Random Modern Photos Of The Deadliest Battles In History (30 items)

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  (#1) Battle of Thermopylae

  The most famous "last stand" in military history occurred when several thousand Greek hoplites - stiffened by a core of 300 professional Spartan soldiers led by King Leonidas - chose the narrow "hot gates" of Thermopylae as the place to stop a massive invasion of Greece by overwhelming Persian forces under King Xerxes I.

  The Spartans lost their lives to a man, but not before severely bloodying the Persians' nose. The battle inspired further resistance by the Greeks, who would soon turn back the Persians altogether, and it has echoed in history ever since.
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  (#2) Battle of Iwo Jima

  The end game of the Pacific War kicked into high gear with the American invasion of this tiny island 750 miles south of Tokyo. Japanese defenders, unable to evacuate or be reinforced, put up an incredibly tenacious fight, leading to heavy casualties on both sides.

  Mount Suribachi, where the historically remembered photo of the Iwo Jima flag-raising was taken, is on the island's southwest corner. 
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  (#3) Battle of Gettysburg

  • Military Conflict

  The greatest battle of the Civil War was a three-day slugfest between Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and George Meade's Army of the Potomac, fought just outside a small town in Southern Pennsylvania. After a terrible struggle in which more than 7,000 men lost their lives, and thousands more were wounded, Lee's invasion of the North was blunted. Today, the battlefield is well-preserved, dotted with monuments to regiments and officers, and is an essential part of any Civil War buff's education.
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  (#4) Battle of the Somme

  • Military Conflict

  A massive Anglo-French assault taking place in the summer of 1916, the Somme Offensive has, for subsequent generations, come to encapsulate the terror of WWI. Allied troops went "over the top," leaving the safety of their trenches, and suffered enormous casualties from German defensive firepower.

  Though the battle would go on for months, the first day - in which over 19,000 British soldiers lost their lives - has haunted the world's memory for over a hundred years.
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  (#5) Battle of Cannae

  The Carthaginian general Hannibal, universally regarded as one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, smashed a force of over 80,000 Roman soldiers at this battlefield in southern Italy. Hannibal's brilliant tactics - achieving a double envelopment which totally surrounded the Romans and allowed them to be essentially slaughtered like cattle - are studied to this day.

  His brilliance wasn't enough in the end; Rome would prevail in the Second Punic War and destroy Carthage in the Third.
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  (#6) Battle of Marathon

  • Military Conflict

  At the beginning of the 5th century BCE, Persia was the greatest empire in the world, and Greece was a collection of squabbling city-states. If you had to place bets on who would beat whom in a conflict, it would be a pretty easy call. But that all changed near the sea at Marathon, where Athenian troops repelled an amphibious landing by Persian infantry.

  After that it was game on, although it would be another 160 years before the Greeks, now led by Alexander the Great, brought down the Persians once and for all.
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  (#7) Battle of the Little Bighorn

  Near the Little Bighorn river in southeastern Montana Territory, combined forces of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, annihilated the 7th Cavalry regiment commanded by George Armstrong Custer. 268 men of the regiment, including Custer himself, lost their lives. The battle has since gone into legend as "Custer's Last Stand."
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  (#8) Battle of Agincourt

  Immortalized in Shakespeare's Henry V, the Battle of Agincourt was a key engagement of the Hundred Years' War. The efficacy of the English longbow was shown as King Henry's archers proved more than a match for mounted French knights. The battle was named for a nearby castle which is no longer standing.
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  (#9) Battle of the Hydaspes

  Alexander the Great's thirst for conquest led him as far east as the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent (modern-day Pakistan). Here, by the banks of the Jhelum river, Alexander's Macedonian veterans battled the army of the Indian king Porus.

  Though victorious, Alexander was impressed enough with his opponent that he made Porus a satrap (regional governor) to rule in his stead. Alexander would have pushed on further east, but his army threatened to mutiny and he reluctantly turned back for home.
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  (#10) Battle of Culloden

  The Jacobite Uprising of 1745 reached a climax at Culloden, in the Scottish highlands, where a British force commanded by the Duke of Cumberland defeated forces loyal to James Stuart and his son Charles ("Bonnie Prince Charlie"), who had hoped to restore the Stuart line to the British succession.

  The last pitched battle fought in Britain, it was a decisive victory for Cumberland and dealt a crippling blow to the Jacobite cause.
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  (#11) Second Battle of Fort Wagner

  This ill-fated assault by Union troops under Captain Robert Gould Shaw against a fortified Confederate battery in South Carolina was dramatized in the film Glory. Although the attack was repulsed with heavy casualties (including Shaw, who lost his life that day), it was a showcase for the tenacious fighting skills of the now-famous 54th Massachusetts, one of the first all-Black regiments to be mustered for the Union cause.
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  (#12) Battle of Actium

  The future of the Roman world was decided at this naval engagement, in which the fleets of Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) and Mark Antony clashed for supremacy. The fleets met at the mouth of a harbor in western Greece; Octavian's force, led by the skilled admiral Marcus Agrippa, would carry the day.

  Soon afterward, Antony and his legendary lover, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, ended their own lives.
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  (#13) Battle of Alesia

  Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul was sealed with this battle that was as much a display of Roman engineering skill as fighting prowess. Besieging the Gauls, Caesar had a wall built around Alesia, a town in what is now eastern France, then built a second wall to keep a Gaulish relief force from coming to the town's aid.

  The impressive victory established Caesar's reputation as Rome's greatest general and triggered the civil wars that would transform the Republic into the Empire.
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  (#14) Battle of Blenheim

  A major battle of the early-18th-century War of the Spanish Succession, Blenheim is not quite the household name that Waterloo or Agincourt are. But its outcome - a decisive victory of the Anglo-Dutch-Austrian Grand Alliance against a coalition led by France's Louis XIV - cast a long shadow on European history.

  Contested on a field near the small village of Blindheim on the Danube River, the battle cemented the Duke of Marlborough's reputation as one of the greatest commanders in English history.
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  (#15) Battle of Tours

  In the 8th century, the Umayyad Caliphate stretched from Iran to Spain. Conquest of Europe seemed within its reach, but this ambition was blunted in 732 when the Frankish forces of Charles Martel stopped an Umayyad invasion led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi.

  The battle was fought between the cities of Poitiers and Tours in the Aquitaine region of western France. Had it gone the other way, the history of Europe might have been very different.
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  (#16) Battle of Waterloo

  • Military Conflict

  Napoleon's dreams of European domination finally ended near a small town in Belgium, where his army encountered an Anglo-Prussian force led by the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blucher. A day's brutal fighting decided the contest, which Wellington later characterized as "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life."
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  (#17) Battle of Shiloh

  • Military Conflict

  The first major engagement in the Western theater of the American Civil War took place near a small church named Shiloh. Confederate forces under Albert Sydney Johnson caught Ulysses Grant's Union troops by surprise, pushing them back to the Tennessee River amid the bloodiest fighting that had yet been seen in the war.

  The unflappable Grant withstood the storm, and the arrival of Union reinforcements the following day turned the tide.
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  (#18) Battle of Gqokli Hill

  • Military Conflict

  The Zulu leader Shaka has long been celebrated for his tactical and organizational genius, which turned his people into a potent fighting force. At Gqokli Hill, south of present-day Ulundi in South Africa, the Zulus demonstrated their superior new tactics by defeating an army of the Ndwandwe Paramountcy that was more than twice the Zulus force's size.
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  (#19) Battles of Saratoga

  • Military Conflict

  Saratoga was actually two battles, separated by a couple of weeks, in which British forces of General John Burgoyne, invading the Colonies from Canada, attempted to avoid being surrounded by General Horatio Gates's American troops.

  Battling through the forests of upstate New York, Burgoyne failed and was forced to surrender his army. The defeat, a massive blow to British prestige, helped persuade the French government that the colonists could actually win their quixotic revolution and were worth helping.
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  (#20) Battle of Antietam

  The deadliest single day of American military history occurred near Sharpsburg, Maryland, where Union forces under General George B. McClellan halted the first invasion of the North by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Although the outcome was a tactical draw, the battle broke Lee's string of victories and provided a window for Abraham Lincoln to enact his Emancipation Proclamation, changing the character of the war.
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  (#21) Battle of Austerlitz

  Austerlitz was Napoleon's masterpiece, one of the greatest examples of generalship in military history. Contending against allied forces of Russia and the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon deliberately weakened his right flank in order to entice the enemy into a trap - a risky gambit that paid off spectacularly.

  The battle, fought in what is now the Czech Republic near the town of Slavkov u Brna, cemented Napoleon's control of continental Europe - for a time.
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  (#22) Battle of Gaugamela

  At Gaugamela, 25-year-old Macedonian king Alexander III (AKA "the Great") completed his conquest of Persia, defeating Darius III's force, which outnumbered Alexander by at least two to one. The mighty Persian empire, which had menaced Greece repeatedly in the previous two centuries, was now Alexander's to rule.

  Eventually, the legendary leader's gaze would turn East and he would lead his army as far as India in pursuit of more conquests.
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  (#23) Battle of Boyacá

  Simon Bolivar, the great liberator of South America, freed New Granada (later Colombia) from Spanish control at this engagement not far from Bogota. With his fellow commander Francisco de Paula Santander, Bolivar split the Spanish force in half, taking almost 2000 prisoners before advancing on Bogota itself.
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  (#24) Battle of Rorke's Drift

  The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 included several battles, but the most famous is likely Rorke's Drift, where 150 British and colonial soldiers fought off a Zulu force some twenty times their size. The battle was dramatized in the 1964 film Zulu, featuring Michael Caine.
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  (#25) Battle of Yamen

  Given the astonishing success of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, perhaps it was inevitable that they would subjugate their Chinese neighbors to the south. The hostile takeover was completed in 1279 when naval forces of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty attacked the coastal city of Yamen, where the embattled Song Dynasty was making its last stand.

  Despite the efforts of Song General Zhang Shijie, the heavily outnumbered Yuan forces under Zhang Hongfan combined blockade tactics with a massive infantry assault to finish off their enemy, many of whom jumped into the sea and drowned rather than be taken alive.
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  (#26) Battle of Balaclava

  An engagement of the Crimean War, the Battle of Balaclava - in which British, French and Ottoman forces faced off against Russians outside the besieged city of Sevastopol - is perhaps best remembered today in the English-speaking world as the site of the famous "Charge of the Light Brigade," immortalized in Tennyson's poem.

  Due to a communication mixup, the Brigade was sent on a disastrous frontal assault against Russian artillery emplacements. The doomed charge notwithstanding, the battle was inconclusive.
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  (#27) Battle of Zama

  • Military Conflict

  Hannibal, one of the toughest opponents the Romans ever faced, met his match in Scipio Africanus at this decisive final engagement of the Second Punic War. The battle was joined on a plain in modern-day Tunisia. Despite deploying some 80 war elephants and slightly outnumbering Scipio, Hannibal was defeated, an event which paved the way for Rome's domination of the Mediterranean world.
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  (#28) Battle of Sekigahara

  This battle between rival clan alliances was fought in Japan's modern-day Gifu Prefecture. Forces under Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the loyalists of his rival Toyotomi Hideyori, consolidating Tokugawa's power. Soon Japan would be unified under the Tokugawa Shogunate, which would rule the islands for 250 years.
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  (#29) Battle of Nicopolis

  In the 14th century, the rising Ottoman Empire was seen as a direct threat to the continued power of Catholicism in Europe. A large pan-European army - including Hungarians under King Sigismund II, as well as French and Burgundian knights under the nobleman Enguerrand VII de Coucy - attacked the forces of Sultan Bayezid I just south of the city of Nicopolis on the Danube in Bulgaria.

  Due in part to a rash charge by the European knights, the day went to the Ottomans, who would clash with Eastern and Central Europe many more times in the centuries to come.
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  (#30) Battle of Lens

  The last major engagement of the epic - and devastating - Thirty Years' War was contested not far from the town of Lens in northern France's Pas-de-Calais region. French soldiers under the Prince de Condé decisively defeated a Spanish force of about the same size, leading to the signing of the Peace of Westphalia. Condé would gain a reputation as one of the most capable French generals of all time.

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