 Say what you want about Alexander the Great, but he is quite possibly the most daring, audacious commander in the history of mankind. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition of Lessons in Blood. As always, if you haven't seen the introduction to the series, please go back and watch that. It gives better context for what we're doing here. If you don't care about context, then hey, welcome to the party. Also, below in the description, we will have a link to a video of a much more in-depth context of the battle. If you are like me and you're a nerd for history, then please go ahead and follow that. That'll give you a better understanding of the context where this battle happens and the historical implications and all that kind of really cool stuff that we're not going to get to cover here. So, for this battle, we have the Siege of Tyre, Siege of Tyre. I don't know, I've heard it both ways. I'll probably say both interchangeably during this video, so please just forgive me. It happened in 332 BC and you have Alexander the Great, who I'm sure you are well aware of, versus the City of Tyre, or again, Tyre, not sure how to pronounce it. So basically what happens is Alexander's coming down the coast of the Mediterranean, around the city of Tyre, by the way, it's still a city, you can go look at this on a map, comes down the Mediterranean and long story short, he ends up sieging the city of Tyre. Now the city of Tyre at that time was an island, about a kilometer, give or take, off the mainland. So the entire city was walled up to the shoreline all the way around it. This is a harbor here, this is a harbor here, and they had a pretty strong navy. So what Alexander the Great did becomes pretty audacious. So what Alexander does is he goes and he raises the city of old Tyre. There was a city down here with a bunch of buildings, they built new Tyre on the island, like I said, and walled it. He comes and he raises the city and takes all of the rubble and starts to build a bridge, a land bridge, about 200 yards or 200 feet wide and it ends up being a kilometer long when it's done. But he starts to dump all of this rubble into the sea in order to literally build the bridge. Furthermore, he conscripts tens of thousand citizens from neighboring towns to come down and help him build his bridge. He's down there day in, day out inspecting his bridge, making sure material's getting moved. Well, eventually, as you would think, the citizens of Tyre think, gee, this is bad, and they take their superior navy because Alexander does not have a navy here. They come out and they attack the bridge, you know, kill a bunch of the workers, attempt to delay construction of this bridge. So, of course, the Greeks end up building some, you know, siege works out here to try to defend against a sortie. They come out, Tyre comes out again. This time, they take some old transport ships and they load them up with all kinds of combustibles and put big hanging pots of fire in the ship. So, when the ship crashes, you know, it'll spill and it'll burn. And they crash those into the side of the bridge as they're building and try to burn everything out and burn out those siege works. In that attack, they also land some troops on the mainland and do some fighting and skirmishing there. Again, an attempt to disrupt this siege. At the same time, Alexander's dealing with these multiple raids on his bridge. He also is importing timber from deep inland. Well, some Arab tribes in the area decide they don't like that and they raid and kill his foresting parties deeper inland, further delaying his production of this bridge. So, eventually, Alexander realizes this isn't going to happen without a navy. So, he goes back north to the city of Sidon and some other cities that he conquered, the city of Cyprus, some other cities, and they send him navies. We're talking in order of hundreds of ships that he ends up getting. And he comes back with his new ships. While he is up there getting these ships, he also decides to go on a putative raiding expedition against the Arab tribes that were raiding his timber supply and puts that down. Alexander the Great is probably one of the last kings who led from the front, meaning that whenever there was a battle, he was in it. And this punitive expedition on the Arab tribes was no different. They snuck up on these guys at night. Alexander the Great apparently killed two of the guys with a dagger, you know, came up to their fire as they're all sitting around their fire, stabbed two of the guys to death because that's how Alexander rolls. So, Alexander comes back. He has a navy. He's taken care of the timber issues. And then a storm comes and wipes out a lot of his bridge and just washes it away. So, he has to start over yet again. Not all the way over, mind you, but you know, there's rework to be done yet again. This whole time the city of Tyre, you know, had founded a lot of the Phoenician colonies like Carthage and they had said they would help. News comes back to Tyre that they're not going to be able to help. So, Tyre is entirely left on its own. Now, eventually they get the bridge far enough out that they're able to build some siege works on it and they're able to actually attack the wall. The first attack that they have fails. The Greeks are rebuffed and they're pushed off the walls. You know, they're using these siege works to try to pummel down the city walls, right? And then, of course, at night the citizens of Tyre are building secondary walls. They're trying to repair the walls that they can. Like it's an ongoing back and forth struggle here. At this point, Tyre does attempt a naval sortie to break out of the blockade because you gotta remember they're blockaded by all these ships from Carthage, right? So that they can't utilize their navy to come out and attack the ramp anymore. They do attempt to break out here. That doesn't work. That fails. Alexander the Great ends up leading some ships in to cut that off. So, that sortie fails. Eventually, they mount a second attack on the same city spot and they swing around here and there was a previous spot that opened up due to some other naval battles. Again, not important for the total context of this video. If you want to know more, watch the real historical video below. And Alexander the Great now with two points of attack, they're able to get in, break into the city, they sack the city, you know, kill on order of thousands of people, enslave the rest of the population. Typical ancient warfare, not good stuff. So, this is probably one of the most unique battles, or in this case a siege, you know, took like six to seven months that we will cover in this series probably ever. Let's learn some lessons from this. All right. So, what are the modern lessons that we're able to learn from this battle that happened, you know, over 2300 years ago? Lesson number one, daring. The official model of the motto of the SAS is who dares wins, right? Who dares wins? Alexander the Great is the absolute personification of that motto. This guy is possibly, like I said, the most daring commander in human history ever. And he does it again and again and again. And this might be his most daring endeavor he's ever undertaken. Who comes out and thinks I'm going to build a new bridge from Stone, Rubble, Timber, whatever to get out to this island? Who looks across a sea and says I can get there by building a bridge. I'm not just going to like drive pylons. I'm literally going to fill the sea with earth until we get there. That is a daring plan. Say what you will about its levels of sanity. Alexander the Great was probably a psychopath in general. However, he's extremely daring. And this is a guy who was in his late 20s at this point. And he decides he is going to go out and fill the sea with earth to get where he wants to go. It's an incredibly daring plan and really that can't be understated. Because again, even in modern warfare, who would ever look at that and think to do this? That pairs with our second lesson, which is outside the box thinking. Outside the box thinking is an important thing to do to not be conventional. And Alexander the Great was anything but conventional. And this is another excellent example of how he did that. He thought he will again fill the sea with earth in order to get there. This is not something that a normal person would think of. You would not look at an island and think I know how I'll get there. I'll just fill in a bunch of earth until we fill up the bottom of the sea and then we'll get there. That's not a normal solution. And in part because of that, it worked because he was able to do something that no one would have anticipated him being able to do. Now you might say listen Dylan, I mean the daring and the outside the box thinking that's great but I'm not a king. I can't just conscript tens of thousands of people at my will in order to get them to do what I want. And I would say you're right. You can't. However, you can still learn that lesson. You will always be faced with different things on a battlefield that require daring and outside the box thinking. And how you apply those principles to your specific situation will vary but the principle remains the same. Rolling right into our third lesson that makes total sense. Lean from the front. Alexander the Great again was a perfect embodiment of leading from the front. Every time this guy's army went to battle, Alexander was there. And I'm not saying like a couple hundred yards behind the actual fighting there. I'm saying he was there driving his sword through people's throats. He almost died on several different occasions. He was wounded on more than one occasion. Like the guy was actually doing the fighting. And the most effective combat leaders are going to be those people. Hands down across the board. It's also why NCOs, non-commissioned officers in all modern combat, always take the most casualties because they're leading from the front. If you want to be an effective combat leader, that means you're going to have to lead from the front. You've all heard the cliches about, you know, you should never order someone to do something you can't do or anything like that and those are true. But think of how inspiring it is. Think of how inspired you would be to be just a Joe Schmoe, which you are. I am. That's just how it is. And to see someone who is your leader, who's going to ask you to put your life at risk, who is going to go do that, who's going to lead by example. This is of course a thing that they try to build into all modern military officers and non-commissioned officers and rangers and that whole thing. You lead from the front and this is again, Alexander personifies that almost perfectly because he's always leading from the front. When they decided to go on this punitive expedition against these Arab tribes, he could have easily handed that off. He could have easily sent a detachment or one of his very competent generals to handle that. But he goes himself and he doesn't just go himself. He goes up there and he sneaks up on these guys at night and knives two of them because that's the kind of guy he is. Again, maybe a psychopath. However, he is very inspiring and because he leads from the front like that, his men were just devoted to him. And there's something to be said about that. Inspect what you expect, right? When he's out here inspecting the bridge as they're building it. And the second lesson being that if you're out and you're in the fight too, that is going to be very inspiring to the people following you. And again, if you're that person, that's the kind of leader you want. You don't want the guy who's just going to send you into the danger area. You want the guy who's going to lead you into the danger area. And I think that that is again, a very important lesson we can always take away from this. The fourth lesson, we have act and react, which we want to anticipate, right? I'm honestly kind of surprised that Alexander didn't anticipate these guys are going to get upset and come out and try to attack his little land bridge that he was building, right? The first attack seems to have caught them fairly by surprise. Like he didn't think they'd come out and disrupt it. However, that's what happened, you know, and then he built some siege towers and some things like defend his guys and they came out and attacked again with the flame ships. So there's kind of this back and forth trade-off that's very reminiscent of World War I, if you're familiar with that at all. Like one side will get attacked like gas. The other side will get a countermeasure, right? Like gas masks. Then one side will get attacked like tanks. Then the other side will get a countermeasure, right? Like really wide trenches or whatever. One side will get attack airplanes. The other side will get another attack. Well, we're putting machine guns on our airplanes now, right? There's this constant like race in the arms and technology to try to outdo the other side. And this is very similar to that where the the tier is not passive in the siege at all. They are extremely active. They're doing work to try to disrupt the enemy as much as possible. And so they're acting and reacting to Alexander as well. And Alexander's acting and reacting. And you can watch that unfold in real time. Again, the lesson here is we want to try to anticipate what the enemy is doing rather than react to what they're doing, right? Anytime you're reacting, you're seeding the initiative, which usually is never good. And rather than seed the initiative, you'd like to anticipate what they're going to do and then act. And that way you force them to react. So that's an important lesson here. Rather than getting caught in this back and forth temple of acting and reacting, Alexander could have preemptively built things on his bridge to protect it, right? And that would have helped kind of stall that and change the temple and make the tier have to do something else. One of the biggest lessons we can learn from this is determination and grit, both from Alexander and tears perspective. From Alexander's perspective, like, I mean, they attacked his land bridge once. They attacked it the second time with fire ships. They landed people on here. He's getting raided back here. He has to go get naval ships. His first attack fails. A storm hits. Like, there are multiple setbacks. He experiences over this half year, you know, seven months of a siege. And any normal person, again, Alexander might have been crazy, any normal person might just look at it and say, you know what, enough. Like, or even a person of this era would look at it and say, the gods have cursed this. Like, forget it. But he doesn't quit. Again, another thing Alexander personifies, the guy never quits. He literally dies campaigning, right? He never stops going to war. And so you have to learn when is the point to just grit. Like, there is a point to quit, right? And to be able to grit through that and fight through that continuing to be determined when you should have changed tactics or give up a long time ago can be a virtue. Now, obviously, that can be a fault because you can just be stubborn and stupid and you cannot think through the problem, right? But Alexander had a solution. He knew he had a good solution and he pushed it through on grit and determination and a face like Flint that was just unchanging to setbacks and obstacles and roadblocks. And he overcame all of those to achieve victory. Now, Tyr also deserves an incredible amount of accolades for their grit and their determination. They said, screw you. You know, we're not, we're going to fight this. We don't care. We're going to be safe in our city. Well, it turns out they're not, but they were not passive. They attacked once and twice. They tried to break out with their swordy. They were seeking help from allies. Like, they went down and they lost and sometimes it's just how it goes. However, they did not go down passively. They had grit and determination to hold on to the siege. They refused to surrender and they fought to the bitter end, which is impressive and they deserve all kinds of credit for that. And again, sometimes you're just unlucky. You're just unlucky. You're overmatched and you lose. But they also had a significant amount of grit and determination and refused to give up the city without a fight, which they should get credit for. The last lesson is lessons in brutality and prowess. I am not a fan of sacking cities. I consider that highly immoral for fairly obvious reasons. That being said, you have to realize that one of the end results of this battle was that all the other cities on the Mediterranean surrendered to Alexander like that because they heard what happened to tear. Now, it's not just the sacking of the city and the brutality that was displayed there. That's a fairly common course for the ancient world and, you know, there's some argument to be made that if you're super brutal, then people will fear you more. That's a different video, whatever. My point is the prowess is really what won all the other cities to surrender to Alexander. Because who would have ever thought that you could have taken tear? Why would anyone have ever thought the tire was going to be a city to fall? It's an island fortress. Quite literally, it's an island fortress. How do you even get there when you don't have a navy? So the fact that he was able to take that island so cowed and scared the rest of the cities that they just surrendered, you know, as soon as they saw him from then on forward. Because they heard what happened to tire and, hey, if you can take out tire, then surely you can take out us, right? It's kind of the equivalent of finding the biggest, meanest, bad guy you can and beating him up and then that solves the problem for everybody else because, hey, if you can take down, you know, Bob the bully, well then, you know, I have no chance so, of course, I'm gonna cow to you, right? That's kind of the same playground principle that's at play here. He took down one of the most impregnable fortresses known at that time and therefore everyone else knew that, hey, we don't have a chance because if he can take that, surely he can take us. And so there's a lesson there of defeating the toughest opponent first and then letting the weaker opponents surrender on their own will. Not saying it always works, but again, a lesson there to be taken. That's quite a few lessons. I've talked at you a bit. I hope that is helpful and I hope that helps you again understand these principles in ancient battles so that we can see where these principles would apply in our modern day fighting. Do brave deeds and endure.