SS Hauptsturmfuhrer -> RE: Least Fascinating War/Most Fascinating War (7/24/2009 2:50:30 AM)
|
Most interesting battle I ever read about was Malta 1565, the last battle of the crusades. The Order of John was last defense in the Mediterranean against the Turkish invasions of Europe. Basically Malta and Vienna were the Bastognes of the crusades. The Order of John has be evicted from Rhodes after a long, brave siege and was allowed by Holy Roman Empire to rent Malta as a place of refuge. Of course they used their ships to take a few supplies from the rich Turkish merchant fleets moving through the sea and this enraged the Turks who swore to kill every Christian on Malta. The tiny Christian army, with the Maltese who wanted revenge against Turks for their slave-grabbing raids on the island, had to hold the island which was frantically fortified in the nick of time before the Turks arrived with their state-of-the-art siege team including massive cannon, tunneling engineers, armies of Jannisary musketeers, experts in torture, and some basic infantry to use as fodder. The island had a series of forts that the Turks systemically attacked in long, absolutely brutal fights mostly using cannon, muskets, pikes and lots of napalm. The Turks tortured and/or crucified anyone they could get their hands on so the Christians and Maltese responded by killing their captive Turks and putting their heads in cannon to fire onto the Turks. The fighting at the breaches in the defenses was a hectic slaughter of gunfire, napalm and melee weapons. Pure, crazy mayhem. That was a sick fight. I like WW1 too. The early battles before the trenches were dug were pretty crazy. And there were some interesting tactics used once tanks were deployed like at Cambrai, and the final Kaiserschlacht in 1918 was both violent and the beginning of intelligent infantry tactics using both shock attacks and elastic defences.
|
|
|
|