Outnumbered, cut off from any hope of rescue or support, operating secretly. The dramatic potential of troops or pilots conducting a raid has been well explored by film, television, and literature. The scenario even offers all the, for want of a better word, “fun” of being in the military without many of the responsibilities, such as looking out for the well-being of civilians or many other parts of protocol. It also offers the persons involved the potential for much more glory than most regular operations since the numbers are small enough that there’s less credit to spread around and less commotion for an individual’s contribution to be lost. 

Most raids are good primarily for wasting the enemy’s resources or extracting a specific target. Some, however, have changed the very shape of history and the courses of wars. While some are still kept under a shroud of secrecy that may never be lifted, some are so devastating in their impacts that they can’t be kept under wraps by either side. 

10. Operation Flipper

No one could say that the mission that Colonel Robert Laycock and his 59 other commandos were sent to on November 10, 1941, was unambitious. They boarded the submarines H.M.S. Torbay and Talisman intent on sneaking into Axis-controlled Tunisia, raiding Sidi Rafa. There they would kill Lt. General Erwin Rommel himself while also destroying the Italian high command in North Africa, effectively liberating the continent for the Allies. 

They didn’t even make landfall before things began to go wrong. A storm struck on November 14 and forced the Talisman aground, with only seven commandos arriving for the landfall. Despite around 50% of the personnel being knocked out without a shot being fired, Laycock decided to go ahead with the plan to assassinate Rommel and attack the Italian HQ. The weather continued to be a problem as they were bombarded with rain, but by November 17, they launched their two-pronged attack. 

While the commandos killed three German colonels and destroyed a supply dump, it turned out Rommel hadn’t even arrived, as the same weather that had given the commandos so much trouble had convinced him to stay in Rome. It turned out to be a steep price to pay as only two of the commandos returned to British lines at all, and that took them five weeks of subterfuge. A very loose and flattering film adaptation of the events called Raid on Rommel was released in 1971.  

Hopefully, this entry has gone to show that just because a raid was daring does not at all mean it was successful.

9. Raid on Boulogne 

As Napoleon Bonaparte said, if the French could be masters of the English Channel for six hours during the 1800s, they would be masters of the world. This was no idle boast to the British military, who watched the French draw together a navy with alarm. By 1804 the time had come to act, and the target was the 150 French ships in the fortified port of Boulogne. The British navy sent a flotilla of ships heavily laden with torpedoes, a brand new weapon designed by Robert Fulton. The raid actually inflicted light French casualties (about 14) and little damage on the French fleet. 

And yet it had an effect far out of proportion to material damage in one area: Morale. Spooked by the torpedo explosions, the morale of the French military sank, and the initiative to launch an invasion of the United Kingdom was replaced by panic. Ports were refortified instead of being prepared for an attack. Great Britain might have been saved by the Raid on Boulogne. Not bad for a raid that hadn’t cost the British a single casualty. 

8. The Great Raid of 1840

On March 19, 1840, leaders of Comanche and Penateka tribes in Central Texas were engaged in peace talks with Texas leaders. Owing to one freed hostage’s account, the Texan authorities threatened that unless all hostages were returned, every Native American participant could consider themselves a hostage. When the Comanche refused, a fight broke out which left more than 30 Comanche, including women and children, dead. So it was that by August 6, 1840, between 600 and 1,000 Comanche men under the command of Buffalo Hump rode into Texan territory in reprisal. 

First, they sacked the community of Victoria, killing fifteen as the rest huddled in the Southern district. The war party rode along the Guadalupe River, coming to a stop in and sacking the community of Linnville, outside San Antonio. The Comanches then retreated on August 8, but they made the mistake of carrying an oversized haul of loot and stolen horses with them, which slowed the party down enough for the Texans to organize a war party of their own. They caught up to the Comanches at Plum Creek and were estimated to have killed eighty of them in a surprise attack. As a result the Comanches never attempted anything like such a large and elaborate raid again, reverting to tried and true small-scale guerilla tactics.  

7. Morgan’s Raid

us is not an unabashed fan of Confederate raiders, considering what those under commanders like William Anderson did at Centralia.  Still, there’s no denying the daring and significance of many of their raids, especially in regards to lengthening the Civil War. Surely the one that John Hunt Morgan began on June 11, 1863, at the head of 2,400 cavalrymen was one of the boldest. He had been ordered to move from Sparta, Tennessee, and invade Kentucky to distract the Union armies, but he was not to cross the Ohio River under any circumstances. So on July 8, Morgan crossed the Ohio River with around 1,800 cavalrymen as the rest continued operations in Kentucky. While he was far from the largest Union armies, there were 100,000 Union troops against him, albeit widely scattered. 

It turned out Morgan’s orders had been much more reasonable than he would have liked, for the Union command quickly figured out where he was going. At Fayetteville, West Virginia the 23rd Ohio and 13th West Virginia Volunteers led by future president Rutherford B. Hayes ambushed Morgan on July 19th and cut his numbers in half. The Federals chased them to Salineville, Ohio, and captured Morgan and the remnants of his command on July 26. As we’ll see in a bit, that was nowhere near the worst thing to happen to the Confederate military that season.    

6. Belov’s Raids

TopTenz has written before about how the winter of 1941-1942 actually didn’t stop the Third Reich’s capture of Moscow and was quite bad for the Red Army’s counterattack. Still, one force of the Red Army came away from the largely disastrous counterattack with a massive credit under their belt. It was the 1st Cavalry Corps under General Pavel Belov. A large number of German divisions were positioned in a salient point in the Rhzev area, and Belov’s cavalry was sent behind the front in an attempt to cut the salient supply lines. 

The corps would find itself cut off, surrounded, and badly outnumbered. Yet Belov’s forces were sufficiently resourceful that they tied down seven divisions for six months, aided in no small part by the many partisans that were rallying against the Axis army as their extermination operations were making it clear they were not the heroic liberators many initially took them to be. Ultimately, Belov and roughly 2,000 under his command would break back out of the encirclement, and Belov would go on to become one of the most acclaimed Soviet commanders of the war.   

5. The Whitehaven Raid

For most of the American Revolution, it was taken for granted that all the fighting would take place in American territory as the crown had such an overwhelmingly superior army and navy. In 1778, John Paul Jones, who a year later would very famously capture the British ship Serapis after yelling “I have not yet begun to fight,” made to bring the fight to the home country by raiding the port town of Whitehaven in northwest England with its 400 merchant ships. Having sailed the Atlantic, Jones set out with thirty commandos in two boats to conquer the two forts and burn the merchant fleet to the waterline. 

For Jones’s boat, things went relatively smoothly. They landed, took their objective fort, and ruined the guns so that they could safely escape. The other boat, however, had problems that sounded like something out of Black Adder. First, the tide gave them so much trouble that they fell three hours behind schedule. Then when they belatedly made landfall, they went to the local pub and got drunk off liquor. When Jones caught up with them and understandably raged at the neglect of duty, he attempted to set fire to the town and ships, but the town’s fire brigade, bolstered as was English tradition since the 1666 London Fire, dutifully put the fires out promptly. Jones and company got away having neither suffered nor inflicted much damage, yet their exploit sent a wave of terror through the Isles that led to many sea towns being put on the alert for years afterward.    

4. The Doolittle Raid 

Anyone who’s seen Michael Bay’s 2002 film Pearl Harbor knows the Doolittle Raid was how the US Armed Forces saved face after the humiliation of four battleships being sunk and about 2,000 lives being lost during the sneak attack. On April 18, 1942, 16 B-25 Mitchells took off for Tokyo, starting more than half again over the original distance they originally intended. There would be no returning: They had to fly for China and hope they could land in airfields controlled by the Allies. 

The bombing killed 50 Japanese people, mostly civilians, and wounded about 400 others, but did little structural damage. So when the bombers were found to be too low on fuel to reach their airfield objectives and had to crash land, Commander James Doolittle’s belief that he would be court-martialed for losing 16 planes and three personnel while inflicting little damage on the enemy seems understandable. Considering the boost the attack had for US morale and the way it disrupted Japanese public sentiment to a point where it changed military strategy, it’s also understandable that he received the Medal of Honor instead. 

Initially ignored but increasingly more mentioned, the raid cost China’s population by far the most of any nation involved. Both because it revealed just how vulnerable Japan could be to air attacks from China and simply thirsty for revenge, the Japanese military launched a series of reprisals that by some accounts left hundreds of thousands of Chinese dead. If Doolittle’s men had given any sort of American gift to a Chinese person in compensation for kindness, they were very likely unknowingly giving that person a death sentence. It also seemed to influence the decision for just where to place the infamous Unit 731, as it was quite close to Chuchow, the Doolittle raiders’ intended destination. Such are the greatest sacrifices in war often overlooked.  

3. The Osel Air Raid

When the Third Reich launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, and invaded the Soviet Union, they caught the Red military completely off guard, destroying 1,200 Soviet plans in a single day. By July they were launching bombing runs on Moscow itself. General Secretary Joseph Stalin caught wind of the effect the raids on Moscow were having on Soviet morale and so ordered air raids on Berlin itself in retaliation. 

This was no idle command, as Berlin was the best-defended city in Europe and tore through squads of Allied aircraft on the regular. So when 15 Ilushyin DB-3 bombers took off from Osel, Estonia for Berlin on July 7, 1941, the years’ obsolete planes were generally regarded as being sent on a suicide mission. Such was their condition that the crews needed to perform wing repairs on them in midair. 

Fortunately for them, Berlin’s anti-aircraft guns were pointed toward the United Kingdom and it was Reich policy to keep all peacetime lights on at night. When the DB-3s flew over the capital, they were largely misidentified as errant Luftwaffe aircraft and sent signals asking them who they were. Five bombers were able to reach their targets and put the fear of the proletariat into the Reich. Not that it had much material effect, as subsequent raids quickly found themselves running into fully alerted anti-aircraft, and as many as eighteen bombers would be lost in a night until the Wehrmacht conquered Osel in August 1941 and the raids ended. Still, the raids boosted Soviet morale at a time when any support was desperately needed. 

2. Harper’s Ferry Raid 

20 men versus the institution of slavery in the United States. That was what John Brown could bring to muster against the Virginian Harper’s Ferry Armory on October 16, 1859, with the intent of arming a slave revolt that would spread throughout the South. Brown hoped that if he seized the thousands of small arms in the armory, enough of the 18,000 slaves in surrounding counties would rise up that they could overwhelm all militias and marines sent to put them back down. Both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman had denounced the plan, with Douglass warning Brown he was leading his insurrectionists into a “perfect trap.” 

While the raiders did seize control of the armory and took eleven hostages, one of the first people they killed was a free black porter named Hayward Shepherd, which likely contributed to the fact far fewer slaves rose up in revolt than Brown needed. Over the next two days, Brown’s men were surrounded by thousands of militia members and several attempts to negotiate their release resulted in an abolitionist being shot dead. By October 18, a force of 90 marines broke into the armory and captured the remaining raiders in less than three minutes. Brown and other captured raiders would be put to death on December 2, 1859. Only five of the original group lived to tell the tale.   

Once again, short-term failure turned out to be a long-term triumph because of how Brown conducted himself through his trial and execution. His belief that his martyrdom would provide the impetus needed to cleanse the sins of the nation with blood left him fearless in the face of the gallows. Millions throughout the nation were inspired on both ends of the political spectrum, with even many slavery supporters offering him a grudging respect. No less than John Wilkes Booth, who witnessed the execution, would despite his admiration for the Confederacy write admiringly of Brown for years after his execution and say that Lincoln wasn’t fit to follow in the footsteps of that “rugged old hero.” 

1. Grierson’s Raid

On April 17, 1863, Union soldiers under Ulysses S. Grant were in a tight spot. They had just run the guns at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and were to a significant degree cut off from their supply lines. If the Confederate troops under General John Pemberton moved swiftly, they could catch Grant with his back to the Mississippi and potentially destroy him as they almost did at Shiloh the year before. But Confederate eyes were largely turned away, following a force of 1,700 cavalrymen under the command of Benjamin Grierson. Their ride would take them from Tennessee, through Mississippi, and down to Louisiana. 

They would ultimately ride 600 miles in sixteen days while the raiders were outnumbered more than 20 to 1, inflicting hundreds of casualties while suffering less than 20 themselves. More importantly, they kept the Confederate Army too occupied to move south against Grant and thus allowed the Vicksburg victory that essentially did more than anything to doom the Confederacy. Pretty good results for a raid led by a man who before the war was a music teacher that despised horses. 

Dustin Koski cowrote the post-apocalyptic supernatural comedy Return of the Living with Jonathan “Bogleech” Wojcik. 

There’s nothing quite like the prospect of a battlefield advantage to convince a general or politician to plow some money into a military project that might just work. As this list shows, however, innovation is always a gamble. For every radar or bouncing bomb, there are a handful of expensive, clunky duds.

Some of the most fascinating projects are the ones that almost came to fruition, whether through the determination of a convinced individual or the sheer possibilities that it could offer—if it would only work the way it’s supposed to. From a rocket-powered drum to a chicken-warmed nuke, these are the strangest military inventions to almost see deployment on the battlefield.

10 The Puckle Gun

Invented in 1718 by British lawyer James Puckle, the Puckle gun was the world’s first patented multi-shot weapon. It fired at triple the rate of a soldier armed with a standard single-shot flintlock rifle or musket—yet with the same kind of accuracy and range.

It could even fire peculiar square bullets designed to cause maximum pain. The Puckle gun was massively ahead of its time. If it had been adopted and deployed by a major military, it would have changed the face of warfare, much like the Gatling gun did a century and a half later.

However, the Puckle gun was a victim of its own cleverness. It was unreliable and expensive to make. Its many complicated components made mass production impossible. Worst of all, it was impossible to fold into the military tactics of the time.

Even though it wasn’t a large weapon, it had to be stationary to fire. In addition, the time it took to break it down, move it to a new location, and set it up again proved simply too slow for the military leaders of the era. As a result, it was never adopted by a major world power.^[1]

9 Pigeon-Guided Missiles

The pigeon-guided missile is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a World War II–era missile with three pigeons in the nose cone, with each bird trained to tap at the outline of a German Bismarck–class battleship. If the pigeon pecked in the center of its little screen, the missile flew straight. If it pecked off-center, the missile would alter course to get back on track.

Despite sounding ridiculous, the pigeon-guided missile was both fully functional and incredibly reliable. B.F. Skinner, the brain behind the idea, was a professor of psychology at Harvard University who was renowned for his behavioral experiments with rats. After developing the missile, he stated that he’d never use rats again because pigeons were so trainable.

The idea was fully tested but never used in combat. Skinner blamed the reluctance of generals to get behind the idea of a pigeon guiding an explosive. But in truth, he was beaten to the punch behind the scenes by another invention, radar-guided missiles.^[2]

8 The Bat Bomb

“Think of thousands of fires breaking out simultaneously over a circle of [64 kilometers (40 mi)] in diameter for every bomb dropped.” This was the fevered dream of Pennsylvania dentist Lytle S. Adams, who imagined Japan being devastated by a series of fires started by tiny incendiary devices delivered by hundreds of bats.

The idea didn’t arrive from nowhere. Adams was a keen spelunker and had been impressed by the bats he had seen on a recent trip to Carlsbad Caverns. When he heard the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, he cooked up his zany scheme and took it to his friend Eleanor Roosevelt.

As a result of Adams’s connection to Roosevelt, his bizarre plan was heard at a higher level than might be expected for a scheme that involved strapping bombs to bats. The National Research Defense Committee certainly warmed to the idea. Over time, “Project X-Ray” had over $2 million invested in it to solve the problems of bat transportation and simultaneous release.^[3]

The bat bomb might have been a success if it had been fine-tuned enough, but the US military decided to move all its development resources to a far more powerful weapon. In the end, the atomic bomb was simply a higher priority than the bat bomb.

7 The Great Panjandrum

The Great Panjandrum, two 3-meter-wide (10 ft) rocket-powered wheels attached to a drum filled with explosives, was as peculiar and powerful in practice as it sounds. The Panjandrum was supposed to accelerate across a beach to the speed of a car and blow a massive hole in the German defenses that British troops and tanks could roll through.

Unsurprisingly, the rocket-powered speeding explosive was unpredictable in practice. The Panjandrum was critically unstable and could never be relied upon to go entirely in the direction in which it was pointed.

The designers tried adding a third wheel and steel cables for steering, but nothing really helped. On top of that, when the Panjandrum reached its top speed of 97 kilometers per hour (60 mph), the rockets had a habit of detaching.

Despite this, the Panjandrum was tested in front of top members of the military in January 1944. The test began well. The Panjandrum rolled through the surf in a straight line and began to accelerate. As it started to reach higher speeds, though, the rockets began to detach and fire off in all directions.

The Panjandrum became a spinning wheel of flames that nearly ran down the official cameraman. As the Great Panjandrum disintegrated into a flaming pile of wreckage on the beach, so did any hopes of it ever seeing real battlefield usage.^[4]

6 Hajile

Hajile was created by the same minds that brought you the Great Panjandrum, and in terms of explosive failure, it reaches that high bar. An early retrorocket design, Hajile was created with the hope of using a rocket to slow the descent of supplies dropped from planes. This idea was recently used successfully to land the Curiosity rover on Mars (similar to image above), but the Hajile project was anything but a success.

The Hajile project was named as the reverse of “Elijah,” who ascended to heaven on a column of flame in the Bible story. Hajile was originally tested on concrete blocks with rockets strapped to them. When a dangling weight below the block hit the ground, the rockets would fire to slow the descent of the payload.

However, the first three tests were disasters. Twice, the rockets failed to slow the descent enough. On the third test, too much fuel relaunched the payload several dozen feet in the air.

The device was tested until it was successfully used, and eventually, two jeeps were donated by the United States Navy for real-world testing. One crashed into the ground at 48 kilometers per hour (30 mph), and the second was successfully landed with minimal damage as long as you count an upside-down jeep as a success.

Deeply unreliable, the project was shelved as World War II drew to a close.^[5]

5 Nellie

“Nellie” (aka the “White Rabbit”) was a machine doomed from the start as it was designed to solve an obsolete problem. Nellie was an armored vehicle made to cut a trench through defensive works so that other machines could advance through the trench and bypass the defensive line.

As a pet project of Winston Churchill, work continued on the White Rabbit long after it became clear that it was not the only solution to the problems that tanks faced due to defensive structures.

As time went on, it became clear that Nellie wasn’t even a particularly good solution to these problems. It had a turning circle of 1.6 kilometers (1 mi) and was almost unable to be steered. Conditions inside the cramped cockpit were unbearable. Perhaps worst of all, serious questions were raised about the advisability of using a near-stationary machine with a long guiding trench behind it in the era of bombing runs.^[6]

Despite Churchill’s enduring belief in the project, it was finally formally shelved in 1943. Churchill acknowledged that the project would have been mothballed years earlier if not for his promotion. In the end, he declared that he was “responsible but impenitent” for his misguided enthusiasm.

4 Maus

The Allies weren’t the only ones in World War II who had some bizarre ideas up their sleeves. Adolf Hitler particularly desired an indestructible superheavy tank. He proposed it in 1942, but few others at the top of the German military shared his enthusiasm for the idea. The Maus (“mouse”) was a 200-ton behemoth of a tank designed by Ferdinand Porsche, but it was plagued with mechanical problems from the start.

The driveshaft especially suffered from constant failures. Despite a massive Daimler-Benz aircraft engine powering the motors, the tank’s top speed was only 19 kilometers per hour (12 mph). It featured armor that was more than 23 centimeters (9 in) thick, but the Maus didn’t have a single machine gun to make it suitable for close combat—and the considered opinion of the top German brass was that it would find itself in close combat often.

There were plans to make 150 of these tanks, but the concerns of the generals couldn’t be overcome. In the end, only two prototypes were completed.^[7]

3 The Coleoptere

The Coleoptere (“beetle”) is one of the strangest-looking aircraft ever designed. With a ring-shaped wing wrapped around a fuselage, it was capable of vertical takeoff and landing. In fact, the designer theorized that it might be capable of supersonic speeds once it was airborne.

However, the Coleoptere had problems from its very beginning. In early hovering tests, pilot Auguste Morel complained that it was nearly impossible to determine his vertical height. He had to listen for changes in the engine’s hum to gauge the aircraft’s altitude. Even later versions of the Coleoptere had a distressing tendency to spin vertically.^[8]

The only time that the Coleoptere achieved horizontal flight (instead of a vertical takeoff and landing) was accidental. On its ninth and final flight, the aircraft wobbled wildly during descent and ended up accelerating away horizontally—and briefly. The pilot ejected, the Coleoptere wrecked and burned up, and the project was discontinued.

2 The Blue Peacock

At first glance, the Cold War design of the Blue Peacock doesn’t seem too strange. A massive nuclear mine, it was designed to be buried by British forces in West Germany and detonated to stop a hypothetical Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

However, the design suffered from a major flaw. Buried deep underground, the device would inevitably get cold, and if it got too chilly, the detonator might not be able to set off a nuclear explosion.

The proposed solution is where things take a turn for the weird. The scientists in charge of the project suggested that chickens be buried inside the casing of the bomb with enough food to keep them alive for a week. The body heat produced by the chickens would be enough to keep the device functional.^[9]

Perhaps the oddest part of the whole story is that wrapping a nuclear bomb in chickens isn’t what got the project shelved. In fact, it was fully accepted as a sensible solution to a peculiar problem.

The problem wasn’t the political tangle of burying nuclear bombs in an allied nation, either. It was simply that the British decided that the amount of nuclear fallout that would be produced by the Blue Peacock’s detonation would be unacceptably high.

1 The Gay Bomb

The idea of a “gay bomb” is a terrible marriage of awful science and rampant homophobia that seems like it belongs firmly in the 1950s. But as recently as 1994, the US Air Force’s Wright Laboratory requested a jaw-dropping $7.5 million to develop a chemical aphrodisiac that could be dispersed by an explosive and would cause “homosexual behavior” in enemy combatants.^[10]

The whole idea was a failure on a scientific level. First, there is no known or proposed mechanism for a chemical causing heterosexual people to suddenly change their sexual orientation. Second, there’s also no known or proposed aphrodisiac chemical that’s ever had a measurable effect on the human body, let alone such a drastic one.

It was also a failure on a conceptual level as there’s no evidence that a big gay orgy would actually reduce troop morale. To the contrary, we already have plenty of evidence of excellent career soldiers who happen to be homosexual.

As this is the case, the funding was never delivered and the whole project thankfully never made it past the concept stage.

AJ lives in Stafford in the UK and has equally deep and abiding loves for weird science, horror stories, and good bourbon.

Warfare has evolved quite a bit from the first time we looked at another group of people and decided to fight them. We’ve come a long way from charging headfirst into each other and hoping our weapons hit their intended targets. There may have been a time when just having superior battle tactics and higher numbers would have ensured victory, though now, a numerically inferior force could easily take on a much bigger one by just having a technological upper hand on the battlefield.

Nearly all of the biggest countries in the world are now working hard at gaining that upper hand, and some of the breakthroughs in military tech in recent times have started to resemble things straight out of science fiction. While we knew that these technologies would definitely be a regular part of warfare at some point in the future, we didn’t know that future would be here so soon.

10 EMP

The idea of a superpowered weapon that could theoretically release a burst of electromagnetic radiation (e.g. an electromagnetic pulse [EMP]) and incapacitate all electronics in a given area has existed in science fiction for a long time. Any army that has access to such a weapon would gain an automatic advantage in a battle, as even one working weapons system is better than thousands that are disabled.

Many countries have ongoing projects attempting to make such a thing, but it looks like the US Air Force already has it. Called the Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, the weapon was able to successfully target and disable the electronics of seven separate buildings during a test in Utah.^[1] Thankfully, it’s able to pinpoint specific targets instead of just bombarding a whole area with the pulse, ensuring that civilians won’t be affected during a live operation.

9 Hypersonic Missiles

The speed of sound isn’t anywhere close to the speed of light, and saying that overtaking it is any sort of a breakthrough in 2019 would be dishonest. We have many things that can breach the sound barrier like it’s nothing, though most of it is military tech, like jets and missiles, and also super-expensive to build. It’s not the same for hypersonic speed, though, which is at least five times the speed of sound and much more difficult to achieve.

It’s one of those things we thought we’d see farther in the future, but that was until China put its hypersonic missiles to the test.^[2] Unfortunately for all of China’s potential enemies, the tests were successful. Developing hypersonic missiles has been a top priority for the United States for some time now, so it would be interesting to see what they come up with now that China has seemingly taken the lead in that arms race.

8 Micro-Drones

Thirty years ago, few would have imagined that we’d have unmanned flying objects capable of carrying out military operations from a safe distance. Drones (aka UAVs) have already transformed the way we conduct warfare as well as other parts of life, like news reporting and drunken bets at tech school parties.

Despite their utility in warfare, there are some things that UAVs still can’t easily do, like carrying out an operation undetected. For that, they’d have to be minimized to an almost undetectable scale, something science fiction authors have played around with quite a few times. It sounds overpowered and kind of scary, as tiny armed drones no one can see could wreak havoc in the wrong hands. It’s a relief, then, that they’re still quite a bit away in the distant future, right? Well, no.

In January 2017, the Pentagon announced that it had successfully tested a group of 103 micro-drones, each about 16 centimeters (6 in) in length.^[3] They’re largely autonomous in nature and are capable of things like collective decision-making, changing formations according to situation, and “healing” themselves. And no, that’s not all; they also have plans to some day be able to fit advanced and deadly technologies on their minuscule drones, including tiny nukes.

7 Weaponizing AI

Many scientific and military experts have grave, and justified, concerns about artificial intelligence being allowed into the realm of warfare. Even if a full-fledged killer robot uprising isn’t really that big of a concern at this point, it poses many other ethical questions we need to answer first. How do we make sure that autonomous, self-learning weapons know the difference between combatants and civilians, when even we mistake the two every now and then? More importantly, how do we hold a machine accountable for its actions? Going to jail isn’t really a deterrent for it.

Despite those concerns, artificial intelligence is already a part of warfare to a larger extent than those concerned about it would be comfortable with. Take Israel’s “Harop” loitering munition system, which is essentially a suicide drone that can self-destruct if it’s able to lock on to what it perceives as a target, like enemy combatants or antiaircraft missile systems.^[4] It has already been successfully used on the battlefield, and the scariest part is that it’s capable of deciding what to dive-bomb entirely on its own. Reportedly, Germany also has completely automated missile systems capable of shooting down enemy missiles without any human intervention.

There’s a silver lining, though; AI developers aren’t as easily available for hire as general weapons experts, and many in Silicon Valley have explicitly refused to work with the military to try to ensure that AI’s use in warfare remains limited.

6 Mind-Controlled Weapons

Imagine simply linking your brain to a weapon, vehicle, robot, or what have you and being able to pilot it with a deftness and fluidity you’d never attain with a joystick, to be the fighter jet or Pacific Rim-style giant death robot. If you think that it’s safe to say that it’ll be some time before we can actually do that, you’d be wrong; the tech already exists.

In one study, neuroscientists developed something known as the “brainet,” where two monkeys were taught how to control a digital limb with the help of just their thoughts. While it has noncombat applications, especially in aiding people with brain damage or disabilities in their day-to-day tasks, it could also be used for military purposes. The US Department of Defense already has ongoing programs looking into creating mind-controlled weapons, and we could see them put to use quite soon.^[5]

5 Exoskeleton Suit

Anyone who has played first-person shooters is probably familiar with the concept of an exoskeleton suit, an exterior suit of powered armor that provides enhanced protection and capabilities. The idea, in various forms, has been explored quite a bit in fiction as well; just look at Iron Man.

While something as high-tech and awesome as Tony Stark’s duds will take some time to develop, an exoskeleton suit already exists. In 2018, Russia tested its RATNIK-3 prototype. The tests were largely successful; the tester was able to carry heavy loads and shoot a machine gun one-handed. The suit is made with a titanium framework to increase the soldier’s strength and stamina.^[6]

It has a limitation, though: It doesn’t have much in the way of energy storage, so it can only work for a limited time. They’re working on fixing that, though. Either way, the RATNIK-3 sounds like a working exoskeleton suit to us.

4 Seeing Through Walls

Gone are the days of face-to-face battles on large fields. The wars of today are largely urban in nature, which is partly due to the combatants being non-state actors and guerilla fighters. That also makes it all the more difficult, as booby traps and ambushes in densely populated urban battlefields can bring the best armies to a halt (as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Many countries have been trying to perfect their own technologies for being able to scan an area before they move in, but that would require the ability to see through walls, and no one really has that. Or don’t they? Some recent breakthroughs have proven that not only is it closer than we thought, but the tech to see through walls already exists.

In 2015, a Czech radar manufacturer successfully built a device that can see what’s on the other side of the wall, as long as whoever is behind the wall is moving their limbs or breathing. If that’s not good enough, in 2018, a group of researchers from MIT developed an AI-type technology that can see anyone through walls with an accuracy of 83 percent, complete with a moving image of their stick-like form in real time.^[7]

In another breakthrough at the Technical University of Munich in 2017, researchers were able to do the same thing with Wi-Fi routers. We’re pretty sure we saw something like that in a movie once.

3 Seeking Bullets

You may not at all be surprised to hear that in a battle, enemy combatants, at least competent ones, are trained to make shooting them difficult. That’s exactly why a type of ammunition developed by DARPA, the research wing of the US Department of Defense, is so impressive and deadly. Known as EXACTO, it’s not just able to home in on a hard-to-hit, dug-in target; it also has the ability to change course midway depending on enemy movement and is accurate to a scary degree.^[8]

Not just that, they’re also actively trying to develop an auto-aiming rifle, which uses computation and advanced algorithms to only fire when the shot should hit, without the shooter having to rely on his judgement of wind conditions and visibility.

2 Freeze Ray

Unlike most other items on this list, which could aid good guys as well as rogue armies, the “freeze ray,” a weapon that can literally freeze someone in his tracks, has generally been portrayed in fiction as something villains use. Of course, we don’t really have anything that can do that from a distance and in a short burst of time, right? Well, a team from the University of Washington developed something along those lines in 2015.

It works by shooting a laser at a liquid and freezing it. We already had the tech to do this to solids in a vacuum, this was the first time it had been done to a liquid. Also, lasers generally heat objects up rather than cooling them down.

Future applications for technology of this sort extend far beyond freezing people in a battle, of course. The researchers think that it could theoretically be used to freeze and slow down the division process in living cells, possibly giving us a better understanding of the mechanisms behind aging and cancer.^[9]

1 Invisibility Cloak

The ability to become invisible whenever we want wouldn’t just be valuable for the military; a lot of us could make use of such an ability in many of our daily interactions. It has been imagined and discussed in science fiction since we started writing science fiction, and even in 2019, it still sounds like something from the future. Fortunately for military contractors as well as people who keep getting stuck in awkward conversations, invisibility cloaks are no longer the stuff of the distant future or science fiction. In fact, we’ve had at least one invisibility cloak since 2012.

A Canadian company called Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corporation has successfully built a material that can make you invisible. It’s also passive in nature, which means that it doesn’t reproduce your background on any kind of screen; it just “bends light around an object.”^[10] In other words, it’s an invisibility cloak exactly like you’d envision an invisibility cloak to be. The US military showed interest in purchasing it, because of course it did, and you might just see it deployed on a battlefield near you sooner than you’d have expected.

You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant, get in touch with him for writing gigs, or just say hello to him on Twitter.

Though it may seem cowardly to some, the best military course of action is often to withdraw to fight another day. However, not all retreats are successful. But when they are, they can be nearly as beneficial as winning the battle outright. Here are ten examples of incredible military retreats.

10 Napoleon’s Retreat From Moscow
Russian Campaign

Determined to convince Tsar Alexander I to stop sending the United Kingdom raw materials which enabled them to continue the war effort against France, Napoleon decided to invade Russia, a decision which haunted him for the rest of his life. After he and his Grande Armee finally arrived in Moscow on September 14, 1812, Napoleon was disheartened to see that the Russian military, as well as the civilian population, had fled the city.

Although Napoleon expected to find supplies to aid his increasingly demoralized army, he found nothing. After only a month of waiting for a surrender that never came, Napoleon decided to retreat,^[1] leaving the city and hoping to escape the harsh Russian winter which was on its way.

However, hunger proved to be as much of an enemy as the Cossacks, who constantly tormented the Grande Armee as it slowly marched westward. In addition, wolves trailed Napoleon’s men wherever they went, picking off stragglers as far as the Rhine. (Some say this is why the forests of Central Europe are home to the number of wolves that they have to this day.) In all, of the more than 500,000 soldiers who went into Russia, fewer than 100,000 ever made it out.

9 The Allied Evacuation Of Gallipoli
World War I

Though he later disavowed the debacle that ensued, the future British prime minister Winston Churchill was one of the architects behind the World War I operation known as the Gallipoli Campaign. Originally designed to be a largely sea-based invasion, bad weather and subsequent losses due to mines prompted the war planners to decide that a land-based invasion would work better. However, the Allied forces sustained heavy losses, barely making it more than a few miles inland.

Eventually, after being bogged down just as they were on the Western Front, evacuation orders were drawn up. More or less the only thing that went right for the Allied troops during the campaign, most of those still alive were evacuated to safety.

Just before the last of the Australians left, Padre Walter Dexter walked through the cemeteries, scattering silver wattle seed and saying: “If we have to leave here, I intend that a bit of Australia shall be here.”^[2]

One of the reasons they were able to escape relatively unscathed was the work of an Australian named William Scurry. He rigged up a self-firing rifle contraption which convinced the Turkish fighters that they were still being shot at by soldiers after everyone had already begun to leave.

8 Highway Of Death
Gulf War I

After years of economic struggles (which were due to Kuwait and its policies in his mind), Saddam Hussein began the invasion of his neighbor on August 2, 1990. Uniformly condemned by nearly every other nation, the hostilities were quickly (in international terms) met with ultimatums, including the United States’ proclamation that Iraq had to withdraw its forces by January 15, 1991.

Iraq refused. Shortly afterward, Operation Desert Storm began. Thoughts of retreat began to enter the minds of many Iraqi soldiers as they were overwhelmed by coalition forces.

The main highway out of Kuwait City was their most likely escape route, which coalition forces quickly realized as well. On the morning of February 26, 1991, more than 1,500 Iraqi vehicles began their trek out of Kuwait.

Unfortunately for the Iraqis, they were “basically just sitting ducks” in the words of Commander Frank Sweigart. A cavalcade of bombs tore through the ranks, with subsequent fires engulfing many of the vehicles. (Those fires resulted in one of the more infamous photographs^[3] of the war.)

Though the retreat may seem to have been unsuccessful, as many as 80,000 troops are estimated to have successfully withdrawn according to the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

7 George Washington’s Escape From New York
American Revolutionary War

In 1776, the Battle of Long Island, the first large-scale battle which occurred after the United States declared its independence, saw George Washington face off against William Howe. Washington had surmised that the capture of New York would be one of Britain’s goals, and his 19,000 soldiers were moved to Lower Manhattan. Stationed on nearby Staten Island, Howe planned to use his warships to block the river while his soldiers marched on the Americans over land.

Howe’s plan met with instant success,^[4] partially due to his overwhelming numbers advantage. (He had around 32,000 men.) However, he paused after the first few days of fighting, intending to prepare for a final push.

Washington took advantage of this delay—as well as a fortuitous storm that drove British warships from the area—and he ordered a retreat of his men. In the end, 10,000 Americans took part in the fighting, with 8,000 of them escaping. This enabled Washington to snatch a stalemate from the jaws of defeat. Legend has it that a fog descended on the retreating Americans, with Washington said to be the last to leave.

6 Russian Retreats Against Napoleon
Russian Campaign

By 1812, Napoleon had earned a reputation as an incredible general, one whose lightning speed (for the age) confounded his opponents. Many of his adversaries were used to smaller-scale, more methodical forms of fighting.

After Tsar Alexander I decided to ignore the terms of the Treaty of Tilsit and begin trading with England, Napoleon decided enough was enough, with all-out war his only option. So he and his Grande Armee marched on Russia.

However, Russia’s leaders were no fools. They knew that the best plan was one used by Wellington: systematic retreats^[5] which would draw the French into a slow, drawn-out campaign and nullify one of their biggest advantages.

Napoleon’s fighting forces often lived off the land to supplement their supply trains. So the Russians instituted a scorched-earth policy, denying their enemies anything of use. (It also did irreparable harm to Russian citizens who were living in the area.)

However, Russia’s strategy proved invaluable in war. It slowly drained Napoleon of almost all his fighting men before he stumbled into Moscow.

5 The Great Retreat
World War I

In 1914, the Battle of Mons was the first taste of the new age of warfare for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), which came to the aid of the French Fifth Army as the Germans attempted to outflank them in World War I. Badly outnumbered by nearly two to one, the BEF nevertheless persisted.

They were intent on inflicting as much damage on the Germans while keeping them from overrunning the BEF’s position. On the morning of August 23, 1914, the BEF got the chance to test their mettle as enemy artillery began to pound their line.

British rifle fire was so quick and accurate that the advancing Germans were certain they were facing lines of machine guns. While the “Old Contemptibles” managed to hold their own, the French Fifth Army did not fare so well, leading their commander to order a retreat^[6] early on August 24.

The British had no choice but to retreat as well. They began what has come to be known as the Great Retreat, a two-week march to the Marne River. Eventually, through a number of rearguard actions, the Allies reached the river. They turned around, halting the German advance and forcing a brief retreat of their forces in the Battle of the Marne. This bought time for an even more unlikely “victory” for the British later.

4 Mao Tse–Tung’s Long March
Chinese Civil War

The Red Army of the Communist Party of China was on its last leg, hounded into extinction by the Kuomintang Army, a rival force fighting for control of the country. On October 16, 1934, the leaders of the Red Army decided that a retreat was the only option. The 86,000 troops were surrounded in the Jiangxi province and, through subterfuge, managed to break out to the west to begin their escape. Their goal was the northwestern province of Shaanxi, a place which would allow them to heal in isolation.

Unfortunately for them, it didn’t take long for their enemy to notice the retreat had begun. Aerial bombardment and ground fighting whittled down the Red Army to half its original size. By January 1935, Mao Tse–tung had managed to garner enough support to take control of the army.

Though his ascent helped with the problem of lagging morale, it didn’t do much to change the army’s fortunes. People just kept dying. By the time they reached Shaanxi in October 1935, only 8,000 troops remained.^[7]

Though the retreat can’t be seen as a military success, the 6,400-kilometer (4,000 mi) journey did become a legend among the youth of China. This inspired many of them to join the Communists over the next decade.

3 Battle Of Chosin Reservoir
Korean War

In late November 1950, the Chinese Ninth Army began an overwhelming surprise attack on United Nations troops stationed at the Chosin Reservoir in eastern North Korea. In all, 150,000 Chinese troops were directed by Mao Tse-tung to encircle and annihilate the 30,000 men they faced. Initially successful in their attacks, the Chinese failed to complete the encirclement, allowing the United Nations forces to escape to the south in what proved to be an arduous journey for all involved.

Narrow mountain roads slowed the Americans and their allies, with the 1st Marine Division of the United States performing some of the most storied actions in the history of the Marine Corps.^[8] For over two weeks, the retreat continued, with both sides inflicting casualty after casualty upon one another.

By the time the United Nations troops reached the safety of South Korea, nearly 18,000 of their men were dead, wounded, or missing. However, it was very much a Pyrrhic victory for the Chinese, who lost twice those numbers. The astonishing number of deaths, especially among their elite troops, forced the Chinese to delay any more attacks, perhaps saving South Korea from being captured.

The most famous quote from this battle was uttered by General Oliver P. Smith, who said: “Retreat, hell! We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction.”

2 Battle Of Dunkirk
World War II

In May 1940, the German blitzkrieg was tearing through Continental Europe like a plague. Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg. All these countries had been conquered or would be soon by the might of the Nazis.

France was soon to follow, and it’s there that this story picks up. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had joined forces with the French army, determined to keep the Germans out of the country. However, the speed and devastating skill of their foes soon proved to be too much as the Nazis quickly stormed through the French countryside.

The Germans were seemingly on the verge of taking the city of Dunkirk, the last port which could be used to evacuate the more than 300,000 Allied troops stationed there. In a stroke of luck for the Allies, Hitler ordered his men to halt on May 24.^[9] Hermann Goering, the leader of the Luftwaffe, had assured Hitler that the aircraft under Goering’s command could finish the job.

Though the delay only amounted to a few days, the Allies were able to fortify their defenses enough to allow nearly everyone to escape. In fact, many of the boats which helped secure passage back to Britain were privately owned: fishing boats, yachts, and lifeboats.

1 The March Of The Ten Thousand
Battle Of Cunaxa

Immortalized by the ancient Greek historian Xenophon in his work Anabasis, the March of the Ten Thousand is the story of a group of Greek mercenaries who went to war in Persia. They were hired by Cyrus the Younger, who planned to go to war with his brother Artaxerxes II and seize the throne. However, Cyrus was slain in battle, stranding the Greeks in enemy territory with no one to guide them out.

More than 2,700 kilometers (1,700 mi) from the sea, the Greeks were asked to surrender, a death sentence to be sure, and they refused. The Greeks were harried by the Persians for the entire journey to the Black Sea, but local tribes and the elements proved to be deadly foes as well.

After suffering through a snowstorm which thinned their numbers, the Greeks arrived at a town named Gymnias. They didn’t wait there long because a local guide assured them that they were only five days from the sea.

Five days later, Xenophon began hearing cries from the men at the front of the line. Fearing an attack, he rushed to the front, only to realize what the men were screaming: “The Sea, The Sea.”^[10] Though some of them died on the journey, most managed to arrive safely in Greece.

Often swept under the rug and given nonthreatening names such as “collateral damage,” the deaths of civilians at the hands of military forces can sometimes surpass even the deaths of fighting men. Given humanity’s long history of warfare, it’s no surprise there is an equally long list of military attacks on civilians. Here are ten of the worst examples.

10 Shimabara Rebellion

Christianity had begun to flourish in Japan during the 17th century, as the country had been slowly opening up more and more to foreigners (mainly Europeans) since 1543. However, the influence of nanbans (Japanese for “southern barbarians,” a term loosely applied to Europeans) began to worry the ruling shogunate, and the age of sakoku (“closed country”) began to take shape. Christianity was seen as one of those influences. There were many Christian peasants, and their dissatisfaction was the reason for the rebellion which occurred in the Shimabara Peninsula in 1637.

Like many before them, the local officials of the area were taxing the peasants heavily, utilizing their powers to abuse the civilians in any number of ways. The spark that lit the fire was the murder of the daimyo’s henchman, who was killed because he was torturing a local farmer’s daughter.^[1] (A daimyo was similar to a feudal lord.) Fighting broke out, and the peasants quickly assembled into a massive group. They were aided by former samurai, many of whom had converted to Christianity, who became leaders of the rebellion.

Unable to defeat the rebels with local forces, the shogun set 120,000 men to kill the civilians. Though they held out for a while, the rebels were eventually killed to the last person, women and children included. Estimates range from 20,000 to 37,000 deaths. As a result, Christianity, as well as other foreign influences, were increasingly forced out of Japan.

9 Bombing Of Dresden

Often seen, perhaps erroneously, as an act of revenge for the similar bombing of their own cities suffered at the hands of the Luftwaffe, Britain’s bombing of the German city of Dresden in February 1945 has been covered in controversy ever since. One of the reasons for this controversy is that the city was not of military or economic importance.^[2] Rather, the bombing was an attack on a culturally important city: the “Florence of the Elbe.”

The Nazis had been bombing British cities for a while by 1945, and in the eyes of some, the bombing of German cities was just their chickens coming home to roost. So, from February 13 to 15, 1945, British planes (with a few Americans) flew over the city of Dresden, devastating the area. Like many attacks during World War II, the death tolls are disputed, with ranges as low as 35,000 and as high as 135,000. However, what isn’t in dispute is the complete destruction of nearly every building in the city. Only a handful of the historic buildings in the city were ever rebuilt.

8 Guangzhou Massacre

Thanks to a number of natural disasters which resulted in widespread famine, Huang Chao led an agrarian rebellion throughout China, eventually culminating with his ascension to the throne. The Tang dynasty attempted, unsuccessfully, to defeat Huang’s forces, who managed to sack a number of provincial capitals. Huang then turned his sight toward Guangzhou, which had suffered at the hands of a rebellious army more than a century earlier. (Thousands of foreign-born merchants were killed.)

So, from 878 to 879, Huang’s men attacked the city, specifically targeting Muslims, Jews, and Christians, initiating a xenophobic pogrom, an act with which humanity is all too familiar. An otherwise nondescript Arab traveler named Abu Zaid Hassan wrote about the attack, claiming that as many as 120,000 people were massacred.^[3] As for Huang, his army was eventually defeated, and he died at the hands of his nephew. His entire reign lasted only four years.

7 Manila Massacre

Colloquially known as the “Pearl of the Orient,” Manila was a magnificent city, the capital of the Philippines, and it would suffer more than any Allied city outside of Warsaw. First occupied by Japan in 1942, the Pacific island chain endured years of military abuse, with hundreds of thousands of Filipinos perishing during the intervening years. Finally, in 1945, US forces arrived, with General MacArthur fulfilling the promise he gave three years prior to return to drive the Japanese away and retake the country.

However, the Japanese military refused to give up easily, and in a continuance of their policy at the time, they began to speed up their killing of civilians. During the Battle of Manila, which lasted about a month, around 70,000 Filipinos were raped and/or massacred by the Japanese army.^[4] A further 30,000 died in the crossfire between Japan and the US. In addition to the civilian casualties, vast portions of the city were destroyed in the fighting, some down to the very last building.

6 Firebombing Of Tokyo

While deserving of much of their attention, the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan at the end of World War II weren’t the only causes of devastating numbers of civilian deaths suffered there: Another example is the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. Later known by the name “the Night of the Black Snow,” Operation Meetinghouse took place from March 9 to March 10, with US bombers dropping 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on the city.

In all, 41 square kilometers (16 mi²) were burned, with as many as 130,000 deaths due to the resulting inferno.^[5] The smell of burning human flesh was so severe that the pilots in the air had to don oxygen masks to keep from vomiting. When asked about it later, Curtis LeMay, the major general in charge, said, “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me.” The firebombing of Tokyo is often cited as one of the most, if not the most, destructive acts of war in the history of mankind.

5 Siege Of Changchun

May 23, 1948. The People’s Liberation Army began surrounding the city of Changchun, one of the largest in Northeastern China, defended by Nationalist forces. Not wishing to attempt to force their way into the city, the Communists decided to starve the population out, hoping to push the defenders to surrender bloodlessly. The civilian population of around 500,000 was caught unprepared, and they quickly ran out of food.

It later became clear there was an ulterior motive to the siege: The Communists were purposely starving the citizens, whom they saw as the enemy. Stories of women sold to awaiting husbands-to-be for mere scraps of food were all too common. When the siege finally ended in October, a minimum of 160,000 civilians had starved to death. Those who had survived had only managed to live by eating virtually every edible thing in the city, down to the bark on the trees and the grass in the fields. A Communist soldier later remarked, “We’re supposed to fighting for the poor, but of all these dead here, how many are rich? [ . . . ] Aren’t they all poor people?”^[6]

4 Siege Of Jerusalem

Though Jerusalem has seen a number of sieges take place outside its walls, perhaps none was bloodier than the climactic battle of the First Crusade. Initiated in 1095 by Pope Urban II’s decrying of the persecution suffered by Christians in the Holy Land, tens of thousands of Western Europeans streamed into the Middle East like a deluge, massacring anyone who was in their way, soldier or civilian.^[7]

Facing little resistance, the wave of crusaders finally broke against the walls of Jerusalem on June 7, 1099. Finding it to be incredibly well-protected, the Christian forces began constructing three massive siege engines with which to defeat the defenses. After about a month, the crusaders finally broke into the city, and the slaughter began. A contemporary account of the fighting told a horrifying tale of senseless barbarism, of deaths so numerous that, “The blood was running up to ankles of the mounted Frankish knights.” Whether or not that was hyperbole, tens of thousands of the civilian inhabitants were murdered, even women and children.

3 The Harrying Of The North

“Harry” is defined as “to ravage, as in war; devastate.” The Harrying of the North, undertaken by William the Conqueror against Northern England, lived up to that definition in every conceivable way. The old Viking lineage which persisted in the North refused to bow to William, with numerous rebellions popping up until the Norman ruler could only come to one conclusion: He would destroy the entire place, starving out the enemy.^[8] That the civilians would also suffer was of no consequence.

So, in the winter of 1069, William’s men marched north, destroying everything in their way, down to the last blade of grass. Though the Harrying directly killed a large number of civilians, many more perished as a result of the enormous famine which resulted from the destruction of the land, livestock, and food stores. The campaign was so horrific that Orderic Vitalis, a monk who otherwise wrote glowingly of William, said the following: “I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.” Though the death tolls are often debated, contemporary reports say as many as 100,000 people died.

2 Massacre Of Novgorod

In late 1569, the grand prince of Moscow had begun to reach the peak of his paranoia, believing that the people of Novgorod were about to turn over their city to Poland. Better known as Ivan IV, or Ivan the Terrible, he decided that the citizens of Novgorod would need to be punished. So, along with his 1,500-man personal guard, the tsar marched on the city, ravaging smaller towns and villages along the way, warming up for what was to be the horrifying main event.

Arriving just after the start of the new year, Ivan IV began the horror with the priests and monks of Novgorod, having them beaten to death with staffs.^[9] He then moved on to the populace, setting up a special court in the city in which to extract “confessions” through torture. Often, the victims were then thrown into the Volkhov River to drown or freeze to death. Man, woman, and child alike met the same fate, and their blood ran so much that the snow around the city was painted red. When it was all over about five weeks later, at least 60,000 citizens were dead, and it took six weeks to clear their bodies.

1 Rotterdam Blitz

Expecting to remain neutral as they had during World War I, the people of Rotterdam in the Netherlands never expected the Nazis to come knocking. But knock they did. On May 10, 1940, the Germans attacked. They were ultimately repelled and locked into a stalemate with their Dutch adversaries. Unwilling to risk too many lives or time, Nazi general Rudolf Schmidt issued an ultimatum: Surrender or face the might of the Luftwaffe. The Dutch refused.

A few days later, May 14 to be exact, the bombing began.^[10] Between 80 and 90 German planes indiscriminately dropped their ordinance all over the city. Owing to the fact that they had virtually no antiaircraft weapons in the city, not to mention inferior air power, all the Dutch could do was watch as their city was leveled. In the end, nearly 1,000 people died, and most of the historic buildings within the city center were destroyed.

Though the deaths directly attributed to the Rotterdam Blitz are low, the argument could be made that it, along with the other Nazi bombing raids, unleashed the extensive destruction perpetrated by the Allies. As the British air marshal Arthur Travers Harris said, “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

The ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All Of Us’ call to action that was issued in September, 2019, fizzled out.^[1] So what happens in Area 51 stays in Area 51. But the government-labeled tin-foil hat brigade, which claims that aliens and their spaceships are hidden there, doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. About a week before the call to action, the United States Navy finally acknowledged that UFOs exist. After decades of denial, the Navy publicly stated that there are, indeed, ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.’^[2] Regardless of what they are called, the strange flying objects that Americans spot in the skies aren’t weather balloons and secret military aircraft, as they have been told.

Top 10 UFO Encounters That You’ve Never Heard About

It took the government almost as long to admit that there actually is a place called ‘Area 51.’ A Freedom of Information Act Request revealed its existence to the public in 2013. Officially, planes are tested and constructed at Area 51.^[3] The facility is actually called the Nevada Test and Training Range at Groom Lake, one of two military training areas at the Nellis Air Force Base Complex in Nevada.^[4] The remote desert site, about a two-hour drive from Las Vegas, is close to the UFO-themed tourist towns of Rachel and Hiko. Whistleblowers and witnesses continue to come forward about what is really going on at Area 51 and other military installations.

10 Malmstrom Air Force Base

Malmstrom Air Force Base, which deploys Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, (ICBMs) is adjacent to Great Falls, Montana. In 1967, the Missile Combat Crew received reports from security patrols and maintenance crew that a UFO was hovering over one of the missile silos. Shortly thereafter, each of the ten missiles shut down, one at a time.^[5] While declassified documents prove that the nuclear weapons did, indeed, become inoperable, there is scant evidence of the UFO claim.^[6][7] However, evidence was gathered at an earlier UFO sighting. The Mariana UFO Incident took place in Great Falls in 1950. Nick Mariana, manager of a minor league baseball team, may be the first person to intentionally capture footage of UFOs. A bright flash caught Mariana’s attention as he was inspecting a baseball field. He ran to get a 16mm camera when he saw two silver disks flying at lightening speed over the city. He was able to get 16 seconds of color video footage. However, he later claimed that 35 complete frames were missing after the Air Force examined the film and returned it to him. These frames showed that the mystery objects in the sky were discs that were rotating.^[8]

9 Carswell Air Force Base

The 1947 Roswell Incident in New Mexico is perhaps the most famous UFO encounter. The first press release stated that a flying saucer had been found. The second press release claimed the object was a weather balloon.^[9] Operations officer Robert Shirkey saw an aluminum-like material with characters written on it being loaded for a flight to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas.^[10] Flight crewman Robert Porter reported that the boxes holding the ‘pieces of flying saucer’ were as light as empty boxes.^[11] In later years, UFOs were seen around the base. In 1954, a T-shaped aircraft was spotted and picked up on radar. The blue, green, and white UFO hovered at 4000 feet over the nearby airport.^[12] Another sighting was recorded by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database. In 1965, a witness saw a triangular UFO with three lights.^[13]

8 Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

Captain Oliver W. “Pappy” Henderson, a senior pilot at Roswell AFB during the Roswell Incident, flew a plane to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio shortly after the incident. He did not discuss the flight for more than thirty years because of his security clearance. But in 1977, he told his business partner about his assignment. He said he transported spacecraft wreckage and small alien bodies. He showed his partner a piece of metal from the wreckage. It resembled aluminum but was lighter and much stiffer. In 1982, Henderson told the same story to several of his Roswell pals while attending a reunion.^[14] Other military men confirm Henderson’s story. One of these men is Marine Lieutenant Colonel Marion M. “Black Mac” Magruder. On his deathbed, Magruder remembered that the alien he saw was ‘squiggly.’^[15]

7 Fort Dix

Major George Filer recounts six decades of investigating aliens and UFOs in John Guerra’s Strange Craft: The True Story of An Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs. Most notably, Filer recalls the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix in New Jersey.^[16] In 1978, a military policeman was following a low flying aircraft through the wilderness of the army base during the wee hours of a frigid January morning. A 4-foot tall, grayish-brown creature with long arms, a slender body, and fat head appeared in front of the MP’s truck and was then shot. The remains gave off an ammonia-like stench.^[17] Filer is a member of the Disclosure Project, which champions the release of all UFO information. In 2017, the Pentagon released footage of an extraterrestrial vehicle outdoing U.S. Navy fighters, confirming some of Filer’s descriptions.

6 29 Palms

29 Palms in the Mojave Desert in California was the site of a massive multi-regimental live-maneuver exercise in October, 2019.^[18] Military training is just one of the interesting activities at the Marine base, which is listed in Project Redbook. This database contains information about subsurface alien activity sites. It was compiled for those who want to explore the sites, with no claims of authenticity for any particular site.^[19] According to researcher Val Valerian, recovered alien technology is examined in underground facilities at the base.^[20] In addition, there have been many UFO sightings in the area since the 1950s.^[21] In May, 2019, a worm-like UFO was spotted over the town of 29 Palms.

Top 10 UFO Encounters That Involve Alien Humanoid Entities

5 Fort Meade

In his book, Above Black: Project Preserve Destiny, Dan Sherman writes that he was sent to Fort Meade in Maryland to train for his role in an above Top Secret-level Air Force program called ‘Greys.’ In 1992, he was recruited to speak to Grey Aliens, first encountered at the Roswell Incident. His mother was visited by aliens and was the subject of genetic manipulation. Therefore, Sherman could fulfill his duties as ‘Intuitive Communicator,’ and receive messages from the Greys. First, Sherman sat in a communications van in an unknown location to receive the messages from the designated alien. After some time, he began to receive what he calls ‘abduction data.’^[22] The National Security Agency, (NSA) headquartered at Fort Meade, declassified many documents in more recent years. Some of these reports note attempts to decode a ‘radio message’ received from outer space.^[23]

4 Edwards Air Force Base

Skeptics wonder why aliens speak to the ‘common man’ rather than leaders. In fact, one of our greatest leaders, Dwight Eisenhower, may have communicated with them. Depending on whose story you believe, the president either took a secret evening trip to Edwards Air Force Base while on a golf vacation or he went to the dentist for repair of a chipped tooth. Ike’s dentist insisted he saw the president on February 20, 1954. But Dr. Michael Salla believes that Ike met two blue-eyed aliens, who had colorless lips and white hair, at the base.^[24] Dr. Salla is a leader in the field of exopolitics, defined as ‘the political study of the key actors, institutions, and processes associated with extraterrestrial life.’^[25] Interestingly, the Associated Press reported that Ike died on February 20, 1954, but retracted the story two minutes later. Laura Magdalene Eisenhower, Ike’s great-granddaughter, has publicly stated that she believes that Ike met with extraterrestrials.^[26]

3 Kirtland Air Force Base

A declassified government report revealed that guards at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico saw UFOs in the Coyote Canyon area in 1980. During the same period of time, radar was jammed by an unknown source for six hours in the same area.^[27] Paul Bennewitz, a physicist, inventor, and UFO researcher, had begun to see odd lights in the sky a year earlier. These lights, which flew towards Coyote Canyon and the base, could be seen nearly every evening. Bennewitz filmed the lights as well as objects he saw on the ground and in the air. Over time, he collected more than 2600 feet of film. Bennewitz also taped low-frequency radio transmissions that he said were transmitted by the aliens, and he created a computer program to translate these transmissions.^[28] In addition, he claimed to have evidence that aliens were controlling people through electromagnetic devices.^[29]

2 Holloman Air Force Base

Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico is at the center of several UFO encounters. Project 1947, an ongoing gathering of articles and documents about UFOs seen between 1900 and 1965, presents one of these incidents.^[30] In 1950, electronics engineer Cliff Booth reported that he and another man had used an Askania theodolite to get photographs of a cigar-shaped UFO. While both men were convinced they had seen a ‘vehicle from outer space,’ photographs were blurry.^[31] Years later, filmmaker Robert Emenegger was prompted by the US Air Force to produce a UFO documentary. In 1974, UFOs: Past, Present and Future was released without its most sensational story. The Air Force reneged on its promise to give Emenegger footage of a UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base in 1971.^[32] The footage showed three UFOs. One UFO landed and three aliens emerged.^[33]

1 Dobbins Air Force Base

‘Georgia’s Aerial Phenomenon 1947-1987,’ written by Roswell, Georgia, police officer Michael Hitt, presents 234 UFO sightings in the state. Many reports come from civilian and military pilots like the airmen from Dobbins Air Force Base who told their story in 1952. They saw an object streak overhead before it disappeared. This same object was seen on radar scopes as it traveled at 1,200 miles an hour, twice the speed of an airplane.^[34] Control tower operator Bruce Beach relates that there were so many UFO sightings at Dobbins Air Force Base in the 1950s that the tower had a 3D camera, which was unusual at that time.^[35] Sightings continued throughout the years. Recently, a square, black UFO the size of a Boeing 727 was spotted near the base and reported to MUFON in January, 2019.^[36]

The spaceship-shaped McDonald’s in Roswell, New Mexico, reminds residents and tourists that we may not be alone in the universe. Right now, the majority of the evidence comes in the form of stories told by military men, pilots, law enforcement officers, and others. The government has finally admitted that UFOs are a real phenomenon. Who knows what secrets may be revealed in the future.

10 Times We Thought We Had Found Proof Of Aliens

Most people can name some basic military maneuvers. There’s the ambush, the charge, deception, artillery or aerial bombardment, just to name a few. But some battles have been won with much weirder tactics. The following examples are some of the most bizarre, yet brilliant tactics ever successfully deployed on the battlefield. 

10. Operation Mincemeat

It’s 1943, and the Allies were cooking up an elaborate scheme to mislead the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany, about their military intentions. The key ingredient? A corpse and a whole lot of imagination.

Operation Mincemeat involved taking a corpse, dressing it up like a drowned military officer, and equipping it with a briefcase full of fake documents hinting at an impending attack on Southern Europe. Then, they released this “corpse of deception” off the coast of Spain, a region known for its pro-German sympathies. Lo and behold, the ruse worked like a charm. The Germans took the bait, shifted their troops, and, unbeknownst to them, danced to the Allies’ tune.

It’s the kind of audacious plan that makes you appreciate the lengths people will go to in the name of strategy and a good plot twist. The corpse might not have known what was going on, but it played its part in a game that ultimately helped tip the scales of a world at war. Operation Mincemeat, where fact meets fiction in the grand theater of war.

9. The Ghost Army

No, it’s not an army of badass phantoms and wraiths like in Lord of the Rings. But the real Ghost Army is just as cool.  It was an Allied ploy during World War II that used inflatable tanks, sound effects, and other deceptive techniques to create a mirage of a much larger and powerful force. Imagine a canvas city, complete with faux radio transmissions, designed to divert the enemy’s attention. They were master illusionists, utilizing tricks of sight and sound to make the Axis second-guess and make costly missteps. They also deployed the “army” in areas that, when photographed by German reconnaissance aircraft and delivered to Nazi high command, made it seem like the Allies were planning to attack far away from their actual target. 

Their performances were both gutsy and pivotal, contributing significantly to the Allied success. A reminder that in the theater of war, sometimes the most potent weapon isn’t a gun or a bomb, but an artful and convincing illusion. 

8. The Double Siege of Alesia

The year is 52 BCE, and Alesia, a hilltop fortress in present-day France, is the focal point. 

Vercingetorix had gathered a coalition of rebellious Gauls inside the fortress, presenting a challenge to Julius Caesar’s legions. To break this deadlock, Caesar devised an audacious plan. He encircled Alesia with a massive fortification: two concentric rings of defenses. One faced outward to repel attacks from Gallic reinforcements, while the other faced inward to contain those within Alesia.

This was a dual siege—a testament to Roman engineering expertise and logistical finesse. The Gauls inside the walls resisted fiercely, while their brethren outside tried to break through. The Romans were severely outnumbered, and being attacked from all sides. Vercingetorix did everything right and… still lost. It was Caesar’s magnum opus, and the reason why he’s one of history’s greatest generals. 

7. Hammering periscopes

U-boats, the deadly submarines of the German navy during the World Wars, were the terror of the Atlantic. Like most submarines, their crews used periscopes to scout and target enemy ships. 

During World War II, the Allies developed brand new techniques for dealing with U-boat wolfpacks, in order to protect precious shipping lanes. One such innovation was hammering periscopes. You read that right, and no, it’s not a euphemism. This intriguing tactic, employed by the Royal Navy, literally involved patrols of sailors sneaking up on exposed periscopes and smashing them with hammers. In other cases, they’d simply shove canvas sacks over them and tie them tight. 

Once blinded, the submarines would be forced to surface, making them easy targets for Allied naval and air units. It wasn’t the most sophisticated strategy, but if it works, it works. 

6. The Night Witches

The Night Witches were a remarkable group of female aviators in the Soviet Air Forces during World War II. Officially known as the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, they earned their more ominous nickname from the Germans due to their stealthy night raids and the distinctive sound their planes made, which their victims on the ground compared to a witch’s broomstick.

Composed entirely of women, the Night Witches flew outdated Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, which were slow and made of wood and canvas, but highly maneuverable. They conducted their daring bombing missions under the cover of darkness, wreaking havoc on German positions with precision and speed, all while remaining virtually invisible in the dark. The pilots often flew multiple sorties in a single night. 

5. Flaming camels

Timur, also known as Tamerlane, was a Turco-Mongol conqueror and military genius of the 14th century. One of his notable tactics, involving flaming camels, was employed during the Battle of Ankara in 1402 against the forces of the Ottoman Empire. Yes, you read that right. Yes, it means exactly what it sounds like. 

During the battle, Timur’s army faced a formidable opponent in the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I. Timur loaded camels with straw and hay, setting them ablaze before releasing them into the enemy ranks. The sight of these flaming camels charging towards the Ottoman forces panicked their war elephants and horses, causing disorder and chaos among their ranks.

The confusion created by the flaming camels threw the Ottoman formations into panic, allowing Timur’s forces to capitalize on the disarray and gain the upper hand. Timur won the battle, capturing Bayezid and dealing a significant blow to the Ottoman Empire.

4. Bring your pets to war day 

Yes, cat paintings. See, the Ancient Egyptians revered cats and believed they possessed protective qualities. 

At the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC, the Persian Empire, led by Cambyses II, fought against the Egyptian Dynasty under Pharaoh Psamtik III. It unfolded near Pelusium, a pivotal location on Egypt’s eastern border, acting as a gateway to the Nile Delta. The Egyptians had extensive fortifications. But the Persians had cats. Yes, cats. 

What set the Persians apart was their innovative battle strategy, revealing a keen grasp of Egyptian culture. Understanding the Egyptians’ veneration of animals like cats tied to their religious beliefs, Cambyses II directed his troops to drive these sacred animals ahead of them, and some accounts suggest they even depicted cat images and other sacred animals on their shields. This psychological tactic struck deep into the hearts of the Egyptian soldiers, instilling fear of harming these revered animals and invoking divine retribution. This hesitation proved advantageous for the Persians, enabling them to breach the Egyptian defenses and claim a major victory.

3. Self mutilation

Zopyrus was a Persian general who played a significant role during the siege of Babylon in 482 BC. He decided on a daring and brutal plan to weaken Babylon’s defenses: he deliberately mutilated himself. Zopyrus believed that this act would enable him to gain the trust of the Babylonians and infiltrate their city from within.

And it worked. He executed this plan by cutting off his own ears and nose, making it appear as though he had suffered severe punishment from King Darius. Presenting himself to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar as a defector, claiming mistreatment by the Persians, he gained the trust of the Babylonians. Over time, he was given a position of authority within the city.

Exploiting this newfound position, Zopyrus orchestrated the sabotage of Babylon’s defenses, ultimately leading to its capture by the Persian forces. Losing the war seems like a better fate, but hey – at least it worked?

2. Releasing one prisoner

World War I was defined by stalemate, where neither side could gain an upper hand. But it wasn’t for lack of men to hurl into the teeth of enemy machine guns. Both sides improved too. Poison gas, tanks, and airplanes all made their debut here. But the most decisive tactic employed by anyone in the entire war was arguably when the Germans released a single prisoner back to Russia. 

His name was Vladimir Lenin, and he did exactly what the Germans intended: sparked the Bolshevik Revolution which began the Russian Civil War, destroyed the Czarist empire and knocked Russia out of the World War One. Just like that, the entire eastern front was brought to a close, and Germany was able to focus fully on the western front against Britain and France. With all their troops freed up, the Germans moved over to the offense in the west and advanced in the 1918 Spring Offensive, which nearly brought the Allies to their knees. Unfortunately for them, they ran out of steam just as the Americans arrived, and it all fell apart. But still, by simply releasing Lenin, the Kaiser’s army very nearly defeated all her mighty enemies single handedly. 

1. Hannibal beats an enemy fleet with snakes

In one intriguing episode of Hannibal Barca’s military campaigns during the Second Punic War, he demonstrated his flair for unconventional tactics. During a naval skirmish against King Eumenes II of Pergamon, Hannibal took an audacious approach to unsettle his opponents.

Rather than relying solely on traditional naval strategies, Hannibal directed his troops to collect venomous snakes from the local terrain. He then ordered his men to hurl these venomous creatures onto the enemy ships. The effect was immediate and chaotic. The Pergamene sailors, freaked, abandoned their posts in a hurry, leaping into the sea to escape the animals. The result? The ships were deserted and Hannibal was left in command of the area. It wasn’t his most famous victory – Cannae or Lake Trasimene likely has that honor – but it was one of his most innovative. And it’s proof that he wasn’t just good at his job. He was one of the most innovative commanders in history.

Military history is filled with tales of deceptions, feints, surprise attacks, envelopments, double-crosses, and other brilliant maneuvers by brilliant generals. But it’s also filled with stories of overconfident commanders biting off way more than they can chew with foolish invasions, attacks on superior enemies, and ignoring all sorts of red flags that might have spared countless lives. Let’s take a look at some of the most infamous military blunders in history. 

10. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia

Like every successful conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte eventually became too ambitious for his own good. His attempts to force Spain and Russia to cut off trade with Britain both became military disasters for him. But of the two, the invasion of Russia was far worse. 

Napoleon’s Grande Armee marched into Russia with a force of between 650,000-700,000 men, unprecedented in world history at the time. But the Russians wisely opted to retreat rather than face him, employing scorched earth tactics along the way and thus forcing Napoleon’s army to rely on an increasingly shaky supply line. He did win the bloody Battle of Borodino and took empty, burning Moscow shortly afterwards, but the expected Russian surrender never materialized. With winter setting in, Napoleon had no choice but to take his remaining men on a torturous retreat. En route, his already mauled army took further losses from disease, starvation, freezing temperatures, and cossack raids. Well under 100,000 French troops made it out alive. It was a humiliating, mutilating defeat from which Napoleon never fully recovered. It shattered the myth of his invincibility and set the stage for his first abdication in 1814. 

9. Germany declares war on the US 

Nazi Germany was at the peak of its power in 1941. France had been overrun in a stunning six week campaign the year before. Britain was thrown into the sea in the same attack and now unable to challenge the Wehrmacht in continental Europe. And in Russia, the Soviets had taken titanic losses, and German legions were at the doorstep of Moscow. 

Just then, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, dragging the US into the war. Hitler could have laid low. Who knows? Maybe America’s preoccupation with Japan would’ve led to them reducing the desperately needed Lend-Lease supplies keeping Britain and the USSR afloat, to funnel into their own war effort. 

Instead, an overconfident Hitler, fully convinced he would be able to finish off Britain and Russia before America was done with Japan and able to send armies to Europe, decided to declare war on the US. It was a symbolic show of solidarity with Germany’s Axis partner Japan. But it would be a disastrous decision. The “Germany first” policy of the Allies took him by surprise, and German defeats in Russia soon paved the way to the thing Hitler dreaded most: an unwinnable two-front war. 

8. Lee blows it at Gettysburg 

The Confederates at least appeared to be winning the American Civil War in 1863, thanks to victories in Virginia. But in reality, the Emancipation Proclamation slamming the door on the possibility of international recognition for the South, combined with a Union blockade and the impending fall of vital Vicksburg on the Mississippi, had the rebels in desperate straits by that summer. Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee decided to take his smaller but highly confident army on its second invasion of the north that June, hoping to win a major victory on Union soil that would scare a war-weary north out of the war. 

This led to the Battle of Gettysburg in early July. Union troops were defeated on the first day, but able to seize and successfully defend high ground on July 2. Knowing he would likely never get another shot at a major northern victory, Lee launched a massive infantry assault called Pickett’s Charge on July 3. It was doomed from the start, and the devastated Southern army never fully recovered. Lee never won a major victory again. Less than two years later, he surrendered his tiny army at Appomattox, all but ending the war. 

7. Custer gets slaughtered at Little Big Horn

George Armstrong Custer was a respected Union cavalry commander during the American Civil War, but he’s not remembered for beating J.E.B. Stuart at Gettysburg. He’s remembered for his ill-fated, and last, performance, at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. Custer, a flamboyant and ambitious cavalry officer, underestimated the strength of the Native American forces he faced and made a series of critical errors that led to a devastating defeat for the US Army.

Custer’s first mistake was a lack of proper reconnaissance. Overconfident and desperate for glory, he divided his forces into three separate battalions without adequate information about the size and positioning of the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes he intended to engage. On June 25-26, 1876, Custer’s 7th Cavalry encountered overwhelming resistance. Instead of waiting for reinforcements or adopting a more defensive stance, Custer pressed forward into a situation where his troops were outnumbered, outgunned, and, ultimately, surrounded and destroyed. 

“Custer’s Last Stand” has become one of the biggest cautionary tales in military history. 

6. Rome gets annihilated at Cannae

The story of the 216 BCE’s Battle of Cannae is usually told from the perspective of Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca’s brilliant double envelopment and slaughter of tens of thousands of Roman soldiers, during his Second Punic War invasion of Italy. But it’s worth examining the degree to which the Romans brought the disaster on their own head, too. 

In a nutshell, the Romans got their cavalry wiped out and then, overconfident in their heavy infantry, shrugged it off and marched straight into the Carthaginian lines. Hannibal wanted this – he feigned weakness and ordered his men to slowly withdraw, keeping the Romans preoccupied with splitting his line in half. By the time they realized it was a trap, it was too late. The Carthaginians stopped retreating, snapped their flanks in, and used their cavalry to seal the last remaining escape route. Surrounded, the Romans lost some 70,000 men in one day, an unimaginable death toll. Given Rome’s population at the time, that would be the equivalent of America losing tens of millions of men in one day. 

Watch your flanks, people. And don’t underestimate any enemy, especially those who had already beaten you multiple times before. 

5. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor

Japan’s brutal invasion of China didn’t lead to a swift victory. What it did lead to was their army getting bogged down there and their supplies of oil, steel, and rubber being cut off by an American embargo. 

Japan realized it could get its own sources by seizing resource-rich territory throughout Southeast Asia. But that would lead to inevitable war with Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, who owned that land. But they rolled the dice and invaded all that land anyway. As part of this offensive, they decided to preemptively remove their greatest naval competitor in the Pacific, with a sneak attack on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 

They knew America had overwhelming industrial might, but hoped that by the time America recovered, they would’ve already conquered China and would be so entrenched throughout the Pacific that America would sue for peace, realizing the cost of removing Japan was too high. It was a ludicrous gamble. The Americans were enraged but far from crushed in the attack. They turned the tide at Midway mere months later, and then slapped aside every Japanese attempt to stop them as they smashed their way to the home islands. Oops! 

4. The Battle of Fredericksburg

By December 1862, the American Civil War had raged for a year and a half – far longer than either side had anticipated. And it was only getting bloodier by the day. Part of the overall Union plan was, in addition to seizing the Mississippi River and blockading Southern ports, to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. The Union Army of the Potomac had failed repeatedly at this task, but was determined to get it right. 

Under extreme pressure from president Lincoln, new commander Ambrose Burnside (after whom sideburns were named) decided to cross the Rappohanock River at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and then march south to Richmond. But pontoon boats were slow in arriving, giving General Robert E. Lee a chance to guess his opponent’s intentions and swiftly fortify his positions. His subordinate Stonewall Jackson had some difficulty in his sector, but James Longstreet held the line masterfully at Marye’s Heights, inflicting appalling losses on Union brigades that walked straight into the teeth of a rebel stone wall. It was one of the worst Union defeats of the war, and no major attempts were made to march on Richmond for nearly a year and a half afterwards. 

3. Charge of the Light Brigade 

It’s been immortalized and glorified by Lord Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem of the same name, but the real charge of the light brigade, which took place during 1854’s Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War, was far from glorious. The charge occurred when a miscommunication led the Light Brigade, a British cavalry unit, to charge directly into a well-defended position. 

The confusion that led to the Charge of the Light Brigade began when an order was given by British commanders. Due to unclear communication and misinterpretation, the Light Brigade, under the command of Lord Cardigan, advanced into the “Valley of Death” against a heavily fortified Russian artillery position. The brigade faced fire from both sides as they galloped headlong into a devastating crossfire. It was old school military glory versus the harsh reality of modern military killing machines. The resulting carnage foreshadowed the carnage of the First World War.

2. Gallipoli campaign

Combat in World War I heavily favored the defender, leading to static front lines and lots of dead men who tried to breach them. Seeking a way to break the stalemate, Entente (Allied) leadership sought to attack one of Germany’s perceived weaker partners, the Ottoman Empire. 

Future WW2-era British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, then a high-ranking Naval strategist, concocted a plan to devastate the Ottomans and make contact with their Russian allies by forcing the Dardanelles straits near Istanbul. They would charge into the bay with older wooden warships as the vanguard, hoping these less valuable vessels would do as much damage as they could while absorbing Ottoman fire and nautical mines. After the Ottomans were tired and running low on ammo, newer metal warships would cruise in, finish off the defenders, and deposit infantry to capture the area. 

Unfortunately, it all fell apart. Commanders overly attached to their beloved wooden boats protected them from fire, exposing the rest of the fleet. And the infantry got bogged down on Gallipoli with no way forward for months, facing murderous Ottoman fire until they were evacuated in 1916, having achieved nothing of strategic value. 

1. Invasion of Canada

We could go on and on about how dumb the War of 1812 was. But the invasion of Canada by US forces was arguably the silliest and stupidest chapter in it. In the early stages of the war, the United States sought to annex British-held territory (a longterm policy goal for many Americans politicians) initiated a three-pronged invasion plan targeting Upper Canada (present-day Ontario), Lower Canada (present-day Quebec), and the maritime provinces. 

The Americans faced initial success with victories at Detroit and the capture of Fort Mackinac. But the campaign ultimately faltered as underprepared American forces, stuck with horrible intelligence and worse leadership, encountered logistical challenges, harsh weather conditions, and strong resistance. The Battle of Queenston Heights in October 1812 proved a significant setback for the Americans, as their attempts to invade Upper Canada were repelled.

In 1813, both sides engaged in a series of offensives and counter-offensives before the Americans finally called it a day and returned home, solidifying much of the US-Canada border we still have today. Canadians still cheer about it, and it’s hard to blame them. Meanwhile, Americans would rather change the subject.

The history of humankind is essentially the history of war itself. For as long as people have existed, so have reasons for them to fight, either for territorial domination, resources, or, in more recent cases, fossil fuel reserves. And throughout history, some units have fared much better at the job than any other, as we’re about to find out.

These are some of the most successful and celebrated military units in history. In addition to their prowess in war, their reputations alone gave enemy soldiers pause long before they’d stepped onto the battlefield. The fear their mention struck into the hearts of warriors was a weapon in and of itself.

10 The Immortals

A lot has been said and written about the Spartan war with Persia during the ancient times, though we forget that most of it doesn’t narrate the full story. The Spartans, even though outnumbered, had a distinct advantage in the form of the narrow mountain pass they were defending during the Battle of Thermopylae, and also, that was only one battle. The force they were fighting, on the other hand, was one of the best in the world at that time.

The Immortals were an elite force of exactly 10,000 men—no more and no less—and were instrumental in many great victories of the Achaemenid Empire (one of the, and possibly the, biggest empire before Ancient Greece) during that time.^[1] They wore a minimal amount of armor and relied primarily on scaring the enemy with their fear tactics, much of which was, “Look at those badasses who need no armor.” Even during the Battle of Thermopylae, they ended up succeeding by attacking the rear of the Spartan defense, and they won most of the battles they ever took part in. The Immortals were one of the most feared units of the ancient world, no matter what the movie 300 would have us believe. (Actually, the movie did accurately represent how fearsome they were.)

9 Thessalians

Alexander the Great’s massively successful conquest of vast regions of Asia is largely attributed to his prowess as a capable general, and while that may be true to an extent, what is often missed is the backing of the capable army left to him by his father. When they started out, Macedonia would have never had a chance against the cavalry-heavy armies of Persia, though things changed when they conquered the kingdom of Thessaly (now in modern Greece, obviously) and got their elite Thessalian cavalrymen, along with the rest of Philip II’s trained army.

Now, they weren’t just known for their victories in Greek armies; Thessalians were legendary cavalrymen at a time when empires in the region were still finding their way around horses and were used as mercenaries to great success by other empires. But it was when Thessaly was conquered by the Macedonians that they truly lived up to their potential. By far one of the best units of Alexander’s armies, they were the only unit which participated in all the great battles during Alexander’s invasion of Persia, and they were instrumental in his victories. It was said that it was nearly impossible to defeat a Thessalian unit in formation due to their rhomboid arrangement, rather than the usually deployed wedge one, and their loyalty to Alexander.^[2]

8 Genoese Crossbowmen

The Middle Ages in Europe were a curious mix of technological awakening, an unforeseen exchange of various ideas between different cultures, and brutal wars. It was a time when some of the earliest iterations of what would eventually turn into modern military tactics would develop. While there were your famous knights and cavalrymen, one unit that doesn’t get as much recognition is Genoese crossbowmen. Crossbows were already a feared weapon, due to their ease of use and ability to pierce armor, though it was crossbowmen from Genoa who really put them on the map. They were some of the most elite soldiers in the region, known for their prowess with the weapon, and were regularly hired as mercenaries by many countries to aid them in their regular rampages across Europe.^[3]

While they were a part of many great victories, one of the most prominent ones was when they aided the pro-papacy rebels against the Holy Roman Empire (yes, they were different sides; long story) and successfully defeated the imperial army and looted their treasure during the Battle of Parma in the 13th century. The emperor was so pissed with the casualties they caused that he specifically ordered the fingers of all captured Genoese crossbowmen chopped off, possibly to ask the rest of them to quit it. They clearly didn’t, as they remained a feared mercenary force in Europe until the advent of gunpowder.

7 Nordic Housecarls

One of the most important and pivotal parts of British history is when the Vikings showed up. After years of honing their marauding skills and building their own consolidated empires in the north, they made their way to English shores for riches and possible knowledge of what lay further west.

With them, they brought their unique fighting styles and weapons and, of course, their own brand of elite corps that hadn’t been seen in the region before: housecarls (also known as huscarls). Before the Norman conquest, housecarls used to be personal bodyguards to the various Nordic kings, though it was when the Danish king Canute (aka Cnut) conquered England that they started showing up in the records as one of the most fearsome fighting units in Europe.

Many subsequent English kings employed housecarls as an elite part of their forces as well as provided them with various administrative roles and senior political positions along with their traditional cutting-people-down duties, somewhat like knights in later centuries.^[4] (The housecarls were also covered head-to-toe in mail armor.) They traditionally fought with heavy two-handed battle axes, though were also proficient with spears and swords with their trademark kite-shaped shields.

6 Argyraspides

Another one of the best units from Alexander the Great’s army, Argyraspides are also sometimes referred to as “silver-shield bearers.” While sources on this are shaky, it is said that the silver was due to a prophecy by the Oracle—who Alexander used to famously trust in—who claimed that he would conquer the world on the back of silver. Regardless, just the fact that one of the best generals in history would bestow a unit with literal silver on their shields should tell you something about how good they were.

It wasn’t until the end of Alexander’s reign, when he went to India on his final campaign, that the Argyraspides were formed and given their silver shields. They were sort of his personal bodyguards on the battlefield and, along with the shields, carried the hoplite dory (a spear) as their main weapon. They were also battle-hardened, above a certain age (50 to 70, depending on the sources from that time), and were trusted by Alexander above all others, though that might be due to good ol’ racism, as they were Macedonian in origin, and he tended to not give elite positions to soldiers from conquered nations. Regardless, it’s historically established that they were by far the best unit in his army at the end of his campaign. They were also extensively used by the splinter kingdoms made by his generals after his death, particularly the Seleucid Empire.^[5]

5 Almogavars

Most of what we hear about Catalonia today is from its recent calls for independence from the Spain and the Spanish not wholly appreciating that demand, as any modern state would be expected to. What we don’t realize is that Catalonia was once a power to be reckoned with on its own, and it wasn’t until far later that they were consolidated into the Spanish Empire. During the 13th century, Catalonia, along with its bigger dynastic cousin in the Kingdom of Aragon, turned into one of the strongest unions in all of Europe, and the credit could be solely given to the Almogavars, mercenary mountain soldiers from Catalonia who were also one of their best units around at the time.^[6]

Originally chosen from the natives in the region, the Almogavars were an elite force of soldiers adept at fighting in the mountains and were known for attacking at night. They famously wore no or very little armor, all of which combined to give them what no other kingdom they were at war with had; mobility across the Iberian terrain. And they had a lot of enemies, including the Byzantine Empire (who they were allied with at first but turned against as soon as their leader was assassinated by them), the Turks, Genoa, and pretty much anyone around the Mediterranean region stupid enough to pick a fight with them. The war between Christianity and Islam—of which the Iberian Peninsula, particularly Spain, was a focal point—at the time is what they’re remembered for the most; they were a part of some of the most pivotal victories on the Christian side, including taking back Constantinople.

4 Tuskegee Airmen

“Tuskegee Airmen” is a name given to units of African American pilots in World War II, and if you remember, the US was still a segregated society at that time. The pilots were recruited from the University of Tuskegee in Alabama, even though Roosevelt had to go against many of his generals before making the decision due to old-fashioned racism. That was only until they were put into service, though, as they turned out to be among the best-performing pilots in the war.

Their role primarily consisted of escorting bombers against Germany’s war machine, as the bomber units were still all-white. That was only how it started, though; they were soon destroying German aircraft unlike any others, all the while looking out for the bombers. While it was earlier believed that they had successfully protected all the bombers by the end of the war, a few records uncovered later do mention some bombers that were downed, though their record is still impressive. Overall, they flew over 15,000 sorties, destroyed 261 German aircraft throughout the war, and earned 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses for their performance.^[7] Tuskegee airmen were even awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Bush in 2007, though many would call that a bit delayed.

3 Caroleans

The only things Sweden may be known for today are Volvo, meatballs, and the bitter cold, though we forget that it was once one of the most feared superpowers of Europe, with an empire stretching across Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. A big reason was their army known as the Caroleans, named after King Charles XI, who conscripted them.

They carried a combination of bayonets, pikes, and rapiers and were specifically trained to attack and not defend, which worked quite well for Charles XI as well as his obviously named son, Charles XII. They proved their merit as one of the most (possibly the most) feared armies in Europe in many battles, the most notable of them being the Battle of Narva, where a force of Caroleans defeated an advancing army of Russians about four times its size. It was only one of the battles in the Great Northern War, fought between Russia and Sweden for the control of various territories.

While they scored some pretty awesome victories in the beginning, they admittedly fell prey to one of the oldest tricks in the book: advancing into Russia during the winter.^[8] Russia eventually won the war, which led to Sweden’s influence waning soon after, though Caroleans are still remembered as one of the best armies to have ever been formed in Europe.

2 The Knights Hospitaller

A lot has been said about the Knights Templar, though we either conflate it with or entirely ignore the Knights Hospitaller when we speak about the most potent units that participated in the Holy Wars. Not only were they entirely different units meant for different purposes (the former was more of a multinational corporation, while the latter meant to take care of the pilgrims going to the Holy Land, at least when they started out), but they often found themselves to be at odds with each other.

The Knights Hospitaller were established in the early 11th century as harmless members of a hospital meant to take care of the sick and elderly pilgrims in Jerusalem, though when the city was overtaken (or taken back, depending on how you look at it) after the First Crusade, the pope decided that their roles needed to be expanded. From then until at least the 18th century (as their power was diminished after Napoleon invaded their home kingdom of Malta), they participated in many successful wars, many times being the decisive factor in the many victories against the Ottomans, as well as taking part in most of the Crusades. They also successfully raided many Turkish ships, as they were adept at naval warfare as well. They were proficient with many weapons like lances and maces, though it was the sword—like many other knight brotherhoods of the era—that they really preferred.^[9]

1 Reislaufer

Whenever we think of Switzerland, we think of a peace-loving country that just doesn’t want to have anything to do with the wars of the world and would rather stay neutral than fight. That’s only because we haven’t been paying attention to its history, though everyone who has ever thought of attacking them surely did—and chose to leave them alone. All of it has to do with Swiss pikemen, possibly the most legendary fighting unit in history. (Ever seen the pope’s bodyguards? Yup, Swiss pikemen.)

Their reputation started building up when they successfully pushed back the Hapsburgs after saying “screw it,” declaring independence, and forming their own Swiss Confederacy (Switzerland hasn’t been conquered since) and then going on to repel every attack from the massive Hapsburg armies on the back of their pike-wielding abilities. They were so efficient that not only did the Hapsburgs leave them alone somewhere at the end of the 15th century due to all the defeats, but every other country soon started asking the pikemen to fight for them as mercenaries as well, cementing their reputation as some of the best heavy infantry units in all of Europe.^[10]

Reislaufer, Swiss mercenaries who were proficient with pikes, soon went on to fight alongside the best armies in many wars across Europe to great success, right up until pikes got kind of redundant with the advent of firearms. They were known for fighting to the death, and a part of their success was knowing how to repel the cavalry-heavy European armies of the time. While they used other weapons like halberds, swords, and war clubs, it was the pike that they were the masters of.

Himanshu can be found shouting obscenities at strangers on Twitter @RudeRidingRomeo or making amateur drawings on Instagram @anartism_. Has written for Forbes, Cracked, Modern Rogue, and Screen Rant. Pay him money for writing stuff for you here: [email protected]

While big guns and large armies are an important part of modern warfare, they’re ineffective without a network of highly-specialized covert operatives working behind the scenes to support their objectives. Some of the most successful military missions in history have been carried out by small, nameless groups of individuals that could be classified as both spies and soldiers, their exploits usually only coming to light decades later when documents about their missions are finally declassified.

10. Operation Fortitude

Operation Fortitude was a crucial Allied deception operation during the Second World War, designed to mislead Nazi Germany’s high command about the main Allied invasion of Europe in 1944. Officially beginning in 1943, it was organized by a secret group of military officers called the London Controlling Section, and formed a part of the much-larger global operation called Operation Bodyguard. 

Fortitude’s primary goal was to divert German attention away from the real invasion site at Normandy. To achieve this, it focused on two main areas – while Fortitude North kept Germany’s attention on Norway, Fortitude South reinforced the German belief that the invasion would occur in the Pas-de-Calais region of France, as it was closest to the English coast. 

The Germans were led to believe that the fictitious First United States Army Group (FUSAG) was stationed in southeast England under General George Patton, complete with dummy landing crafts, tanks, vehicles, and fake radio traffic to back up the plan. The operation was wildly successful by the end of it, as the Germans continued to believe in the existence of FUSAG even after the D-Day landings in June 1944. 

9. Operation Farewell

Operation Farewell was a CIA campaign of computer sabotage during the Cold War in 1981. It began when French President François Mitterrand informed President Ronald Reagan about a high-level KGB officer, Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, who had decided to switch sides. Vetrov provided what is now infamously known as the Farewell dossier, exposing how the Soviets were systematically stealing or buying advanced technology from the West.

Under the guidance of Gus Weiss, the CIA planted deliberately flawed designs for technology, including computer chips, stealth technology, and space defense, that would appear fine at first but failed during operation. For the USSR, the primary purpose of operations was to obtain computer control systems for a new trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The manipulated software caused a massive explosion in June 1982, leaving the Soviet authorities in shock and raising doubts within the administration about the reliability of stolen technology from the West.

8. The Cambridge Five

The Cambridge Five was a spy ring of British double agents that infiltrated the UK government and passed sensitive intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union during the early stages of the Cold War. The members were Kim Philby (pictured above), Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, recruited by the KGB during their time at Cambridge University in the 1930s. 

They were later found to be openly communist and believing in the Soviet cause, leading them to spy on the British government and undermine its foreign policy, including the development of the British nuclear bomb. The ring had a huge impact on global affairs, especially in its effect on the British relationship with post-war allies like the USA. The Cambridge Five stole and passed on classified documents from British intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office to Soviet authorities throughout the duration of their operations. 

7. Operation Gladio

Operation Gladio was a secret, stay-behind network of anti-communist fighters set up by the CIA, British secret service, NATO, and other European military agencies in Western Europe after the Second World War. Specially trained by Green Berets and SAS Special Forces, these soldiers were armed with explosives, machine guns, and high-tech communication equipment hidden in underground bunkers and forests across the continent. 

Codenamed ‘Gladio’, the Italian branch of the network was exposed in 1990 by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, revealing similar stay-behind armies in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and other European countries. These secret armies were usually directly coordinated by NATO and the Pentagon, and were originally created during the Cold War as a defense against a potential Warsaw-block invasion. Gladio would eventually evolve into an extensive NATO-operated network, often involving civilians trained by intelligence operatives. 

6. The Lavon Affair

The Lavon Affair, named for former Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, is a media-nickname given to a failed covert operation carried out by Israel against Egypt in 1954. It was a highly controversial mission that had lasting consequences for relationships within the Middle East, as it involved activating an Israeli sleeper cell of young Egyptian Jews to set off bombs across Egypt with the intention to destabilize Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government. 

That didn’t turn out too well, however, as the Egyptian authorities discovered the plot during its planning stages, leading to arrests, trials, and harsh treatment of the spies. Two members of the cell were executed, while others received lengthy prison sentences.

The affair triggered a series of events – a retaliatory military incursion by Israel into Gaza, an Egyptian-Soviet arms deal that angered Western leaders, the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt, and a failed invasion of Egypt by Israel, France, and Britain to topple Nasser. France accelerated its nuclear cooperation with Israel in the aftermath, enabling the latter to eventually develop nuclear weapons.

5. Operation Washtub

Operation Washtub was a clandestine program developed during the 1950s amid Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The initiative aimed to create a network of civilian sleeper agents in Alaska who would stay behind in the event of a Soviet invasion, providing intelligence on enemy activities and establishing escape routes for stranded American military personnel. 

Led by US Navy Captain Minor Heine, the plan received approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1950, and was eventually overseen by the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations with support from the FBI. The FBI’s role involved recruiting, training, and equipping the stay-behind agents, strategically chosen from various local occupations like miners, pilots, fishermen, and others with survival skills and knowledge of Alaska’s geography. The agents were trained in espionage, survival techniques, and were equipped with caches of supplies, including weapons and gold in case of emergencies. 

4. Operation Wrath of God

Operation Bayonet, also known as Operation Wrath of God, was a covert Israeli campaign initiated in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Massacre, where terrorists belonging to the Black September group killed Israeli athletes and coaches during the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. Directed by Mossad, the operation was a retaliatory measure aimed at assassinating those responsible for the attack and deterring future terrorist actions against Israel. 

The campaign was authorized by Prime Minister Golda Meir, and the target list included over two dozen individuals affiliated with Black September and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The assassinations began in mid-October 1972, with Mossad agents targeting individuals in various countries across Europe and the Middle East. 

In April 1973, a related operation called Operation Spring of Youth involved a raid on several PLO compounds in Lebanon, resulting in several dozen deaths, including individuals connected to the Munich Massacre. The campaign continued for years until Ali Hassan Salameh, the alleged mastermind of the Munich Massacre, was killed in 1979.

3. Operation Gunnerside

On February 27, 1943, a covert group of nine Norwegian commandos raided a German-held hydroelectric plant called Vemork, just outside Rjukan, Norway. Their mission – now officially known as Operation Gunnerside – was to sabotage the facility by destroying the water pipes in its basement. 

While unaware of its significance at the time, the operatives later discovered that their successful sabotage hindered Germany’s atomic bomb program that relied on heavy water production at the plant. The Germans had been using heavy water – or deuterium oxide – as a moderator for their nuclear reactor to sustain a chain reaction necessary for the bomb. The lack of coordination and support among the German leadership, however, along with heavy water’s technological limitations, prevented them from achieving a successful reaction. 

2. The Red Orchestra

Named by the Nazis, the Red Orchestra was a network of communist spies and resistance fighters operating across Germany during the Second World War. Led by Leopold Trepper, a Polish-born communist, the group provided intelligence to the Soviet government and acted as a resistance organization against the Nazis. 

Trepper established the network in the mid-1930s, and when the war began, he turned it into a spy ring aimed at gathering Nazi secrets for the Soviet army. Operating divisions, or rings, were established in Nazi-occupied France, Belgium, Holland, and neutral Switzerland, as they successfully infiltrated Nazi offices, intercepted intelligence information, and even obtained leaked documents about the Nazi plan to invade the Soviet Union. This crucial intelligence, however, was completely ignored by the Soviet government. 

The Red Orchestra started breaking down some time in 1942, when several agents were arrested in Belgium. The Gestapo subsequently captured Trepper in Paris and eliminated many members of the network, though some rings continued to operate on a smaller scale.

1. Operation LUSTY

Operation LUSTY – short for ‘Luftwaffe secret technology’ – was a post-WW2 effort spearheaded by the US Air Force to collect and study captured German aircraft, technology, and scientific documents. Led by Col. Harold E. Watson, the Air Technical Intelligence teams were tasked with locating enemy systems and equipment listed on ‘Black Lists’ collected throughout the war. After the fighting ended in May 1945, the ATI’s focus shifted to post-war investigations and the acquisition of advanced German technology.

As a part of the operation, Watson’s team of pilots, engineers, and maintenance personnel sought to recover enemy aircraft and weapons for further study in the United States. In total, Operation LUSTY collected 16,280 items, adding up to about 6,200 tons of captured German equipment.