Smallest but Most Influential Battle in History

Great Debates
1

I was watching The Guns of Navarone over the weekend and had a thought (I know a dangerous pastime). In the fictional movie, a small squad destroys a somewhat important strategic target. Now, it is obvious that many of the largest battles in history have been pivotal turning points in their respective wars. However, what battle has included the least number of combatants but been the most pivotal. I’m not much of a history expert so I don’t really have any position, but I am interested in insights from the experts on here (I considered making the FQ but it feels like it will be debated), and I thought it might be a fun somewhat less serious debate.

A few rules (they be more guidelines than rules, yarr):

  1. Duals don’t count regardless of the numbers involved.
  2. Military forces used to be much smaller so some consideration should be given to the size of the force relative to the typical force of the day.
  3. Impact should probably be relatively decisive to the overall conflict. Domino effect allowed. I.e., if the guns of Navarone had not been destroyed, then the troops would not have been present for X, which would have been a disaster for Y! But the least dominoes the better.

So, any thoughts? What battles had few combatants but a large impact?

2

Battle of Jumonville Glen fewer participants than would violate a Denny’s fire code, but it sparked a war fought in North America, Europe and India.

3

Battle of Teutoburg Forest where, in 9 AD the Romans were defeated by an alliance of Germanic tribes. It ensured that Central Europe would never be conquered by the Romans.

4

Sure, but the French and Indian War was just really a branch of the larger Seven Years War being fought in Europe, not a war in its own right. It certainly wasn’t brought on by the Battle of Jumonville Glen.

I sometimes wonder about whether the Battle of San Jacinto qualifies; just a little over 2200 total combatants, and while the proximal result of the battle (a massive rout by the Texans) was Texan independence, the long term effects led to the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American war, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gained the US over half of the territory that Mexico laid claim to, including California, Nevada, Utah, and large parts of Arizona and New Mexico.

5

The Battle of Hiroshima? Two combatants, one blast, changed the world forever.

6

The Battle of Hastings is estimated to have had less than 10,000 men on each side, yet changed the course of history - for western Europe at least.

7

The Battle of King’s Mountain occurred in the Southern theater of the American War for Independence involving about 2,000 troops total, all militia. The overwhelming Patriot victory ended a series of losses in the South, boosting morale and checking Cornwallis’ plans to move into North Carolina. You can trace a line from King’s Mountain to Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, and ultimately the siege and surrender at Yorktown. Teddy Roosevelt called it the turning point of the American Revolution.

8

A shoving match between Orthodox and Latin Catholics at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem triggered the Crimean War. But I don’t think the Crimean War was really that big a deal.

9

How do you think the Seven Years’ War got started? It was your friend and mine, George Washington, and his first colossal fuckup, encountering the Sieur de Jumonville at the wrong time in the wrong company.

10

That battle wasn’t particularly small, though. It was certainly larger than, say, the Battle of Tours which according to some historians ended Umayyad expansion into Europe.

11

Not as small as some already mentioned, and not as influential, but the Dieppe Raid was pretty small-scale compared to other World War II battles, but in a domino way hugely influential, and I think gets extra points for the perverse influence that a disastrous loss wound up being a key to later smashing victory.

In 1942, the Americans were itching to take the fight directly to the Germans on the Continent, and Stalin was putting as much pressure as he could on the other Allies to open up a second front. The British High Command felt their forces weren’t ready for a real cross-Channel invasion and that the American forces were nowhere near ready. So they came up with a compromise.

A relatively small number of British and Canadian infantry, abut 6,000, with a tiny detachment of the newly formed U.S. Rangers, would stage an amphibious “demonstration” raid on the French port city of Dieppe. They were to occupy the city, gather intelligence, wreck the port facilities, and withdraw before the Germans could respond in force.

In the event, it was a total disaster. The German defenders were outnumbered 4-1, but inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers. Basically everything that you could do wrong in an amphibious combat landing, the Allied forces did. Tactically and operationally it achieved almost none of its goals, and most of the force was killed, wounded, or captured.

Strategically, though, it was a subtle but profound success. One purpose of the demonstration raid was to divert German resources to coastal defense, away from the Eastern Front. It did manage that to some degree, and the Germans did divert some significant resources to defend against follow-on raids that never materialized.

More importantly, the British and Americans learned how not to stage an amphibious assault and how not to conduct a cross-Channel invasion. Without the lessons learned at Dieppe, the D-Day landings less than two years later might themselves have been a similar disaster. That wouldn’t have led to a German victory (the balance of forces was tilted far too gravely against them), but the war might have dragged on for months longer, with far higher casualties on both sides, and ended with the U.S. in a far weaker position in Europe, and the U.S.S.R. in a far stronger position, with long term ramifications for the Cold War and beyond.

12

I’m tempted to say the Battle of Britain. Military casualties on both sides totalled about 4,000 deaths and less than 2,000 wounded. Yet it had a hugely significant impact on the outcome of the the greatest war in human history.

But: How significant was it really? Would the Germans have been able to invade even if the RAF had been completely wiped out? Many experts believe not - the Germans did not have the hardware to transport and supply an invasion force across the channel. So maybe it wasn’t very important.
However - if Britain had lost control of its own airspace, and the German bombers were free to roam at will over the country in daylight - would the British have removed Churchill, handed the reins over to Halifax and co, and signed something with Hitler, taking them out of the war? That means:
No German forces diverted to Italy and the Middle East to fight.
No need for a massive submarine force to attack British supply lines.
No massive anti-aircraft defences to protect German cities from British bombs.
Even if the US decided to fight Hitler - without the UK as a launching ground for an invasion of Europe, would it even have been possible (particularly once they were engaged with the Japanese).
And so - even if Hitler had still lost his war with Russia - once the Russians had got to Berlin, would they have stopped there if there were no Allied forces in Western Europe?

13

It might have been the first skirmish, but it wasn’t the cause of the war. There was already plenty of tension and military units nearby anyway.

It wasn’t Pearl Harbor or anything; just the initial skirmish. It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that something wouldn’t have happened right around the end of June/beginning of July 1754 in the general area of Jumonville Glen and Fort Necessity, whether or not Washington ambushed Jumonville or not.

14

Regardless, that is in fact what kicked off the fighting, and it just snowballed from there, since the conditions were set for that happening. Nobody’s claiming that Washington’s blunder was the ultimate cause of the war, but it definitely was the proximate cause.

15

My pick would be the Battle of Badr, fought in 624. It was a battle in which Muhammad fought off an attempt by local leaders to crush his religious movement. Only around twelve hundred people fought in the battle (with the Muslims outnumbered around three to one). If Muhammad had lost, Islam would have disappeared from history.

16

I can think of two interesting candidates:

In 1616, natives on the island Run (in the Banda Islands, part of modern-day Indonesia) pledged their allegiance to employees of the English East India Company, who defended it against the Dutch, who wanted to secure their monopoly in the spice trade. One historian called this the genesis of the British Empire. The English held off the Dutch for about 4 years, but eventually the island was taken. 45 years later, when negotiating the Treaty of Breda to end the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the English gave up any claims to Run, provided that the Dutch gave up their claims to another island. That other island was Manhattan.

There’s also Operation Gunnerside (1943) , in which Norwegian commandos (11 of them, I think) raided the Vemork power station and destroyed the source of heavy water for Germany’s atomic weapons research. No way to know what would have happened if they had failed, but probably not good.

17

Similarly, in 1981 fourteen Israel jets, in a very long-range raid, destroyed Iraq’s Osirak (Tammuz) nuclear reactor.. A nuclear-armed Iraq would have made the last 40 years of Middle-Eastern - and world - history very different.

18

The Battle of La Mesa, 1846. 600 American troops and sailors routed a force of 300 Californio lancers and artillery just south of Los Angeles securing the surrender and subsequent annexation of Alta California to the United States.

19

This one is very interesting, and I like the outside of the box thinking. It highlights the force multiplication of technology and especially atomic weapons. It certainly had a considerable impact on the war.

To quibble though, I wonder if the cities population should be counted as (unwilling) combatants since they were the direct targets of the strike?

20

I’m enjoying all of the responses so far and learning a lot!

I’m glad to see my prediction of a debate breaking out has come to pass. :slight_smile: