"Alamo or Waterloo? The most famous battle?" Topic

Most famous battle ummmm when I was a kid 7 – 12 years old it would have been

The Guns of Navarone – I had a very cool playset for Christmas one year, I will never forget it !! Same Year I recieved ( Fort Apache )

Battle of Midway – Had a cool 1000 piece puzzle, from the book fair at school

The Cobra Army taking over over the GI Joe HQ !! where they proceeded to fondle Scarlet

As a adult – Waterloo would be more famous …… Being a American its hard to bend …. but I think its more famous then the Alamo

Captain Gideon,
LOL, you don't know many Texans do you?

Security Minister Critter 1,
I had to Google it and found out that the police in G.B.
stopped a convoy of protesters and beat the stuffing out of
them on the side of the road by a bean field.

In Texas the Alamo's not a just famous battle or national monument it's a HOLY SHRINE!

Coabeous

No Coabeous I don't know many Texans in fact i'm not sure if i do know any Texans.

I fully understand about how Texans feel about the Alamo and all kidding aside i respect what Texans think about the Alamo,so we can leave it at that.

Captain Gideon

Maxshadow:

DRT stands for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

drt-inc.org

thealamo.org/main/index.php

They operate the Alamo as a museum and archive for the State of Texas. I may have been a little hard on them. They actually raised the money and saved the Alamo form completely falling apart back in 1905. They have been criticized for their management of the Alamo and for not following standard museum procedures but I am not going to get into that here. They have a script of how the battle took place and the sequence of the events. This story is laid out for visitors in a prepared presentation.

They have been criticized for not updating their Alamo story given all the new research of the last twenty years. They stick to the tried and true story as personified by the John Wayne movie and Disney. But I haven't been there since I moved several years ago so maybe things have changed for the better.

The state doesn't care because the daughters manage it for free. Certainly their heart is in the right place and they have maintained this and their other properties well and have allowed new excavations in the Long Barracks which is revealing even more new facts. I once again recommend reading the book "Texian Iliad: A Military History of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836" By Stephen L. Hardin.

In case anyone still reading this- I would recommend "Lone Star Rising" by William C. Davis as the best single work on the Texas Revolution. It gives the "why" of it all, and not just the "how." Connecting the work to this thread, Davis does a good job of showing how the Napoleonic Wars influenced, and even helped bring about, the Texas Revolution.

link

The Alamo can't possibly be the better-known of the two. If it were, then logically there would be no need for anyone ever to say "Remember the Alamo!"

All the best,

John.

As long as I gaze on waterloo sunsets….

Alamo is more a US thing, Waterloo by far in Europe. Marathon is one of the few battles to become a word in its own right though…

Phil

"Fun facts: If you actually 'iron out' the mountains and count the square footage, *Idaho* is larger than Texas"

I'm not sure what your source is for this 'fact', but I'm willing to bet my house that it's not true.

Regards,

Stephen

I think this story says it best….

A True Texas Lady

A very gentle Texas lady was driving across a high bridge in Texas one day. As she neared the top of the bridge, she noticed a young man fixin' (means 'getting ready to' in Texas ) to jump. She stopped her car, rolled down the window and said, "Please don't jump, think of your dear mother and father."

He replied, "Mom and Dad are both dead; I'm going to jump."

She said, "Well, think of your wife and children."

He replied, "I'm not married and I don't have any kids.."

She said, "Well, Remember the Alamo ."

He replied, ''What's the Alamo ?''

She replied, ''Well bless your heart, just go ahead and jump, you dumb a$# Yankee.''

I set up a poll on a non wargame site to see what the general public (or computer netbook obsessives in this case – mostly US based) think: link

Results of choices are:
Hastings 1066 = 2 votes
Agincourt 1415 = no votes
Alamo 1836 = 1 vote
Somme 1916 = no votes
Verdun 1916 = no votes
Waterloo 1815 = 2 votes
Trafalger 1805 = no votes
Stalingrad 1942-3 = 5 votes
Midway 1942 = 3 votes
Gettysburg 1863 = 2 votes

There were also votes for some battles not listed: 2 votes for Thermopylae; 2 for the battle of the boyne; 1 for Battle of Britain; and 1 for Zenta.

So – it's not Waterloo or Alamo. It's Stalingrad.

Did you have Tsushima listed on your poll?

Captain Gideon

Dammit! It was pretty hard to think of 10 famous battles – as opposed to historically significant battles. I thought I should stratigy by region, time period, and medium. However, medium went out of the window pretty fast when I couldn't think of any major air battles, apart from the Battle of Britain, which I doubted was famous outside the UK.

For naval battles, Midway, Jutland, Lepanto, Salamis and Trafalgar came to mind, so I picked the 2 most famous.

For land battles, I went for 1 ancient (Hastings) – rejecting Thermopylae as too sensationalist thanks to 300, and Marathon as too confusing with the race. Other ancient battles considered, but rejected as too obscure included Megiddo and Cannae.

There was then a big period where I could only think of 1 battle. From 1067 to 1804 I only came up with one battle – Agincourt – mainly famous through literature. Thought of Blenheim, but it's also obscure and the list is anglo-centric enough anyway (of the 10 battles chosen, The British and French are both involved in 5 (including Hastings for both), The Americans in 3, and the Germans in 4 – including Waterloo). I though of maybe the fall of Constantinople or the siege of Vienna, but more famous later battles ruled them out.

Essentially, for an ancient battle to stand the test of time it needs to have a book, film, or rug made of it.

History written by the winner? Maybe sometimes, but a couple of the battles are made famous by the losers (Hastings, Alamo, possibly Somme and Verdun)

From Napoleon onwards, the list stratified by major wars, but you'll note that despite my attempts at stratification, there are none in Africa (El Alamein was considered), South America, or the whole of Asia (with the possible exception of Midway).

I thought about the American war of Independence for a battle but had to struggle before thinking of Yorktown – but imagine this comes way down the list from Gettysburg or the Alamo (which I wouldn't have even considered, were it not for this thread).

Anyway, it was fun to do – try making your own list & see how you do. If I were to do it again, I'd drop the WW1 battles and add Thermopylae and D-day.

Final comment – these polls, like any other online polls are subject to vote rigging. Two people living in Ireland made the Battle of the Boyne as famous as Waterloo, and more famous than the Alamo!

Alamo? They used to rent cars.

You need to do some digging to find it, but the US Forest Service is a decent start. Idaho goes from 550' to 12,000' above sea level. Lots of anything-but-flat here, with 'normal' mountains running about 3000' from valley bottom to peak, and the exceptional ones rising 7000'. Heard of Hell's Canyon? It's a mile deep, and there's another canyon almost that deep not 30 miles away, not counting all the draws into Hell's Canyon.

I'll be nice and let you keep your house, though, Stephen1162.

Well then, we'll iron out our mountains in Texas and be bigger too.

Scutatus 08 Mar 2010 3:59 p.m. PST
''"WE" Lost? That is a bit wierd considering the (white) "we" of today is largely a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon, Viking and those Normans. Meaning the Normans that won Hastings and became the ruling class for the next few hundred years, intermarrying with the locals and eventually being amalgamated, are part of the "we" and the "us" too.''

Umm – methinks, not.

The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of British ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps and were contained by the Channel separating the British from Europe.

The English still derive most of their current gene pool from these people. There were many later invasions which spread 'Celtic' culture in the west and the Anglo-Saxon languages but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix. The Normans even less. In fact, the average ice-age Briton carried a more diverse gene pool that present-day inhabitants – a tell-tale function of isolation rather than absorption.
link

So, Hastings? Yes, lost.

Wargammers are a funny lot we can think of Deim Deim Phu while the person on the street or the average joe would go deim deim who?

Wargammers are a funny lot we can think of Deim Deim Phu while the person on the street or the average joe would go deim deim who?

I'm with the average Joe in the street. What the hell is Deim Deim Phu?

If you're grasping for the battle that the French lost in Vietnam, it's Dien Bien Phu.

Irony's lost on some folks

Hmmm, who has the better quote?

"Merde" – Gen Cambronne

"You all may go to hell and I will go to Texas." – Davy Crockett

Neat thing in downtown San Antone, you can get a shirt that says, "Texas – It's bigger than France."

Hmmm, who has the better quote?

I prefer short and to the point. Remember McAuliffe's 'nuts'?

There's probably a better way of phrasing that question…