Top 5 Crazy yet Successful War Strategies

            Everyone has a favorite TV show or movie where the hero comes up with this idea so crazy that it can’t help but succeed.  And lo and behold, the villain is shocked by the strategy, feeling cheated as he scrambles on his back away from the approaching hero.  From Aragorn’s Ghost Army to Odysseus’ Trojan Horse, these are legendary across fiction.

            But I gotta say… the real life crazy strategies are much crazier. 

            This list is dedicated to all of the mad genius generals who won through weirdness and triumphed through trickery.  Candidates will be judged by how unconventional the strategies were, how intentional the craziness was and whether or not the event actually happened.  So… sorry.  No Trojan Horse.

            5). USSR General Gregori Zhukov’s “Operation Uranus”

            In perhaps the most important battle of the Second World War, the Soviet Union found itself fighting for their lives against the German Wehrmacht in the city of Stalingrad.  As this city was the namesake of the USSR’s leader, Hitler demanded that the city be taken to damage Soviet morale.  Upon hearing that Hitler went all in on Stalingrad, Stalin did the same and declared that the Soviet Union would never leave the city.  “Not one step back” became both a rallying cry and a military policy (if you tried to run away from the fighting, you’d be shot).  So the moral of that story is… never name a city after you if you’re in charge of a country I guess.

            However, one guy was not paying attention to the “not one step back” mantra.  Luckily, he was the guy in charge.  He was a military genius.  He had the cojones to contradict Stalin on military concerns.  And his name was Gregori Zhukov.  In fact, his whole strategy revolved around “stepping back”… in moderation.  He knew that the Nazi command wanted to capture center of the city, and very badly too.

            So he gave it to them.  But he kept the north and east portions of the city.  But soon after, he also took the poorly secured south and west portions of the city in a quick flurry of attacks called “Operation Uranus”.  Before this strategy, the Soviet Union was under siege.  11 Days later, the Nazis were under siege in the very city they were trying to capture.  The Nazis tried to airdrop supplies, but to no avail.  Over the next few months, the Nazis slowly lost all of their provisions, and with no bullets in their guns and no food in their stomachs, Zhukov had forced the first surrender of a German Fieldmarshall in World History.

            4). Hannibal Crosses the Alps with Elephants

            This one’s pretty difficult to forget, but given our modern perspective, it’s also pretty difficult to appreciate.  With cars, railroads, explosives to clear rock, and airplanes, crossing the Alps now a days isn’t a very big deal anymore.  But around 2000 years ago, everyone appreciated the difficulty of crossing the Alps.

            And that’s why this strategy worked so well.

            Carthage (in modern Tunisia) and Rome (in modern Rome) had been at war with each other over dominance of the Mediterranean on and off for a while.  During the second of three “Punic Wars” between the two giants, a general named “Hannibal” had come to lead the Carthaginian Army.  He had grown up being taught to hate the Romans more than anything, by his father who was a general in the First Punic War.  Hannibal had the military genius to attack and beat the Romans, and he sure as hell had the confidence.  Having War Elephants will give you confidence.  But there was one problem.

            It’s hard to ship elephants from Africa to Italy in the middle of a naval war.  So if Hannibal ever wanted to see his living, breathing, eating tanks literally stomp Roman Legions to a pulp, he’d have to take the long way around.  Again, it all sounds so simple to cross the Alps now.  But what if I told you that he crossed the Alps with a full Carthaginian Army complete with War Elephants after fighting battles through Spain (which arguably increased his forces when Hannibal recruited Spanish mercenaries)?  At one point, Hannibal had to go down a sheer cliff.  He solved the problem by cracking the rock with large amounts of the soldiers’ wine provisions and lots of fire.  The chemical reaction between wine and fire somehow did well at turning solid rock into gravel pretty quickly.  Upon adding in a few chisels, Hannibal had constructed a rock ramp down the cliff rather quickly.

            After turning the Italian Alps into a tasty red wine vinaigrette salad, he marched his men and elephants into the Italian peninsula and defeated the surprised Romans in the next three battles.  If it weren’t for a decisive Roman victory at Zama (just outside Carthage), Hannibal would’ve marched his tusked tanks right to the gates of Rome itself.  And perhaps providing Italy with the first of many wine-related crises.

            3) Inflatable Tanks Accompanied by a Very Non-Inflatable Gen. Patton.

            Unlike the above two strategies, this strategy wasn’t deployed in a direct battle.  Rather, it was perhaps World History’s biggest, most ridiculous, yet most successful bluff.  Prior to D-Day, or Operation Overlord, one of the largest amphibious assaults in human history, everyone believed that if the U.K. and U.S. decided to invade Nazi-held Western Europe, they would land at Calais.  Calais had been a French city that was historically controlled by the British for the explicit purpose of invading France.  You know, just in case the mood struck them just right.  Aside from historical reasons, Calais was simply the closest point between France and the U.K.  Logistically and strategically, it made the most sense.  So Allied Command saw fit to fill the British towns across from Calais with tanks, tents, cannons and even had George Patton himself stay at the camp.  German planes saw the army and got ready to fight it out at Calais.

            But for whatever reason, inflatable tanks and cannons don’t look so fake from the sky.  Aside from Patton, everything in the camp was fake.  The artillery, the armor, the Allies even made a newspaper for the camp under the hopes that German spies would read them and think of it as solid proof of the location of the camp.

            The bluff paid off.  While the entire coastline between Britain, France and Germany had been fortified, most of the really heavy defenses were concentrated around Calais.  Even when German troops began sending off distress signals of the Allied landings in Normandy, German High command was so certain that the real invasion was coming to Calais, that they did not move their tanks to help contain the invasion at Normandy until it was far too late.  France was soon liberated, Hitler was sweating bullets and British children everywhere had some unusual looking bouncy houses at their 12 year old birthday parties.

            2) Giving Egypt a Taste of Their Own Catnip

            If you were to ask anyone what they know about Egyptian Mythology, you would hear “they worshipped cats” 99.9% of the time someone answered.  The Egyptians actually worshipped a broad range of animals, including dogs, jackals and ibises.  However, the “they worshipped cats” stereotype isn’t just an example of typical modern ignorance of history.  That stereotype is as old as Egyptian Mythology itself, and apparently the Persians took the stereotype very seriously.  Luckily for Persia, this was one of the few times adhering to stereotypes actually worked.

            When Persia invaded Egypt around 545 B.C., (you know, because Egypt was there) they had a secret weapon in mind.  Much like Hannibal would, they would have this animal charge before them to frighten and intimidate the enemy.  Unlike Hannibal’s War Elephants, the Persians deployed kittens.  The Persians painted cats on their shields and marched cats before them into battle.  The Egyptian soldiers, so afraid of accidentally harming their sacred animals, retreated and were slaughtered in the retreat.  Some accounts claimed the Persians even threw the felines at the Egyptians!  Either way, these killer kittens won the day for an army that, quite honestly, probably didn’t need their help beating an Egyptian army anyways.  But kudos for creativity nonetheless!

            1). Vikings lighting birds on fire!

            THIS.  BIRD IS ON FIREEEEEEEEEE!!!
            Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I probably have to put that nonsense in context.  Vikings were known for raiding all across Europe, not just the British Isles.  In fact, they once managed to get as far south as Sicily.  Harold Hardraada, the Viking most well-known for losing his life at Stamford Bridge shortly before the iconic Battle of Hastings, had come upon a castle in Sicily.  The walls were too risky to scale and there were no readily available catapults or siege engines to knock down the walls.  However, Harold was a crafty one.  Harold noticed that the roofs of all the buildings in the castle were all thatched, and therefore, very flammable.  He also noticed that the small birds of the city had made their nests in said thatched roofs.  So, issuing one of the strangest “Alive” bounties in Sicilian history, he ordered his Viking warriors to capture as many of the small birds as they could alive.  When the time of day came where the birds would go back to their nests, the Vikings released the birds back into the city… with flaming twigs and kindling tied to the birds.  The birds lit their nests, the nests lit the roofs, and the roofs lit the Sicilians on fire.  After literally smoking the Sicilians out of their castle, the Vikings forced a surrender from the Sicilians.  The city was taken without a fight, and in the process, they took the title for the “Craziest combat win in World History”.