The Maginot line wasn’t overstaffed, and the bulk of the french army was on the Belgian border. That wasn’t the mistake made. The Ardennes ere understaffed, though.
Sorry for the OP, I don’t think such a ranking is possible, an if it were, the oldest battles probably would be the most significant, due to the long hain of different events trigerred.
However, I’m going to say, after other posters, that I don’t think Waterloo was important, except symbolically.
But eventually they won. They had already ousted Napoleon once the previous time. The british army didn’t play as important a role as you seem to think in Napoleonic wars. The UK primary role has been the naval blockade and a persistent refusal to come to terms with France coupled with a persistent diplomatic action against him. The campaign of Russia, for instance, was at least in part triggered by british diplomatic actions in Russia and the blockade issue, but the resulting war was essentially fought and won by Russia, Austria and Prussia. Conquest of France included.
The UK (and Prussia) happened to win the final battle against Napoleon (and more importantly Trafalgar) but Britain wasn’t the major player in these wars. And anyway, I highly doubt the UK would have given up after a mere defeat at Waterloo. Nothing in its previous behavior and stance let me think so.
Besides, even assuming a defeat, even assuming that the allies had chosen to come to terms with France, then what? Barring the extremely unlikely case of Napoleon conquering Europe again, you’d have had Napoleon insted of Louis XVIII reigning in France. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Talleyrand never seemed to have been interested in salvaging anything else than his head, social standing and bank account, anyway. All the rest was incidental to these main goals.
But the allies didn’t intend to change France into a pile of rubbles, anyway. They just wanted to oust Napoleon and more generally anything born out of the french revolution. And they were interested in long-term stability.
Whichever battle one might regard as decisive in Hannibal’s failure to crush Rome, that may be the most important “what if” in Western history. At least equal to the Marathon I think, though the comments about the destruction of Jerusalem are really intriguing-no second diaspora?
In modern times, I feel the “battle” of Dunkirk is extraordinary: If the BEF is lost wholesale, even Churchill cannot hold out to the tremendous pressure to sue for peace-and no two front war for the nazis,which leaves them free to attack S.U. in May as planned,reaching Moscow in all likelyhood before the fall rains. And in this campaign, no doubt the critical battle on which the outcome of the war turns is the one before Moscow-whoever wins there wins the war. Once denied the knockout blow, Germanie’s fate in S.U. is sealed,with or without American entry to the war.
While it might not have altered the England was then Viking victories at Stampford Bridge and then over the Normans would almost certainly changed the way the world is now. There would be no French influence on the English language and no Hundred Years War, among other things.
I disagree. Certainly it is difficult to imagine all of history as we know it hinging on a single event but nevertheless I think it can. Perhaps it is human nature to suppose that the course of history is more a force of nature and no single event amounts to more than spitting into the wind.
You mention Alexander and wonder which battle it was that was “the” turning point and inasmuch as this thread goes I think you may be correct. It is difficult to say just where it was that Alexander had gone far enough to essentially lock in the Greeks as a major aspect of world history. Nevertheless I think if Alexander did die young in the Battle of Issus (I think that is the one where he came very, very close to getting killed) it is not too far fetched to think Rome and/or Persia would have dominated the area. What then of all the nifty ideas that percolated from the Greeks (Democracy anyone?). Even if you suppose that the idea of Democracy would eventually get “invented” how you could ever suppose that the world would have turned out largely as it did. It can only be speculation on how it might be different but I think it is a pretty safe bet history would be very noticeably changed from how we see it today.
I know it goes against the OP restrictions but what about Sennacherib going after Jerusalem in 701 B.C.? Had that battle followed through he would have squished what was then just the very beginnings of Judaism. No Judaism no Muslim or Christian religions which sprouted from it. Might Judaism have survived anyway? Maybe. Might monothesitic religions come about anyway? Probably. But surely it is not too far fetched to think the world would have played out very differently had Judaism been smashed before it ever really got started.
I’m a bit of an adherent to the ‘Great Man’ theory. I’m of the opinion that one man, let alone one battle, can change the course of history. That said, I want to be able to back up my case, and have to re-read certain sections of my notes before I get serious on this…
But what if the North had won at First Manassas? Given that, and the victories leading to Richmond, it’s possible that the momentum could have carried enough to defeat Lee in Seven Days. Civil war ends, no Crittenden-Johnson Resolution being necessary, after the victory at First Manassas. No declaration of slavery as being one of the reasons the war is being fought. States come back in, sullenly, and possibly rebel a second time twenty to thirty years later, leading to WWI on our doorstep.
I say the South’s victory at First Manassas was a turning point, because, while it led to the long Civil War, it also led to a lasting peace in the country, and our isolationist standpoint leading to the first World War. If we had continued war against ourselves, the entire 20th century could be very different. Our war materials would have been of WWII quality in WWI, but they also would have been needed at home.
I think sturmhauke makes a good argument. The Battle of France (assuming one can call it a battle) was a decisive turning point. The French did have the potential to win and the results would have been huge if they had.
Interesting stuff in this thread. I would argue, however, that there was no danger of Germany breaking through Stalingrad to reach the Caucasus oilfields.
If you look at a map here you’ll see that Stalingrad was off to the side of the route to the oilfields. Hitler felt that taking the city would “secure the flank of the drive to the oilfields”, but his generals (Manstein especially, if I recall correctly) did not, and definitely did not want to be tied down in a city fight. As both sides rushed reinforcements to Stalingrad, however, Hitler was seduced into drawing off forces from the southern drive toward the oilfields. Those forces wouldn’t have been able to return in time and take the oilfields even if Stalingrad had fallen; it was the attempt to take Stalingrad that doomed the Germans to never capture the oil – not the defeat itself.
RickJay mentions Kursk. Kursk was another enormous battle with great loss of life and equipment, but I suppose I can’t call it decisive. It was more like “two titans pound each other into exhaustion”, and pretty much used up both sides for 1943. For decision, Stalingrad – or maybe 1944’s Operation Bagration, which destroyed German fighting power and drove them pretty much back to Poland – would be better choices.
Regarding the “Antietam versus Gettysburg” debate, I’d choose…Vicksburg. 
Split the South and was a clear signal that the North was dominating at last. Also, there’s much to be said for the restoration of free navigation of the Mississippi keeping the northwestern states in the war effort; they had been feeling an ecomnomic pinch.
That said, the argument for Antietam is threefold: as already mentioned, its effects on potential European intervention and the Emancipation Proclamation; but it also interrupted a tide of Confederate victories that were threatening to break the morale of the Army of the Potomac. Gettysburg also marked a change in the flow, but its principal effect was to grind down Lee’s offensive options via attrition.
When contrasting the results of the battles, the emotional resonance is sort of like this: Gettysburg’s “fought to a standstill and took away the initiative by means of attrition” versus Antietam’s “freed the slaves, avoided expansion into a world war, and reversed a rising tide of victory”, Antietam feels more decisive. Even though Gettysburg was unquestionably a huge victory and a dramatic event.
Sailboat
I’ll put in a vote for the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
It ended French control of North America and assured British dominence on the continent. Without the French Threat and the English attempted solution to deal with the thousands of French colonists now under their control (The Quebec Act) this would pave the way for the American Revolution. That would eventually lead to the creation of the loyalist colonty of Upper Canada. Two nations seeded out of one battle.
Quebec marked a turning point, but I don’t think it was a turning point, if you get my drift. France had pretty much written off New France at that point by refusing to send reinforcements to Montcalm. “When the house is on fire, one does not concern oneself with the barns” is the way the King put it. Britain had already captured Louisberg and the rest of the St. Lawrence, and had been systematically burning out French settlers all summer. Quebec would have fallen eventually, whether Wolfe had won on the Plains of Abraham or not.
I think Gettysburg’s reputation as the turning point has grown in retrospect because people now see it as the last Confederate offensive into the north. After the defeat at Antietam, the Confederates were able to launch a new offensive, so by definition, the 1862 Maryland campaign didn’t defeat them. If the Confederates had been able to pull together another invasion of the north after their 1863 Pennsylvania campaign, then Gettysburg would be regarded as an operational rather than a strategic defeat.
And you left out one of the major effects of Vicksburg. It cemented Grant’s reputation and led to him being given overall command of the Union armies. If the Confederates had won at Vicksburg, Meade or Butler or Sigel might have been in command in Virginia in 1864.
Besides, Stalingrade wasn’t so much a battle as a seige.
The German Sixth Army was successful in taking most of the city, although they paid a heavy price for it. But, it was the encirclement of the city by the Russians that led to thier demise. They were surrounded by many times their number and cut off from resupply. There was never any chance of victory after this point.
I’d wager that even if the Germans pushed through Stalingrad, they would just have gotten cut off and surrounded some other place later. The Russian vs German element of WWII was more about logistics and materials than tactics. I wouldn’t say that any particular battle was so important as to really change anything.
I would say just the opposite: Every battle changes the course of history, just some more than others. I think that the question here is which changed the course of history the most.
One “battle” I haven’t seen mentioned here, but I would rank as one of the most significant in the 20th Century, if not all of modern history, is Hiroshima/Nagasaki. It wasn’t a battle in the sense of a defined conflict between two matched opponents, but had anti-air opposition or technical difficulties prevented the dropping of the two atomic bombs, the course of history thereafter would be significantly different.
First, in the short term, the atomic bombs precipitated the surrender of Japan. Although there is considerable debate over what the alternatives would have been had the atomic bombing campaign not succeeded, no one can dispute that grave and unprecendented destruction they caused was an important factor in causing Japan to surrender, rather than continue its professed strategy of fighting to the end.
More significantly, Hiroshima/Nagasaki framed the Cold War, and all of the hotter wars within it, as well as the entire global political strategy for the second half of the 20th Century. Without the example of the unthinkable destruction that could be caused by the earliest generation of nuclear weapon, it is unlikley that we would have had only limited wars between the major powers (or their surrogates) like the Vietnam, Korean and Soviet-Afganistan Wars and many smaller conflicts. The idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, in which both sides refrained from acting based on fear of a nuclear holocaust, kept the East and West from entering World War III. Meanwhile, the need for military spending for nuclear parity that could never be used, except in the most unthinkable circumstances, was an important cause of the eventual downfall of the Soviet Bloc.
I guess that’s what a lot of this sort of debate comes down to:
Do you mean that history would be different if the two single events of dropping the bombs didn’t work as planned? If so, I’d disagree. The US would simply have sent another bomber to do the job, then another, until they were successful. Very little would be changed.
If you mean that history would be different if no bombing was ever to have happened then I would agree. But, how would this be possible? To re-write history so that the US didn’t invent the bomb or that Japan surrendered without it being dropped is more than simply changing the results of a battle. It’s changing much more.
It’s the same with Stalingrad. What other possible outcome was there? The Germans had weak armies at thier flanks, which were overrun. That resulted in them being surrounded. Over the next couple months they starved and ran out of gas and bullets until they eventually were ground down by the Russians. Then they were all killed. To change any of this would require some real history re-writing, or some real unrealistic battle sequences with good special effects!
That’s why I chose First Manassas. If things had gone differently, I can (and hope I did) mak the case that things would have become significantly different.
Hm. First Conquistador battle… no, more would have come, and General Disease won it as much as anything.
Loss of the 6 Day’s War would have eliminated Israel. Think that would have changed much?
Yes, but the failure to crush Rome wasn’t the result of a single battle. In fact, the Battle of Cannae illustrates the exact opposite idea of the decisive battle. Cannae was an incredibly one-sided victory for Carthage. But Hannibal couldn’t defeat the Romans with it. If Hannibal had lost, we could be asking the opposite question “What if Hannibal had won the Battle of Cannae?”, and believe that Cannae was a decisive battle and if Hannibal had won there would be no Roman Empire. But as we know from reality, the answer is that nothing would have changed, the Romans would still have defeated Carthage…eventually.
I think battles like Stalingrad and Kursk and Gettysburg and the Battle of Britain and Waterloo are battles of this nature, where the counterfactual case wouldn’t have changed history much, while one side or another might win one battle or another, the winner of the war was overdetermined.
But I’m really liking the example of the WWII German offensive into France. Germany won a resounding victory and occupied France and secured their western front for years. But it was a very close thing, a few changes and France might have stalled the advance. And if the advance stalls, then WWII turns into something completely different. Hitler would almost certainly be kicked out as a bumbler instead of lionized as a decisive winner, although Germany likely won’t be successfully invaded by France. What does Stalin do with German expansionism stopped? Is there a Soviet invasion of a disorganized Germany? And without the lessons of the long German advance into Russia, is the Red Army even capable of offensive operations? Without the Great Patriotic War, can Stalin hold onto power in the Soviet Union? Can Japan risk war with Britain, France, the US and the Netherlands if they aren’t fighting for their lives against Germany?
The real-world WWII redrew the map across Europe, and set the stage for the Cold War, decolonialisation, NATO, the UN, and on and on. I don’t think it’s out of the question to imagine France stopping the German Blitzkrieg cold with a little bit better planning and intelligence, and if the offensive stops then WWII fizzles before it really starts.
Psst… post #36
Antietam vs. Gettysburg
(N.B. neither made my top 5 list – this is sort of a mini-Highjack I,semi-appropriately at the time, started)
**Antietam **
Lee’s strategy in the First Invasion was to seek new supplies and fresh men from Maryland, if not to ignite an actual revolution in the state and have it join the Confederacy. All that and an emotional desire to take the War to the enemy. Even if the South had forced the Union from the field more decisively – it was after all a tactical Southern “victory” in that they held their ground- none of that (save the supplies) was really going to happen
Would Britain and France committed heavily and publicly to the Southern Cause if Lee had forced the Union Army from the field and raided and burned around Pennsylvania? It certainly WASN’T Going to happen after Antietam, I 100% agree with that. But to say that Antietam PREVENTED that intervention? I am going to call shenanigans on that idea.
Among the arguments for Antietam the one I buy least is that the Emancipation Proclamation was not possible without it. The E.P. sat in Lincoln’s desk for months waiting for a Union Victory. For Antietam to equal freeing the slaves we have to believe a Union loss in Maryland ’62 meant that no Union victories would ever follow. I find that a dubious proposition.
Gettysburg
But rather than argue and rail against the bloodiest day in the bloody history of the Western hemisphere, ever. I’d rather argue for Gettysburg‘s significance.
Lee, the aggressor, risked everything he had on victory. He lost 1/3 of his men before he thought the effort not worth it and called a halt to the battle. A Southern victory would have meant Baltimore, and Philadelphia were open to Southern attack, even Washington would not be out of the question (though not defenseless). Lee believed that victory in the North at that time and place (a victory in what became the Battle of Gettysburg) would force the Union to abandon the siege of Vicksburg. He may well have been right. Lee also hoped that a decisive victory in the Northern campaign might force Lincoln to sue for peace. I doubt that.
Bottom-line
Gettysburg was, to Lee (&me), about winning the war. The outcome of a more decisive Southern Victory in Antietam might well have been best case scenario scrounging badly needed supplies, or getting ~5,000 Marylanders to join the Confederate Army or the CSA getting to open an embassy in London before Lee would have scampered back to Virginia a short time after he actually did. The outcome of a Southern victory in Gettysburg may have meant the siege of Vicksburg lifted, Philadelphia burned, all major Union Offensive actions delayed at least 6 months, and maybe longer, & quite possibly McClellan elected President the next year. Of these two Battles, Gettysburg outcome was the more decisive to History (but not a top 5 Alltimer).
QUOTE=Lemur866]Yes, but the failure to crush Rome wasn’t the result of a single battle. In fact, the Battle of Cannae illustrates the exact opposite idea of the decisive battle. Cannae was an incredibly one-sided victory for Carthage. But Hannibal couldn’t defeat the Romans with it. If Hannibal had lost, we could be asking the opposite question “What if Hannibal had won the Battle of Cannae?”, and believe that Cannae was a decisive battle and if Hannibal had won there would be no Roman Empire. But as we know from reality, the answer is that nothing would have changed, the Romans would still have defeated Carthage…eventually.
I think battles like Stalingrad and Kursk and Gettysburg and the Battle of Britain and Waterloo are battles of this nature, where the counterfactual case wouldn’t have changed history much, while one side or another might win one battle or another, the winner of the war was overdetermined.
But I’m really liking the example of the WWII German offensive into France. Germany won a resounding victory and occupied France and secured their western front for years. But it was a very close thing, a few changes and France might have stalled the advance. And if the advance stalls, then WWII turns into something completely different. Hitler would almost certainly be kicked out as a bumbler instead of lionized as a decisive winner, although Germany likely won’t be successfully invaded by France. What does Stalin do with German expansionism stopped? Is there a Soviet invasion of a disorganized Germany? And without the lessons of the long German advance into Russia, is the Red Army even capable of offensive operations? Without the Great Patriotic War, can Stalin hold onto power in the Soviet Union? Can Japan risk war with Britain, France, the US and the Netherlands if they aren’t fighting for their lives against Germany?
The real-world WWII redrew the map across Europe, and set the stage for the Cold War, decolonialisation, NATO, the UN, and on and on. I don’t think it’s out of the question to imagine France stopping the German Blitzkrieg cold with a little bit better planning and intelligence, and if the offensive stops then WWII fizzles before it really starts.
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Yeah, in fact Hannibal seemed to always win the battles but lose the war, but my point was more that it was a very close thing indeed, and seems to me could easily have gone the other way overall-maybe the disadvantage of a mercenary army fighting for booty against people knowing a loss meant extinction was really too great.
Perhaps the battle of France could have gone the other way, but it sure didn’t look close at the time nor from hindsight. But with a different high command, different strategic thinking, different army organization(armored units rather than tanks mixed with slow heavy infantry), different army moral, it COULD have been close.
I persist in thinking that the battle before Moscow was THE battle of the European war. Failing there, for Nazi GErmany, it was just a matter of time. In the spring offensive of '42, the Soviet retreat is strategic, though quite costly, really more a matter of drawing the Germans in deeper but not too deep to set them upfor the counterattack-Stalin learned he had to quit shooting his good officers, and it showed here. The Chechen oil would have been useless to the Nazis for years due to Soviet scorched earth, so the overall point of the offensiveis unclear to me-Hitler’s strategic genius at work again?
The offensive at Kursk looks like a suicide mission to me more than a deciscive battle-could the Germans count? Attrition wouldn’t work. So I guess I more or less agree with your general point, though on the battle of Britain I might hold out.