Battle

• 1. Introduction

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  A battle is an occurrence of combat in warfare between opposing military units, and its history stretches from unorganized hunting bands fighting over territory to the coordinated air, land, and sea operations of the modern age. The word itself carries that violence in its bones: it entered English as a loanword from the Old French bataille, first attested in 1297, tracing back through Late Latin battualia, a term for the exercise of soldiers and gladiators in fighting and fencing. And from that same Latin root, the word battery grew as well.

  For most of recorded history, battles were short affairs. Many lasted only part of a day. The Battle of Preston in 1648, the Battle of Nations in 1813, and the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 were notable exceptions, each stretching to three days. What changed all of that was trench warfare and improved transport, which arrived together in the First World War and transformed battles from single-day affairs into weeks-long ordeals.

  But what exactly is a battle, as opposed to a skirmish, a raid, or an operation? Why do opposing sides sometimes call the same fight by entirely different names? And what happens to the individual soldier caught inside one, who often cannot tell whether the combat around him is a minor skirmish or a turning point in history? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Defining the Fight

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  Carl von Clausewitz, the German strategist, offered a definition that cuts straight to the point: the employment of battles to achieve the object of war was, in his view, the essence of strategy itself. But the English military historian John Keegan pushed for something sharper still, describing the ideal battle as something that happens between two armies leading to the moral then physical disintegration of one or the other of them.

  Neither definition covers every case. A battle, in the technical sense, is well defined in duration, area, and force commitment. When an engagement lacks those qualities and produces no decisive results, it is usually called a skirmish. When duration exceeds a week, planners often reclassify the event as an operation for organizational purposes. And occasionally the word battle is stretched to cover entire campaigns, as with the Battle of the Atlantic, the Battle of Britain, and the Battle of France in the Second World War, all of which involved sustained combat with consistent strategic objectives across a large theatre.

  Victory in battle takes one of three forms: forcing the enemy to abandon its mission and surrender; routing the enemy, meaning forcing a retreat or rendering the force militarily ineffective; or annihilating the opponent through deaths or capture. A battle may also end in a Pyrrhic victory, which ultimately favors the losing side. If neither side resolves the issue, the result is stalemate. A conflict where one side refuses direct conventional battle often evolves into insurgency.

• 3. What Decides Battles

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  At the Battle of Omdurman, an Anglo-Egyptian force equipped with Maxim machine guns and artillery destroyed a large Sudanese Mahdist army that was armed in a traditional manner. That extreme case illustrates how weapons and armour can swing entire engagements. But superior technology is far from the only lever.

  Swiss pikemen won repeated victories by turning a traditionally defensive weapon into an offensive one. Zulus in the early nineteenth century gained advantages over rivals after adopting a new kind of spear called the iklwa. Forces with inferior weapons have still come out on top, as in the Wars of Scottish Independence. At the Battle of Alesia, the Romans were greatly outnumbered yet prevailed because of superior training.

  Terrain shapes outcomes as well. Holding high ground forces an enemy to climb uphill into battle, wearing them down before contact. Dense jungle and forest act as force-multipliers for smaller or weaker armies, and even in modern warfare, terrain retains value for camouflage and guerrilla operations. Aircraft have reduced but not eliminated that advantage.

  Generals matter too. Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Khalid ibn Walid, Subutai, and Napoleon Bonaparte were all skilled commanders whose armies achieved remarkable records. Trust in leadership produces higher morale, and morale shapes outcomes. The British naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar owed its success, at least in part, to the reputation of Admiral Lord Nelson.

• 4. A Taxonomy of Battle

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  A pitched battle is one where opposing sides agree in advance on the time and place of combat. A battle of encounter, sometimes called a meeting engagement, is the opposite: both sides collide in the field without either having prepared their attack or defence.

  A battle of attrition aims to inflict losses the enemy cannot sustain, even if one's own losses are similar, because a larger force can absorb equal casualties more easily. Many battles on the Western Front in the First World War were attrition battles, some deliberately planned as such, as at Verdun, and others arriving at that character unintentionally, as at the Somme.

  A battle of breakthrough seeks to pierce enemy defences and expose the vulnerable flanks. A battle of encirclement, tied to the German concept of bewegungskrieg, traps the enemy in a pocket. A battle of envelopment attacks one or both flanks; the double envelopment at the Battle of Cannae became the model for that type. A battle of annihilation destroys the defeated force in the field, as happened to the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile.

  Then there is the decisive battle, a category that cuts across all the others. A decisive battle carries political effects that alter the course of a war, as at the Battle of Smolensk, or bring hostilities to an end, as at the Battle of Hastings or the Battle of Hattin. The concept grew in popular prestige with the publication in 1851 of Edward Creasy's The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, which inspired later historians including J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart to write in the same vein.

• 5. How Land Warfare Changed

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  During the Battle of Megiddo in the fifteenth century BC, the first reliably documented battle in history, both armies were already organised and disciplined. That stands in contrast to what came before it: early battles were probably fought between rival hunting bands as unorganized crowds.

  By the Age of Enlightenment, armies had adopted highly disciplined line tactics. Soldiers followed officers, fought as units, and were organized into regiments, battalions, companies, and platoons that would march, line up, and fire together. It was a choreographed form of killing. Native Americans fought differently, using guerrilla tactics rather than lines, a contrast that persisted through encounters with American colonists and European forces well into the Civil War era.

  From the 1850s through the First World War, trench warfare transformed the battlefield into a siege-like environment. Chemical warfare began in 1915. The static front required unit rotation to prevent combat fatigue, with troops ideally kept out of combat areas for no more than a month at a stretch.

  By the Second World War, smaller units, platoons, and companies became central. Elite squads grew more recognized. Maneuver warfare returned at speed thanks to the tank, which took on the role that cannon had once played. Artillery gradually replaced frontal assaults. In that same war, both sides found that small groups of soldiers encountered other small groups as often as they met organized formations. Modern battles, shaped by that heritage, rely heavily on aircraft and missiles, and large-scale land engagements are now mostly reserved for capturing cities.

• 6. War at Sea and in the Air

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  Naval battles have been fought since before the fifth century BC. A good example from the ancient world is the Battle of Salamis. Early fleets relied on fast ships armed with battering rams or on close enough proximity for boarding in hand-to-hand combat. Troops stormed enemy vessels, a tactic common to Romans and pirates alike. Civilizations that could not match their enemies with ranged weapons favored this approach. In the late Middle Ages, the Byzantines introduced Greek fire, and demolition ships were sent crashing into opponents to ignite them.

  The ironclad, first deployed in the American Civil War, made the wooden warship obsolete by resisting cannon fire. Military submarines arrived during the First World War and took naval combat beneath the surface. The aircraft carrier displaced the battleship as the central unit of modern navies, acting as a mobile base for aircraft.

  During the Battle of Midway, five aircraft carriers were sunk without either fleet ever coming into direct contact. That single fact signals how completely the shape of naval war had changed. Air battles are rarer than land or sea engagements, partly because aircraft themselves arrived so late in military history. The Battle of Britain in 1940 stands as the most prominent example. Since the Second World War, the helicopter has become a major transport and support tool, first used heavily during the Vietnam War. Today, direct fighter-to-fighter engagements are rare; modern aircraft carry precision bombing payloads instead, and aerial bombardment frequently serves as the opening strike in any engagement.

• 7. The Soldier's Experience

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  Few of the British infantry who went over the top on the 1st of July 1916, the first day on the Somme, would have anticipated that the battle would continue for five months. That gap between what a soldier can see and what the battle actually is runs through every period of military history.

  To an infantryman inside a large offensive, there is often little to distinguish the combat around him from a minor raid. The bigger picture is invisible at ground level. Some Allied infantry who had just defeated the French at the Battle of Waterloo fully expected to fight again the next day, at the Battle of Wavre. A soldier fighting at Beaumont Hamel on the 13th of November 1916 was likely unaware that the British Battles Nomenclature Committee would later name the action the Battle of the Ancre. That committee was formed precisely to bring order to naming: the distinction between battles and subordinate actions was, to the men doing the fighting, usually academic.

  Personal effects of battle extend well beyond the fight itself. Survivors carry nightmares, abnormal reactions to sights or sounds, and flashbacks. Physical consequences include scars, amputations, lesions, blindness, paralysis, and death. The political effects ripple outward as well: a decisive defeat can compel surrender, while a Pyrrhic victory, such as the Battle of Asculum, can force even the winning side to reconsider its aims. Battles in civil wars have decided the fate of monarchs and factions, as in the Wars of the Roses and the Jacobite risings.

• 8. Naming the Fight

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  After Henry V of England defeated a French army on the 25th of October 1415, he met with the senior French herald and they agreed to name the battle after a nearby castle. It became the Battle of Agincourt. That negotiation over a name was not unusual for the Middle Ages, when chroniclers needed a settled term to record the event for history.

  Naming conventions have never been uniform. During the American Civil War, the Union tended to name battles after the nearest watercourse, producing names like the Battle of Wilsons Creek and the Battle of Stones River. The Confederates favored nearby towns, giving the same engagements names like Chancellorsville and Murfreesboro. Sometimes both names entered popular use simultaneously: the First Battle of Bull Run and the Second Battle of Bull Run are also known as the First and Second Battles of Manassas.

  Opposing nations sometimes chose entirely different names for the same engagement. The Battle of Gallipoli, as it is known in the English-speaking world, is called the Battle of Çanakkale in Turkey. In desert warfare, where no nearby town exists, map coordinates have filled the gap. The Battle of 73 Easting in the First Gulf War took its name from a grid reference. At the extreme end of repeated engagements on the same ground, the twelve Battles of the Isonzo between Italy and Austria-Hungary during the First World War were numbered First through Twelfth to keep them distinct. Some places have become so identified with a battle that the name alone carries the weight of the event: Passchendaele, Pearl Harbor, the Alamo, Thermopylae, and Waterloo each stand in for entire conflicts in the popular memory.