Intellect PlusMilitary leaders and theorists
83 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 2 of 2.
The Duke of Marlborough never lost a battle, yet still lost his jobJohn Churchill triumphed at Blenheim in 1704 and in a string of later clashes with France, and is remembered as a general who was never beaten in battle. What undid him was court …
Church bells ring at noon partly because of John HunyadiIn 1456, as John Hunyadi defended Belgrade against an army led by the Ottoman sultan himself, the pope ordered church bells rung at midday to call Christians to prayer for the fig…
Garibaldi's famous red shirts may have come from an Argentine meat trade orderBefore he helped unite Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi spent 14 years as an exile fighting in South America's wars. Popular history says his Italian Legion in Montevideo got its tradema…
The first crusader ruler of Jerusalem refused to call himself kingAfter the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, Godfrey of Bouillon accepted its rule but reportedly balked at the royal title, calling himself Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre inst…
Hannibal occupied southern Italy for 15 years and still lost the warHannibal marched an army and 38 elephants over the Alps, beat Rome again and again, and held much of southern Italy for a decade and a half. Rome's answer was to stop fighting him…
Barbarossa, the Redbeard, may have been a mangled Baba, meaning fatherThe name Barbarossa sounds like Italian for Redbeard, and Europeans took it that way. One account says it began as Baba Oruç, Father Oruç, an honorific earned by a corsair who fer…
Heinrich Himmler was a failed farm manager before he ran the SSHeinrich Himmler studied agriculture, never saw combat, and was out of work at 23. Six years later he led a Nazi bodyguard unit of about 290 men. He built it into a vast apparatus…
The earliest-born person whose voice survives was a Prussian field marshalHelmuth von Moltke was born in 1800, and in October 1889 he spoke into a phonograph; two of those recordings still exist. The general who built the modern general staff was also a…
The only Army general ever awarded the Nobel Peace PrizeWinston Churchill called George Marshall the organiser of victory for running America's war effort. Marshall then did something rarer for a soldier: as Secretary of State he champ…
Months before Hitler invaded, Zhukov played the Germans in a war game and wonIn January 1941, Georgy Zhukov commanded the invading side in a Soviet staff exercise and, by his own account, attacked along lines strikingly close to the real German assault tha…- Ferdinand Foch's most famous battlefield message may never have been sentCentre giving way, right flank falling back, so attack: that defiant report from the marshes of the Marne in 1914 came to symbolise French defiance and Ferdinand Foch's leadership…
Spain's Grand Duke of Alba is remembered by the Dutch as the Iron DukeIn Spain and Portugal he was the Grand Duke, one of the most skilled generals of his century. In the Netherlands he became the Iron Duke, a byword for tyranny, after the tribunal …- The Roman who stopped Attila learned war as a boy hostage among the HunsAs a youth Flavius Aetius was handed over as a hostage, first to the Visigoth king Alaric and then to the court of the Huns. Those years gave him allies he later used to seize pow…
An illiterate swineherd's son drew a line in the sand and toppled the Inca EmpireStranded on a Pacific island with orders to come home, Francisco Pizarro reportedly scratched a line in the sand: Peru and riches to the south, Panama and poverty to the north. On…- A sickly boy judged unfit for soldiering became Russia's undefeated generalissimoAlexander Suvorov's father thought his frail son belonged in the civil service. A visiting general, Gannibal, talked with the boy and persuaded the family otherwise. Suvorov went …
Erwin Rommel's legend as the Desert Fox was partly built by propaganda on both sidesErwin Rommel became a larger-than-life figure in Nazi and Allied propaganda alike, and after the war a clean, apolitical commander was a useful image for rearming West Germany. Hi…
The most influential book on war was unfinished, and his wife published itCarl von Clausewitz joined the Prussian army at twelve, was captured by Napoleon's forces at 26, and switched to the Russian side rather than serve alongside France. His great tre…
Douglas MacArthur's mother moved into a hotel overlooking West Point to watch himWhen Douglas MacArthur entered West Point in 1899, his mother took a suite at a hotel with a view of the academy grounds. He graduated first in his class with the third-highest ma…
Spain's greatest Christian hero carries a title borrowed from ArabicRodrigo Díaz de Vivar fought for Christian kings and Muslim rulers alike. His famous name, El Cid, comes from an Arabic word meaning lord. Exiled by his own king, he ended up conq…
Ludendorff helped invent the lie that Germany was stabbed in the backFor two years Erich Ludendorff effectively ran Germany's First World War. When it collapsed in 1918, he blamed traitors at home rather than defeat in the field, spreading the stab…
One Portuguese admiral tried to lock the entire Indian Ocean shutAfonso de Albuquerque aimed to seal every sea route into the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the Pacific, turning it into a closed Portuguese lake. Between 1509…
Amr ibn al-As launched the conquest of Egypt on his own initiativeIn late 639 an Arab commander named Amr ibn al-As marched on Byzantine Egypt without waiting for full backing. Within two or three years Alexandria surrendered, the swiftest of th…
Montgomery was so badly wounded in 1914 that doctors ordered his grave dugTwo months into the First World War, a sniper shot Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery through the lung. Medics thought he was finished and had a grave prepared. He survived, and three …