Hannibal Crosses The Carpathians

Why did Hannibal take elephants to cross the alps?
Hannibal took elephants across the Alps as weapons of war against the Romans.

How many men crossed the alps with Hannibal?
50,000 infantry, 9,000 cavalry, and about 30 elephants when he first began the ascent.

It never occurred to me that would have factored in. But it does make sense. Too bad though. Even a tale of defeat can hold many stories of individual valor and heroism. I wrote a screenplay years ago on Operation Tidal Wave, the low-level B-24 attack on the oil fields of Ploesti. Not a military success, but the individual true stories of heroism were incredible.

Th movie at first did generate a lot of interest, I suppose the sight of 50 Asian elephants, huge fighting force, support personnel trekking through the nearly impenetrable Alps, made for some spectacular movie making. And while I agree with you regarding your take on the perspective of heroism and bravery from any point of view, they probably didn’t want to take a chance on a movie where the central character doesn’t survive.

Elephants were used analogous to the way tanks are used today, or more like they were used in WWII. The practice of using African elephants for this *may* have arisen as a consequence of Greek experience of their use in India, where the elephant has been used for over 2000 years to do the jobs done nowadays by backhoes, forklifts, and the like. Alexander the Great won a battle in India, having innovated a method of coping with the battle elephants, after improvising a mass-crossing of a river.

Hannibal got his elephants up *to* the Alps after having to cross rivers with them; the method said to have been used was to build large (for stability) rafts, and covering the tops with cut sod, so the elephants would go out onto them. At one of these crossings, the Gauls were waiting on the opposite bank to have-at-you, but when they saw these rafts with elephants on them, they decided discretion was the better part of valor and vanished into the pucker-brush.

Elephants continued to be used in battles in n Africa for decades after this, but as usual, the Romans figured out how to cope with them. The last major Med-basin battle featuring elephants was Thapsus (as someone noted). The Romans imported elephants for their “games” and for what passed for zoos in imperial Rome, and AFAIK never much cared for their use in battle, correctly regarding them as at least as much of a threat to those using them as to those opposing them.

Not only African elephants, but also Indian elephants, were imported (by ship) for exhibition in Rome. :’)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HetYXwtCCho;t=1460

The problem was that Hannibal only managed to keep two of them alive afterward IIRC. He did manage to keep a field army on the Italian peninsula for an entire decade without losing a battle.

Back home, however, he finally did manage to lost the Big One against Scipio at Zama. The Romans learned to open spaces in their ranks for maddened elephants, who were dispensed with in the rear with weapons more suited to elephant hunting than human combat. I had a hard time finding out how, exactly, the Romans maddened them until I read Brian Caven's The Punic Wars. As well as having enormously tough hide, elephants could be armored nearly everywhere. One place that couldn't, however, Caven phrased delicately as "under the tail". Elephants poop. And so, at some point in some battle somewhere, some tough old Roman centurion said to himself, "well, nuthin' else is workin'. I think I'm gonna poke this here pilum up that there elephant's butt." The rest...is history.

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