George Washington’s escape from New York
Less than two months after the July 1776 signing of the
Declaration of Independence, General George Washington’s Continental
Army was in a fight for its life. The Patriots had failed to check a
British amphibious attack on Long Island, and following a disastrous
defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn, some 9,000 Americans were pinned
against the East River. While British General Sir William Howe settled
in for a siege, Washington ordered his men to round up all the
flat-bottomed boats they could find. As drenching rains fell on the
night of August 29, he used his hastily assembled flotilla to silently
ferry unit after unit across the river to the safety of Manhattan. The
regiment of Massachusetts fishermen that manned the boats used rags to
muffle the sound of their oars, and campfires were left burning to
deceive the British.
Many Continentals had still yet to be evacuated from
Brooklyn by sunrise, but luckily for Washington, a dense fog rolled in
and masked the final stages of the withdrawal. By the time the British
finally realized what was happening, all 9,000 colonists had slipped
away along with most of their equipment and artillery. “In the history
of warfare I do not recollect a more fortunate retreat,” Continental
officer Benjamin Tallmadge later wrote.
The March of the Ten Thousand
The Ten Thousand were a band of Greek mercenaries hired by
the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger to wage a civil war against his
brother, King Artaxerxes II. The soldiers of fortune arrived near
modern-day Baghdad in 401 B.C. and fought valiantly at the Battle of
Cunaxa, but after Cyrus was killed, they were left stranded on enemy
turf. The historian and soldier Xenophon later described their flight to
safety in his legendary work “Anabasis.” Rather than turning on one
another or surrendering, the gang of toughs elected new leaders and
began an epic fighting retreat out of Persia, often doing battle by day
and traveling by night. The 1,500-mile journey pitted them against bands
of hostile natives and a bitterly cold winter, but after nine months of
running they finally sighted the Black Sea to celebratory cries of
“Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The sea! The sea!”) Amazingly, more than
three-quarters of the original mercenary army later returned home to
Greece.
The Allied evacuation of Gallipoli
In April 1915, British, French, Australian and New Zealand
forces launched an amphibious invasion of the Ottoman Empire via the
Gallipoli Peninsula. Their landings were met with fierce resistance from
Gallipoli’s Turkish defenders, and most of the Allied troops were
unable to advance more than a few hundred yards past their beachheads.
The campaign soon settled into a trench warfare stalemate. By the time
the Allies finally began an evacuation in December 1915, they had
suffered over 200,000 casualties.
The Gallipoli invasion had been one of World War I’s great
blunders, but the retreat was a stroke of genius. As part of a
multi-phase operation, troops were quietly ferried off the beaches right
under the Turks’ noses. Extra tents and cooking fires were used to give
the impression of larger numbers, and empty equipment boxes were left
on the beach to convince the enemy that nothing had been removed. Near
the end of the evacuation, some soldiers even covered their getaway with
so-called “drip guns”—phantom rifles rigged with strings and water
weights to make them fire automatically. The subterfuge worked to
perfection. Despite early predictions that a retreat would cost them
half their troops, the Allies escaped Gallipoli with only a handful of
casualties.
The flight of the Nez Perce
In 1877, the United States government seized the ancestral
lands of the Nez Perce Indians and ordered them to move to a reservation
in Idaho. A band led by the charismatic Chief Joseph reluctantly
complied, but after a group of disgruntled warriors killed several white
settlers, the tribe found itself at war with the U.S. Army. What
followed was one of the greatest fighting retreats in military history.
Hoping to find sanctuary in Canada, the Nez Perce led their pursuers on a
1,400-mile chase across Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Despite numbering
just 700—only around 200 of whom were warriors—they outmaneuvered or
defeated some 2,000 U.S. cavalrymen in multiple battles and skirmishes.
General William Tecumseh Sherman later noted that the Indians “fought
with almost scientific skill, using advance and rear guards, skirmish
lines and field fortifications.” Finally, after 15 weeks on the run, the
Nez Perce were cornered after October 1877’s Battle of Bear Paw and
forcibly moved to a reservation. They were just 40 miles from the
Canadian border. “My heart is sick and sad,” Chief Joseph said in a
famous surrender speech. “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no
more forever.”
The Dunkirk evacuation
World War II’s “Miracle of Dunkirk”
began on May 27, 1940, when the first of some 338,000 British, French
and Belgian troops were evacuated from the French coast. The Allies had
retreated to the sea a few days earlier after failing to block Germany’s
blitzkrieg invasion of France and the Low Countries. They were cornered
and facing imminent destruction, but when Adolf Hitler unwisely halted
his Panzer tanks’ advance, the British Expeditionary Force was able to
fortify the port of Dunkirk and initiate a frantic retreat codenamed
“Operation Dynamo.”
As the Royal Air Force dueled with the Luftwaffe in the
skies overhead, the British Admiralty cobbled together a fleet of over
900 Navy ships, merchant vessels, ferries, and paddle steamers and began
transporting soldiers to the English mainland under heavy fire. Scores
of civilians also chipped in by piloting fishing boats and pleasure
craft across the heavily mined English Channel. The British initially
feared it would only be possible to retrieve 45,000 men over the course
of 48 hours, but the ragtag armada eventually spent nine days executing
the largest sea evacuation in history. Allied losses were still
sobering—many ships were sunk and some 40,000 men were left behind and
captured—but those that escaped later played a crucial role in the
continued fight against Nazi Germany.you may download the movie on our blog here. just scroll down to look for the apple adverts and click on one.
The U.N. retreat from Chosin Reservoir
“Retreat, hell! We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing
in a different direction.” That was how Major General Oliver P. Smith
supposedly described the Korean War’s Battle of Chosin Reservoir, where a
United Nations detachment made a 78-mile fighting withdrawal along a
muddy mountain corridor. The force of U.S. Marines, Army troops and
British Royal Marines had been ambushed and surrounded in late-November
1950 by a much larger Chinese army. Led by Smith’s 1st Marine Division,
the allies broke out of the enemy encirclement and began a two-week trek
to the seaport of Hungnam. Along with enduring arctic
conditions—temperatures dropped to 34 degrees below zero—they also
battled the Chinese at places like Hell Fire Valley and Funchilin Pass,
where combat engineers famously assembled an airdropped bridge after the
original one was destroyed. The veterans of the “frozen Chosin” later
reached the evacuation point at Hungnam in mid-December. By then, the
retreating U.N. army had suffered 17,000 casualties compared to a
staggering 60,000 for the Chinese.
Mao Zedong’s “Long March”
The Chinese Communist Party owes its early survival to a
retreat. The exodus began in October 1934, when the First Red Army
became trapped at its base in Jiangxi Province by Nationalist forces
under Chiang Kai-shek. Once the situation grew desperate, future party
leader Mao Zedong and some 86,000 other Communists broke out of the
encirclement and fled west. The early stages of their retreat were
dogged by Nationalist ground attacks and bombings. Nearly half the Red
Army was anhhililated in a matter of weeks, but the survivors continued
the flight for a full year, braving starvation, disease and perilous
mountain crossings before finally arriving at new headquarters in the
northern province of Shaanxi. Mao elbowed his way into power during the
journey, and he later used the legend of the “Long March” to cement his
position and recruit scores of Chinese to the Communist cause.
Historians still debate certain aspects of the ordeal, but there’s no
doubt it was brutal. According to some estimates, nine out of every 10
people who began the retreat perished along the way.
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