Historical underdog nations, people, armies, groups, etc
People who while potentially never doing anything relevant on a global scale, managed to accomplish great things with the cards they were dealt/against a greater force.
Kicking off with Ireland to start.
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>Collins
>Executed more Irish Republicans in league with British support than the British themselves
>Underdog
Freestaters pls go
He was just the most related person to Ireland I have saved.
Also
>executed traitors
>bad
Collins was a great military man, great economist and great statesman, seeing as Ireland as a nation was pretty much birthed in its entirety from his plans, and would have been done much better if De Valera hadn't assumed control.
Anyway, my point was he represents Ireland here as they can be argued to be an underdog in many ways.
I'll give you that he was a great military man, but we'll never know if he was a great economist seeing as never got a chance to put his plans into action and he certainly wasn't a great statesman given that his only record was negotiating a treaty heavily slanted against him and being pressured by the British into starting a civil war before being assassinated.
Poland
there i said it, everyone was thinking it and i fucking said it, lets move on.
>get told to shoot fellow IRA men by Churchill
>do it
A lot of Ireland's industrial boosts, for example-the most famous being under Sean Lemass (a later Taoiseach and one of Collin's gunmen back in the day) were confirmed to have pretty much been copied from plans Collins laid out.
His plans were never laid out in full, but had he survived as opposed to passing on his work to a group of bickering other boggers Ireland could potentially have been a very different place.
But it didn't accomplish anything
not surrendering against overwhelming odds is something
Probably the best and most obvious example would be Genghis Khan.
Skanderberg
Bohemia, later Czechoslovakia
OP said people that weren't relevant on global scale.
The Gurkhas who BTFOd the British.
shut up you cUCK.
Romania, they had the best luck possible in WW2, and they have been granted a lot of land they could have lost simply by playing the cards properly and being good diplomats (knowing whom to orbit, knowing when to become traitorous and to leave the hungarians wallow in their own blood).
...
>this square jawed Polack is tearing apart the foundation of the Warsaw Pact and you're basically just fucking stupid
>country is pretty much held together by semi-decent relations with warlords and a thin pretense of nationalism
>still manages to survive 8 years of Jap rape monkey waves
>be a poor shithole nobody cares about up until the early 20th century
>fucked by both Swedes and Russians on a regular basis for hundreds of years
>Finns mentioned as among the poorest people in the whole of Europe in mid 1800's by a British traveller
>gain independence during WW1
>fight a civil war against commies and win
>also kick Soviets out of your lands in early 20's
>fast forward 20 years
>stop a head on Soviet invasion and remain independent despite losing the winter war
>outnumbered like 10 to 1
>a year later join Germany and take back your shit + some extra from the Soviets
>stop yet another and way more coordinated Soviet invasion in 1944
>remain independent but forced to pay reparations to the Soviets for decades
>the whole country is in a brink of collapse after the war
>fast forward 70 years
>???
>one of the wealthiest and safest places to live on the entire planet
how?
Autism and im not even kidding.
The whole 1st Crusade. That shit probably would have failed badly if you ran it again.
xenophobia and national pride/interests at the forefront
...
>fucked by Swedes
You would be nothing without us
But they always surrendered against overwhelming odds
Finland vs Russia
pls gib sources
Switzerland, managed to fend of kings and emperors, trashed vast armies and stayed a republic. Afterwards they weaseled out from every war there was, whilst usually just sitting right in the middle of it.
Prussia during the Silesian and 7 years war
Add in that A-rabs had the latest Soviet tech and Jews were stuck with Shermans
Singapore.
An Asian geographical shitspeck on the map was turned into a legitimate first-world country on par with Japan or S. Korea by one man.
Skanderbeg, though he is probably overexaggerated to a point because he is such an important figure of Albanian history.
Literally blew Turks tf out during his reign, then Albanians got conquered and a Muslim would sell you out for a piece of your land. It's a reason why the only Catholic Albos are in the northern mountains, Turks couldn't be bothered to go all the way up there.
The fuck happened in Corsica?
Savior of Europe
*double envelops your army*
no
When was Hannibal ever an underdog? Carthage was prosperous and Hannibal was born to a powerful man.
Rather small country, large parts of it below sea level, and constantly dealing with that.
Colonizes Indonesia and builds a stinking rich commercial empire.
Serves as a refuge for free thinkers in the 17th century, contributing a great deal the the Enlightenment.
What the actual fuck is up with Corsica?
>1 infantry division
>500 tanks and armored vehicles
what did wikipedia mean by this?
Ho Chi Minh. That little old Asian man defended his little old Asian country from both France and America. (The latter of whichbeing the most powerful nation in the world)
The Rif Berbers in the Rif War are a particularly insane example. A bunch of desert nomads with old weapons and not even that many horses managed to thrash two European armies that outnumbered them many times over for several years until they were finally basically drowned in blood. This was mostly because the French and Spanish tended to tie themselves down in static garrisons which the Rif could attack at will. At their peak, roughly a quarter of a million French and Spanish troops equipped with modern bolt action rifles, machine guns, and artillery and supported by air and naval elements fought against roughly 20,000 Rif tribesmen, mostly equipped with mid to late 19th century rifles such as the Chassepot and Gras, a handful of modern bolt actions, no naval or air support, and only as much artillery and machine guns as they could loot from the Spanish.
Two occasions in particular stand out. One was what happened immediately after the French joined the war: the Rif quickly attacked and wiped out 2/3 of French outposts in French Morocco, inflicting on them 5,700 casualties. Two was the Battle of Annual, where 3,000 Rif troops managed to route 23,000 well-equipped Spaniards. The Spanish suffered over thirteen thousand casualties, over forty outposts were overrun, their commanding general, Silvestre, was killed and they had lost 14,000-20,000 rifles (mostly Mausers), 60-400 machine guns (Hotchkiss Machine Guns) and 129 cannons (Schendiers and Krupps). The Rif suffered fewer than 800 casualties.
>Rif Berbers
>desert nomads
Rif berbers are neither living in a desert nor nomads.
He executed enormous tasks with good success when there was a lot going against him.
Pajeú, a successful strategist that used Cerrado's terrain agaisnt the republican army.
They launched 3 attacks against Canudos and 2 failed because of Pajeú tactics of ambushing the soldiers and using psychological warfare agaisnt them.
On the 3rd attack the Republic used the Military Police and the Army and won because the number were absurdly disproportional, while Pajeú ambushed 3~4k soldiers with 20 "jagunços"/poor irregular insurgents, now they were faciling better trained soldiers.
Because of republican revisionism they count some(25k) of the civilians as soldiers too so the war can't be called a genocide.
yes he is, turns out communsm sucks
No greater soldier, no truer american.
Raden Wijaya
>born as noble in vassal kingdom in Java
>trained to use machetes in combat from birth
>be a general in his Overlord's court
>fucking loyal as fuck to his overlord
>his overlord kingdom's had a rebellion
>his overlord murdered
>put fierce resistance against rebels
>but his lord's capital has fallen shortly after
>the Rebel leader put a bounty on his head
>somehow he escaped
>brought thousands of loyalists
>meanwhile his former overlord had some disagreement with the Mongols before the rebellion took place
>Mongols Invaded Java to punish his former overlord
>Raden Wijaya met Mongol invasion fleet's commander
>uhhh hi, u guys come to pillage or what?
>yea we had some sort of disagreement with this particular dude
>oh yea sure, i will help you guys, i know everything about dat dude
>(he's already dead you mong)
>well, lets get rolling boys!
>basically Raden Wijaya tricked Mongols to attack the rebel leader that murdered his former overlord
>(insert typical mongol horde plundering towns .gif here)
>somehow Raden Wijaya made those mong mongols believes they killed the right guy
>they go back to their beach camps and ships
>party hard, rock hard, drink hard
>meanwhile when those mongols got drunk, Raden Wijaya attacked their camps
>thousands of machete-wielding madmen swarming into camps full of drunken mongols
>total slaughter btw
>few survivors noped out back to Mongol Capital
>Great Khan hears the news
>SAY WHAT NIGGA?????
>Raden Wijaya : lol get rekt you mong
>Khan : that's it, fuck you, and fuck your shithole, we're fucking done
and so that's how the largest Thalassocracy Empire was born
Actual Corsican nationalists instead of the religion of peace. Though their attacks nowadays are mostly between the different factions/families, they still destroy the houses of a few continentals or shoot in the general direction of cops once a while. As far as I know, no one has died in a while, but it's a tiny island, so on this map it's bound to look like there is a general insurrection.
Funnily enough, the Corsican nationalists have declared on IS and are quite anti-Muslim, blaming the French government if any attack were to happen. They said they prevented a few attacks already, but don't know if they provided any proof.
bullshit map
>be born the sixth child on a farm in the middle of nowhere
>no education
>warned his Afrikaner volk about a war against the British
>is being ridiculed and called a coward
>tells them if there is a war, he will be fighting when everyone now talking has long surrendered
>defeats the British Empire in the Battle of Magersfontein despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned
>continues to fight a guerilla war with some farmers against the mightiest Empire of the time
>the British invent concentrations camp and kill 50 % of Boer women and children there to break his fighting spirit
>years later, refuses to vote for a South African entry to WWI on the side of the British Empire that he fought against
>is murdered
General De La Rey, sal jy die Boere kom lei?
And I love the song. Best history-themed song I know: youtube.com
England / The UK totally counts as a surprising underdog.
>1500
>England is 3rd rate power
>Has warred on and off with everyone else in Europe
>Spain is about to EXPLODE into an ultra-wealthy empire
>There are literally Italian city-states which can be favorably compared to England in terms of power
Through luck, financial genius/madness, and a neverending ambition to dominate, the English unite their island and forge an enormous Empire. A tiny island with mediocre resources, history, and economy rides the waves of history to become the largest empire the world has ever known.
It's kinda nuts when you think about it.
Also on my list:
Prussia
>open land
>militarizes
>from irrelevant backwater to major power to unifier of all Germany
The USA
>By luck, a rebellious movement finds itself the only power in a vast and super-wealthy continent with any wherewithal to expand and hold territory
>Becomes obscenely wealthy following expansion
>Becomes so wealthy that even the rival globe-spanning super Empire's GNP is eclipsed
Venice
>Byzantine colony
>Jews the Jews, their neighbors, the Ottomans, and everyone else
>becomes a colonial power
>becomes absurdly wealthy
>somehow winds up as a great power
This guy