Forested terrain constrains visibility and movement, favouring small-unit engagements, ambush, and portable weapons. This tag highlights battles shaped by woodland fighting.
At the tactical level, Prussia’s victory over Austria at the Battle of Königgrätz can be attributed to: a weapons revolution, a command philosophy revolution, and innovative tactics. Together, they formed a tactical innovation with profound implications for the future of warfare. As recently as 1859, the Austrian shock tactic doctrine had been the dominant tactical system in Europe. .
October 2024, Orléans, south side of the Loire River. I am exploring the Hundred Years War battle locations around the city of Orléans. On this site on 7 May 1429, a French Army led by Count John Dunois, ‘The Bastard of Orléans’, and Captain La Hire, and inspired by Jeanne d’Arc, a 17-year old French peasant girl from Domremy, defeated a strong English force defending the ‘Tourelles’ fortress on the southern bank of the Loire River. The Tourelles controlled access across the Pont bridge into the French-held city of Orleans.
June 2017. Chlum Village, just outside modern Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. I visited Chlum during my exploration of the Königgrätz battlefield in 2015 and again in 2017. I explored Sadowa, Rozběřice, Chlum, the Svíb Forest, and the southern sector around Nechanice. The modern battlefield is quiet, agricultural, and deceptively open. It takes some effort to reconstruct the scale of what happened here.
November 2024. Verdun, northeastern France. This is my second time exploring the battlefields of Verdun. The first impression is the massive scale of the fortification complex. Large and small forts with interlocking and mutually supporting fields of fire cover several hundred square kilometres. The ground is still broken by overlapping shell craters, stretching in all directions. Even after more than a century, the terrain remains uneven, cratered, and difficult to walk on. It is not a single battlefield, but a vast zone of destruction.
July 2012, Belleau Wood, near Château-Thierry, France. I am exploring the site of the legendary US Marine battle in June 1918. The first impression of ‘Bois Belleau’ is confinement. The ground is enclosed by dense woodland, with limited lines of sight and little sense of distance.
October 2025, Kalkriese, Germany. I am exploring the ancient battlefield of Teutoberg Forest, accompanied by Stefan, the Chief Archaeologist at the site. In AD 9, Roman General Varus led a punitive expedition of three veteran Legions into the area of Teutoberg Forest. Arminius led the Roman Legions to a location near present-day Kalkriese. Here, the Kalkriese Heights and the Lower Saxony bogs funnel any movement along a very narrow pass.
Next stop in our battlefield explorations was the incredible 16th-Century bastion fortress of Rocroi. Here, in May 1643, two of the superpowers of the 17th century – Spain and France – clashed in the plain south of the fortress. The battle marked the end of the dominance of the Spanish ‘Tercio’ tactics that had dominated European warfare for the previous 100 years.
The Battle of Bushy Run, fought on August 5-6, 1763, was a major engagement during Pontiac’s War, a widespread Native American uprising against British postwar policies in the Great Lakes region following the French and Indian War. The war was named after Pontiac, an Ottawa chief who led a coalition of tribes dissatisfied with British policies and expansion into their territories.
In the English-speaking world, the Battle of Agincourt in October 1415 is legendary. But there was a lesser-known battle a few years later where the outcome was reversed. A combat-experienced French army, inspired by Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orleans, launched a lightning campaign that overwhelmed multiple English strongholds before wiping out an entire English army in open combat at the Battle of Patay on 18 June 1429. Mark Twain even wrote about this battle!
The Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina, was a relatively small engagement in the American Revolutionary War, but had outsized impact on the trajectory of the war. The American commander, Brigadier-General Dan Morgan, also employed tactical innovations that were adopted for future campaigns.