The Turning Point of the Battle: Factors of Victory and Defeat

THE TURNING POINT OF THE BATTLE:

FACTORS OF VICTORY AND DEFEAT

Terence Casey

Military History to 1860

7 December 2014

        No matter the era, warfare as a contest of pure manpower is a constant. In many cases, superior armies have inflicted decisive defeats on inferior ones, but objectively inferior armies have also emerged victorious in numerous instances. This tendency compels historians to contemplate the true definition of a “superior” army. Clearly, numbers are not the answer. In fact, the outcome of a battle is much more likely to be influenced by factors of technology, tactics, physical geography, the performance of individual men, and the element of surprise. Under a substantial number of occasions throughout history, these forces have come together to vanquish numerically superior armies, bringing upset defeats to the most hubris-ridden belligerents. Given the critical nature of these five factors, a superior army can evidently be defined as one that takes advantage of all or most of them. However, even if a general does not put all five factors to use, he must implement the two most paramount of the group: tactics and the performance of the individual. This postulate of war is demonstrated across three historical periods: The Classical Period (700 BCE-600 ACE), the Middle Ages (600-1500 CE), and the Napoleonic Era (1796-1815).

        In 216 BCE, the Roman army suffered the most disastrous and costly defeat in the history of the Republic. Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian commander who ravaged his way through Southern Gaul, over the Alps and, ultimately, Italia met the numerically superior Roman army at the village of Cannae in Apulia.^[1] Not only did the Romans have numbers on their side, however. The Roman Maniple Legion, whose implementation is commonly associated with Marcus Furius Camillus, was the most well-articulated tactical formation of the pre-modern world. When it was deployed in battle, the opposing army was forced to contend with three lines of heavy infantry armed with Spanish slashing swords, or gladii. Additionally, each legionary carried two javelins, or pyla, which were thrown on the charge, be it theirs or that of the enemy. The young and relatively inexperienced hastati formed the first line, the middle-aged veteran principes formed the second, and the old and elite triarii formed the third. Additionally, lightly armored skirmishers or velites formed up in between the infantry lines to harass the enemy with pyla, enraging them into a rash charge before retreating. Each unit of heavy infantry formed up in homogeneous maniples of 120-160 men. The Maniple Legion provided Roman generals with maximum flexibility as they could move the infantry reserves to gaps in the line very quickly. It also made the adversary’s attack a costly matter as his forces had to first make their way towards the Roman troops under a cascade of missiles, only to exhaust themselves fighting the weaker hastati before they could engage the fresh principes.^[2] 

This is exactly how consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro deployed their army of 80,000 infantry and 6,400 cavalry against Hannibal’s army of 45,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry at Cannae. With his troops massed in the center, Varro hoped to immediately burst through the Carthaginian vanguard. However, narrowness of the plain on which he launched his attack created a bottleneck, limiting the amount of legionaries who could engage the enemy at a given time to 2,000. Hannibal understood the threat to his center, arranging his own infantry in the shape of a crescent with his most elite African hoplites in reserve behind the vanguard and his cavalry on the flanks. After some minor skirmishing, the two armies engaged each other en masse. At the outset of the engagement, Hannibal used an ingenious tactic to defeat an army twice as large. The individual strength of his infantry at the center kept the Roman’s fixed in place, buying time for the Carthaginian heavy cavalry to charge down the flanks of the battlefield, crush the Numidian light cavalry stationed there, and effectively surround the Roman infantry, repeatedly charging them from behind while the Carthaginian infantry on the wings turned both Roman flanks simultaneously.^[3] Historian Robert L. O’Connell writes:

“[The Romans] were reduced to a crowd of loners trying to fight off a coordinated engine of destruction. Meanwhile, the emotional shockwaves rippled inward, spreading paralysis throughout the Roman ranks and halting the forward momentum of the entire army. Their fate was all but sealed.”^[4]

This tactic, known as double envelopment, had enormous shock value. The Romans became swallowed into their own ranks as Hannibal’s troops pushed from all sides. In the Classical Period, a broken army surrounded by its enemies typically did not fare well, and the Romans at Cannae were certainly no exception. 60,000 legionaries were killed and 10,000 were captured that day, reducing the Republic’s standing army to a third of what it was before Hannibal’s campaign began.