fandomhigh | Battles That Changed History, Second Period, Friday 1/15

"Today we're going to start with a little vocabulary, since I promised you more on the phalanx later and did not deliver last week," Steve said, and proceeded to write the words 'phalanx,' 'hoplite,' and 'trireme' on the board. "The phalanx was a fighting formation composed of heavy infantry in close formation. Their primary weapons were polearms--spears, pikes, and sarissas. They would lock shields to form the shield wall, and then the first three or so ranks would project their spears up and over. This made any frontal assault a much more difficult proposition, and meant that more than the first rank could be actively involved in the battle at any given time, and presented an impenetrable wall to the enemy. The soldiers that fought in the phalanx were the hoplites, citizen-soldiers. These are men in bronze armor weighing up to sixty pounds, including a breastplate, helmet, and greaves to protect the shins. They're carrying a nine-foot-long spear and a short sword, and a big, circular shield with an Argive grip." Steve paused and grinned wryly. "Sometimes the old ways really are the best; I've fought in battles with a shield of the same design, just newer materials. I can tell you firsthand it's very effective as a weapon. If anyone would like to see it they're welcome to stay after class. But I've gotten off-topic. To round out our vocabulary lesson for the day, the trireme is a class of warship with three galleries of rowers. Now, moving right along." Steve handed out packets of information on today's three battles.

"480 BC. The Persian empire, defeated ten years earlier at Marathon, has decided to give Greece another go. The Greeks need to buy time to gather their forces, and for a religious festival in Sparta to end. The Spartans are the greatest of the Greek soldiers--they're professionals, you see, trained up from childhood to be only soldiers--and until this festival is over, their full army can't march. So the Spartans come up with a workaround. They put together a small, hand-picked group, led by one of their two kings, Leonidas. It's a suicide force; they know they're going to die to a man, because the odds are astronomical, and it is absolutely unheard of for a Spartan to surrender or run away from a battle. Every man chosen has a living son to continue his line. Leonidas has been told by an oracle, the oracle at Delphi, that either a king of Sparta will fall or all Greece will, so he tells his wife that after he leaves she is to marry a good man and have good children, and he takes his three hundred men, and he marches to meet their allies at Thermopylae. The Hot Gates."

Steve paused. "I don't want to hear one word about that terrible movie from a few years ago, by the way. The number of things it got ridiculously wrong could fill a class period twice over." Then he went on. "Thermopylae was a bottleneck. Cliff on one side, a drop to the sea on the other. A small force properly utilizing the shield wall of the phalanx could hold a larger one there indefinitely, if they weren't betrayed, because there was a way around, a sheep trail." He inclined his head to his class. "There's always someone in it for the money: a local shepherd sold them out. Leonidas dismissed most of his army--about seven hundred locals stayed, along with the three hundred Spartans--on the third day of the battle. And then they all died. But they bought three days, they killed somewhere between seventy thousand and a quarter of a million Persian soldiers, and they won a massive psychological victory.

"The allied Greek forces were forced to rework their strategy due to the defeat at Thermopylae--they'd planned for the pass to be held much longer. So what did they do? They moved their navy to the Straits of Salamis. When the Persian fleet tried to block the entrances to the straits, the Greeks went on the attack. Ancient naval warfare was basically a matter of trying to sink the other guy's ship, usually via ramming. The sheer numbers of the Persian fleet worked against them; they were confused, slamming into each other, unable to maneuver. The Greeks sunk or captured two hundred ships, a sixth of the entire Persian navy, and forced the main Persian force to retreat, leaving a force under General Mardonius to hold what they'd managed to take--which did not include the Peloponnesus, which is basically 'Greece' at that point--and continue the assault the following year.

"This break in the fighting gave the Greeks time to regroup, and in 479 they marched out the largest army they'd ever fronted to meet the Persians near their camp at Plataea. The ground there was good for a battle involving cavalry, which the Persians had and the Greeks kind of didn't, so there was a stalemate for several days. Finally, the Greeks had some supply line problems, they were rearranging things, the battle line fragments, and Mardonius mistakes this for a full retreat and orders his light infantry to attack." Steve paused for a moment to let them absorb that. "The Persians were using wicker shields and short spears. Wicker is great for certain things, actually. It catches weapons and makes it difficult for the wielder to take them back and use them against you again. The phalanx strategy against light infantry with wicker shields is basically bowling: the front ranks knock them over with their heavy shields, the back ranks finish them off. It was a total rout. Mardonius was killed, and the surviving Persians retreated--all the way back to Persia. Greece survived, Athens, which had been routed, was rebuilt, and Persia never attempted to take Greece again. In fact, when next they met, it would be going the other way.

"So, now that I've thrown a lot of information at you, let's talk about luck. Good luck, bad luck, bad luck that turned out to be good luck, it played a part in all three of these battles. It plays a part in every battle, really. A plan is something that generally does not survive the first encounter with the enemy, after all. So, look over your packets of information, if you want to, then pair up and talk about luck. How could any of these battles have gone differently? What cascade effect would Thermopylae or Salamis going differently have on Plataea? Or some variation on that theme."

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"Hole in the bloody air," Mat explained. "You have to be an Aes Sedai--around here I think 'witch' would explain them--to make it work."

Oh goody, more magic talk.

"A hole in the air. Like a vacuum?"

"Vacuum?" Mat repeated, looking confused. "It was like they cut through the air with a bloody pair of shears, then it opened up like a door and on the other side of the hole was another land."

And that got Claudia's brain going something fierce, muttering about wormholes and the fourth dimension and holy crap, that's a lot like teleportation, isn't it?

"And you have no idea how they do it?"

"Sorry," Mat said, shaking his head. "They don't exactly share with me."

Damn.

"Well, I guess they can't keep their mystery if they go around telling everyone."

"I'd be bloody floored if more than ten of them knew how to make it work," Mat commented. "Aes Sedai love their secrets more than a drunken farmer loves ale."

His metaphors were really kinda cute.

"So it's like people and cars, then."

"We took one of those out to the woods in the fall," Mat said proudly. "I know what that is!"

Even though that had been a bus.

"Would it surprise you to know that most of the people who drive one in this country have no idea how to take care of it, what makes it operate, or anything other than that the left pedal makes it stop and the right one makes it go faster?"

"Not really," Mat admitted with a laugh. "I've been riding horses all my life and couldn't tell you how to fit a horseshoe."

"But you at least understand that the horse needs shoes and that they need to be replaced."

"Do they end up stuck in the woods like idiots who forget their horse needs to eat?"

"Stuck on the side of the road when their car breaks down or runs out of gas, yeah."

"So you need to feed a car too?" Mat replied.

"Pretty much everything's gotta run on some kind of fuel."

"Am I supposed to be doing something to keep the lights in my room appeased, then?" Mat checked.

"Other than turn them off when you leave?" Claudia shrugged. "Their already wired to their fuel source. Like, uh." She tried to figure out a good analog from a more rustic time period. "Yeah, I got nothing."

Mat grinned. "Sorry. I'm still getting used to the bloody future."

"Yeah, must be a little bit of a culture shock."

"We have horses and lances," Mat said with a laugh. "We sound like the bloody Greeks."

"If it makes you feel better, I think a lot more of history has horses and lances than has guns and planes."

"The guns are brilliant," Mat said, eyes lighting up. "I have to see how those could be replicated."

And what joy that would bring to a medieval society.

Oh wow, that was a kind of disturbing thought.

"Just remember, odds are, the Chinese already have gunpowder."

Mat blinked, then laughed. "Oh, we don't have them."

Re: Discussion

notmyownage - 2010-01-16 05:36 (UTC) - Expand