Unusual and funny battles tactics

Having a single unit march in a loop such that on each circuit it passes through an area under enemy observation, thereby persuading the enemy that there are many more troops present. (General John B. Magruder CSA, at Yorktown in 1862).

Also done during the French landing at Fishguard in 1797, where one unit marched over the top of a hill until they were out of sight of the French in a dip in the ground, then scurried round the back of the hill and marched over the top again - with the added twist that the "unit" in question consisted of a crowd of local peasant women, whose traditional red shawls and tall black hats looked from a distance to be similar to the redcoats and shakos of regular infantry...

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To fool the Swedes in the Battle of Kircholm into thinking that the Lithuanian forces are more powerful than they actually are, Jan Karol Chodkiewicz ordered to place a few hundred stuffed dolls in a forest near their camp to make Charles IX's forces believe that those are Lithuanian reserve troops.

Swedish troops basically charged at nothing.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
The classic attack on Christmas Day by Washington must be brought up. The unusual and unpredictable battle strategy may very well have changed the course of the Battle of Trenton!
Honestly, though, that one's kind of dickish because it involved breaking what was at the time an implicit truce.




Here's one - Battle of the Alma. The French diversionary attack on the right flank involved basically climbing a cliff.
 
The first time "Quaker guns" were used by COL Wm Washington near Camden SC in the Revolution started a trend.

And then of course there were the cottonclads at (most notably) Galveston, in the Late Unpleasantness....
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Having a single unit march in a loop such that on each circuit it passes through an area under enemy observation, thereby persuading the enemy that there are many more troops present. (General John B. Magruder CSA, at Yorktown in 1862).
Did he actually do that? I've never seen that in the primary record... in fact, as far as I can tell it doesn't really appear before the 1980s.



Another one to avoid thread derail!


The British in the 19th century made this whole habit of night marches and dawn attacks, which tended to work startlingly well (even when making direct frontal attacks). This somehow kept working.
 
Another good bluff that shouldn't have worked in a million years.

During the campaign in Austria, the bridge of Thabor was critical for the french army that just took Vienna to advance along the Danube and further on Bohemia and Moravia.
Austrians did knew that well,and planned the destruction of the bridge if it was in any danger to fall under French control. Two maréchaux, Murat and Lannes, decided to prevent this to happen in the most bullshitted bluff of all times.

Add to that that Lannes and Murat had absolutely HATED each other ever since the Egyptian Campaign.

Not to mention that they both have living descendants today. Philippe de Montebello, the arch-aristocratic director of the Metropolitan Museum, is a descendant of Lannes (his full last name is "Lannes de Montebello"). How he puts up with Jean Lannes, duc de Montebello, having been born a dyer is probably not recorded. René Auberjonois, Odo of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is a descendant of Joachim Murat (his full name is "René Murat Auberjonois") through his mother and there are Princes Murat, including one who died fighting in the French Resistance on July 20, 1944, under I believe the command of his relative the Prince Napoleón.
 
Jason of Pherae was actually a good general according to Xenophon, but most of the tactics and strategems attributed to him are about how to pay his mercenaries after buying himself into debt. This happened multiple times.

1) He wanted to take a neighboring city but was unable to pay his army before campaign. Therefore he ordered Pherae's army to assemble in parade formation which was also the usual 'payday' for ancient armies. A messanger coincidentally interrupted the formation and said that the city he wanted to attack had crossed the border. Since it was now a defensive war Pherae's army demanded to go repel the invasion without giving any thought of pay until after victory. But since it was just a bluff the other city was taken completely by surprise.

2) Being unable to pay his mercenaries, again, but apparently unable to convince his mother to give him a loan, he ordered a group of his soldiers to chase him into his mother's house with swords so it looked like they were trying to kill him for their pay. His mother decided to pay off the owed wages.

3) While on campaign with his army in a foreign city he wrote home saying he was going to hold a religious feast for his commanders, and requested they send him plates and cups for the feast. Gold and silver tablewear was sent, but since he never told his officers about the feast he sold the tablewear to get the money he needed to pay the troops instead.

4) He invited a rich man who wouldn't loan him money to take a bath with him (it was a manly Greek activity), so he could show him the newfangled strigil. Since the strigil was cumbersome he suggested the banker take off his signet ring so they could wash properly. The rich man did so and handed the signet ring to the bath servant. The servant then ran around the city while they were bathing and used the signet ring as proof the rich man had authorized Jason to take out funds to pay his mercenaries.
 
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Anaxagoras

Banned
According to an article in Newsweek, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, American forces used loudspeakers to blare out messages saying that Arab men were impotent, in the hopes that the taunting would so enrage the Fedayeen fighters that they would emerge from their hiding places and launch direct attacks against the Americans. Once out in the open, the Iraqis were slaughtered.
 
To fool the Swedes in the Battle of Kircholm into thinking that the Lithuanian forces are more powerful than they actually are, Jan Karol Chodkiewicz ordered to place a few hundred stuffed dolls in a forest near their camp to make Charles IX's forces believe that those are Lithuanian reserve troops.

Swedish troops basically charged at nothing.

Robert Baden-Powell (also famous for founding the Boy Scouts) used similar tricks at the siege of Mafeking during the Second Boer War, getting his men to mime laying minefields or setting up barbed wire -- he didn't have either of these things, but the Boers didn't know this, and their siege lines were too far away for them to realise the trick. Another thing Baden-Powell did was give some of his men makeshift spears and get them to ride around in view of the besiegers, to make it look as if he'd received reinforcements (there were no lancers in his original garrison, so the Boers thought that a regiment had somehow slipped through their lines without any of them noticing).
 
Beeston castle in the English civil war was located on top of a tall rock face and was extremely difficult to assault. Captain Sandford and eight men took it anyway, by sneaking into the castle at night, essentially mugging Captain Steele, the garrison commander, and forcing him to surrender the castle.
The unfortunate Captain Steele was later hung for cowardice.
 
Aw, sad. I read that story as a kid and thought it was hilarious.

This is the problem with history; sometimes you learn marvelous new things you never knew, and sometimes you end up deflating the marvelous things you thought you knew.
I believe this one actually happened.

Godesberg was located atop a mountain, possessed a strong curtain wall, and had turned all possible approaches into a deadly kill zone, but was an old medieval castle at a time when everyone was switching to star forts, so it was expected cannonfire would be able to take it down. In practice the castle was so high up on the mountain, the besiegers had to elevate their guns to shoot against gravity which just caused the cannonballs to fall back to the earth and ended up having their own guns destroyed (by counterfire, not by their own shots). After burning through a ton of gunpowder, they finally discovered the problem and repositioned the cannons to hit the walls straight on rather than at an angle, which managed to breach it.

At that point the formidable curtain wall was breached with a huge hole in it but when the besiegers prepared to send troops to take the breach they remembered that the defenders had guns and cannons too, which would cut them up in the killing zone before they could even reach the wall. So they ended up just leaving the hole there without doing anything.

With artillery and assault ruled as failures, they decided next to dig a sap under the wall, fill it up with the remaining gunpowder and blow the castle up from beneath, before sending the infantry through the trench to take the fort. This meant they had to dig through the solid rock of the mountain, but eventually it worked and sent half the fortress flying into the sky. Except the chunks of the wall started landing on the trench the soldiers were trying to move into, so the attackers were forced to abandon the trench and do an overland assault. Which involved running straight into the kill zone they were trying to avoid and predictably they got cut up trying to take the breach.

At that point, the besiegers got quite sick of things and resorted to the old toilet shaft stratagem, which finally took the castle. After all the grief Godesberg had been given them, they might have figured at that point even that hell would have been better than enduring another month of trench warfare.
 

There's a similar (probably apocryphal) story told about the British during WW2. During the Norwegian campaign there was a proposal to give the British troops rubber sheaths to slip over the barrels of their rifles and prevent them being damaged by the cold, and Churchill, then head of the Admiralty, suggested that they be stamped with the words "British. Size: Medium", in order "To show the Germans, if they ever capture any, who's the master race."
 

Saphroneth

Banned
The Corvus.

Roman generals basically decided: "We keep losing all these stupid sea battles! Let's just nail the enemy ships to ours and turn it into a land battle while afloat!"


Also, of course, whoever decided to domesticate elephants.
 
The Corvus.

Roman generals basically decided: "We keep losing all these stupid sea battles! Let's just nail the enemy ships to ours and turn it into a land battle while afloat!"


Also, of course, whoever decided to domesticate elephants.
Horatio Nelson did one better with his "Patent Bridge for Boarding First Rates": Hammer two ships so badly they collide into each other, board one, then use it to climb onto the other. Both ships surrendered in very short order.
 
Do losing tactics count? Because King Stephen of England retook a castle that left its MAIN gate wide open in broad daylight. This was unusual and the defenders knew Stephen was coming because they shot his men with arrows, right up until they rode in through their front door.
 
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