After the defeat at the Battle of Marathon, there was another rebellion in the land of Egypt, and just as the Persian king Darius I was considering whether to go to Greece again or quell the Egyptian rebellion first, he suddenly left and was succeeded by his son Xerxes.
In order to fulfill his father's last wishes, Xerxes vowed to conquer Athens and conquer Greece. To this end, after he succeeded to the throne, he began a 4-year-long expansion of armaments to prepare for a larger expedition!
In 480 BC, Xerxes personally led hundreds of thousands of Persian troops, divided into more than 1,200 warships, crossed the helestrial coast, and marched west along Thrace by land and water.
In the face of the huge Persian army, the Greek side formed a military alliance of more than 30 city-states led by Sparta and Athens, and elected Sparta with a powerful army as its ally to form a Greek coalition army to jointly resist the enemy.
However, the menacing Persian army, all the way to the bamboo, only took a short time to occupy northern Greece, and approached the gate of Central Greece - Hot Spring Pass!
Hot Spring Pass, a dangerous pass in central Greece, is named after the hot hot springs at the pass. The hot spring pass faces the sea on one side, the cliffs on the other, and there is only a sheep intestine trail in the middle that can only pass a small carriage, which can really be described as "one husband and one pass, and no one can open it".
Out of the East Pass, is the Central Greek Plain, many famous greek cities, such as Athens, Thebes, etc. are located on this plain.
Therefore, the hot spring pass is like a gate to these famous cities, if this place is lost, then these famous cities are bound to be ravaged by the Persian army.
However, this place is easy to defend and difficult to attack, and there are insurmountable mountain and river terrain, which is not conducive to Persian cavalry activities, so it is not easy for the Persian army to capture it, and the Greek side has also deployed an army of more than 7,000 people here to guard!
Unfortunately, however, at this time, Greece was holding a grand Olympic Games. This can be said to be incomparably sacred to Greece at that time. Thus, during the Games, a series of acts of war were prohibited.
In simple terms, the 7,000 Greek defenders stationed at Thermos Would not receive any military support.
As the commander of the Greek coalition, Leonidas naturally did not want to see the hot spring pass fall into the hands of the Persians, otherwise the consequences would be unimaginable. No way, Leonidas had to lead his 300 Spartan defenders to reinforcements.
Figure | Stills of the Spartan Three Hundred Warriors
Of course, as the commander of this advance team, Leonidas was well aware of the dangers of this operation, and it was undoubtedly a praying arm to fight hundreds of thousands of Persian troops with a very small force. But he had no choice but to block the Persian army at the hot springs pass to buy time for the decisive battle that followed.
Before setting out, Leonidas selected elite warriors with sons from his army and incorporated them into the march.
Before the expedition, after encouraging her husband, the wife asked him if he had anything to answer in the end, and Leonidas replied: "Marry a good man and raise a group of good children!" ”
A short sentence, I don't know how much emotion is contained, how much helplessness! Leonidas was already determined to die on this trip!
After Leonidas led 300 Spartan warriors to the front line of Thermos Pass, he began to deploy combat missions!
First, he divided the 7,000 warriors stationed at the pass into two teams, of which 6,000 were in a team, mainly responsible for guarding the passage; the remaining 1,000 were responsible for guarding the trail behind the hot springs to prevent the Persian army from sneaking in from behind.
Although Leonidas was relatively well prepared, and the hot spring pass was easy to defend and difficult to attack, this was nothing to Xerxes, because he had hundreds of thousands of Persian troops, and leonidas could not support it by relying on the tactics of the sea of people alone.
Therefore, during the battle, Xerxes was not in a hurry to launch an attack, but first sent a letter to Leonidas, saying that the Persian warriors were too numerous to count, and the arrows they shot could cover the sun, advising him not to resist.
But Leonidas was not frightened by him, but replied sarcastically: "That is very good, we can kill in the shade!" ”
Four days later, Xerxes saw that his deterrence was ineffective, so he ordered an attack! However, although the Persian army was numerous, the advantages of the large number of people in the narrow passage of the hot spring pass could not be fully demonstrated, so the attack lasted for two days without any progress.
Subsequently, angry Xerxes ordered his elite Janissaries "Ten Thousand Immortals" to launch a strong attack, but it was still ineffective!
And just when Xerxes was at a loss, the arrival of a farmer gave a new turn in the war!
Figure | Xerxes, King of Persia – stills
One day, a local farmer named 'Epiatis' came to inform Xerxes that there was a path that led to the back of the pass.
Xerxes was overjoyed when he heard this, and then asked the farmer to lead his "Army of Ten Thousand Immortals" along the thorny path to the back mountain of the hot spring pass.
Finally, after nearly three days of arduous trekking, this "army of 10,000 immortals" finally succeeded in approaching the top of the mountain.
Leonidas' 1,000 defenders deployed here, believing that the terrain was dangerous and that there had been no fighting for several days, thought that the Persian army would not attack from here, so they let down their vigilance!
Who knows, in the evening, the Persian army suddenly appeared, killed this thousand defenders by surprise, and soon collapsed! The Persian army, which succeeded in its surprise attack, plunged straight down from behind to the hot spring pass.
In order to preserve its strength, Leonidas had to order the withdrawal of the main force of the Greek coalition army, and he himself personally led 300 Spartan defenders to stay and fight to the death. In addition, more than 700 warriors of the City-State of Thebes volunteered to stay and fight alongside the Spartans.
Losing the natural barrier of the hot springs, Leonidas could not resist hundreds of thousands of Persian troops. As a result, Leonidas' more than a thousand warriors were soon surrounded by Persian troops.
Nevertheless, these Greek warriors were not afraid at all, and they fought bravely to kill the enemy, in order to make the enemy fearful. But the disparity in strength was still too great, and by the evening of the battle, all the more than a thousand soldiers had died. Persia managed to take the hot spring pass at the cost of losing more than 20,000 people.
And the corpse of the Spartan king Leonidas also fell into the hands of the Persians, and Xerxes ordered that the heads of the owls be raised on spears and displayed to the public to show their glory!
After the war, the Greeks erected a lion-shaped monument to the place where Leonidas died, which read: "O passer-by of a foreign land, please bring a message to the Spartans, saying that we have faithfully fulfilled our promise and are buried here!" ”
In fact, in the Battle of Hot Springs Pass, the heroic sacrifices were not only 300 Spartan warriors, but also the 700 Theban warriors, but the glory of this battle was only recorded in the name of spartans.
In addition, not all of the 300 Spartan warriors were killed, only 298 were sacrificed to be precise, and two did not participate in the battle, one with an eye disease and one with orders to go out.
It is said that when the two men later returned to Sparta, the natives despised them very much, and one of them committed suicide because he could not bear this humiliation.
The other also died heroically in a later battle, but the Spartans refused to bury him in the cemetery of the heroes who died in the glorious battle.
Although thousands of years have passed since this battle, when we look back, there are still many places worth studying and exploring, and the heroic and indomitable spirit of spartan warriors and sacrifice for the country is even more worthy of our admiration and learning!
Of course, in addition to the Battle of Hot Spring Pass, there are many famous classic battles in history that deserve our understanding and learning, such as the Trojan War, the Battle of Issus, the Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of Giant Deer, the Victory of Zhennanguan and so on.
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This is not a book that simply introduces the war, but through authoritative interpretation, the detailed process of the war and the behind-the-scenes truth are told, and the military deployment, tactical application, command gains and losses of the two sides are analyzed in detail, bringing you different shocks and enlightenment!
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