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Legendary Losses: Biggest Losers In History

Khalid Elhassan July 25, 2023 32 min

Loser - The Battle of Red Cliffs — The Battle of Red Cliffs. Rebellion Research

The King of Kings

Loser - An ancient mosaic depiction of the precise moment when Alexander the Great's charge at the Battle of Issus put Darius III to flight — An ancient mosaic depiction of the precise moment when Alexander the Great’s charge at the Battle of Issus put Darius III to flight. Wikimedia

On October 1^st, 331 BC, Alexander the Great led 47,000 Macedonians and Greeks against 52,000-120,000 troops under the command of Persia’s “King of Kings”, Darius III. Two years earlier, at the Battle of Issus, Alexander had defeated the Persian monarch, who ignominiously fled the battlefield. In a high stakes rematch, the two rulers and their men faced off at Gaugamela, near the modern city of Dohuk in Iraqi Kurdistan, to decide the fate of the Persian Empire. Darius placed himself in the center of the Persian line, with cavalry on both flanks, and chariots in front.

Alexander took his elite Companion Cavalry and most of the rest of his horsemen, and rode towards the right of the field, parallel to the Persian line. To keep the Persian chariots off his flank, Alexander took a scratch force of infantry, and placed them between his cavalry and the enemy chariots. As he rode to the right, Alexander was shadowed by Persian cavalry on that side of the field, to keep him from outflanking the Persian left. It was what Alexander wanted: to remove as much Persian cavalry from their initial position as possible. Alexander also had a surprise for the Persian horsemen: light infantry who kept pace with him, concealed by the dust stirred up by his cavalry.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.