20 Famous War Stories History Got Wrong All Along

The story tells us King Leonidas of Sparta held the narrow pass of Thermopylae against the Persian emperor Xerxes I. But the ancient Greek historian Herodotus says the king led thousands of allied Greeks, buying time for the Greek navy at Salamis. When the last day came and the Persians flanked the pass, 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans chose to stay and die with the Spartans rather than retreat.

While leading the defense of the Alamo mission in San Antonio against an attack by Mexican forces under General Santa Anna, William Barret Travis, according to legend, drew a line in the dirt and asked anyone willing to die to cross it, and all but one man did. No account from 1836 mentions it. The story was first told decades later by a man called William Physick Zuber, who said he made up the story based on family lore. Nearly all of the men at the Alamo died with Travis when it fell.

In 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren sent Boston silversmith Paul Revere to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching toward Concord, Massachusetts. But a famous poem, written decades later, made Revere into a lone rider yelling, “The British are coming.” Actually, Revere rode with William Dawes, who was soon joined by Dr. Samuel Prescott. Together they only warned, “The Regulars are coming out.” Revere was captured before he arrived at Concord. Only Prescott completed the ride.

On April 21, 1918, Manfred von Richthofen, Germany’s “Red Baron” and the war’s most successful flying ace with 80 confirmed victories, was flying low, in pursuit of a green recruit, over the French town of Vaux-sur-Somme. The Canadian pilot Captain Roy Brown was officially credited with downing him. The path of the bullet that killed Richthofen was consistent with being fired by someone on the ground rather than from above. In all likelihood, it was Australian sergeant Cedric Popkin who shot Richthofen. Richthofen crashed and died on the spot, but Brown retained the credit.

On September 1, 1939, the first day of the Second World War, Colonel Kazimierz Mastalerz of the Polish 18th Pomeranian Uhlan Regiment attacked a German infantry battalion near Krojanty, Poland. He ordered a saber charge that routed the infantry and allowed a Polish withdrawal to take place, until German armored cars opened fire with their machine guns. A later propaganda story claimed the Polish cavalry had foolishly charged tank units, but in reality they were armed with anti-tank rifles and sometimes fought by dismounting. Mastalerz was killed in the fighting, but the delaying action proved successful.

Following a ten-year siege of Troy, now Hisarlik, Turkey, Greek commander Odysseus is credited with a final trick that allowed the Greeks to breach the city’s walls. Homer and, later, Virgil in the Aeneid, tell of a hollow wooden horse with armed men inside, but such technology didn’t exist in the Bronze Age. Others think the “horse” was simply a shorthand for a hide-covered battering ram, or perhaps for a Phoenician cargo ship called a hippos. Troy and the siege were real. The horse was a poet’s way of describing a weapon.

During the Crimean War at the Battle of Balaclava, British commander Lord Raglan gave a poorly worded order to prevent Russian soldiers from taking guns that the Allies had seized on some nearby heights. His messenger, Captain Louis Nolan, took the message to rival cavalry commanders Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, who held a long-standing grudge against each other. This exacerbated the confusion, and the two commanders ordered their men to charge a different set of cannons, which were well fortified. A well-known poem immortalized the charge as a senseless but noble sacrifice. Approximately 110 out of around 670 men died in the charge.

Dunkirk, also known as Operation Dynamo, refers to the evacuation of Allied soldiers from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, France, between May 26 and June 4, 1940, as they were surrounded by German troops. Dunkirk’s “little ships,” a flotilla of small vessels, are popularly credited with rescuing the British Expeditionary Force single-handedly. However, logbooks held in the British National Archives reveal that Royal Navy destroyers and other naval vessels, along with larger civilian ships such as ferries, transported over 80% of the rescued soldiers, many directly off the piers. The small boats simply transported soldiers from the shallow beaches to the larger ships offshore.

Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French during the Napoleonic Wars, was said to be only five foot two, but those were old French units, the pouces, which were longer than the British inch. British cartoonist James Gillray often depicted him as tiny in cartoons known as “Little Boney.” And thus began the trope, which has stuck ever since, that small men are particularly insecure and over-aggressive. Once converted into the British inch, Napoleon came out to around five feet and 6 and a half inches tall, about average or a little above average for the typical Frenchman of the era. And yet the height myth still persists to this day, used as shorthand.

In 1943, two British intelligence agents, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, dropped a body masquerading as a “Major William Martin” near the Spanish coast. He was carrying phony papers that suggested the Allies would be invading Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. The 2021 film Operation Mincemeat makes it seem like this was the one trick that completely tricked Hitler, but it was really just part of Operation Barclay, a more elaborate ruse that included bogus radio traffic and fake troop movements in the Middle East. And it wasn’t even new. German generals were expecting an attack on Greece all along.

In April 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox Court House, Va. It is widely reported that the generals signed the papers outside under an apple tree. In fact, they signed the document inside a brick house owned by a local resident named Wilmer McLean. And though Lee had only rested under a nearby apple tree while waiting for Grant’s reply, souvenir hunters quickly chopped down the tree and sold pieces as walking sticks.

Publisher William Randolph Hearst sent the artist Frederic Remington to Havana, Cuba, before the start of the Spanish-American War. Remington supposedly sent a telegram saying all was quiet, and Hearst supposedly responded, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” There is no record of these messages in either of their files. The quote is found only years later in a book by James Creelman, a journalist with a penchant for embellishing. Hearst said he never sent such a message. But the phrase is still often repeated as proof of yellow journalism.

In a London newspaper, several weeks after the British Expeditionary Force’s bloody retreat from Mons in Belgium in 1914, Welsh writer Arthur Machen published a short story titled “The Bowmen” that imagines ghostly archers, fighting at a battle centuries ago, saving the lives of retreating soldiers. Printed without any indication that it was fiction, many readers took it as fact. Within months, the story had mutated from bowmen into angels, the “Angels of Mons,” whose protective power was relayed in sermons and war rumors. Machen repeatedly insisted that it was just his own invention.

In 146 BC, Roman general Scipio Aemilianus took Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, and torched it, marking the end of the Third Punic War. Legend says that he commanded that the surrounding fields be plowed over with salt, rendering them unable to ever grow crops again. However, none of the ancient historians, including Polybius, Livy, and Appian, record any such event. Salt was also too valuable a commodity at the time to have been discarded in such a manner. The story likely originates in the work of 19th-century historians who adapted it from the Book of Judges. Decades after the destruction of Carthage, Rome established a prosperous colony on the site.

During World War II, Soviet General Pavel Rotmistrov deployed his 5th Guards Tank Army against German tanks near Prokhorovka, Soviet Union. Soviet sources hailed Prokhorovka as a great victory that resulted in the destruction of hundreds of German tanks. Only when new records were unearthed did the truth emerge. Rotmistrov lost between 200 and 400 tanks in his assault against German defenses dug in with anti-tank ditches and field artillery. German records claim they lost fewer than 15 tanks on the day of the battle. Although the larger Battle of Kursk remained a Soviet victory, the fighting at Prokhorovka itself was a loss.

In 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 men across the state of Georgia, capturing Savannah. Later Confederate “Lost Cause” myths asserted that Sherman’s men burned everything in their path, including all towns and homes. According to Sherman’s orders and local records, Sherman’s men burned railroads, cotton gins, telegraph wires, and fields planted for food or military supply. Most towns, including Madison, Georgia, were left alone. Savannah was captured with minimal destruction and given to President Lincoln as a “Christmas gift.”

On Christmas night 1776, General George Washington led 2,400 Continental Army soldiers across the freezing Delaware River for a night raid against the Hessian garrison in Trenton, New Jersey. The Hessians were commanded by Colonel Johann Rall, whose soldiers were supposedly so busy partying they couldn’t fight back. But Hessian battle records and a subsequent British investigation say they weren’t drunk so much as tired, as their day-long cold, wet sentry duty was preceded by several American militia raids, leaving them in constant danger and unable to rest. Washington’s assault took the garrison completely by surprise, resulting in the death of Rall and the capture of more than 900 Hessians.

The last Anglo-Saxon king of England, King Harold II, died in 1066 while battling Duke William of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings. While many believe he died from a stray arrow that pierced his eye, the earliest account of his demise is actually a poem written shortly after the battle, which states Harold was surrounded by four Norman knights and cut down. The image of an arrow hitting Harold’s eye most likely developed from a depiction on the Bayeux Tapestry that art historians now think was altered during Victorian times. Whatever the case, his death meant William would succeed in his conquest of England.

About 100,000 British and German troops participated in sporadic and unofficial truces in Flanders, Belgium, over Christmas 1914, on the Western Front. Legends have imagined that whole teams assembled for full soccer matches over the expanse of no man’s land. Diaries and letters from the war itself report smaller-scale incidents: temporary truces to sing carols together and bury the dead were common, though many reported “games” consisted of brief kickabouts with ration tins or improvised balls across crater-strewn mud, and some areas never even experienced the truce. Officers quickly moved to ban further fraternization and shut the truces down.

Allied soldiers in the Pacific Theater referred to the female voices in Japanese radio broadcasts as “Tokyo Rose.” In fact, the nickname was applied to as many as 20 different broadcasters. Among them was Japanese-American Iva Toguri D’Aquino, who had been stranded in Tokyo during the war. She provided English-language music shows but smuggled food and medicine to Allied POWs and refused to read anti-American scripts prepared for her. After the war, U.S. prosecutors made her the lead defendant in their most publicized treason case. Toguri was convicted in 1949, but key witnesses later confessed they had lied under pressure. She was pardoned in 1977.

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