"Lucky shots that changed the world" Topic

Got to thinking about lucky shots the other day and how much of world history can be changed by a bullet moving just another inch or two.
Now obviously some we'll never know because they were killed and can't possibly know what might have been. But I thought of three single bullets that brought about great changes:
1) The shot that wounded Charles XII
2) The shot that wounded Joe Johnston (and put Bobby Lee in charge)
3) The shot that killed Stonewall.

Out all of those, I kind of think that Charles' wounding was most significant. I think without it, Poltava might have been fought a few days earlier – before redoubts were built – the Swedes wouldn't have had the command & control problems they did and things would have been much different.

Why limit it to bullets?

Harold at Hastings. Hardrada at Stamford Bridge.

Go waaay back, and take out king Josiah by Egyptian arrow. Now, that was some serious removal, since arguably he was the reformation in bodily form of the Jewish kingdom; the last of the Davidic kings (his two sons amounted to nothing). I'm thinking that the revisionists had an impossible task, trying to keep their people on board. Their religious faith had to have been shattered, their morale broken. Not long after that, Jerusalem became a mere client state to the Babylonians. (Btw, Ahab died by arrow, so it is assumed by some that the 2 Chronicles description of Josiah's death is based on that earlier bolt from the sky to slay a monarch. But if Hardrada and Harold both die from random arrow shot in 1066, it is easier to believe that two widely separated kings could die the same way.)

Franz Ferdinand?

How about the gun that came up blank / misfired when the trigger was pulled, pointing at Joshua Chamberlain on Little Round Top.

The shot that took out Stonewall Jackson

5 bombs at Midway

Luke on Death Star I. Apparently it was a shot in a million from this untrained agrarian youth.

Prague, 1848. The Austrian commander had agreed to a cease-fire when some moron, evidently firing in the air in celebration, managed to kill the commander's wife. He reversed course and crushed the uprising, which gave the Habsburgs troops to suppress the uprisings in Vienna, Italy and ultimately Hungary.

The whole course of European and world history might be different if the Czechs had figured out that rounds fired into the air come down somewhere.

Hmm. And don't forget the shot that took out Longstreet in the middle of his attack in the Wilderness in 1864.

Annie Oakley shot a cigarette out of the Kaisers mouth, had she hit him, she could have prevented WWI

In 1933, a deranged, unemployed brick layer named Giuseppe Zangara shouts Too many people are starving! and fires a gun at America's president-elect, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had just delivered a speech in Miami's Bayfront Park from the back seat of his open touring car when Zangara opened fire with six rounds. Five people were hit. The president escaped injury but the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was also in attendance, received a mortal stomach wound in the attack.

The shot that hit Adolphus Gustavus' horse?

The chap that missed Hitler in WWI

That shot…
That Croation, that archduke…
Lucky?
Maybe…
How many attempted assaainations with a pistol, that missed in around the same period.

McWong 👍🏼

The death of Turgut Reis ("Dragut") at the Siege of Malta by splinters from the nearby strike of a cannon shot.

B

Perhaps the Bismark and the Hood

Robert Ross, British commander killed by American riflement at North Point near Baltimore in 1814. Ross was a talented commander, led British forces at Bladensburg and burned Washington. Likely would have led British forces at New Orleans, probably with more energy and talent than Pakenham.

How about all the shots that just missed George Washington.

The shot that killed Simon Fraser at Saratoga. Fraser was rallying his troops, when Morgan ordered his riflemen to shoot him. Fraser was killed and the Americans won the battle.
If Fraser lived, who knows what the outcome of Saratoga would have been. Without the victory at Saratoga, there would not have been intervention by the French and perhaps no United States.
Legend says that it was Tim Murphy who fired the shot, but no one knows for sure.

I like the story that a guest at Davouts' house was commenting on his good fortune and Davout offered all his wealth if the guest would allow him to shoot at him 30 times in the backyard if the guest survived. No takers.

The crossbow bolt that felled Richard the Lionheart.
The shots that downed Montcalm and Wolfe.

How was the shot which killed Stonewall Jackson lucky? Shot by your own troops? I would call that very unlucky.

It was lucky for the Union though.

Very lucky for them.

I thought it was the gangrene that killed Jackson, not the bullet. ;-)

My understanding was that pneumonia killed him.

How about the one that hit Reynolds on day one of Gettysburg?