10 Best/Deadliest Warriors (Military Units) of their Era

daft

The fargone
Joined
Dec 19, 2013
Messages
1,398
Location
New World
Looking for opinions about the best, most effective/deadliest land (military) warrior units of each era. What famous warrior/soldier army types such list(s) could include?
Ancient. Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, the World Wars, Modern and any other eras you can think of. I like grouping all non gunpowder units (like the Impi or Jaguar Warriors) into subgroups, separate from their gunpowder based counterparts.
Again, if considered a non interesting/historical thread, please remove, ty.
 
Athenian hoplites, Battle of Marathon, 490 BC: The Athenians engaged when the Persians were unable to bring their cavalry into the fight, but even without the horses, the Persians had a 2-to-1 numerical advantage in infantry. The Greeks still won. A lot of it had to do with the phalanx, which is a tactic/formation, but you can have the best battle plan in the world and the grunts still have to implement it. Anyone who's ever played rugby or American football knows how important teamwork, discipline and stamina are in a scrum.

 
^Athens also won in 470ish BC, in Asia Minor, by itself, against Persia. Their double victory at the river Eurymedon in Lydia secured their Delian league/empire.

However the Spartans always had a better hoplite force at the era. Athens never risked a battle of hoplites against Sparta, even when it meant they had to abandon their older port at Dekeleia.
 
In the 1st half of the 15th century there was no any deadlier fighting force in Europe than the Czech Hussites. They repulsed 5 international crusades, organized their own devastating counterattacks, one of them reaching even as far as the Baltic coast, and remained undefeated by external forces. What else is required?

They also popularized two things - gunpowder and religious "heresy" (the latter led to the Reformation of the 16th century).
 
I would say the Prussians had one of the best fighting forces of their era, with Frederick the Great repelling an attack by nearly every major European power at one point or another.
 
^Afaik he was also very lucky in the end, though, cause he had written a letter expressing his fear that almost all of Prussia would be divided in the end of (iirc his last) the ongoing war. -Although i read that on wiki, and some months ago, so maybe it is not correct.-
 
I think the Prussian army, like most military establishments, went through phases of dynamism and stagnation, and that when dynamic it was excellent and when stagnant it suffered. Frederick the Great himself should not be underestimated as a force for its success in his day, of course, but Prussian performance was rather variable; they performed excellently against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 but far from inspiringly against Denmark in 1864 (though they did in the end win) and their record in the early part of the Napoleonic War was little short of shambolic.
 
I have to think there's a place for two of the classics of modern fantasy fiction on this list: the Western European knights of the Middle Ages, and the Japanese bushi/samurai of the 'Sengoku Jidai.'
 
I think the Prussian army, like most military establishments, went through phases of dynamism and stagnation, and that when dynamic it was excellent and when stagnant it suffered. Frederick the Great himself should not be underestimated as a force for its success in his day, of course, but Prussian performance was rather variable; they performed excellently against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 but far from inspiringly against Denmark in 1864 (though they did in the end win) and their record in the early part of the Napoleonic War was little short of shambolic.

I agree, but there was a reason that Prussian military training methods were considered the best of their day.
 
At times, certainly. When the Prussian establishment was open to the idea of doctrinal flexibility and giving relatively junior officers good training and freedom of action, it generally performed quite well. When those same junior officers became generals and ceased to appreciate the value of the flexibility that had won successes in their youth, it became too set in its ways and too vulnerable to be rendered obsolete at a stroke by changes in technology or methods of warfare. Hence the sons of the generation that fought with Frederick the Great were decimated by Napoleon.
 
Indeed - greatly simplified, what happened was that Frederick's army was great because it was willing to adapt to changing ways of waging war and had great energy and intelligence in doing so, but success bred stagnation. In 1800 the Prussians were still trying to fight wars as they had under Frederick, while Napoleon had totally changed the game. It took the shock of Jena and Auerstadt for young officers like Clausewitz to have both the desire to change the system radically and the receptive audience for their radical ideas.
 
Top Bottom