War Elephants

They would go on rampages through enemy lines and their trunk was strong enough to lift a man and slam him to the ground, while the tusks could be used as siege weapons against lesser barricaded strongholds.

The problem is that people figured out their weakness, which were the squeal of a pig.
Hence, people started using War Pigs to counter the War Elephants and make them go on a rampage on their own masters.

Not exactly related, but a fun vignette.
On the outbreak of the civil war, the King of Siam offered to furnish the United States 200 with War Elephants for use as cavalry against the Confederacy. Lincoln respectfully declined.

If you had never seen an elephant before and they were running at you, you would bee spook

elephants have a natural aversion to pigs, finding their squeals jarring.

So the Romans turned it up to 11 by rounding up a shitload of pigs, coating them in pitch, and lighting them in fire.

The elephants really didn't like that

War elephants were pretty cool rides, they kill calvary and doesn't afraid of arrows

There is a story I've heard that during Pyrrhus's attack on Argos, one of his elephants was wandering through the streets, looking for its rider, and when it found him, it picked him up, laid him on its tusks, and proceeded to freak out and go on a rampage.

Elephants were a regular aspect of warfare in India and South east Asia well into the gunpowder era, but in the west they fell out of favor around the time of the second Punic war.

Where Indians and Asians were apt to use them as infantry support, Carthaginians and Greeks were more apt to group them into squadrons and attempt to use them as a type of cavalry. This approach was flawed for the same reasons why it's better to put machine guns with infantry units rather than group them together into machine gun nests.

Elephants are highly intelligent and emotionally complex animals. Putting one in a field full of fighting humans is like locking a person in a kennel full of mad dogs ripping each other to pieces. Even the fittest fit/bro/ would be panicked because he knows if the dogs put their minds to it they'll rip him to pieces. Elephants felt the same way, especially when subjected to a shower of missiles when they drew close to the line, so they did not make effective force multipliers for the simple reason that they were just as likely to panic and run away from the fighting and trample their own army in the process.

Once the shock value wore off, counter measures were developed. For one thing, simply pelting them with javelins was often enough to make them want to fuck off. Infantry formations could be adopted which allowed the elephants to pass through lanes in the infantry without trampling them, so that they'd be surrounded and easier to pull down one by one. They also hate the sound of pig squeals, so rounding up a bunch of pigs and unleashing them at the elephants was often enough to spook them. Europeans simply didn't have the exposure to elephants to know what worked and what didn't, and what they eventually discovered was that gimmick units like war elephants simply can't compare to disciplined soldiers and well-equipped cavalry

On a related note, it's a pity rhinos aren't so widely spread as elephants. They're much less intelligent and much more prone to charging, as well as being thicker skinned and more irritable, so it would have been cool to have armoured rhinos set loose on tightly packed formations.

somebody has the chance to turn history into a fanfic of an 12 year old autist, and he doesn't use it, weak!

Bronze Age bowling with phalanx and testudo formations

Tamerlane, during one of his indian conquest campaigns, found himself in a field battle against war elephants. So he took some of his camels, strapped hay to their backs, set the hay of fire and freed the camels so that they would run towards the elephants. They routed in fear and caused countless victims among their former army.
So yeah, a double-edged sword.

>Where Indians and Asians were apt to use them as infantry support, Carthaginians and Greeks were more apt to group them into squadrons and attempt to use them as a type of cavalry. This approach was flawed for the same reasons why it's better to put machine guns with infantry units rather than group them together into machine gun nests.

Why is that? Both for the machine guns and the elephants, I'm interested. I'm kind of new to this stuff, but wouldn't an elephant having infantry around freak out more easily like, as you said, a human with mad dogs around, compared to one surrounded by other members of his own specie?

said tightly packed formations would be full of spearmen so I doubt charging them is a good idea

Armor the rhino

I've seen them before and I would be spooked anyways.

Wasn't Nader Shah who did that? Or is it just common for central asian conquerors to do that against the indians.

>machine guns
Machine guns, for all their dakka, are primarily suppression weapons, laying down a hail of gunfire in order to keep the enemy pinned while troops with carbines and SMGs move in from the flank to do the real damage. A lot of machine guns lays down a larger spread but you're still primarily convincing the enemy to keep their heads down, turning them into a redundant waste of ammo. Not to mention the heft and mass of the machine gun making it a tactically inflexible weapon, prone to being outmaneuvered. A single machine gun supporting a squad of infantry gives them the suppressive firepower they need to advance, while the infantry screen the machine guns.

>elephants
Same principle, by spreading them out you're giving individual infantry units an added punch, and you're making it so that the soldiers themselves protect the elephant, as opposed to grouping them into a squadron and running that squad into the melee, where they are vulnerable to being surrounded and pulled down, not to mention making a nice fat target for missiles.

>Likely somewhere in the Raj in the 19th century
>user doesn't know anything about history but posts.

Ever since the marathas elephants started being dropped in India as militarily useful because they moved too slowly and often couldn't keep up with the cavalry based armies in India.

rhinos can't be tamed dumbass.

Wow the elephant and the rider really must have had a bond for the elephant to search the town and find him rather than just flee or do it's own shit

>the elephants really didn't like that
lol

Why not? Or are you just being a shitlord?

Too stupid.

>War Pigs

When Rome: Total War becomes real

Elephants are strikingly intelligent. They're smart enough to have a sense of self, engage in altruistic behavior, and have been shown to use tools. They can read human body language, mimic human speech (for the express purpose of trying to communicate with us), even differentiate between different human languages. They comfort each other when distressed, mourn their dead, and even seem to be fascinated by their own mortality (studies have shown them to take a much greater interest in the bones of other elephants than other animals). They've been shown to engage in homosexual behavior, with certain males touching and mounting one another in explicitly erotic ways. They're even known to be creative
youtube.com/watch?v=foahTqz7On4

During Roman times there was the tale of the elephant's curse. Pompey Magnus was celebrating his election as Consul by throwing a series of lavish games, the apex of which was an army of convicts fighting a herd of elephants. At first the people went wild, watching the elephants trample and stomp on criminals, but one by one the elephants went down, and when there was only a few left this is what happened, according to Cassius Dio:
>"the elephants were pitied by the people when, after being wounded and ceasing to fight, they walked about with their trunks raised toward heaven, lamenting so bitterly as to give rise to the report that they did so not by mere chance, but were crying out against the oaths in which they had trusted when they crossed over from Africa, and were calling upon Heaven to avenge them"
The fact that Pliny the Younger and Seneca also mentioned this event speaks to the sheer gravity of the scandal, and the people were so shocked and horrified by the sight of the crying elephants that they began to hiss and curse at Pompey. Seven years later, disgraced and defeated, Pompey was murdered almost the moment after stepping foot in Africa, fulfilling the elephant's curse in the eyes of the Romans.

Why didn't he just fucking do it? Just use them as bullet shields or something?

>"the elephants were pitied by the people when, after being wounded and ceasing to fight, they walked about with their trunks raised toward heaven, lamenting so bitterly as to give rise to the report that they did so not by mere chance, but were crying out against the oaths in which they had trusted when they crossed over from Africa, and were calling upon Heaven to avenge them"
Too real.