HC: Winning battle with fewest men possible

I may have mentioned somewhere on these boards that one of my favorite ever video game moments was in Sun-Tzu's Ancient Art of War on my friend's Kaypro our freshman year (1987-88), winning a battle with one exhausted guy left versus 5-6 enemy soldiers and somehow coming out a winner. (Made so much cooler by coming downstairs to go to supper and in the dorm lounge the song someone was playing was: "All I Need Is A Miracle.")

I don't know if any government would ever actually accept defeat with only one guy left in a battle, but yoru challenge is to have a battle in a war where the fewest number of people possib le survives to claim the title of winners of the battle. I suppose you could count a Hastings-type situation where onl one soldier survives so it's like, "Well, nobody esle around to claim the crown." But, it seems like that would be pretty hard.
 
Your best bet would be some sort of tribal conflict between relatively small groups of hunting bands in a relatively isolated part of the world.

It's my understanding that the more complex/large a society, the lower their overall casualty ratio in warfare, barring things like genocides.

I know some anthropologists have looked at some relatively isolated, warlike societies where violence is endemic and found that the proportion of violent deaths is far higher. An ambush gone wrong between two isolated groups, both using stone tools, competing over diminishing resources on their local Pacific Island, leaving one person alive might not be improbable.

Otherwise your question just ignores the psychological element of warfare. People aren't orcs - they won't just blindly run into spears and gore themselves until nobody's left. They'll be convinced it's hopeless long before than and whichever group wants it less will break and run.
 

Don Quijote

Banned
The Battle of the Champions between the Spartans and Argives sort of fits the description, though it was set up in the expectation that there wouldn't be too many survivors. A Spartan victory with one man left alive and the two enemy survivors departed from the battlefield, or an Argive victory with two survivors to the enemy's one, depending on one's point of view.
 
Top