What was the greatest battle of all time?

Is that nigga throwing his rifle?

what else you supposed to do when you run out of boolet??

Battle of Austerlitz

Vive L'Empereur

troy

>Not the 710 Siege of Constantinople

Absolutely plebeian.

Battle of Vienna

>20,000 Polish, Austrian and German cavalry led by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski and spearheaded by 3000 heavily armed Polish hussars charged the Ottoman lines. This is the largest cavalry charge in history.

Yarmouk.

Leyte Gulf. Largest naval battle in history, last proper fleet on fleet engagement in history, and the climactic naval engagement of the largest war in history.

I don't know, maybe wait a moment then defend yourself as one of a long line of pole arm wielding professional soldiers.

Instead, that guy is like "Fuck waiting, I hate samurai so fucking much that I'm gonna throw my weapon into this one dude's throat. It doesn't matter if I'm hewn into rifleless chunks afterwords, that would be a preferable fate to having to wait three more seconds to stab this silly hatted, feudal douche."

the battle for minas tirith

Zama.

Battle of the Red cliffs

based

I bet you're a blast at parties.

Cannae or Austerlitz

Auerstaedt though

Auschwitz

6 million casualties in total, no one can beat that

Vienna, 1684

Battle of Gaugamela

How's April vacation going? Honestly if you're over the age of 16 please correct me.

youtube.com/watch?v=9TNF2sZQoV8

...

Stalingrad

OP is a faggot
Learn to use google

Battle of the Catalaunian plains, in terms of pure pre-mechanized carnage

Battle of Kursk

Stalingrad was brutal urban fighting but Kursk was probably the last massive field battle with thousands of tanks fighting thousands of other tanks in open ground. I hope if there's an afterlife, I get to be a spooky ghost and travel back in time to spectate Kursk.

Battle of Zama, when the Romans decisively defeated their Carthaginian adversaries and permanently established control over two sides of the Mediterranean sea.

seige of stalingrad. bonus points if someone links the mock up lord of the rings did when the nazgul come out.

I would say Marathon, Salamis and Plataea, just because of the massive effects these would have had on history if the greeks lost.

Austerlitz is my favourite

this is also a battle id like to view

If the Greeks had lost.... What?

The Persians would have looted for a while, collected tribute for a few years, like in any other part of their empire and.... what?

Objectively correct, I don't think of stalingrad as a battle though, more of a seige.

This is when western civilization is born

>Greece gets conquered
>Greece becomes subdued along with each of its city state values
>Hellenism never spreads into the middle east because there will be no Macedonia to conquer it
Seriously?

Gettysburg

Not because it was the largest or most bloodiest, but because it typifies elements of many great battles combined into a great epic. I'll explain.

>Location

The Gettysburg battlefield itself is a very picturesque site. Rolling hills, wheat fields, streams, flowers blooming. This peaceful little town was the last place where one would expect one of the most important battles of the Civil War to take place.

>Scale

Gettysburg was the largest engagement in the largest (and bloodiest) military confrontation in the Western Hemisphere. Not even the Conquest of the Americas can hold a candle to the titanic clash between North and South.

>Epiciness

The Battle of Gettysburg, along with the Civil War as a whole has been seared into the American psyche as one of the most epic event in its history. A defining moment. Even today, its ramifications are still felt far and wide.

>Clash of the Titans

North and South fought with two of the largest armies ever assembled on the continent, both at roughly equal strength. Victory was not decided by who had more men, but by who held the best ground.

>Race against Time

Both sides were locked a deadly race where who got to the top of the hill first meant the difference between victory or death. Renyolds' race to relieve Buford before the gray wall swallowed his meager division up whole. General Hood's race up the slopes of Little Round Top in a bid to reach the summit before the 20th Maine got there.

>Tragedy

The showdown between former comrades Lewis Armistead and Winfield Scott Hancock. General Pickett's heartbreak after watching his division be decimated. Wesley Culp, who died on the very hill that bore his family's name.

>Few against Many

Buford vs. Heth on the first day, 20th Maine vs Hood's division on the second, Armistead's men who got the wall vs. literally everyone else on the third.

Continued in next post

The Brusilov offensive

>Forlorn hope

Buford's initial sense of apprehension let to the battle occurring the first place by stubbornly holding until the Union Army could arrive in force. Hood's pleading with Longstreet for permission bypass Little Round Top. Longstreet's repeated urging Lee to cut his losses and carry on the fight elsewhere.

>Decisiveness

Gettysburg is only rivaled by Vicksburg and Antietam as the single most consequential engagement of the Civil War. It reversed the Confederacy's fortunes and began it's inexorable downfall.

>Neutral observer

One of the most important contemporary accounts of the battle was written by Colonel Arthur Fremantle of Great Britain, who was visiting the Confederate Army camp at the time.

>The Great Charge

The 20th Maine's counter attack and all of the Confederate actions.

>Last Stand

Buford and Custer's cavalry and the 20th Maine narrowly avoided this fate by taking desperate measures (against standing orders) at the last moment. Armistead's brigade, along with the 26th North Carolina and 11th Mississippi did suffer this fate in their practically suicidal final charge against Cemetery Ridge, despite having reached their objective, they were simply too exhausted and outnumbered to stand a chance and were effectively wiped out within minutes.

It's the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny of Late Antiquity, and the last hurrah of the Roman army of the West.

>Hand-to-hand combat
>siege

???

>greatest in terms of what
OP is probably implying culturally relevant battles that had great lasting effects. This kinda question is pretty much a free for all since its asking for cultural bias and therefore will have thousands of different answers.

A more concrete question could be framed in such ways like "which battle had the most amount of people fighting?" "which battle employed the largest ships in a single battle?" "which one caused the most damage?" etc and you'd be limited to objective answers, which would mostly limit the number of answers to handful sized depending on people's understanding of global history

Stalingrad lasted way too long to be a battle.

Except the fighting was continuous and occurred within the same geographic areas.

The Persians were famous for letting locals have whatever government they wanted as long as they would pay their taxes and dues to the Empire. It's not far fetched that they would have let the Athenians keep democracy and the Spartans keep their weird proto-Fascism as long as they paid their taxes.

Still probably not the greatest in history, but you do really sell it, quite a staggering battle

Oh man it's hard to choose. There were some great ones in the pacific theater.

It truly was.

The entire battle lasted not 72 hours and yet it cast a shadow on American (and arguably world) history that continues to this day.

>Battle between two Caucasian peoples is where western civilization is born
Yeah okay, Gibbons.

If you're going to pick made up Tolkien battles, you better pick Nírnaeth Arnoediad or the War of Wrath. Any other choice is wrong and there is no arguing the point.

Battle/Siege of Alesia + most of Caesar's other battles. Guy was a tactical genius.

Battle of Arbela inflicted this "European/Western civilization" meme upon us all for more than 2 millennia.

Or, you know, it's a video game

1942 in russia

this was essentially the year that determined the outcome of the war. The wermacht was actually in a position to knock the soviets out for the entire year and at least had the theoretical capability of doing so.

The soviets were involved in not one but numerous back-against-the-wall stands across the frontline that if lost could spell defeat across the board.

the inability of the germans to break the red army, and the fact they bled themselves dry doing so, sealed the fate of the reich

but if you wanna get all arsey about definitions of battles fine then, stalingrad

Battle of Tours

Charles the Hammer saves Europe from the Mohammedan yoke.

OOOOHHHHRRRAAAAAH

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Belleau_Wood

Implying Marathon wasn't western civilization's "blew up the Death Star" moment. Alexander was taking Athen's (and his daddy's) pie out of the oven.

Prior to 480 BC Greek civilization hadn't been prominent on a large scale since the Mycenaean period, which had collapsed many centuries before then. Greeks believed themselves to have been living in a degenerate age, gradually fading from prominence, their inevitable fate to be swallowed up by invaders from the north and east. The Persian Empire was the largest, mightiest, and wealthiest regime that had yet existed in history, a conquest juggernaut which showed no signs of slowing down and had yet to be humbled in battle. Ionian Greeks (the same ethnicity as Athenians, an expressive people which valued art, philosophy, and self-rule) living in Asia Minor had been crushed utterly, and there was no reason for anyone to think that Persia wouldn't finish the job in what was left of the Greek world

9,000 Athenians and 1,000 Plataeans marched against the largest military host that had ever set foot on their soil: 25,000 Persian infantry, 1,000 horsemen, and over 100,000 armed support crews. While rugged, militaristic Spartan country boys were taking their sweet ass time performing religious rituals and completely flaking out, poetry loving, boipucci pounding, city-slicking Athenians won the most important battle in history through sheer grit and determination. Ordinary, amateur soldiers found the courage to break into a trot when the arrows begun to fall instead of grinding to a halt, and when surprisingly the enemy wings fled they didn't take the easy way out and follow them, but somehow stopped and came to the aid of the hard pressured center

John Stuart Mill famously called the battle of Marathon a more important event in British history than the Battle of Hastings

The legendary Athenian playwright Aeschylus considered participating at Marathon to be his greatest achievement in life, rather than his plays

stfu you motard

fuck off civilian

The battle of Waterloo
Here ended the napoleonic era,french domination of europe ended and it became a second rate nation (much like germany after WW2)

The battle pittered the previously undefeated emperor Napoleon against the Iron Duke and his prussian allies.

For 8 hours the french bombarded and charged at the allied army which held out, running out of ammo in some places, and routing the imperial guard with a volley and a bayonet charge.

Just as Wellingtons center started to fold, a miracle... the prussians finally arrive and Wellington is able to order a full advance against the crumbling french

High drama, bravery and defeat of Napoleon make this the greatest battle of history.

The Battle of Berlin, 1945

fuck off normie. Germany was finished by then, was basically a mo up operation

Sorry, but Napoleon was not undefeated at the time of Waterloo.

The failure of the invasion of Russia, Leipzig and his abdication in 1814 were very much defeats.

France was a primary World Power up through the Second World War.

As to Waterloo, the Prussians arrived well before the attack of the Guard

The Guard went into the attack unsupported by cavalry or Hose artillery.
It took many volleys from 3 sides before the Guard retreated.

>you will never hear 23,000 horses galloping towards you
both a curse and a blessing

>previously undefeated emperor Napoleon
You have a funny definition of "undefeated".
I'd consider your military adversary exiling you from your empire and disbanding your armies a pretty hefty defeat.

Battle of Stalingrad is the only answer

It's not easy to gleam the absolute depravity of it from the statistics. You can't know about the mass insanity, mass cannibalism, mass freezings, learned helplessness, the rotting excesses of the commanding officers on both sides, the desperation of the soviet defense, the broken souls of once invincible 6th army. the encirclement. the clear skies and full moon on christmas eve.

6th army entered stalingrad on 23 august 1942 numbering 285,000.

91,000 survived the battle long enough to be captured by 2 February 1943.

5,000 made it back to germany alive. about half of the soldiers died on the march to the prison camps and the other half died in the camps themselves.

Battle of Stalingrad is like a Mandelbrot set of human misery. You look as closely as you want and it's horrors all the way down.

>posting the edited version

Why are commies natural thieves who steal Rolex watches off corpses?

Waterloo was his first battlefield defeat, he was captured and his army destroyed, all the previous setbacks he was able to recover his power

How do you think the Battle of Aleppo will be interpreted historically? How significant is it? The soldiers called it "the mother of all battles."

Can you imagine fighting in the same ruined and besieged city for 4 years straight?

What is stalingrad. Bunch of untrained scrubs fighting not that special.

Documentary on the Battle of Stalingrad featuring extensive interviews of surviving soldiers who participated in the battle.

Hard to swallow honestly.

I'd say it's the greatest battle of our current period of asymmetric warfare

Forgot link:
youtu.be/KPcM4o2yfXo

Idk what crazy advanced strategy's and revelations we will learn from it though.

I always like to look at what happened to the 13th Guards Rifle Division.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Guards_Rifle_Division#The_Battle_of_Stalingrad

>In the middle of resupplying, get sent across the Volga to stop a German advance.
>Within 24 hours, 3/10ths of the division is dead.
>Get told to keep puhing
>Retake Mamaev Kurgan Park
>Small portion turns the railroad station into a hellish room by room slaughter house for 3 weeks so the Germans can't retake it

10,000 men from the division crossed the Volga on the 13th of September. By the 16th 280-320 are still alive.

Stalingrad

Personal favs though:
Siege of Tenochtitlan, but it was tragic.
Battle of Austerlitz, I support Napoleanne.
Battle of Catalonian Fields, the prelude and context really make it for me.

Is there any decent artwork/photos of the fighting on Mamaev Kurgan?

I just want to know if the blasted frozen Hell depicted in Red Orchestra is really that accurate.

he lost battles before that

"it's even worse than you could have possibly imagined" - official motto of the battle of stalingrad

Cannae and Austerlitz. Peak of military genius and execution.

That would be the Siege of Constantinople 717-718. The Battle of Tours was no more than a raiding party. I mean I expect this kind of ignorance if you're an average Joe, but this is the history forum. You should know these things.

Battle of Trenton

Ain Jalut

and Nazis are not natural thieves, they just save Rolexes not to be lost

Battle of Cape Ecnomus
>one of largest naval battles in history.
>256 BC, first punic war
> ~330 carthagean ships, 350 roman ships
> ~140k carthagean rowers and marines and 150k roman
I don't think number of people in single battle was matched till this day. Thats over 650 ships and 300k people iin single battle.

>Nazi reich saves countless pieces of priceless art from hands of barbarians
>Glorious western army comes to crush evil reich and lo and behold art is lost

they proffered to destroy art related stuff like bunch of barbarians or in some cases appropriate them as part of "germanic" heritage

Someone should make a film of it and make it really gritty and realistic. Shame their doing a film on Dunkirk, literally the least interesting part of ww2

>Why are commies natural thieves who steal Rolex watches off corpses?
restitution for the natural tendencies of right-wingers to invade his land, brutalize his family members, and burn everything they didn't steal in a zealous rage

Lepanto is why you're able to post on a degenerate website instead of worshipping allah 24/7

Nigga the ottomans didn't even try to convert their christians, the stuff in the balkans was done by sufi orders.
One of the reasons balkan muslims are relatively liberal are because of the reason above.