemy as a bad idea and King Hamza’s 16-year-old son, young enough to barely surpass his father’s waist, said “Don’t you want someone else to drink first?” King Hamza, however, chose to ignore what he called “the foolish paranoia of youth.” By the end of the day, King Hamza was dead from the ravages of the Ingerith Queen’s poison.

6.    In 2835, King Conrad of Rheeding decided he wished to expand his kingdom. After successfully taking over the tiny elf realm of Brugiére, one of the less wise members of the Seifert dynasty (that still rules Rheeding to this day) turned his attention to his northern neighbors, thinking it would be easy to overpower the halflings. He instead learned what the adage “pride comes before the fall” means. The Seiferts’ army managed to take over two Drémeadow villages in one day through the element of surprise, but then decided the best route to taking more would be to march through a valley surrounded by a mixture of forests and boulder-strewn hills, feeling it dishonorable to hide his army in the woods. Predictably, the halflings of Drémeadow, who did not share such notions of honor and were unwilling to permit a larger race to take over any more villages, concealed themselves among the rocks and trees. They then launched a counterattack that forced the invading army back to Rheeding and return the villages they’d seized in what was for the Rheeding monarch a humiliating defeat.

7.    In January 2881, a snowstorm bore down on the land of Baur, currently at war with its northwestern neighbor Merelimbor after a failed attempt to take over some of the elven King Laurent’s southeastern territory. Despite the nuisance of snowy weather, however, Maximino Graciano, the infamously inept commander of the force situated near the border (the same commander unable to even breach the borders of either Rheeding or Drémeadow just a month earlier, perhaps because of Baur’s proclivity back then for having trumpeters play as they marched) was utterly determined to save face from his past failures by… launching another attempt at taking over some of the elf’s land. Blizzard and all.  His army was scattered in the blizzard, many of them succumbing to the harsh winter elements, and what was left was forced to return to their own land. Fortunately for Commander Graciano, he was among those  killed by the snow, or he would have been forced to answer to Crown Prince Eusebio Tattersall, who after ascending to the throne just over a decade later would come drive most of the nonhumans he did not manage to have killed out of Baur.

8.    In early October 2941, the dwarf Dwannis Kacklethrug, general of the main army of the former Thyrsus (now part of Kheraozi), found his army being afflicted by heavy casualties at the hands of a Kheraozi army led by Ven Clapokov from the south in the front with mountains to the east, the Peka River, newly frozen-over for the winter, and an evergreen forest to the west. His solution? To lead his army across the mile-wide Peka, which had been frozen for all of a third of a day. Predictably, the ice collapsed beneath the retreating army, dropping over a third of the soldiers to a watery grave. Needless to say, losing that large a percentage of the troops had was a detriment to future battles, for the army was even more outnumbered than it had been, and Thyrsus fell the next month, it’s king’s guard routed and the entire royal family consequently slaughtered by a force comprised of men, orcs, and the occasional Kheraozi dwarf.

9.    Just four years later (June 2945), Zoran Jovanovic, who led a battalion in the former Zosteria (now the Desolation of Gharakhzg) and failed to heed General Kacklethrug’s fatal error in not considering the territory through which to lead a retreat, chose to flee invading orcs via a swamp. Many of the men became stuck in the quagmire and drowned in quicksand. Those left alive were surrounded by orcs within an hour, who killed many with javelins and burned the rest alive.

10.  Lessons to be learned from the gross errors in Merelimbor commander Humir Ethelberg’s judgment in 2969, when the gnomes inhabiting southeastern Merelimbor were fighting to become an independent entity? Do not plan battle strategies drunk, do not use tactical maps when drunk, and most especially do not get drunk or encourage your soldiers to get drunk the night before a battle. From mislabeling his own homeland’s major cities to offending local nobles that might have assisted his army by permitting his troops to trespass upon their land to relieve themselves and claim food from their livestock, actions for which the Merelimbor king still strives to make amends to this day, to forgetting half of his own battle plans (his solution for which is to get drunk so he can remember), Humir Ethelberg is now known in Merelimbor as the worst tactician they’ve seen in recent centuries.  The idiocy of Ethelberg culminated in his leading his men into celebrating an upcoming “lesson” for the revolting gnomes by drinking the army’s supply of absinthe dry so they spent a rough night before the latest mission hallucinating, vomiting and exhausting the food supply and the following morning hung over- not exactly prime condition for a battle. The only lessons learned that day were by the elves and not the gnome rebels- that you tend not to fight well when hungry and hung over, and that the day might have been better spent replenishing their supplies than carrying out battle plans made during a drunken stupor.

11.    When it came to deciding who would lead his arm in 2989, young King Jacques Derrier of the former Gervais (now part Spolingharrow and part Balsam) selected who would lead his army not by past experience, intelligence, or wisdom, but who won his favor by bringing him the best gift at his 16^th birthday feast. He ignored the adamant advice of both his entire advisory, several of who had protected Gervais for twice the amount of time he’d been alive, and his nearby allies of Balsam, Khar-Phazabough   and Cancalia.  The winner? Thebus Bamberger, who promptly lost the entire triangle of Gervais. between Spolingharrow and Simillior. In an effort to exact revenge upon his northeasterly foe for the capture of this region, General Bamberger decided upon a counterinvasion.. His path led him along a road flanked on both sides by Spolingharrow camps. That idea transpired to be just as suicidal as it sounds, as the Spolingharrow camps were unwilling to permit the Gervais troops to march the road between them unmolested. The general was killed and several important officers, intimately familiar with Gervais’ royal family, were captured by Spolingharrow, who was subsequently able to procure enough information to guarantee the kingdom’s fall.

 

Author's Note

I wrote this when I was both very bored and trying to expand upon the universe I've been creating for a fantasy series in the making. This was a list a professor wrote, copied via the printing press and distributed to his students when my character Kiran Mani was 15 and a student at a university in his homeland.

Reviews

[NoelHC]

This seems to be a good guide to "What not to do before a war" The font is a real problem to read though.

[SpeedyHobbit Armstrong]

Ewwww didn't even know it did that until your review. Damn you WC and your formatting glitches...

[New Theory]

Interesting, what is this ficitonal universe that you are building upon??

[SpeedyHobbit Armstrong]

It's this fantasy continent I created with roots in several DnD campaigns my best friend and I did. The continent is the one I use in my books Democracy's End, Fallen Ones and Traitor Princess. All of these happened before any of my books, as Democracy's End starts in Continental Calendar 3009 and this list was written in CC3000 by a professor and given to character Kiran when he was a student haha ( I get way too into developing my world lol)