Just 27 days after Rossbach, Frederick marched his army 170 miles in winter to face an Austrian force of 65,000 entrenched near the village of Leuthen in Silesia. Using a feint against the Austrian right, Frederick concentrated his 36,000 men against the Austrian left in the oblique order — a formation he had drilled his army to execute at speed. The Austrians, unable to redeploy in time, were overwhelmed flank by flank. It was his masterpiece.
Considered by Napoleon, Wellington, and military historians to be one of the greatest tactical victories in the history of warfare. Frederick defeated an army nearly twice his size using maneuver so precise it seemed impossible. The battle preserved Prussian control of Silesia and demonstrated that Frederick's army was something categorically different from any other force in Europe. After Leuthen, his troops spontaneously began singing a Lutheran hymn as they marched through the dusk — the 'Leuthen Chorale.'
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Hama fell on December 5, 2024, after the Syrian Arab Army announced it was 'redeploying' from the city to its outskirts — a euphemism for flight. The symbolism was overwhelming: Hama was where Hafez al-Assad had crushed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in 1982 by shelling the old city flat and killing somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people, the massacre that defined the family's rule by terror for two generations. Rebels opened the city's prisons and filmed themselves walking through the same neighborhoods. The government's abandonment of Hama without a serious fight told every remaining garrison in Syria what was coming.
The psychological hinge of the offensive. Hama was the Assad dynasty's founding atrocity; losing it without a battle broke whatever remained of the regime's aura of inevitability.
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