Military Myopia

In Brief

Italian special forces descended to the hapless burg of Kristianstad, Sweden last week for routine NATO exercises. Unfortunately, the rest of NATO was chilling at Kristiansand, Norway. The names were close enough to cause a little confusion. The history of war and preparation thereof is full of little mistakes like these that could have proven disastrous. Just ask Greek general Pyrrhus, whose troops met an untimely end walking through the dark woods when they didn’t bring enough torches to see.

Party On

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The News

6/5/2000 Italian NATO regiments, trying to fight an "unfair and outdated" image of the Italian military as comically inept, landed in the wrong city on May 31 2000. Confusing Kristianstad, Sweden for Kristiansand, Norway, the soldiers never noticed that Sweden isn't even a NATO ally.

The cities of Kristiansand, Norway, and Kristianstad, Sweden, have mighty similar spellings. NATO might have noticed this when they convened troops from several nations for training, but didn't make a stink about it. They probably should have. The two names are so similar that when the elite Italian Alpine Corps sent 116 troops to Kristianstad for these exercises at the end of May, the troops rambled through the civilian airport dressed in camouflage and toting enormous packs around before realizing they'd been sent to the wrong city. The NATO forces were actually stationed in Kristiansand, some 250 miles (400 km) away. Uh-oh! Good thing there wasn't a war going on.

Lack of research and preparation kills a lot of military effort. It's a common ailment. In the not-so-distant past the United States accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia by using two-year-old maps,[1] nicely causing an international brouhaha and provoking not a few Chinese officials. Unlike a bunch of hulking, wildly-gesticulating Italians[2] getting lost, this unfortunate oversight wound up killing three embassy workers and injuring 27. Oops![3]

This motif, as one might imagine, continues back through history. Our favorite blunder in this department starts with a guy named Pyrrhus,[4] who was king of a state in northern Greece around 280 BC. He was Alexander the Great's first cousin, and was thinking that he might like to conquer Italy one day. Indeed, according to biographer Plutarch, Pyrrhus remarked that once the pesky native Romans had been offed, "there is neither barbarian nor Greek city there which is a match for us, but we shall at once possess all Italy." Sounds lovely.

Pyrrhus campaigned for some two years in Sicily, and his army of 40,000 encountered a Roman army of equal size in Maleventum in 275. For reasons we'll soon see, the Romans renamed the city Beneventum (it's Benevento today).

Pyrrhus decided the way to go about this attack was to send a substantial portion of his troops to the rear, through the woods, in the dark of night, to the top of ridge behind the Roman forces. Before sending the troops off, however, Pyrrhus had a dream wherein his teeth fell out and his mouth filled with blood. Freaked, he asked his generals to call the plan off, but was told it was too late.

The troops went, with war elephants aplenty and torches blazing, into the darkened forest. Unfortunately, whoever prepared the torches didn't anticipate the march to the ridge to be as long as it did, and the lights went out long before the Greeks got to where they needed to. They stumbled around in the brush, blinded, only reaching the ridge at dawn. At that point, however, the Roman soldiers saw them coming, and quickly put them to the sword.

Uh-oh. At least he still had some soldiers left. In prior contests, Pyrrhus' victories had come at the wastebasket-shaped feet of his charging war elephants, and he figured this time they would again make up for his staggering torch miscalculations. However, the Romans, long tired of being trampled underfoot by said pachyderms, came upon the bright idea of shooting spikes and hot things into the critters until they panicked. Their plan was a roaring success, for panic they did, trampling everything in sight. Squished or freaking[5], the Greeks broke formation and ran all over, where Romans made short work of them. Pyrrhus was forced to flee back to Greece, having lost some 30,000 troops.

We wish we knew what happened to Pyrrhus. After entertaining dreams as lofty as Alexander the Great's (it was Pyrrhus' ambition to conquer all land west of Greece) and contributing a fine expression to the English language, he settled into relative obscurity. The noble general met his end in a lowly street fight in the tiny town of Argos when a disgruntled woman heaved a roof tile on his noggin. What indignity!

Footnotes

1. One year ago May 7, for those playing along.
2. Don't you tell us Italian mountaineers don't gesticulate wildly. We know.
3. To be fair, there are credible folks who feel this bombing was intentional. Help yourself to a Salon aricle or a Canuck view.
4. Yes, of "Pyrrhic victory" fame. He remarked, after winning two battles that cost him 7500 troops, that "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined."
5. And we don't mean dancing a la Rick James.

 
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