Wars & Conflicts

42 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it.

Captured officers once won freedom simply by giving their wordIn eighteenth-century Europe, a captured officer could hand over his sword, swear as a gentleman not to escape, and receive comfortable lodgings and the run of the town. Swear nev…
The word refugee entered English with French Protestants fleeing persecutionWhen Louis XIV outlawed Protestantism in France in 1685, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots escaped to England, the Netherlands, Prussia and as far as South Africa. English speake…
Religion was the main cause of surprisingly few of history's warsA popular claim holds that religion has caused most wars. Tallies suggest otherwise. The 1997 Encyclopedia of Wars listed 1,763 notable conflicts and filed 121 of them, under 7 pe…
The oldest known siege trench ringed a Philistine city nearly 3,000 years agoSiege comes from the Latin for sitting, and much of siege warfare was exactly that: surrounding a city and waiting. The earliest surviving proof of an attacker digging a ring arou…
The word sniper comes from hunting a small, jittery wading birdBritish officers in 1770s India prized one game bird above others: the snipe, alert, well camouflaged and prone to zigzagging flight. Bagging one with a flintlock took stealth and…
The word soldier originally meant someone who fights for a coinSoldier descends, through Old French words for a mercenary and a shilling's wage, from the solidus, a Roman gold coin used in Byzantium. Being paid is baked into the name. Yet one…
Napoleon ran his wars with a chief clerk instead of a planning staffLouis Alexandre Berthier served Napoleon as chief of staff for years, yet his job was mostly paperwork: turning orders around fast. Napoleon kept intelligence and operational plan…
The Western Front's trench lines grew out of a failed race to outflankIn autumn 1914, German and Allied armies each tried to slip around the other's open end, digging in every time they were blocked. Within weeks the leapfrogging had carried two mat…
The English word war grew from an old Germanic root meaning confusionTrace the word war back far enough and it stops meaning battle. It came into English in the eleventh century through Old French werre, the ancestor of modern guerre, from a Franki…
The First World War forced military science to swap history lessons for experimentsBefore 1914, officers studied war mainly by combing through past battles for lessons to repeat. That method told Europe's planners that bold, relentless attack was the only road t…
Sun Tzu offered 13 principles, Napoleon 115 maxims, and one Civil War general just oneGenerals have long tried to bottle victory into rules. Sun Tzu set out 13 principles in The Art of War. Napoleon compiled 115 maxims. The American Civil War cavalry commander Nath…
For thousands of years, armies moved no faster than a tired soldier could walkThrough most of history, an army's speed was capped by human legs. Even with pack animals hauling supplies, a force could rarely cover more than about 32 kilometres a day unless i…
Andorra's citizen army has not fought a battle in more than 700 yearsTucked into the Pyrenees, Andorra has never kept a standing army in modern times. Its defence rests on an old principle: when the call called the Sometent sounds, every able-bodie…
Ancient crews dodged ramming by rushing to one side and tilting their shipIn Greek and Persian sea battles, warships fought by smashing reinforced prows into enemy hulls. Crews under attack had a clever defence: every marine dashed to the side about to …
A tenth-century Indonesian fleet sailed about 7,000 kilometres to raid East AfricaIn 945 and 946 AD, seafarers from the island kingdoms of what is now Indonesia, either Malays of Srivijaya or Javanese of Mataram, sent around a thousand boats across the Indian O…
Modern armed forces have far more officers per soldier than armies of the pastIn the First World War fewer than one British soldier in twenty held a commission. Today officers make up around a sixth of many Western forces. Early in the 20th century Spain's …
Why the good guys are always blue in war games: thank Prussian uniformsIn Western training exercises the friendly side is blue and the pretend enemy is red, a neutral way to avoid naming any real country. The habit traces back to Georg von Reisswitz,…
Eisenhower made the phrase military-industrial complex famous, but he did not invent itOn 17 January 1961, departing president Dwight Eisenhower, a retired five-star general, warned Americans to guard against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial comp…
Ask four militaries what a squadron is and you will hear four answersMilitary vocabulary sounds precise, but a single word can mean wildly different things. To most admirals a squadron means a cluster of warships. To most air commanders it means a …
Several armies tried scrapping military ranks entirely, and every one brought them backCommunist governments have occasionally tried running armies without formal ranks. The Soviet Red Army went without them from 1918 to 1935, China's People's Liberation Army from 1…
The lawyer who coined genocide considered the treaty banning it a failureRaphael Lemkin invented the word genocide during the Second World War and spent years persuading the new United Nations to outlaw it. When a convention was finally agreed, it had …
Infantry and infant share a root meaning without speechThe word infantry traces back through French and Italian to the Latin infans, meaning speechless or newborn, the same source as infant. In Renaissance Italy and Spain, infanteria …
Why Confederate warships were treated like American ones abroadDuring the American Civil War, no foreign power recognised the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. It was, however, recognised as a belligerent, so its warships enjoyed the same ri…
Great walls and border forts could only delay an invasionHadrian's Wall, the Great Wall of China and the Danish Danewerk all tried to stop invaders at the frontier. Such barriers demanded huge garrisons and constant upkeep. Chains of fo…
An Irish abbot drafted rules to shield civilians in 697In 697 the abbot Adomnán of Iona summoned kings and churchmen from across Ireland and Scotland to Birr. There he gave them the Law of the Innocents, which forbade killing women an…
Prussia's soldier king spent most of his budget on the armyFrederick William I of Prussia, nicknamed the Soldier King, launched sweeping military reforms in 1713 and pushed army spending to 73 percent of the state's annual budget. When he…
Military once described only soldiers, not sailors or the whole armed forcesWhen the Royal Military Academy opened in 1741 and West Point's United States Military Academy in 1802, military still meant land forces and the soldier's trade. Only around the N…
An 18th-century Spanish general blamed rebellions on bad rulersWriting between 1726 and 1730, the Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado argued that a people seldom rises up unless its governors are at fault. His prescription for stopping rebelli…
Australia refused to execute its deserters in the First World WarBritain pressed hard, but Australia's government would not allow soldiers of its First Australian Imperial Force to be shot for desertion. It held firm even though its troops went…
A British officer was once cashiered for refusing to duelDuelling was illegal across Europe, yet in 1814 a British officer was court-martialled and thrown out of the army for failing to challenge a man who had publicly insulted him. Kil…
Renaissance Venice guarded its secrets even from its own dogeVenice lived by trade, and trade secrets were worth protecting at almost any cost. Its security body, the Council of Ten, would not let even the doge browse government archives fr…
Three rival theories try to explain why ethnic groups clashIf ethnic conflict sprang from ancient hatreds always simmering below the surface, neighbouring groups would fight constantly. Instead violence erupts in sporadic bursts, often af…
Nelson hid his ships over the horizon to lure out a fleetA blockade does not aim to capture a city; it aims to choke a whole country. Britain perfected the full naval version against France in the 1750s, and in 1805 Nelson pulled his sh…
A military casualty need not be dead, or even woundedWhen a report lists casualties, many people read it as a death toll. In military usage the word is far broader: a deserter, a prisoner, a soldier laid low by illness or a missing …
Early Assyrian horsemen rode in pairs with no saddles or stirrupsRiding a horse is one thing; fighting from one is far harder. Carvings of Assyrian cavalry from around 865 BC show riders working in pairs, one holding the reins for his neighbour…
Babylon ran a draft under Hammurabi, and people already dodged itNearly four thousand years ago, Babylonians owed the king service called Ilkum: soldiering in war, labour in peace, in exchange for land. Some hired substitutes, some traded the o…
Air warfare began with man-carrying kites in ancient ChinaLong before engines, Chinese armies lifted people aloft on kites to look over the battlefield. Balloons, zeppelins and fixed-wing aircraft followed, the last entering war only in …
Britain and Finland both claim the world's first independent air forceIn 1918 two countries created air arms that answered to no army or navy. Britain's Royal Air Force was formed on 1 April by merging two older flying services. Finland's traces its…
Why anti-aircraft fire is called flak, ack-ack and archieAir defence has collected a remarkable set of nicknames. Flak shortens a German word for aircraft-defence cannon, ack-ack comes from the British signallers' way of saying AA, and …
Germany built only twenty tanks in the First World WarTanks were invented to break the deadlock of trench warfare, and their debut at the Somme in 1916 largely failed. Britain and France kept investing anyway, fielding thousands by 1…
Paying soldiers full-time may have helped create the modern stateMedieval Englishmen owed their king forty days of military service, far too short for a campaign overseas. So most paid a fee instead, and that money bought professional troops. O…
Before the 19th century, most battles were over within a dayGettysburg's three days were unusually long for its era; most earlier battles ended in hours because armies could not be fed in the field or fight well at night. Then railways and…

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