If I'm honest with myself, I share the same preference that many wargamers have. A preference for the underdog. David prevailing against Goliath. It doesn't really matter what the conflict is.
Let's take the Battle of Thermopylae in the late summer of 480 BC. The name means something to most of us straight away. But very few people know where Thermopylae actually is. Thermopylae is a bottleneck between the Kallidromo Mountains and the Gulf of Malia in central Greece. It has always been of great strategic importance, as in ancient times the passage through the pass was only 15 meters wide on average. Today, however, it has expanded to several kilometres due to silting.
This is where the battle we are so familiar with took place between the Persian army under King Xerxes I and the hoplite army of the Hellenic alliance. The 300 Spartans who died there are firmly anchored in our consciousness and the remaining soldiers of the Greek army are forgotten. The Greek army was significantly stronger, and Herodotus speaks of the following contingents that are said to have taken up positions at the pass: 300 Spartan hoplites, 1000 Tegeans and Mantineans, 120 from Orchomenos, 1000 from the rest of Arcadia, 400 from Corinth, 200 from Phleius, 80 from Mycenae, 700 from Boeotia and Thespiae, 1000 from Phocis, an unknown number of men from Opuntian Locris and 400 Thebans, which makes a total of 4840 men.
Spartan Hoplites
Admittedly, this number also seems vanishingly small when you consider the size of the Persian army, which according to Herodotus was around 5 million men. However, if you take more recent research into account, you can assume that the Persian army at Thermopylae comprised no more than 40-50,000 men, still a huge superiority. However, if you consider the location of the defensive position, this superiority is put into perspective, because the narrowness of the passage means that this numerical superiority cannot fully develop its effect.
Herodotus reports that the Greeks were able to hold their position for days and were able to fend off the attacks of the "Immortals", the Persian king's elite unit, inflicting heavy losses on them.
Even if the term "Immortals" does not appear in Persian sources but was coined by Herodotus himself, you can assume that Xerxes led his elite regiments against the Greeks in order to quickly break the resistance. One thing we as wargamers tend to forget is logistics. An army of any size needs to be supplied, and in ancient times this was much more difficult than it is today. This is also how the Persian victory can be explained. If we assume that the Greeks also suffered losses in the battle, which is not unlikely, then it could simply be a result of attrition that they had to withdraw from their positions to avoid being completely wiped out, and not, as Herodotus writes, the result of betrayal that allowed the Persians to bypass the Greek positions. The Spartans under King Leonidas I of Sparta, who stayed behind, covered the withdrawal of the rest of the army and the wounded. They sacrificed themselves to give the rest of the army the opportunity for further operations. Even though Xerxes I was able to march unhindered to Athens after the battle, the Greeks managed to successfully defend their independence against the Persians with the victorious battles at Salamis in the autumn of that year and Plataea the following summer.
Persian Immortals
The Confederate States' fight against the Union in the American Civil War was not quite as successful as the Greeks' fight against the Persians. Although the "underdog" managed to achieve spectacular successes there too, it ultimately had to admit defeat to superior forces. And yet it is precisely these ultimately pointless battles that make the history of the American Civil War so interesting. Resistance against overwhelming superior forces achieves impressive successes in the short term but is futile in the long term.
Let's take McCellan's Peninsula campaign from March to June 1862 as an example. Here too, a far inferior force managed to hold off the larger one until its advantage dwindled more and more. General Magruder, with his division of around 13,000 men, managed to hold off the far superior Union forces of around 125,000 men along the line between Yorktown and the James River and convince them that he had far more forces than he actually had. Of course, McCellan's tendency to greatly overestimate the enemy's strength also played into his hands, as he had already done during the previous campaign in Virginia.
While McCellan was besieging Yorktown and deploying heavy siege artillery, the South managed to assemble 70,000 men at Richmond under General Joseph E. Johnston and counterattack, always concentrating his still inferior, weak forces elsewhere. However, he was seriously wounded at the poorly coordinated Battle of Seven Pines and was replaced as commanding general by Robert E. Lee, who subsequently developed a plan to cut off McClellan's lines of communication to the east.
The result of this plan was the so-called Seven Days' Battle, a series of six major battles between June 25 and July 1, 1862. The Army of Northern Virginia failed to achieve a decisive victory in any of these battles; in fact, it was clearly defeated at the Battle of Malvern Hill on July 1, when Lee's troops attacked a well-fortified Northern position. However, through this offensive approach, Lee succeeded in convincing McClellan more and more of his inferiority.
The opposite was true, because the Army of the Potomac was at that time the largest army that had ever been formed on the American continent.
Despite the victory at Malvern Hill, McCellan retreated to positions near his supply base on the James River at Harrisons Landing, but from there he could not threaten Richmond again by land or sea. Even though Lee's ambitious plan did not work and Confederate losses were significantly higher than those of the Union, he had managed to fend off the greatest threat to the Confederacy to date and established his reputation as a brilliant strategic genius. But it also showed Lee's lack of understanding at the lower tactical level, as was clearly evident in his attack at Malvern Hill and later at Gettysburg. Both cases in which he let a well-fortified or entrenched enemy attack openly, although he could have at least avoided the mistake at Gettysburg after his experience at Fredericksburg. There he was in the position of the defender and was able to watch as the Union lines collapsed at his positions.
And that brings me to my third example for today. The Battle of Rorke’s Drift on January 22, 1879.
Rorke's Drift Diorama
Here, 139 British troops under the command of First Lieutenant Bromhead (24th Regiment of Foot) and First Lieutenant Chard (Royal Engineers) held out against up to 4,000 Zulus. First Lieutenant Chard was in command as the senior officer. Here too, the Zulus were far superior, but they were also fighting against an entrenched enemy and they too were unable to make their numerical superiority count because their attacks were not coordinated, but only carried out in sections, so that the defenders were able to reinforce every threatened point.
After ten hours of fighting, the Zulus had suffered around 351 dead and 500 injured and withdrew. The British losses initially amounted to 15 dead and 12 wounded, of whom two more succumbed to their injuries.
Zulu Warriors
As a result of the heroic defence of the mission station, the defenders of Rorke's Drift were awarded eleven Victoria Crosses, Britain's highest award for outstanding bravery in the face of the enemy. Seven of these went to soldiers of the 2nd/24th Infantry Regiment - the most that a regiment has ever received for a single action. Four Distinguished Conduct Medals were also awarded.
An interesting aspect of this is the fact that Acting Assistant Commissary James Langley Dalton was not initially intended to receive the Victoria Cross, but received it after massive protests in January 1880. According to eyewitness reports, although he was only a supply officer, he did much more to organise the resistance than Chard and Bromhead, who initially wanted to abandon their post when the Zulus approached. Another of those awarded was Corporal Christian Ferdinand Schiess, a Swiss citizen who posed as a South African. This is how he received the Victoria Cross, which is otherwise reserved for British citizens.
Mixed Infantry
However, this high number of awards for bravery was often interpreted as a reaction to the earlier defeat at the Battle of Isandlwana, as the praise of the victory at Rorke's Drift distracted public attention from the great defeat at Isandlwana.
This last example also shows the heroism and willingness to make sacrifices that are required in the face of such overwhelming force and I think it is this knowledge that almost always makes us take the side of the supposedly weaker in the hope of leading them to victory.
Perhaps you can tell me how you are doing. Are you attracted to the seemingly hopeless defence of an insignificant mission station? Or are you more inclined towards large field battles? I would be delighted if you could give me some feedback via the WoFun Facebook page.
That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed my trip to the underdogs and we'll see you here again soon
See you soon,
Yours, Martin