Rick Beyer - The Greatest War Stories Never Told: 100 Tales from Military History to Astonish, Bewilder, and Stupefy

for Marilyn

CONTENTS

War is hell, said William Tecumseh Sherman. But it has also spawned some mind-bending true stories.

Consider: a topless dancer saved the Roman Empire, and Daniel Boone was once tried for treason. One conflict broke out because of a soccer game while another was halted so a soccer game could be played. An African-American unit managed to serve on both sides during the Civil War. And Santa Anna, the general who massacred the defenders of the Alamo, was instrumental in the invention of modern chewing gum.

I am a lifelong history enthusiast lucky enough to be earning a living doing what I love: making history documentaries. A few years ago I got the chance to produce a series of history minutes for THE HISTORY CHANNEL . The Timelab 2000 series, hosted by Sam Waterston, was so well received that it led to my first book, The Greatest Stories Never Told. I filled that book with the kind of history I lovestories that turn your expectations upside down and leave you shaking your head in wonderment. Happily, readers and critics enjoyed the stories as much as I did.

Now I have turned my attention to the subject of war and warriors, human experience at its most concentrated and extreme. For better or worse, war has been a fundamental part of history, touching every generation and reaching into every corner of the globe. War means fighting, said Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and fighting means killing. Hard words, and true. But there is more to war than death and destruction. War can be a catalyst for change, an engine for innovation, and an arena for valor, deceit, intrigue, ambition, audacity, folly, and, yes, humor. Thats what makes military history so compelling.

Beyond the big-name battles and celebrated soldiers lies a wealth of amazing characters and unbelievable happenings. As I did for my first book, I set out on a quest for the unusual, the surprising, and the ironicstories that cry out to be told. Here they are in your hand, gathered from more than two thousand years of history. The very first one is about an elite military unit composed entirely of gay soldiers, and the last is about Pentagon pizza deliveries predicting the start of the first Gulf War. In between you can find out why George Washingtons house was named after the inventor of grog, what the Mafia did to help win World War II, and how a Civil War general who didnt know a note of music still managed to write a song that everybody knows.

Though I have read a fair bit of history, I was quite amazed by some of the stories I came across. Each of them has been painstakingly researched and carefully fact-checked. Many a fascinating tale has failed to make the cut because it didnt hold up under scrutiny. The ones that made it in, bizarre as they might seem, are as true as I know how to make them.

It is well that war is so terrible, blurted out Robert E. Lee in the midst of a battle, or we should grow to love it. Human beings have been fascinated by war since the dawn of history. What could be more dramatic, after all, than high-stakes, life-and-death conflict on a grand scale? For all of wars horrors, its pull remains strong. I hope that the stories that follow truly do astonish, bewilder, and stupefy. I also hope they will prompt readers to ponder the ultimate folly of war, and why it is that we never quite manage to make it a thing of the past.

An elite fighting unit like no other.

T he Spartans of ancient Greece were among the most famous and fearsome warriors of all time. Never have there been a people more single-mindedly devoted to the military arts. Spartan boys were taken from home to attend military school at age seven, and every male between twenty and sixty had to serve in the armed forces. The result was that Sparta fielded the most powerful military force in Greece.

Nevertheless, the vaunted Spartan army was defeated by Thebes at the battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. The turning point in the battle came when an elite Theban military unit known as the Sacred Band led a breakthrough against the Spartan right wing. Famed for both its fighting ability and its unusual makeup, the Sacred Band consisted of 300 soldiers who all had something in common.

They were gay.

This one-of-a-kind unit consisted of 150 homosexual couples. The idea was that every man would be motivated to fight to his maximum ability both to protect his lover and to avoid shaming himself in front of his lover. In modern military jargon, it was thought that this Theban band of lovers would enjoy a high degree of unit cohesion.

And it worked. The Sacred Band stood undefeated for more than thirty years. When it was finally overcome in battle against Macedonians, it is said that the unit was so unwilling to yield that every single man fought to the death.

P ERISH ANY MAN WHO SUSPECTS THAT THESE MEN EITHER DID OR SUFFERED ANYTHING THAT WAS BASE .

PHILIP II OF MACEDON, VIEWING THE BODIES OF THE SACRED BAND SLAIN IN BATTLE BY HIS ARMY

T he Spartans were the original men of few words. Sparta was part of a larger area known as Laconia, which is where the word laconic comes from. The story is told that Philip II sent a threatening message to the Spartans, warning, If I enter Laconia, I will level it to the ground. The Spartans one-word reply: If...

The Spartans daily regimen was so demanding that Plutarch claimed they were the only men in the world for whom war was a welcome rest from training.

How one old man held off an entire Roman fleet.

I n 213 B.C. , a Roman fleet under the command of Marcus Claudius Marcellus attacked the Greek city-state of Syracuse. Marcellus was confident he could take Syracuse in five days. Instead, it took more than a year, thanks to the ingenuity of one old man.

Archimedes.

Archimedes is best remembered for shouting Eureka! in his bath and running through the streets naked. But there was much more to the man than that. He was Einstein and Edison combined, the greatest scientist of the ancient world, and also a brilliant inventor. As the military adviser to the king of Syracuse, he spent years devising mysterious engines to protect the city. When the Romans came, Syracuse put Archimedes machines to work.

There were large catapults capable of hurling rocks the size of wagons, and small catapults called scorpions that shot darts at the Romans. A giant grappling claw lifted Roman ships by the bow and smashed them against the rocks. Mousetrap-like mechanisms levered giant weights down upon Roman siege ladders.

Then there were the mirrors.

Archimedes, according to several chroniclers, created a series of mirrors that could focus the suns energy on ships and cause them to burst into flamea death ray in the ancient world.

Marcellus had to admit he could not take the city by storm. He was forced to lay siege to it for many months before he finally found a way in. Archimedes was killed in the sack of the city, but not before demonstrating that the genius of one man could prove equal to all the military might in Rome.

A RCHIMEDES USES MY SHIPS TO LADLE SEAWATER INTO HIS WINE CUPS .

ROMAN GENERAL MARCUS CLAUDIUS MARCELLUS

Archimedes so terrorized Roman sailors that every time they spied a rope or a piece of wood sticking out from the walls of Syracuse, they feared it was another of his fearsome engines, and fled. The Romans said Plutarch, began to think they were fighting with the gods.