Real life is of course not Call of Duty and one person can’t win a war by himself, however…one soldier on the field may have a big influence on the course of a single battle, still highly improbable, but possible, for example a really good sniper that takes out a lot of enemies, a person that blows himself up taking a bunch of enemies with him,etc.
As an example, Milan Tepic, a Serb/Yugoslav commander in the Croatian war in 90’s who didn’t want to give up a surrounded ammunition storage blew himself up destroying the ammo-storage, to a certain extent at least. (actual video of the event Major Milan Tepic digao u vazduh skladiste - 29.09.1991 - YouTube )
That event didn’t affect the war much at all, but, were there similar cases where a single person or a small group influenced a battle, a battle which then influenced the outcome of the entire conflict?
The pilots of the planes that carried nukes to Japan could probably count in a way, but that’s something else.
I’d have to dig for specific examples and most of them would be unnamed. Many wars of royal succession were decided by one of the claimants being killed on the field of battle. It didn’t matter if their army survived them relatively intact or was even winning at that point. The cause of the war was over unless there was a spare claimant to take over the fight. One arrow or sword stroke that hit home could be enough to decide the issue.
About 20 or so American dive bombers during the Battle of Midway literally turned the entire tide of the battle and eventually the war, and had they not been in the right place and right time the US would have certainly lost the battle and delayed the ending of the war by a year.
Can’t think of an example that decided the outcome of a war*, but pre-modern sieges were often ended by a single individual or small group gaining access to the besieged city (often with the help of an insider) and letting the rest of the army in.
Except the Siege of Troy, of course, which while mythical probably had some basis in fact. So it’s not ridiculous to think that the Trojan horse might be a mythologized version of some ancient siege that was ended by a small group of besiegers gaining access to the besieged city.
Also plenty of important generals that were shot by a single rifleman (particularly in the early days of rifled firearms, before generals learned to keep out of range of them)
In these cases though you get into a bit of alternative history discussions, as to how much difference the survival of one general would actually have made to the war in question , if any.
Three examples that spring to mind:
Thomas Plunkett shooting General Colbert-Chabanais at the Battle of Cacabelos. You can make reasonable case that this swung the battle, less so that it swung the war.
Timothy Murphy shooting General Fraser at Bemis Heights. Pretty hard to argue this would have change the outcome.
Plus of course John Barry and his men who who shotStonewall Jackson (they were on the same side which is awkward). The argument here would not be the immediate effect of his death, but whether he was a good enough general to make a difference later in the war.
Well there is the most famous of them: the Welshman Rhys ap Thomas has a pretty good claim to be the guy who killed Richard III. Which definitely won the battle and the war.
The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, and couldn’t have involved huge numbers of people – there wasn’t enough time. It was the shortest declared war in history.
There were about 500 Zanzibari casualties on one side and one British sailor on the other.
The size of the British force is larger, I think, than the OP envisioned:
Pizzaro had about 180 men when he won the Battle of Cajamarca against perhaps 6,000 Inca warriors. He only had a few hundred when he went on the conquer the Incan Empire. This is probably the greatest victory against the longest numerical odds in history.
The group who developed the atomic bomb was not by any stretch of the imagination “small”. Though if scientists count then I’d say Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch have a reasonable case. They did the original calculation that made the atomic bomb feasible (that meant pounds not tons of fissile material would be required) and publicized it (behind closed doors to the powers that be in the UK, who passed it on their counterparts in the US) via the Frisch–Peierls memorandum. That memo led directly to the Manhattan Project (and the underlying calculation was never repeated in Nazi Germany, so their atom bomb project was a non-starter).
That’s a good one, though fair to say the Incas were largely disarmed.
But that’s inaccurate. By the time he besieged Cuzco he had thousands or even tens of thousands of Indian auxiliaries. Tribes from the losing side of the Inca Civil War( i.e. Huascar’s partisans ) threw in with Spaniards fairly early.
Much like Cortez, after the initial encounters Pizarro depended heavily on auxiliary manpower to effect his conquest.
Secured British influence over Bengal and even that incompletely. It was the start of the snowball, but there was literally a century of fighting ahead of them. Next step was the rather more decisive Buxar, last step was arguably the Great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-1858 and the subsequent formal termination of the Mughal state.
While the movies may give the impression that it was all down to Alan Turing and a few egg heads, Bletchley Park employed over 10,000 personnel at its peak.