Battle of Karánsebes Or the Battle of the booze : the battle that the booze finished before it started.
This battle was one of the battles in the war that took place between the Austrian and Ottoman empires This battle ranked the stupidest battle in histor.
On September 17, 1788, there was a battle called the Battle of Karánsebes, where the Austrian army mistakenly attacked itself and killed 10 thousand soldiers of its own.
How did the Battle happen
In early 1788, after the Ottoman army had lost a large number of its troops, the Ottoman army occupied the area of vetrani Hol, a very important pass on the course of the Danube, about 150 kilometers from Belgrade.
The river here forms the border between Romania in the North and Serbia in the South. That victory raised the fears of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II -Who happened to be very ill at the time-because it threatened the rear of his army in Hungary. With the Ottomans in control, they were able to cross the river to Romania and head towards Hungary.
In an effort to restore the region, Emperor Joseph II gathered a large army of one hundred thousand men consisting of various nationalities that included Austrian, German, Czech, Serbian, French, Croatian, Italian, Polish and Slovak, all speaking their own languages.
The Austrian army at that time was in many respects very haphazard, its units were made up of Austrian citizens, others Czechs, Germans, French, Croats, Serbs, polish, so communication and communication processes between all these multiple nationalities became very difficult.
The emperor had camped in the Karánsebes region of Romania, between Slota and Slatina with 100 thousand of his soldiers and sent a cavalry battalion to look for a better campsite, but the battalion came across a group of gypsies with a cargo of wine barrels.
Deadly relaxation
The soldiers, exhausted by the war, wanted to relax before the expected battle the next day. They forcibly took the drink from the Gypsies and began to drink.
A little later a group of Austrian infantrymen who had known about this place before came to join them.
The cavalry got drunk and refused to let the infantry join them in drinking wine, so a quarrel broke out between the two teams, which soon turned into a fistfight.
And in the stillness of the night, a bullet went off, the infantry shouted that they were under Ottoman attack!
The drunken cavalry squad thought that the Turks had come up behind them and fled to the advancing battalions of the army in panic, so these advancing battalions, in turn, thought that the Ottomans had attacked! These forward battalions began to flee towards the main camp.
Soldiers Clash
A little later a group of Austrian infantry came to join them and it seems that they were aware of this location before.
The cavalry became drunk and refused to be joined by the infantry in drinking wine, so a quarrel broke out between the two teams, which soon turned into a fistfight.
A quarrel broke out between them, which turned into random shooting in all directions.
On the other bank of the bridge, the majority of the army was asleep, so they heard the shooting, thinking that it was an attack by the Ottoman army.
Because of the dark darkness at Karánsebes, they did not see anything, so there was a great panic and horror that made the horses have to break the fence and run away, making a sound like an attack by a cavalry squad.
This is exactly what the army commander imagined, who ordered the artillery to open fire, and more people died on Karánsebes land.
The voices were raised among the military members "Turks.. The Turks. Ange yourself!.. Everything is lost!".
Panic soon overtook the entire army, and it became a farce to try to tell that multilingual army what was really going on.
The first regiment retreated, followed by other regiments, and soon more fleeing soldiers followed in a rare human tidal wave, and most of the regiments could not understand each other because of the language barrier.
The German soldiers realized the mistake of reality and simply wanted the shooting to stop, so some German officers in the Austrian army shouted ” Halt! Halt! ” Which means "stop", but because of the language barrier The Non-German soldiers thought that the word " halt " was " Allah " the word the Ottomans were known to always utter on the battlefield, and instead of a cease-fire, those cries simply caused him to increase his intensity.
This made each regiment think that the other was its enemy because of the dark darkness, and when they were dominated by the idea that the Turks would pounce on them with their swords, they shot their fleeing ranks back thinking that they were soldiers of the Ottoman army.
After this farce
The Austrian camp was in complete chaos, and the fighting escalated in the Battle of Karánsebes with a combination of drunkenness, obscurity and language obstacles, the whole Austrian army entered into a battle against itself. By the end of that black night, thousands of Austrian soldiers had fallen dead and wounded
And when morning came, the Austrians realized exactly what had happened , yes, more than 10,000 soldiers of the Austrian army perished.
So when the Turks actually reached Karánsebes two days later, it turned out that their offensive plan was unnecessary, as they found that most of the Austrian army became helpless, and left the city without defenses protecting it, so the Ottomans captured it without any significant effort.
