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Odd Solutions to Historic Problems

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 32 min

United States - American Civil War — Young recruits during the Vietnam War, circa 1967. History

2. This Wily Strategist Tricked the Enemy Into Supplying Him With Arrows

Chinese stamp commemorating Kongming’s arrows exploit. 123RF

Kongming gathered a flotilla of riverboats, lined them up with bales of wet straw, and explained to their crews what he expected from them. He waited for a foggy night, quietly rowed them across the river and, undetected, positioned them in a line close to the enemy camp. At a signal, his crews erupted to break the night’s silence, shouting, beating drums, clanging gongs, and creating an unholy din.

Startled, the enemy camp awoke in a panic. Convinced they were facing a surprise night attack, they unleashed a storm of arrows at the boat silhouettes flitting in the murk – arrows that were embedded in the bales of straw. Then, his pin-cushioned boats groaning with the weight of more than 100,000 captured arrows, Kongming departed. His exploit became a Chinese idiom for using others’ strength against them: “borrowing arrows with thatched boats“.

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.