Why didn't Hannibal just use boats to transport his army to Italy?

It was more Rome. They would kill them for fun in the coliseum

It would have been a huge fleet, and it would have had to stop every day to rest, to forage and to collect fresh water, and there're only so many places on the shore you can comfortably beach a fleet this big. It would have been quite easy to detect just by sending fast ships to patrol harbors and beaches on the route.

Without control of Sicily he couldn't go anywhere and Sicily wasn't in Carthage's hands by the start of the Second Punic War. Naval war was very different in his days.

>Forest elephants are extinct now

A simple Google search proves you're a moron

Not him but he got the name wrong, google the north african elephant

Dude, they caught and intercepted and inflicted roughly 80% casualties to the one time Carthage attempted to send a fleet straight to Italy.

livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-war-against-hannibal/appian-war-against-hannibal-11/

Even if it's not a sure thing they'll catch you, it's a hell of a risk to take.

>Why didn't Hannibal just use boats to transport his army to Italy?
Dick too big for oar and sail powered ships desu

Why was he so obsessed with elephants anyway?

The Romans had no experience fighting them, son along with Carthage's cavalry it was one of Hannibals few advantages he could utilize.

How many elephants did he have anyway? Were they a major part of his army or they just became of history meme because "lol elephants crossing the mountains and shit"?

Elephants wouldn't fit on the boats and could only take short trips on specially built rafts. Hannibal insisted they find a land route.

He had 37 at Trebia, but most of them had died over the next few months crossing one of the swamps in northern Italy, some kind of disease bumped most of them off.

You wouldn't see another large scale deployment of elephants in Italy again, although they featured some in the fighting in what's now Spain, and of course in Africa. As for their effect, that's harder to measure. They required the Romans to come up with anti-elephant tactics, but they did very much help at Trebia itself. But they were a tertiary arm, probably behind regular cavalry in importance.

Shock the enemy/force them to break formation. What would you do if you saw several dozen elephants charging at you?

Because they were ready and waiting for him.

Not quite true; Pyrrhus also used elephants against the Romans.

was he autistic?

form lanes, pepper the beasts, kill the riders, and send them running back through their own army in a panic.

didn't Claudius take Elephants into Britain?

Rome established supremacy in the Mediterranean Sea with the First Punic War, and any Carthaginian invasion by sea would have to land troops and establish safe lanes to keep ferrying new reinforcements across by sea. Carthage trying to contest Rome for naval supremacy was simply out of the question in order to accomplish that.

Carthage could try to slip past the Roman fleet and avoid battle in order to land troops, but the risk of getting caught and intercepted was probably seen as too great and opted for the land route, where Hannibal's army could act more autonomously through hiring Gaulic mercenaries along the way, which worked in raising his numbers to nearly double its original size.

He wasn't. They literally all died by the time of Lake trasimene they are just played up for memes

This

Elephants were military memes. They were impressive and intimidating but not that useful. They were easily spooked, difficult to control, and once engaged in a charge impossible to maneuver.

Have you ever tried sailing in the Med? You can't even get to Sardinia by boat, let alone Italy, let alone with elephants aboard.

The funny thing about that picture is that I remember being told the exact same thing in school, it's literally
>American education
incarnate.

Didn't Clodius get 12 war elephants to Britain in his invasion?

maybe because he was very experienced and skilled on land but not on sea..

the roman navy was quite better than any other navy since they had these pivot ladders that made boarding easy and in close quarters elephants cant do shit

>but user mountains are also close quarters
but it's so ridiculous it worked. the romans never expected elephants from the alps

What were you told exactly?

Probably for the same reason he never received reinforcements while in Italy - aside from them not being sent, his attempts at controlling any ports have failed, and it's possible that his landing would be contested, which would give Romans a heavy advantage over him, since an amphibious assault would play exactly into their strengths.

>aside from them not being sent
Reinforcements were sent, on at least 4 attempts that I'm aware of. The first even got through. On the other hand, the other two attempts went by the same route Hannibal took originally, and the second one to go by sea got absolutely slaughtered.

why was I expecting to see a hand rubbing jew in the bottom left corner??

>combine forces with Gauls in Po valley
Just how large was this Gaul force to make it worth losing so many of your own soldiers to desertion and weather in the Alps?

Did anyone ever figure out what magic the Poles used?

i'd imagine very considerable due to the high population density in the po valley. po valley is the peninsula's most fertile region and with fertile regions comes large populations of people.

not sure where you could find actual numbers to support it though, if they even exist :(

He feared the Mediterranean wave.

Hannibal had control of proper port cities, the Romans just destroyed all the fleets the Carthaginians sent. The Carthaginians didn't really try that hard.

>Didn't really try that hard.

Nigger, are you serious?

ancient.eu/Carthaginian_Naval_Warfare/
livius.org/sources/content/appian/appian-war-against-hannibal/appian-war-against-hannibal-11/

100 ships. 300 rowers was for a fully crewed ship, but these ones are "undermanned", so let's say 70% strength or 210. That's 21,000 men right there. Then of course there's the troops that are sent on them. We don't know how laden these ships were, but at least in the first punic war dedicated warships carried 120 soldiers to the rower compliment. If these ships aren't dedicated warships, they probably have more, because they can carry more cargo as they're likely not as narrow in the waist. Still, we're talking a MINIMUM of about 33,000 men, and very probably more, meaning that this reinforcement is about as big as an expedition as Hannibal's entire post Cannae force. And then it suffers 80% casualties in a day. Sucks to be them.

Naval warfare of the era was colossally expensive and risky.

>Naval warfare of any era is colossally expensive and risky

Fixed it.

Well, in an absolute, I suppose. But you look at antiquity and compare the size of forces at sea to forces at land, and often the sea forces are both bigger and battles are more deadly; if your ship goes down, you're pretty much dead, wheras outside of exceptions like Trasameine and Cannae, often losing forces didn't get wiped out in quite the same way.

You look at modern warfare, and even colossal naval battles in the Pacific are dwarfed in scale by land battles in the same theater. I realize that's not quite a fair comparison because ships and their support stuff in the modern world are hideously expensive, but then again, supplying and outfitting and arming millions of men ain't exactly cheap either.

I'm not entirely sure when, but somewhere along the lines the relative costs shifted towards land war.

Didn't the Greeks get elephants on boats?

Lmao blaming Hanibal for the extinction of the elephants, Nice try Cato!

Why didn't the eagles just take Hannibal to Mt. Vesuvius?

SURPRISE SPQR

The thing about ancient sailors not being able to cross oceans without having the shore in sight.