Great Battles in History
Welcome to Great Battles in History. This podcast explores some of the most famous and most important battles in world history from ancient times to the Second World War. Each episode dives deeply into a single battle, investigating its origins, the course of combat, and the outcomes. We will examine the contending forces, including some of history’s most celebrated armies, navies, and air forces. We will meet great captains like Hannibal Barca, Saladin, Napoleon, and Chester Nimitz. We will also delve into the experiences of the soldier at the sharp end: the Spartan hoplite at Thermopylae, the English longbowman at Agincourt, the mounted samurai at Nagashino, the Soviet tanker at Kursk. Battles are regarded as events that change the course of history; the most important have been described as decisive. We will come to question this idea, for, as we’ll see, while a handful of battles do qualify as momentous, epochal turning points, most others—including not a few widely considered decisive—changed very little if anything at all. Finally, battles are more than just exercises of pure strategy and tactics; they are artifacts— creations of the political, social, economic and cultural forces of their times. To investigate great battles is to open up history in its widest sense.
Great Battles in History
Cannae, Part 1-Introduction
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Darryl Dee
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Season 1
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Episode 2
A note to listeners: In addition to the complete episode, I am publishing the Battle of Cannae in eight parts.
On August 2, 216 BCE, at Cannae in southern Italy, the largest army ever fielded by the Roman Republic was wiped out by the Carthaginian warlord Hannibal Barca and his army of African, Spanish, and Gallic veterans. The battle of Cannae is a tactical masterpiece that has been studied ever since by scholars and soldiers. It remains a byword for slaughter, for the total annihilation of an army. For Hannibal, Cannae confirmed that he was one of the greatest military geniuses in history. It also brought him to the brink of final triumph over Rome. For the Romans Republic, Cannae was the darkest hour in its history.