Flaming Pigs and Anti-Elephant Tactics DOCUMENTARY

War elephants were amongst the most feared battlefield units of history. Standing up to 3 meters tall and weighing almost 4 tons, these massive beasts were capable of unleashing massive damage on enemy formations. One must imagine the sheer terror of soldiers facing them for the first time. Even veteran troops were prone to dissolve into a rout as their comrades were trampled, gored, or smashed to pieces. It was therefore imperative that generals prepare themselves for battle with the mighty war elephant. We cover them in a separate video which I suggest you take a look at. In this video, we'll be covering the history of anti-elephant tactics. Today's video is sponsored by Babbel, the number one language learning app in the world. I love learning about the past and exploring new places to get immersed in their rich history. Therefore, it's always helpful for me to have a resource for learning new languages quickly and reliably. Babbel is a subscription-based learning app which has become my go-to solution for these sorts of problems. They offer 14 different languages with professionalized courses that take into account your native tongue. Babbel's approach rises above the competition thanks to bite-sized lessons for easy on-the-go learning tailored to real-life situations which you can actually customize to meet your specific language goals, be it for business, travel, food, or more. The app works across multiple devices which has been excellent as I swap between script writing on my desktop or going on a walk with my phone. Start learning a new language today by signing up for Babbel. Click the links in the description below to get a limited-time deal for 50% off your first six months. I hope you enjoy. Since elephants are close-range, heavy hitters, the most obvious counter-strategy would be to try and beat them from a distance. For much of antiquity, this would have meant using arrows and slings. Such weapons had quite long ranges and theoretically meant that you could unleash several volleys at incoming elephants before they reached you. But would that be enough? Well, elephant hides are actually quite thick and do a good job of protecting vital organs, meaning that scoring a kill shot would be quite hard. On top of this, many armies would equip their war elephants with armor to make them even more resilient to incoming fire. This could be anything from small, strategically placed padding to near full-body metal armor. So yeah, you would need a lot of firepower to bring one of these bad boys down. For example, the war elephant of the Mughal commander Akbar is said to have emerged victorious from battle with nearly 100 arrows sticking out of it. Volume of fire however might just do the trick, or being close enough to actually target weak points like the eyes or the driver. Alternatively, armies might decide to adopt special elephant-slaying projectiles. In India, this was often achieved by using all-iron arrows, which could cut deeply and were difficult to extract. Heavy caliber shots fired from torsion catapults like ballistas or scorpions could also be quite deadly. Ultimately however, anti-elephant tactics did not have to kill to be successful. More often than not, simply frightening the elephants was enough to get them to retreat or even run amok amongst their own troops. We have numerous examples of ranged weapons being able to achieve these results in critical battles like Thapsus. Thus, I'd highly suggest this option to any commander thinking of going up against war elephants, but it was not always a guarantee for success. Let's now look at other tactics. This next tactic keeps to the mentality of defeating the elephants before they get in range. There have been all sorts of traps devised throughout history and I am sure people will be posting their own in the comments below, but the main recurring ploy we see over and over again is the use of spike traps laid on the ground. Anyone who has owned Legos knows how powerful this can be. I'll share a couple interesting case studies. The first one took place during the siege of Megalopolis by the Macedonian general Polipercon in 317 BC during the Second War of the Diadochi. The city walls had been breached and the attackers were making ready to fled through the streets with a spearhead led by 65 war elephants. However, one of the defenders called Damis, a veteran of Alexander the Great's army, proposed that they set a trap. This involved actually clearing out a path through the debris of the city to funnel the enemy in, guiding them towards concealed boards studded with nails. Here's what happened. Quote, The Indian Mahouts did their part in urging the elephants to rush into the city all together, but the animals, as they charged violently, encountered the spike-studded frames. Wounded in their feet by the spikes, their own weight causing the points to penetrate, they could neither go forward any further nor turn back because it hurt them to move. At the same time, some of the Mahouts were killed by missiles of all kinds that poured upon them from the flanks. The elephants, suffering great pain because of the cloud of missiles and the nature of the wounds caused by the spikes, wheeled about through their friends and trod down many of them. Finally, the elephant that was the most valiant collapsed. Of the rest, some became completely useless and others brought death to many on their side. The idea caught on and other successor kings would begin to deploy their own spike traps. At the Battle of Gaza, for example, Ptolemy deployed caltrops linked together with iron chains to counter Demetrius' forces of 43 war elephants. When these charged the Egyptians, they fell upon the spikes, causing them great pain. The terrible screams of the frontline elephants panicked the rest, which now ran amok. This allowed Ptolemy to follow up with a swift assault that captured the elephants and routed the enemy army. We have references of other armies defending their fortifications or battle lines with all kinds of pits and spiky elements to ward off elephants. Back in India, these features were so common that actually most fortress gates were outfitted with spikes to repel elephant battering rams. However, these sorts of measures relied quite heavily on knowing precisely where the elephants would attack, which wasn't always a guarantee. Nonetheless, I'd rank them as one of the most effective anti-elephant tactics. Let's now move on to the next one. Another tactic would be the use of formations to mitigate the impact of elephants. This concept had been tested previously by Alexander the Great against the chariots of Darius at the Battle of Gagamella, where his men opened up lanes to allow them to pass harmlessly through the lines, at which point they were set upon from the flanks. The Roman general Scipio would do the same at the Battle of Zama when he deployed his maniples into lanes whose presence was hidden by skirmishers. When Hannibal's elephants charged, the light troops opened up the lanes, guiding the elephants through to the rear of the army where they could more easily be finished off. This was a spectacular success, but not one to be so easily replicated. Instead, most of the historical record points towards commanders opting for other tactics. Let's continue to cover these. As we have seen so far, one of the major weaknesses of the war elephants was their susceptibility to panic. Thus, another major tactic would be to get them to freak out psychologically using sights, sounds, and smells. Generally speaking, a wild elephant would freak out at most sensory experiences coming from a battlefield. However, war elephants were often trained to endure these. Thus, the trick in freaking them out was to expose them to something novel. One aspect of this was the use of extremely loud sounds. For instance, we have records of numerous battles where armies apparently yelled, blew horns, banged on drums, and created such a cacophony of noise as to repel the elephants. Yet this was not always a guarantee to work, and thus a prudent commander would ideally seek to Armies could use torches and other flaming elements to ward away elephants. Even greater effect would be achieved if one could use a flammable pitch to set alight an elephant, which would undoubtedly send the herd into a panic. But obviously, it would be hard to do this. Some commanders, however, were not dissuaded by such an obstacle, and simply looked for other animals to set alight in their attempts to counter war elephants. For example, we are told that when Antigonus laid siege to the city of Megara in 266 BC, the defenders rounded up some pigs, doused them in combustible pitch, set them alight, and unleashed them on the enemy ranks. The flaming, squealing pigs produced such horrific sights, sounds, and smells as to panic the entire elephant corps, which bolted in terror, trampling a great number of their own soldiers to death. It appears that the Roman army may have attempted to deploy this trick against the elephants of Pyrrhus at the Battle of Maleventum, although our records are spotty. They undoubtedly did play some role, as Roman coins minted during the period feature an elephant on one side, and a pig on the other. Later on, in 544 AD, we are told that during the Roman siege of Edessa, the defenders suspended a pig from the fortress walls, whose screams put Persian elephants to flight. On another occasion, the brilliant general Tamerlane is reported to have loaded his camels with wood and hay before setting these alight and sending them flying at the enemy. It too proved successful in panicking the enemy war elephants, and made for an easy victory. In my research, I also stumbled upon another interesting reference of animals being used to spook elephants. In 338 AD, the Sassanian king Shapur II was laying siege to the city of Nisibis, when a local bishop called upon God to send a swarm of bugs at them. These, quote, filled the hollow trunks of the elephants and the ears and nostrils of the horses and other animals. Finding the attack of these little creatures past endurance, they broke their bridles, unseated their riders, and threw their ranks into confusion. While obviously a fanciful tale, it does hint at the idea of people potentially using insects in warfare, which is quite fascinating. The last tactic I wanted to look at is the deployment of specialist anti-elephant units. There were likely many of these in Asian history, given the long service record of war elephants in regions like India. However, I had a hard time finding specific references to specialist forces. I urge anyone with more information to post below. With that being said, we first start to hear of anti-elephant troops in antiquity during the wars of the Diadochi, as elephants became increasingly common in the west. Such elephanto-makoi, or elephant fighters as they were called, often had spears or heavy chopping weapons to strike at exposed legs, tendons, or trunks. Additional gear might also be included, as was the case with Perseus of Macedon when he fought the Romans at Pydna. Apparently, he had his elephant fighters equipped with spiked helmets to prevent their heads from being grabbed, as well as spiked shields which could be thrown under the feet of elephants, like deployable caltrops. Unfortunately for him however, they don't seem to have had much of an impact in this case and were routed in battle. But the use of anti-elephant soldiers was not a lost cause. We have numerous stories of troops managing to close the distance with elephants and taking them down. Arab soldiers fighting the Sassanids, for instance, learned to pick off the elephant guards before swooping in to cut the girths, holding their haudas, leading them to topple over and make easy targets. Other times, we hear of individual soldiers in Roman, Persian, and Jewish armies, for example, battling with elephants one-on-one. The legendary Iranian king Bahram-Gur, even, is reported to have pulled off a feat worthy of Legolas. He is said to have charged an elephant with a bow, shot it between the eyes, then grabbing its trunk to pull the beast to the ground and finishing it off with the massive sword blow that severed its head. Pretty badass. Another fascinating anti-elephant unit worth mentioning are the 300 specialized wagons deployed by the Romans against Pyrrhus at the Battle of Aeschylus. Here's a description by the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus. These wagons had upright beams on which were mounted movable traverse poles that could be swung round as quick as thought in any direction one might wish, and on the ends of the poles were either tridents or sword-like blades or scythes all of iron, or again they had cranes that hurled down heavy grappling irons. Many of the poles had attached to them and projecting in front of the wagons fire-bearing grapnels wrapped in tow that had been liberally daubed with pitch, which men, standing on the wagons, were to set fire as soon as they came near the elephants, and then rain blows with them upon the trunks and faces of the beasts." This was quite the ingenious idea. However, Pyrrhus saw them being deployed on the wings and moved his elephants to the center while sending out skirmishers to disable the contraptions. This effectively countered the counter and allowed him to win the battle. I'm sure there are a ton more anti-elephant tactics recorded in history that I haven't covered. Definitely let me know in the comments below if you know of any, or feel free to chime in with your own novel ideas. I'll be looking forward to reading these. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this episode. A huge thanks to our patrons for suggesting this topic and financially supporting its production. Big shout out to the researchers, writers, and artists who made this video possible. And be sure to check out these other related videos about our fascinating past. See you in the next one.