12 Famous Battlefield Maneuvers That Shaped History

Historians agree that the fable of the Trojan Horse is just that – a fable – but it is still arguably one of the most famous examples of military deception in history. The story is that after failing to capture Troy despite a decade-long siege, the Greeks, an alliance of city-states under Odysseus, constructed a gigantic wooden horse, which they left outside the city gates as an apparent offering.

The bulk of their forces then appeared to sail away – but some 30 soldiers remained behind, hidden inside the horse. When the Trojans brought it inside their walls, the Greeks emerged and opened the gates for the rest of their army, which had sailed back under cover of nightfall. Troy quickly fell.

The march from Atlanta to Savannah by Union forces during the Civil War was led by Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman. Troops swept across the Georgia countryside destroying bridges, tunnels, railroad tracks, cottonfields, factories, military installations, plantations, slave quarters, and more. Historians say that Sherman’s motivation was to cripple the Confederacy with a minimum loss of life.

His actions economically and psychologically weakened the Southern states, eventually leading to the Confederate surrender. Historians have studied the march as a vivid example of psychological warfare that has influenced recent military tactics. Some even credit Sherman with having invented modern warfare.

The Blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war,” was a German military doctrine during World War II. The idea – echoed much later by the failed U.S. “shock and awe” attacks at the start of the Iraq War – was to hit the enemy with everything at once. In the case of the Germans, that meant their agile tank corps and other mechanized forces working in concert with artillery and air attacks.

While the term – and the technique – came to public attention with the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the Germans used some of the tactics associated with it to help their Fascist allies in Spain in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. The Nazis were eventually defeated, but the Blitzkrieg enabled them to conquer and hold much of Europe for at least two years and had a harrowing psychological effect even in areas they didn’t hold. It is considered a significant step in the evolution of warfare and is said to have influenced American military doctrine even into modern times.

Naval ambush at Salamis

The most important battle of the Greco-Persian Wars, and arguably one of the most important in history, this naval engagement resulted in an unexpected victory by the vastly outnumbered Greek fleet, thanks to the strategies of its commander, Themistocles. He lured Persians to the island of Salamis, and when they arrived and attempted to blockade the Greeks in the straits between the island and the mainland, Greek ships emerged from hidden coves and attacked.

Crowded into the comparatively narrow waterway, where they could not efficiently maneuver, the Persian vessels were easy prey. The battle claimed about 300 lives, while the Greeks lost only 40 ships. It has been said that Western history would have been very different had the Persians won, because they would have pressed on and conquered all of Greece, suppressing the culture that ultimately gave the world so much of our science, philosophy, and government systems.

The Japanese intended to extend their empire into China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific in the 1930s and worried that the American navy might intervene. To forestall the possibility, they launched a devastating surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet on that fateful Sunday morning which President Roosevelt subsequently dubbed “a date which will live in infamy.” Japanese bombers and miniature submarines appeared seemingly out of nowhere, destroying four battleships and incapacitating countless other vessels, damaging or destroying more than 300 aircraft, and killing more than 2,400 people, including 68 civilians.

Japan successfully mounted this attack because they had denial and deception radio actions. For months before the attack, this strategy included radio silence, active radio deception, and effective radio intelligence, which hid their intentions to attack the United States. The day after the attack, the U.S. declared war against Japan, and a few days later, Japan’s allies Germany and Italy declared war in turn on the U.S.

George Washington’s move to ferry 2,400 of his troops, which included 1,500 Hessian mercenaries serving under the British who were garrisoned at Trenton, across a river clogged with ice floes in the middle of a raging snowstorm. It was a gamble, but such a desperate measure was called for, as the Continental Army’s morale was low after defeats in Long Island and northern New Jersey. The Hessians (German troops hired by the British) felt secure in their encampment, certain that Washington was far away. The crossing was successful, and Washington’s troops quickly marched nine miles south to Trenton where they attacked the oblivious Hessians.

More than 100 mercenaries were killed and almost 1,000 captured. News of the triumph reinvigorated the Continental Army’s spirits, attracted recruits, and reassured citizens of the newly declared United States of America, inspiring the emerging nation to continue battling the British until they achieved victory five years later.

A Roman-educated German soldier of fortune named Arminius convinced the Romans that an uprising against Rome’s rule was brewing in a region of Germanic lands. The imperial legate Publius Quinctilius Varus led around 15,000 crack soldiers to put the rebellion down. As they marched along a narrow trail through the forest, barbarian forces came at them from all sides, all but annihilating them (Varus committed suicide as a result of the debacle).

The defeat, one of the worst ever suffered by the Romans, had lasting effects on central Europe, creating a permanent cultural and linguistic barrier between Germanic and Latin civilizations and ultimately helping to create the conditions that resulted in both world wars.

The stealth bombing of two cities in southwestern Japan was justified in America’s corridors of power by the fact that Japan refused to surrender, even after the Germans had put down their arms in May of ’45. Between mid-April and mid-July of the year, Japanese forces in the Pacific inflicted a large number of casualties on the Allies, fighting even more fiercely as they saw defeat looming. The Potsdam Declaration, issued by President Truman and other Allied leaders on July 26, demanded that Japan surrender and warned that if it didn’t, it could expect “prompt and utter destruction.”

When the Japanese refused to reply, American B-29 bombers jolted the world by dropping atomic bombs. More than 200,000 Japanese citizens were killed between the two cities, either immediately or from the aftereffects of radiation. On Aug. 15, Japan’s emperor, Hirohito, announced his country’s unconditional surrender. Besides ending the war and preventing further loss of life, the bombings set the stage for an escalation of the nuclear age, whose effects are still felt today.

William the Conqueror’s fake retreat at the Battle of Hastings

William, the Duke of Normandy – who later earned the title of William the Conqueror – believed that the throne of England rightfully belonged to him and not to the recently installed Anglo-Saxon English king Harold Godwinson. About two weeks after successfully landing a large force of troops at Pevensey, near Hastings, William faced Harold in battle. The English army occupied high ground, behind an unbroken wall of shields. After William failed at an attempt to breach their defenses, he led his men into a feigned retreat.

This led to some of the English army pursuing them, and once they left their positions, they were vulnerable to William’s cavalry. Godwinson was killed during the battle, and William, after further smaller battles, was crowned King of England on Christmas Day. According to the website Historic UK, this victory meant that “England would henceforth be ruled by an oppressive foreign aristocracy, which in turn would influence the entire ecclesiastical and political institutions of Christendom.”

Hannibal’s ambush of the Romans at Lake Trasimene

During the Second Punic War, Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy by leading his forces, including 80 “war elephants” from North Africa, over the Alps. He met the Roman army around Lake Trasimene (now Lake Trasimeno), with the intent of harassing the Romans with small groups of soldiers, taunting them to follow their attackers down a narrow road between the lake and a dense forest. The Carthaginians then surged out of the forest, in what has been called “the greatest ambush in history,” reportedly killing half the Romans and taking the other half prisoner.

Following another defeat by the Carthaginians at Cannae the following year, the Romans appointed Quintus Fabius Maximus as dictator for six months in an attempt to avoid further defeats. Fabius pursued a unique strategy of avoiding direct conflict with the enemy and opted instead to pester them in minor engagements, disrupting their supply lines. This became known as the Fabian Strategy, a tactic later employed by numerous military leaders, from George Washington to North Vietnamese generals during the Vietnam War.

The United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as their allies, conceived a strategy of deception to invade the Nazi-held France from the beaches of Normandy that involved five separate operations, codenamed Operation Bodyguard. The plan was for the Germans to think an invasion was coming later and in different areas. The Allies made plans including leaking false information, holding fake exercises, and employing parachuting dummies and inflatable tanks in a ruse to suggest troops were in regions far from Normandy.

Though troops landing in Normandy on D-Day faced heavy fighting and a days-long battle, Operation Bodyguard was considered a success, delaying the deployment of larger German forces to the area for weeks. The invasion led to Allied victory on the Western Front, an important step towards the defeat of the Nazis almost a year later.

As tensions grew between the 19-year-old state of Israel and Egypt and its neighbors over the closing of a shipping channel vital to Israeli interests, Palestinian guerrilla attacks, and other issues, Israel feared an escalation of hostilities. They launched a preemptive bomber attack on Egyptian air force bases and other facilities and a simultaneous ground invasion of the Egyptian-occupied Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. Other Arab nations, primarily Syria and Jordan, joined Egypt in fighting back, and hostilities raged for six days, ultimately claiming almost 20,000 lives, overwhelmingly on the Arab side.

Israel emerged victorious, having established itself as a major military force in the region, as well as gaining territory that quadrupled its size (at least temporarily), displacing about a third of the Palestinians who’d been living in Gaza and the West Bank, and redrawing the map of a portion of the Middle East, with consequences we see playing out tragically today.