One of units in the game have intrigued me: Incendiary Pigs
Their use in the game is to spook war elephants.
The pigs are covered in tar, herded towards the enemy and lit on fire. Apparently elephants aren’t fond of flaming, shrieking swine.
Anyway, on to the question:
Do these things have any historical basis? Were they actually used in war by the Romans? My boss who is quite the historian has never heard of them.
A quick Google search only led me to Rome: Total War game links.
One of my characters in a role-playing game put nails in small kegs of gun powder, strapped them onto pigs, lit the fuses, and ran them at the enemy.
I called them Kriegschwein.
Now I thought of this all on my own (am I actually boasting about this? :smack: )and I only consider myself a person of average intelligence, so I don’t see why someone else back when couldn’t have thunk up the Flammendschwein.
I’m conflicted on the incendiary pig thing. On the one hand, I love Roman military history and I’ve never heard of them (I knew about the dogs). On the other hand:
Incendiary pigs sound like something they would have done, given sufficient free time, pigs and flammable liquid. They had plenty of all three.
This game developer, while taking plenty of license with historical military units in the Total War series, is usually pretty good at not totally making things up. For example, in Medieval: Total War there was a rebel state to the east of the Black Sea that had Jewish Heavy Steppe Cavalry. I didn’t believe it until I researched it myself, and learned alot of neat history on the way…they had a whole country, apparently.
I’ve tried researching incendiary pigs and found nada. I was on the verge of emailing Creative Assembly to ask if it was true, but got sidetracked.
Maybe someone else here knows, but that’s what I’ve got so far on the flaming pig front.
I’ll need to look this up when I’m at home and dig out an old textbook or two, but from my recollection, there is a passage in a history of the Punic Wars that describe incendiary pigs used as anti-elephant weaponry. I have a nagging suspicion that the controversy around the concept was whether the pigs were herded towards the enemy lines or catapulted towards the enemy lines.
Being a fan of siege machinery at heart, I clung to the idea of pigs being loaded onto a trebuchet, set ablaze, and sent oinking through the air.
Hopefully Tamerlane or Kizarveci… Kiza… Kiz can chime in in the meantime.
For some reason, my admittedly hazy recollection of what I’ve always thought of as “Flaming Pigs” involved them being launched through the air as well. I wish I had more to offer.
The footnote in this case refers to David Bright and Barbara Bowen. “Emblems, Elephants and Alexander.” Studies in Philology, ed. Jerry Mills (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 19, 20.
Apparently millenia ago, the phrase “squeal like a pig” had completely different connotations…
Yep, there is historical basis. IIRC, it’s the unfamiliar noise of the squealing that gets the heffalumps riled up rather than the flame per se. (I’d imagine that a mass of flaming hog bearing down on anybody would seriously undermine their resolve.) Again, IIRC, elephants were raised with pigs after their effectiveness was established, so that the elephants would be familiar with them and not get spooked. (Camel smell had similar effects on horses and the perscription was the same: Raise elephants with pigs! Okay, that was a joke. They raised horses with camels to get them familiar with the smell.)
(From what I’ve read, elephants were notoriously poor weapons of war. Scipio Africanus turned many with blasts of horns and captured the rest by letting them run through openings in the lines and capturing their handlers. Elephants didn’t trust humans like horses do, and when an elephant is spooked and goes running through its own lines the damage can be considerable.)
You can find more info on the incendiary pigs as weapons in the book *Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient * World. Very Interesting (and disturbing) stuff! Link.
