 I'm a sucker for ancient history, sue me. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition of the Tudelage in Blood, Lessons from the Past, where we review battles from the past to learn modern tactical lessons. As always, I'm not gonna give the full context for this battle and the historical implications and all that stuff. I really enjoy that, and if you do too, I'll link to a video down below that you can watch for further viewing and geek out and nerd out about the history of it, all you like. But for today, let's talk about the battle itself and what we can learn. So this battle is the Battle of Lake Trezamine, a very famous battle that happened on June 24th, 217 BC. Rome comes into this conflict, or this battle with about 30,000 guys, and Carthage, led by Hannibal, comes into this battle with 50,000 guys. You may not have heard of Carthage before, but you have absolutely heard of Hannibal. So, for this battle, here's one of the first things I wanna say just to set the stage a little bit, because it is gonna matter when it comes to lessons that we learned from this battle and how the battle plays out. Basically, the Romans were in this fort, Hannibal snuck over by them, they didn't know it, started ravaging the countryside, and the Roman general, who was known to Hannibal, this is gonna be important later, known to Hannibal to be aggressive, eventually got mad and started chasing Hannibal. And that's where we pick this up. This Roman general picked up his entire army, moved out of this fortified town, and started to pursue Hannibal in an effort to bring to battle. So, what we have here is we have the lake Trezemine. This is gonna be our lake for our battle. There's a bunch of hills up in this area of the lake. You can actually go on Google Maps, and you can see where this battle happened, and you can see the hills. It's actually kind of crazy and it's kind of interesting, and I did that, and I would probably recommend that. But it's important to know that there's a bunch of hills on the side of this lake. So, what Carthage did, what Hannibal did, is they set up a fake camp over here, with all their fires burning and everything, as Rome is pursuing them along this route of the lake. That's where they're pursuing them. So, Rome is coming down here in column formation. That's obviously gonna be important. And what Hannibal did is he baited them with their camp, with all their campfires, whatever, and he set up a blocking force right here. Another thing that I need to make sure to mention is that one of the things that's always noted about this battle is that on the morning that it happened, it was very foggy. There's a lot of low-hanging fog coming off the lake. So, for the people walking along this lake, it's very hard to see. You have to remember that, that they can't see super well and it's foggy and it's at early morning. If you've ever walked through an early morning fog, you know what that's like. It can be fairly disorienting. So, because of that, the Roman vanguard, which were made up of their hardened legions, stumbled directly into the Carthaginians. The Romans are famous for not putting out scouts when they should. We're gonna talk about that more later. So, the Roman vanguard gets here and hits the blocking force. As the column continues to approach, to join the battle, all of the Carthaginians were hid up in these hills. So, as the column is stretched out, coming to the battle, the Carthaginians come down out of the hills and smash into the Romans. Now, again, if you're stretched out in a long column formation and someone has already set and they're coming in to ambush you, that's what this ends up being a very, very large-scale ambush. They basically, you're pinned between the lake, the battle in front of you, right, and then getting ambushed from the side. A lot of Romans ended up getting driven into the lake and they tried to swim with armor on. Anytime you're gonna try to swim with armor on, that's not gonna go well and you have a very high chance of drowning. So, that's, of course, exactly what happened. So, the Carthaginians come along, they smash the Romans, drive them into the lake. Again, they can't see. They couldn't see as they're moving along the fog here, but from up in the hills, they were able to see the Romans pretty well. So, they can track them as they're moving. They're down in the fog. They can't really see much. They come in, they smash them into the lake. This Roman legion here, to their credit, eventually knows that their only way out of here is forward and they actually fight and break through the blocking force and escape. They're captured later, but credit to them what credit's due for not dying that day. The last thing I want to say, and then we're gonna start talking about lessons, is that Hannibal set all of this up at night. So, he was traveling along here, learned he was being pursued. He brought his guys around and set them up at night in the hills with, you know, tens of thousands of guys. That's important, obviously, because imagine how difficult that would be to do. So, at the end of this battle, the Romans end up losing their entire army. Half of them, about 15,000 are killed. The other half are captured. Even these guys who break out and get out, they're captured, you know, a couple days later. So, the entire army is wiped off the map. Let's learn some lessons. Okay, the first lesson we want to learn here is deception. As Sun Tzu says, deception is central to all warfare. Ooh, I butchered that quote, but it's something like that. Deception is a very, very important aspect of warfare. So, the reason I bring up deception is they had their camp down here. The Carthage set up a fake camp down here to lure the Romans down the line. They wanted them to follow, right? If you can get your enemy to do what you want, that's of course going to afford you more opportunities. So, they're able to lure the Romans over to the Carthaginian camp and then set up a blocking force to kind of surprise them, right? Again, foggy, remember you can't see, but they could see those burning fires and they could see where that camp was at. Number two, know your enemy and learn how to, in this case, taunt your enemy using that knowledge for your advantage, right? If, again, Sun Tzu, you have to know your enemy and know yourself and you'll never lose a battle and Carthage or Hannibal, I should say in this case, knew his enemy. He knew the Roman general whose name was Flavius, if I remember correctly, he knew his enemy. He knew that he was aggressive and he was known to be aggressive and he was going to look for a battle. So, Hannibal taunted him. He taunted him by burning the countryside. Then he taunted him by running away. Then, like we said previously, he deceived him with a camp, right? He knew his enemy, he knew his enemy was aggressive and wanted to look for a fight and so he was able to lure them into the fight that he wanted to lure them into. Number three, fight your way out. This is just a side note. Sometimes the only option left to you is to fight your way out and credit to those Vanguard Romans who were there who decided the only way out of this alive was to fight their way out and that's what they did. That's a really, really bad day for you but sometimes that's your only option and what else are you going to do? So, I think that's an important lesson to learn is that sometimes your backs against the wall and the only way out is forward and you got to fight your way out of this trap and that's happened before in history. We're going to see that again in other battles but I wanted to note that sometimes that's all you got left. It's fight your way out or you're going to die. Number four, met TC, mission, enemy, troops available, terrain and weather, time, civilian and other considerations. Okay, sorry, I guess the terrain and weather is the first tee and the troops are the second tee but whatever, you get my point. If you're not familiar with this acronym it's an acronym to help make sure you understand all the factors when planning your mission and I bring this one up specifically because I wanted to talk about weather, terrain and weather and again that played an important factor in this battle. Hannibal did a very good job of understanding his terrain. He understood he could hide tens of thousands of guys up in these hills which he used the terrain, right? This is my topographic map, that's what that's supposed to be. He had tens of thousands of guys up in these hills so that he was able to use that to hide his troops and then ambush the Romans. He also had the added benefit in this case of weather and he was able to use weather very effectively. The Romans could not see being down in the fog. The Carthaginians could see being up in the hills. Use the terrain and weather to your advantage. It's easy to forget how much weather and terrain can dictate battles. However, weather and terrain make significant impacts on battles. Go look at the battles between the Germans and the Russians on the Eastern Front in World War II. When the temperature starts getting 40 below zero Fahrenheit and engines start failing and nothing will start and nobody has winter gear, all of a sudden that's a huge, huge deal. I've had multiple cars die in my own driveway when it's 30 or 20 below out, let alone 40 below out with technology that's 75 years older than it is today. So you gotta understand that these things play a significant factor in the outcomes of battles and the tactician who's going to use those factors who's going to realize those factors, who's going to adapt his plans to those factors is more than likely going to be the victorious tactician over the one who does not. Number five, speed. I bring speed up because speed we're going to define as moving faster than the enemy or moving faster than the enemy anticipates you being able to. I bring that up because remember, Hannibal set this up at night, right? The night before he knew he was being pursued, he sent his guys all the way around here up into the hills. Why didn't he just send them straight up into the hills? Well, because then you'd track all through the terrain, right? If you're moving tens of thousands of people up through these hills, that's going to be pretty noticeable the next day. So he sent them around and set up his ambush, something that it was very quickly done that if you're the Romans, you may not even be able to anticipate, hey, we're hot on their trail, they're running, they're not going to be able to ambush us because we're moving too fast. The other lesson that's very closely linked to that is coordination. To be able to coordinate the moving of tens of thousands of guys in this huge, I'm going to call it a flanking motion, but you know what I mean, at night to get them into the right position in the hills, you've got to remember, this is 217 BC. There are no flashlights, right? There's no night vision. The only thing they would have had would be torches and you can't use those because then they'll see you moving. So it's very, very impressive that Hannibal was able to coordinate this. That's only going to work with an army that trusts its leadership and with a leader that is extremely competent and has good control over his guys. You have to have both those two things. If they trust you but you're not competent, well, that doesn't do any good. And if you're competent but they don't trust you, then they're not going to listen to you and they're not going to try something like this. So there's a lesson there between a leader, whether it's a leader of a fire team or a battalion commander, having their people be able to trust them in order to pull maneuvers off like this. There has to be a high level of trust and competence in order to achieve that team cohesion and coordination to be able to pull off a maneuver like this again with the added factor of time. Number seven is a lesson for the Romans. Scouts listening posts, right? If the Romans for the life of them, they never can get this right. We're going to see this in other battles as well. They do not send out scouts. They have no forward feelers at all. And because of that, they just run smack into problems. This is a textbook case of where scouts could have saved their life. If they would have had scouting forces rather than just a full vanguard up here to be able to see the blocking force before they ran into it, then they could have potentially avoided this disaster. If they had had some kind of flank security up here in the hills or some scouting security up here in the hills, they would have discovered that ambush before it crashed into them. Instead, the Romans, being a classic bull in a china shop, just ran in with the full army, ready to rock and roll, and then got steamrolled because of it. I just erased this whole board and then I remember there was one more lesson we forgot to talk about. When you have an inferior force and you're going to attack a superior force that is commanded by an extremely competent commander that's usually a very bad idea. So being able to plan your attacks effectively and not looking to engage in a full scale battle against a known competent general with an inferior force would have seemed pretty common sense. However, let's be honest, the Romans weren't known for their common sense. They were more known for just full steam ahead and damn the consequences. Point being, I think the lesson we should learn there is what troops do you have available and what does the enemy have and how can we use what we have most effectively against the enemy. And sometimes that might mean attacking or skirmishing or raiding or ambushing or whatever, but what it probably doesn't mean is charging full steam ahead with everything you got and risking the entire army against a superior force with an extremely competent commander. I hope that was all helpful. I look forward to continuing to learn some modern lessons from ancient battles with you. Do brave deeds and endure.