I have been watching a lot of ancient history shows on youtube about army tactics, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why a smaller army would every beat a larger army. To me, the larger army would square up against the opponents, and then simply flank the enemy, which would usually result in routing. How would an ancient era deal with the problem of getting flanked? Did it simply just all come down to terrain?
Edit: Thank you so much for your answers! I love learning about this kind of stuff, so this has been a lot of fun. Maybe I’m still confused about how an army would engage and disengage an army to remain mobile to avoid flanks, could anyone provide some insights into this?
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There’s no simple answer, since we are covering a wide range of scenarios here, but here are some factors that woudl help:
* Terrain, as you identify: the best example is the Battle of Thermopylae Pass, where relatively few Spartans and their allies could hold off a much larger army because it was channeled through a narrow pass. If you’re not on an open field or otherwise circumventable, the enemy can’t bring all of their numbers to bear.
* Technology: If you have horses and your enemy doesn’t, or if you have long-range archery and your enemy doesn’t, the effective numbers are not as extreme as actual soldier counts. You can disable a lot of enemies from afar while they can’t touch you. Armor falls into this category, too.
* Tactics: the Greek (corrected) phalanx, for example, was a good defensive formation for the era. If you’re more effective at protecting your men, they will remain in battle longer.
* Skill: Not all soldiers across time were fully trained standing warriors. Many were recruited or forced into service. Going in with inexperienced or reluctant troops against a well-trained standing army is a disadvantage, even if you have more of them.
Add to this some randomness and some strategic mistakes – not every general will just say “hey, there’s more of us, surround them” – and you get a lot of upsets.
The same way they do today.
Equipment, training, discipline and tactical use of terrain.
You have to remember that for large parts of history armies weren’t mostly composed of trained professionals.
That’s one of the reasons the Romans were winning all those battles: an army of paid specialized soldiers against 25 noble warriors.
Incidentally this brought to the construction of the ancient Roman roads as moving an army was a lot more difficult… Some encampments became cities like Londinium that became London.
The benefits of numbers in battle become detriments in every part of war that wasn’t battle. Moving a large group of people is difficult today, and in the ancient world, the quality of roads and lack of motor vehicles made it that much worse. When the best method of carrying food is a horsecart, the math becomes unfavorable very quickly when you factor in the caloric intake of the horse. The upshot of this is that armies needed to be moving constantly and spread out thinly to forage enough food to survive (foraging generally meant stealing food from local farmers) and that gave enemy armies a chance to take them on in more manageable chunks.
Most of the time the smaller army didn’t “compensate” and simply lost, we only talk about famous upsets.
Also remember that there was no GPS or video game style birdseye view / perfect information.
Armies didn’t know exactly where the other army was, nor its size.
There’s plenty of battles where one side attacked because they thought they had superior numbers , only to realise their opponents was only the rear guard / vanguard and the rest of the opposing army was closing in.
Discipline and intimidation were huge factors in war also.
There’s a battle where Caesars legions charge forward to me the enemy and as a result they end up all out of line with each other. People ahead, people behind and all over the place. But shortly before they clashed into the enemy front line the legionaries halted the advance reformed the men and moved forward as a cohesive unit. This is immense discipline especially when your adrenaline is up and showed the individuals skills and competency of Caesar’s officers.
Again with the Roman’s, intimidation was a huge factor in war especially throughout history. Most armies would do battle cry’s and shout and scream at the enemy like we see in Gladiator at the beginning when they’re fighting the Gauls(?). Romans on the other hand were different. They stayed silent. Just a solid line of men in very strict formation stood completely still and completely silent. That, to me, is much more terrifying than people screaming and shouting as it’s like they aren’t even human but a machine or something
Option 1: use the terrain to funnel your opponent into a specific area.
Option 2: go on the attack drive into the opposing army and cause the first rank to run away into the following ranks disrupting the formations and causing them to panic, keep pressing the attack causing a rout.
To provide a counter to your scenario OP, an opponent with superior mobility would simply pick away at your flanks using local superiority to win. If the rest of your very spread out army responded, they would run away before your army could regroup.
Alternatively, they could simply concentrate their mass and just smash a path straight through your center and head straight for your command position. Run or die, your army is leaderless and falls apart quickly as a result.
First of all, you have to realise wars were 99% strategy and 1% battles.
Moving armies, keeping them fed, happy, healthy and well trained were the major worries. Planning supply routes and keeping them safe was crucial especially when moving through friendly territory where you couldn’t loot much.
All of the above required a giant amount of administrative work but is not as interesting as the battle itself and it’s hard to make a 20 minute youtube video about it.
As for battles itself it’s easy for us to dream up a scenario where you flank an enemy. Flanking is a very complex maneuver however and it’s not as easy to execute as you might imagine. You need to practice it so that the mostly illiterate soldiers you lead know what you mean by flanking. You need officers who are able to communicate it. You need to work with imperfect information since getting information around on a battlefield is not easy.
The last point is perhaps one of the most understated. You can’t command an army from the frontline or you pain a giant target on your back. Any information you receive from other forces is delayed since most of it is relayed on foot. If the flanking force is more than 1 km away, in a forest, that’s at least an hour delay.
Then, even if you account for everything, you need to have soldiers that will trust you. Nobody wants to die so convincing your army to split and attack in smaller groups requires a huge amount of trust and discipline.
You can’t assume equal training or strategy between armies, even within nations.
One leader may run an army of knights outfitted in armor against an army in far lighter gear and the army of knights could lose due to the field being wet/muddy even though their gear is better.
Rome did well because of their formations, which wasn’t always a concept yet for their opposing forces.
Flip side of formations is that Persians had formations and the Greeks (Alexander) did not to the same extent, yet he overwhelmed his enemies with a strong Calvary. So another example of effective use of troops to get enemies to panic and flee, undermining the strength of the overall formation.
Most famous example of making army size less important is the Spartans holding up against a vastly larger force at the hot gates where they could invalidate the size difference through a narrow passage.
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