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Old 28th June 2009, 11:48 AM   #13
migueldiaz
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KuKulzA28
Remember Hannibal's Cannae? ... The martial skills play a role in the individual melee between fighters.. the tactics to manage the troops just before and during the thick of battle... and the strategy to win the war. The warriors had the skills, Hannibal had the genius to win those battles... but they did not win the war.
Thanks all for the very interesting discussion!

Cannae (216 BC) is my personal all-time favorite battle ...

I think however, that Cannae is more an example of getting the strategy right (and operationalizing it faithfully), rather than individual warriors besting the other guy in one-on-one combat.

For how can one explain the very lopsided outcome --
  • 86,000 Romans and allies, vs. 56,000 Carthaginians;
  • and thru Hannibal's genius as KuKulzA28 said, the latter encircled an army 1.5 times its size;
  • after which the battle site quickly turned into a enormous meat grinder, wherein 50,000 Romans were killed at a mere casualty rate of 6,000 Carthaginians!

Note how this author [Mark Healy] pointed out that many Roman soldiers were not able to use their swords at all:
"Caught between the 'vice' of the twin African phalanxes on their flanks and assailed to the fore and rear, the encircled Roman legions tried desperately to fight their way out of the trap ... It was to no avail. So compressed had their ranks become that many were unable even to raise their swords before they were cut down by the advancing army. Stepping over the dead and dying, the encircling Carthaginian forces drew the net ever tighter on the diminishing Roman force ... 'as their outer ranks were continually cut down and the survivors were forced to pull back and huddle together they were finally all killed where they stood' [Polybius]."
And thus the battle had become more of a massacre:
"The rest of that August day Cannae had become an abject slaughter, a battlefield Armageddon unrivaled until the twentieth century. The destruction of some 50,000 snared Italians in a single afternoon - more than 100 men killed each minute - was in itself a vast problem in the logistics of killing." [Parker's Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare]
For sure Hannibal's men were seasoned combatants well-versed in their individual fighting styles.

But in this particular battle, once the double-envelopment was effected, for all intents the battle and individual combat had ceased (to oversimplify things a little), and things turned quickly into a 'vast problem in the logistics of killing'.

Thanks KuKulzA28 for bringing up Cannae
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Last edited by migueldiaz; 28th June 2009 at 12:01 PM.
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