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To: C19fan
Hannibal’s problem was that while he was a great tactician and battlefield commander, he sucked when it came to strategy. Following this crushing victory he was unable to finish the war.

Not quite. The Romans simply refused to quit, no matter how heavy their losses. The remarkable thing is that their Italian allies also stood firm. Conquering Italy would therefore have required an endless series of costly sieges. This would have required far more men than Hannibal had, as he needed a mobile field army to maintain control of the operational area and did not have enough troops to detach for endless siege warfare. Nor did he have enough men for the continuous garrisons that would have been required. He was simply too far from his bases in Spain and North Africa, and it's not clear that Carthage could have mustered sufficient force (or been able to hire enough mercenaries) even had he been closer.

The familiar American analogue is the Revolutionary War, where the British, with a handful of celebrated exceptions, won most of the battles but could never maintain control of the countryside or towns without a continuous garrison, for which the British lacked men.

6 posted on 02/28/2016 5:54:34 AM PST by sphinx
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To: sphinx
Not quite. The Romans simply refused to quit, no matter how heavy their losses. The remarkable thing is that their Italian allies also stood firm.

When I was a kid and reading about Hannibal for the first time, he was a hero of mine. I totally admired the way he inflicted such crushing defeats on the Romans. Over time, my admiration has gone to the Romans. I love how they held firm and after Cannae basically told Hannibal's emmisaries to go eff themselves. Then they slowly ground the Carthaginians down. No Matter the opponent, the Romans would eventually grind them down. Winning the Punic Wars made Rome a great nation.

12 posted on 02/28/2016 6:33:44 AM PST by Sans-Culotte ('''Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small''~ Theodore Dalrymple)
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