WAR

Waterloo or Kursk are the only two correct answers.

The battle of Berlin is nothing.

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The Liberation of Istanbul.
>corrupt christians that outnumbered the righteous Turks 100 to 1
>the Pope using black magic to summon dark clouds over the greek forces, since they hate the light of the sun
>on the 5th day Zagan Pasha arrived with reinforcements from the East
>Mehmed II fighting the Corrupt Constantine XI atop the highest tower and darkest pit and ultimately banishing his corruption from Istanbul
Such a great battle will never again happen.

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>>1811214

Depends really, do you want line battles? urban warfare? naval warfare? tanks?

>line formation battle
Waterloo or Gettysburg

>urban battle
Stalingrad

>Naval battle
Trafalgar

>Tank battle
Kursk

I'd be very hesitant to call any one battle the greatest of all time, but there are plenty of greatest battles in a certain category.

>>1811185
Cannae.
/thread

>>1811305
>waterloo
>not one of the dozens of battles Napoleon won but the one that he lost

>>1811305
>Waterloo or Gettysburg
>not Leipzig or Borodino

Anon, please.

Kursk by far.

>>1811185
D day

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>>1811214

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>>1811185

Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania Courthouse reads worse than any horror movie.

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Salamis is a contender for top ancient battle

>>1811750
came here to post this

No mention of the Battle of Leipzig yet?

Stalingrad. Not great in the 'I'd want to be there' obviously, but great in the scale and significance of it.

Antony Beevor wrote a good book on how fucking miserable that battle was.

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Verdun was pretty incredible

>>1811791

Finished his book the other day and even though it got a bit tedious it sure cemented my view of stalingrad as the most fucked up battle to date.

>>1811791
>>1812001
Didn't both sides start to build defenses from dead bodies?

>>1812045
Don't know if they actually built anything but using frozen bodies as cover did happen in not just in stalingrad.

>>1811821

butiful

>>1811821
the casualties of Verdun read like something out of warhammer 40k, averaged out over the entire 9 month engagement there were more than 2000 casualties every single day.

Kursk was pretty fucking hardcore

Also Berlin, Budapest and all the other final batles of WW2

But Stalingrad tops them all in terms of scale and tragedy

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>>1811208
>>1811305
>>1811348
>>1813050
>Kursk

Don't think I'd call a battle in which one side had knowledge of the enemies operational details courtesy of foreign intelligence a "great" battle in retrospect. It was certainly great in scale and decisiveness (arguably the greatest of the war in these regards) but Operation Zitadelle never had any real chance of success. The operational orders went out on April 15th, 1943, Moscow had them on the 16th.

Between Red Orchestra, Lucy, and Ultra the Soviets knew so much about the German plans that they were shelling the jump-off points and airfields immediately before the offensive was even scheduled to start.

Still worth studying, but it didn't have the impact on the school of military thought that other battles did.

How has nobody posted Marathon yet?

>empire stretching from India to Egypt
>invades Greece
>only Athenians meet them
>outnumbered at least 3-1
>see the Persians are beginning to board their ships
>Militades orders a charge of 10000 hoplites
>charge full phalanx into Persian lines, massacre thousands of them
>lose I think it was 169 troops of their own

Militades was GOAT

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>>1811214
>Mehmed II fighting the Corrupt Constantine XI atop the highest tower and darkest pit
Let me guess, at the end he cast down his ruin and smote his enemy upon the mountainside?

I am both schocked and appalled nobody has mentioned D-Day.

>>1813597

Because it went better than anyone expected some seem to think less of it militarily, though it was certainly monumental in terms of logistics and something no other fighting force in the world was capable of at the time.

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An army of "highly trained" and well armoured spaniards and french get stomped by a group of tribes lead by a mountain dweller.

>>1811208
>Waterloo

It wasnt even the greatest battle of the Napoleonic Wars

>>1813645
>spaniards and french

Pretty sure the Spaniards were the only ones getting stomped in that battle and when the French came for help afterward you shitskins muslims got BTFO

>>1813668
>One of the strongest countries in the world
>Air force vs no Air forces
>Outnumbering 10 to 1
>Sovreign state working against the tribes protecting the country
>Get obliterated

b-but you got btfo after because of mustard gas

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Not the entire battle, but the first day of the Somme was insane. 19,000 DEAD in the space of less than 24 hours. That's simply unfathomable.

>>1813687
>One of the strongest countries in the world
>Post Peninsular War Spain

Lmao

>>1813707
Borodino (single day battle) had 80,000 casualties out of which 50,000 were killed in action

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>>1811185
>The-battle-of-stalingrad-(...).jpg

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>>1813553

I agree, but just because a script has been written does not mean that the actors and audience do not need to attend the theater.

As you pointed out, Kursk was a doomed venture from the start. Many German officers knew this before the operation began (Model outright assuming it would fail), and the Wehrmacht by 1943 could not realistically stage another grand summer offensive like those of 1941 and 1942. They were stretched too thin, and the Reds way too organized. Even had the hoped for breakthroughs happened, Stavka had even more Front Armies waiting behind Kursk to counter attack.

Still, taken by itself, it is one of the greatest battles of history. Though the German had very little hope of victory, and even less chance of shifting the war situation, everyone on the ground fought doggedly. The drive of the SS Panzer Corps is one of the most determined attacks documented in military literature. Thousands of planes, tanks, and other vehicles (whole fractions of each nations' economies) clash with one another and burnt up in smoke every day. It was the swan song of a strategically offensive Wehrmacht on the Ostfront, and it was fought bitterly. It certain ranks up there.

>>1811185
During the Continuation War the Finns and the Russians fought a number of battles at the company level (app. 300 troops total) where everyone died. 100% mortality. Perfect battles.

These all occurred at app -100 degrees F.

>>1811185
Cannae hands down

There was some battle in the 1980s Iran-Iraq War that would score big points in a novelty category. When both sides engaged in a particular battle, the skies were filled with attack helicopters. It was unprecedented to see that many helicopters engage each other at once, and apparently it was so epic that ground forces from both sides stopped fighting to watch the fight in the air.

In terms of historical significance in relating to Christian-Islamic conflict, the battle of Yarmouk, Lalakaon and the Battle of Vienna are super important.

Yarmouk

>>1811821
Man, I spend my childhood near the forest full of random artillery craters.
Had an unexploded (and unfired) small caliber cannon shell as a toy but my parents didn't approve that and i had to bury it.

It seemed so natural but more recently i've realized that most people probably haven't ever seen shit like that in their lives. Felt pretty weird

>>1814178
>>1814182

> Yarmouk

Some of you guys are alright, don't go to the Theme of Armenia this campaign season.

>>1813597
Greatest naval landing in history but sort of boring as a battle.
I don't know, I cant appreciate it or any other naval landing in general.

I've toured Gettysburg, it's a really nice place and has some really good museums. Also, wow, the sheer carnage in that one was insane. Terrain made impassable from piles of dead horses, Southern troops getting caught in the "Slaughter Pen" between some boulders, Union getting on top of Little Roundtop Hill and blasting the hell out of everybody with long range cannons, and nearly the entire southern army getting annihilated in Pickett's fucking Charge. They were still finding dead bodies form that battle turning up for years afterwards. All because the Southern Generals wanted to raid some shoe stores.

Paschendale sounds like it was amazingly brutal too. Do they have a nice museum or a tour there? If I ever visit Europe I'd want to check out some WW1 and WW2 battlefields for sure.

>>1813597
The Germans were so far on the ropes by the middle of 1944 that D-day does not really count as a battle.

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>>1811214
This is a good post. Shame you're a tripfag who needs people to recognize him on an anonymous Italian black-velvet cum-painting board though

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>>1813707
>That's simply unfathomable

Not entirely.

33,000 were killed by Einatzgruppen units during a two-day period (15,000) at Babi Yar, Ukraine. 35-50,000 were killed over a three-day period in Odessa. 18,000 were killed in a single day at Majdanek concentration camp during Aktion Erntefest (the Nazis' final liquidation of the Lublin area).

Albeit all of the victims of these massacres were unarmed people.

>>1813707
Cannae saw the deaths of more than 50000+ men in the space of 24 hours. Almost all of them caused by edged weapons. Something like 20000 tons of meat was left for the crows.

>>1814236
The troops on this photo aren't germans.
Did half of the casualties of majdanek die in a single day? I didn't know.

>>1811185
Battle of the golden spurs near Kortrijk 1302. First time mainly poor footsoldiers killed heavily armoured knights on horseback in open combat

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>>1814236
>Implying those soldiers aren't providing cover fire for the pictured evacuees
The rifle doesn't even line up with them for christ's sake, and the guys taking cover on the right are usually cropped out. There's so many dishonestly out-of-context "evidence" photos circulated by the Allies that it's not even funny.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salsu

Most historically underrated battle ever.

>>1814212
The entirety of the Westhoek (Western corner) is filled with museums, graveyards etc. A bit like gettysburg (I did a tour of the american war of independence and civil war when I was 18, so I can compare) though the cemeteries are more huddled up together, because the men were often buried where they lay

>>1811185
Battle off Samar for navyhistoryfags like me.

Context: as part of the overall battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese fleet divided into four groups. It was basically acknowledged from the beginning that they couldn't necessarily win the battle, but the goal was to inflict grievous enough losses on the Americans to possibly force them to abandon the Philippines Campaign. The role of the Northern Force was to act as a decoy; it comprised four nearly empty carriers and the battleship-carrier hybrids Ise and Hyuga. They were useless in a combat role, but the Americans did not know this; Halsey believed they were the main threat and dispatched his powerful Third Fleet to deal with them. This played right into the Japanese plans, leaving 250,000 Americans of the Sixth Army coming ashore on a lightly guarded transport fleet. The Northern Force had done its job.

While this was taking place the two Southern Forces weaved their way through the narrow channels of the Philippine Islands, converging on Leyte Gulf. At San Bernardino Strait, they were effectively routed with heavy losses by a fleet of superior US battleships and cruisers. The Center Force, however, kept sailing with no opposition, beyond one battleship being sunk by air attack. Once the Third Fleet had left to chase the decoy Northern Force, they turned around and continued heading for Leyte with a heavy of battleships and cruisers.

The only thing standing between them and a monumental slaughter of the American transports was a small fleet of 6 escort carriers, 3 destroyers, and 4 frigates: "Taffy 3." These ships had less firepower than the obsolete fleet a much weaker Japanese force had sunk at the Java Sea two years ago. Just ONE of the Japanese battleships alone weighed more than all of Taffy 3 combined. Yet it fell to them to prevent the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of their comrades. By all objective measurements, they should've been smashed by the Japanese like a bug on a windshield.

[cont]

>>1814723
T A F F Y 3
A
F
F
Y
3

>>1814675
China gets so utterly rekt by an enemy they outnumber 30 to 1 their dynasty collapses

>>1814723
[cont]

But they didn't. Instead they fought. Time after time the horribly outgunned and outnumbered Taffy 3 hit the enemy with everything they had, from 5 inch guns to torpedoes. Overhead, aircraft from the escort carriers made attack runs using ordnance designed for use against ground targets, despite most of it being totally ineffective against heavily armored warships. Every cliche space battle you've seen in movies had a sample from it happen here. Desperate fighters attacking heavily armored warships. Heroic suicide runs to disable enemy weapons. An undergunned 'good guy' ship blowing up a much larger 'bad guy' ship with a very lucky, one in a million shot (USS White Plains crippling the IJN's Chokai cruiser with a 5-inch shell that set off its torpedoes). A single ship (USS Samuel B. Roberts), which weighed less than ONE of the fucking TURRETS of the enemy battleship attacking it, going toe to toe with a significant fraction of the enemy fleet for over an hour and inflicting heavy damage on several cruisers, and continuing to fight even after being hit with multiple 14-inch shells.

The ferocity of Taffy 3 stunned Admiral Kurita, who in the confusion of battle believed he was facing much stronger forces than he actually was. After breaking visual contact he ordered a retreat back to Japan. The battle was over. Taffy 3 had paid a great price for their bravery: they lost 2 carriers, 2 destroyers, and a destroyer escort; nearly 2,000 men were killed. But the Japanese Navy was shattered. It lost 3 heavy cruiser that day, and suffered damage to three others. More importantly, the American transports at Leyte went unmolested, and the Japanese navy had its pride and confidence irreparably broken. The US Navy had proven itself to be, without a doubt, the IJN's superior in every way.

The IJN had to face the facts that, despite their bleating about their bravery, honor, and skill, the USS Samuel Roberts alone had more guts than all of them combined.

>>1813645
Just need to read about.
It was a succession of betrayals by the native moroccans who were fucking savages and deserved all what came after that.

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>ctrl+f
>no Battle on the Ice

>>1815113

While it is important, its pretty small scale and easy to forget.

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>>1811185
Battle of Schrute Farms, the most northerly battle of the us civil war

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>>1815327

>mfw I instantly recognize bullshit because I've read about the St. Albans Raid.

Any battle in which the Slavs were present. Greatest warriors of all time! Anywhere in the world.

>>1813574
>herodotus numbers

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>>1814648

They're wearing Feldgrau and using the Kar98. Looks pretty German to me.

Also the primary massacre of Aktion Erntefest took place on November 3rd, 1943 led by Erich Muhsfeldt. 18,000 killed in a day (out of a total of 43,000 victims).

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-07/tgmwc-07-62-01.shtml

>>1814671

Those "evacuees" look like they're dodging the SS shooters, not some unseen enemy.

Also, trained SS troopers wouldn't be shooting at the enemy standing in a line an open field. They're not honorable enough to do that. They'd be seeking cover/going prone if they were firing at an armed opponent.

You're not even trying stormfaggot.

>>1816558
>what is Finland
>what is Chechnya
>what is Afghanistan

Outnumbered farmers with beaten up old rifles > greatest warriors in the world?

>>1811208
I think the battle of berlin must have been truly horrifying. all that was left of you great reich is you, a child. battered, weary and old men by your side while the only real nazis hid away in the reichstag, as the soviets murdered and raped their way through your city.

>>1814061
source? I don't disbelieve this but i'd like to read more about it

>>1811305
Being a brit I want to say Waterloo but truth be told it'd have to Leipzig. Agree with the rest through

>>1814061
source please

t. a Finn so curious

>>1816749
>>1816877
I too would love to see a source or writing on this topic

>>1816820
>but truth be told it'd have to Leipzig

If "greatest" is to be taken in the sense of size of armies
If it's in the sense of "impressive" it'd be Austerlitz or Jena.
Leipzig was nothing else than a zerg rush on massive scale

>>1811185
Zama

AUSTERLITZ, YOU HORRID PEASANTS

Battle of ypres (ww1)

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>>1816820
Thanks prussians for help... and aryan blood...

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>pic

>>1811185
Bagration