Godwin Alabi appears to be puzzled about why the Biafran commanders sent one hundred men to capture Port Harcourt, two hundred men to capture Akwete, and three hundred men to capture Azumini. Indeed, it would have been better if the six hundred men had been deployed to one axis, as Alabi had suggested so that the Nigerian forces would have had to be diverted to redefend Calabar and Ikot Ekpene. What the Brigadier did not understand was that the Biafran leadership and, speaking truth-to-power, Ojukwu were not militarily prepared to fight a real war. Ojukwu depended much on internal and external propaganda and bluff to fight the war. The whole idea was to announce the capture of these little places, gain some minor
tactical victories, and make a big announcement to raise hopes that Biafra was about to recapture Calabar and Port Harcourt from the Nigerian invaders. The government of Biafra will sustain illusions and the morale of the population, and the masses of troops engaged against the enemy. This also explains the foray into the Midwest in August 1967 and the silly military action of bombing of Kano and Lagos shipyards in 1967 – Much like a childish fantasy that imitates the German bombing of London in World War II without the numerosity of bombers. I am not here to argue with the Brigadier’s notion of battle tactics. However, the Brigadier’s assertion that the military operation of the war from Calabar to Port Harcourt was similar to what the Romans did to Hannibal’s Carthage is flatly wrong. Specifically, Alabi makes several misleading
or factually incorrect statements. First Alabi claims that

…it was like Hannibal advancing into Italy after capturing Spain in 218 BCE. The Italian generals had no answer for this African (Carthaginian) general who introduced elephants
into the battlefield

…He attacked and captured everywhere and anywhere that he wanted until a Roman general called Scipio Africanus thought of attacking Hannibal’s supply route. The strategy was to allow Hannibal to continue to advance into Italy but his home base and supply route from Carthage would be captured and his supply route cut off …That was exactly what happened … Hannibal’s counterattack to Scipio’s attack on Carthage should have been to continue his advance to Rome and use Spain as his supply route … because he turned back creating a vacuum in Spain… he lost his momentum … and lost the war …

Every single assertion in Alabi’s narrative above is incorrect. First, Hannibal lost his momentum after Cannae (216 BCE) because his troops had been badly depleted and the Southern Italians, in as much as they had declared for Carthage, did not provide the needed manpower and material support that Hannibal needed to attack Rome and weaken Roman political resolve and military capacity.

Hannibal of Carthage did not introduce elephants into battlefields during the Second Punic War (219–202 BCE). As I stated earlier, elephants had been used in battlefields of the ancient world as far back as three hundred years earlier. Even to Western European warlords, elephants had been encountered more than one hundred years before Hannibal fought against the Romans in 218 BCE. Specifically, Alexander the Great encountered elephants at the Battle of Hydaspes (327 BC), against the Punjabi (Indian Potentate) Porus of India, and in the Magadha empire east of the Punjab, halting his advance. Even before the Hydaspes (327 BCE), Alexander had encountered elephants at the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BCE) and the Battle of Issus (333 BCE). Alexander’s successors employed elephants beginning from about 318 BCE. As for the Romans,
Hannibal was not the first to use elephants against them in battle. King Pyrrhus of Epirus used elephants against the Romans at the Battle of Heraclea (280 BCE) and at the Battle of Asculum (279 BCE). The Romans were frightened of the elephants at Heraclea but at Asculum, the Romans devised a way of attacking and capturing them.

In the struggles between the Romans and the Carthaginians, Carthage had used elephants against the Roman army in 263 BCE at the first encounter between the two rivals during the First Punic War and also in 254 BCE at the Battle of Akragas under the Roman commander named Lucius Caecilius. In 251 BCE, Lucius Caecilius defeated the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal at the Battle of Panormus (Modern Palermo) and captured 120 elephants.

Hannibal did not have to capture Spain to invade Rome. For several centuries, the Carthaginians had been influential in Spain and colonized at least one-third of the peninsula. However, at the end of the First Punic War (264–241 BCE), the Carthaginian senate in its foolish greed held back on paying the mercenaries that helped them fight Rome. A war ensued between Carthage and the mercenaries. Taking advantage of the distraction, the Romans opportunistically occupied Carthaginian possessions in southern Italy, especially Sicily. Having lost their possessions and source of resources, Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father, immediately occupied what was left of Spain, except for a sliver of territory north of Spain.15 After Hamilcar died (229 BCE), a treaty was signed by Hasdrubal in 226 BCE that marked the boundary between Rome and Carthage at the Ebro River. The Ebro River is practically at the boundary between Spain and the Pyrenees. Therefore, when Hannibal set out to invade Rome through the Alps beginning in 219 BCE, he did not have to capture Spain because most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Carthaginian hegemony or influence and probably included parts of Lusitania (present-day Portugal).

The reason that Hannibal advanced from northern Italy through to the south had nothing to do with the inability of Roman generals to answer to Hannibal’s elephants. Hannibal set out with about thirty-seven elephants, but fewer than five survived the crossing of the Alps or engaged in any battle. Therefore, Hannibal fought the battles without the elephants. That Hannibal advanced through Italy was certainly not because the Roman generals allowed it as a means of stretching his supply lines. On the contrary, the Romans did their best to stop Hannibal and confronted him every inch of the way—at the Battle of Ticinus River (218 BCE), the Battle the Trebia Lake (217 BCE), the Battle of Lake Trasimene (217 BCE), and finally at the Battle of Cannae (216 BCE). Each of these battles ended in defeat for Rome and, at least, Cannae was a frightening and disheartening disaster. I am not disputing the Brigadier’s assertion about who was stretching whose supply lines during the Nigeria-Biafra War or why or whether it was the right thing to do under the circumstances that he was referring to. Stretching supply lines and attacking the enemy back and the front is well known in military science. The Nigerian civil war’s Battle of Abagana could arguably be described as such, and Gen. Barclay De Tolly’s decision to retreat and draw Napoleon deep into Russia from the beginning of Napoleon’s invasion (1812) as continued after the Battle of Smolensk (August 1812) could also be argued as an example. When the French invasion of Russia began in 1812, Barclay de Tolly was commander-in-chief and initiated a scorched earth policy from the beginning of the campaign. After the Battle of Smolensk (August 16, 1812), the Russian Tsar (Alexander I) removed De Barclay and appointed Mikhail Kutuzov as commander-in-chief. However, Kutuzov continued the same scorched earth retreat up to Moscow and eventually gave Napoleon a battle at Borodino on September 7, 1812. Arguably, the scorched earth policy and retreat of both De Barclay and Kutuzov were designed to stretch Napoleon’s supply lines.

However, with all due respect to the Brigadier, Scipio did not initiate stretching Hannibal’s supply line, and Hannibal’s ultimate defeat from a strategic point of view had nothing to do with stretching his supply lines. After Cannae, the Romans, on the advice of appointed dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus (nicknamed Cunctator or “delayer”), decided not to confront Hannibal directly any longer. Thereafter, the Roman Army and Navy simply harassed Hannibal and engaged him and the Carthaginian navy in minor confrontations.

In 212 BCE, Hannibal captured the port city of Tarentum, further south and east of Rome. Hannibal failed to besiege Rome because, as some historians have argued, he did not have the siege engines or sufficient forces to attack, invest and capture the city. After Hannibal’s capture of Tarentum (Modern Taranto) in 212 BCE, his brother Hasdrubal tried to resupply him through the Alps. By itself, that choice by Hasdrubal, which stretched Hannibal’s supply route, was a continuation of Hannibal’s original decision to invade Rome from the North. Why they chose to go that way from the beginning of the campaign is a subject of discussion in itself. After all, Tarentum was much closer to Carthage than traveling all the way north of Italy and then traveling southeast. It might have been because the Romans were menacing the Tyrrhenian Sea and a move by Hasdrubal to resupply Hannibal across the Tyrrhenian Sea might have been considered riskier. After the naval battle of Ecnomus (255 BCE) of the First Punic War, the Carthaginians effectively lost their place as the preeminent naval power of the region and the Romans were able to effectively challenge Carthage at sea.

In any event, in 211 BCE, Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio was assigned to stop Hasdrubal in Spain. Later, Gnaeus’s brother Publius Cornelius Scipio was assigned to join him. Publius took along his young son of the same name, P. Cornelius Scipio Minor. The objective was to disrupt the supply line that had already been stretched by choice. During that year, the senior Scipios died in battle at the hands of Hasdrubal at the Battle of the Baetis Valley. The Consul Claudius Drusus Nero was assigned to replace them, but Hasdrubal duped him and managed to slip his soldiers out through the Alps. The younger Scipio pursued, defeated, and killed Hasdrubal at the Battle of Metaurus in 208 BCE. None of this was about the younger Scipio’s thoughtful or ingenious idea of stretching Hannibal’s supply route. The defeat of Hasdrubal had the effect of starving Hannibal of reinforcements in addition to the fact that the Carthaginian Senate had modified their strategic objective in the war. Simply stated, the Carthaginian Senate wanted to recover their lost possessions in southern Italy. Therefore, it is easy to understand why they were reluctant to provide money and manpower to reinforce Hannibal. This modified strategic objective was simply a mirror image of the Roman strategy for the war, which was to consolidate Roman hold on southern Italy and to make stronger their foothold in Spain. Specifically,

Both Carthage and Rome viewed the war in a far broader strategic context than did Hannibal. Rome sought to preserve gains it had obtained during the First Punic War and perhaps seize Iberia, while Carthage aimed to retain Iberia and recover territory in Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily it had lost in the previous war. Rome clearly perceived Carthage’s strategic intent … What Carthage wanted most from the war was to retain possession of Iberia, with its lucrative silver mines, commercial bases, and monopoly on the inland trade. It also wanted to recoup its bases in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and some of the offshore islands and thus control the sea-lanes in the eastern Mediterranean … If Carthage had established a significant military presence in its former possessions, it would have been in a strong position to retain them once the war ended, and negotiations ensued…

The Romans proved resilient and would not negotiate with Hannibal. Under these circumstances, it would have been futile to attack Rome. Once more, Josiah Ober24 provides a cogent explanation. Instead of Alabi’s proposition that Hannibal should have attacked Rome, Hannibal should have taken the gamble of amassing forces in a joint infantry and naval assault on Sicily and southern Italy to recapture lost
Carthaginian possessions and to defend Spain and Carthage. This should have been done immediately after capturing Tarentum or immediately after he unsuccessfully attacked Rome in 211 BCE, the latter of which was done as a means of diverting the Romans from divesting him of Capua immediately to the South of Rome. The failed attempt on Rome in 211 BCE should have taught Hannibal a lesson. Hannibal should also have revised his thinking after his brother Hasdrubal was killed at Metaurus (208 BCE).

Lingering in southern Italy for another three years that enabled Cornelius Scipio, the younger, to mobilize and attack Carthage was a fatal error. If Hannibal had moved to occupy southern Italy and if he had taken Sicily, the Romans would have been forced to withdraw forces from Spain to defend their southern flanks. The Carthaginians would then move to reconsolidate their hold in Spain where the Romans were beginning to attack Carthaginian interests and which they took afterward. Indeed, the moment Hannibal lost his hold on Capua, he should have advised his brother and the Carthaginian Senate to halt all reinforcements through the Alps. Hasdrubal would have consolidated his hold on Spain and Hannibal should have
attacked Sicily. The outcomes would have amounted, at least, to a stalemate that would have earned the Carthaginians a more lasting peace. Gabriel agrees with me on this.27 Simply stated, the capture of Tarentum provided Hannibal and Carthage the opportunity to modify the strategic landscape and give Carthage their more long-term objective. Rome might not have been defeated, but Carthage might have avoided or withstood the Third Punic War. Following the defeat of Hasdrubal at Metaurus, the younger Scipio requested that he be permitted to take the war to Carthage. In 205 BCE, the Roman Senate grudgingly assigned Scipio troops from disgraced veterans of Cannae. Scipio landed in Africa about 203 BCE. The Carthaginian Senate recalled Hannibal and the two military giants met at Zama in 202 BCE. Hannibal was defeated and the younger Scipio was invested with the sobriquet “Africanus.” Thereafter, P. Cornelius Scipio Minor was called by the name Scipio Africanus. Therefore, the name Scipio Africanus was not in existence before P. Cornelius Scipio Minor invaded Carthage in 202 BCE.

Though the Brigadier suggests that Hannibal should have attacked Rome—as many historians agree—Hannibal did try to attack Rome. Specifically, in 212 BCE (see map) after Hannibal captured Tarentum, the city of Capua defected to Hannibal. The Romans attacked Capua under the leadership of Quintus Fulvius Flaccus and Appius Claudius Pulcher and were defeated by Hannibal. In 211 BCE, the Romans, once more, besieged Capua. Hannibal marched on Rome as a means of diverting Roman attention from the siege of Capua, but the Romans called his bluff and Hannibal retreated to Tarentum, leaving Capua to fall to the Romans. What I wonder is
why Hannibal did not head for the City of Rome after the Battle of Lake Trasimene (217 BCE). Instead, he went further away, south and east of Rome, and ended at Cannae where the Romans engaged him and met yet another disaster. In the end, this all goes to prove the point that Hannibal did not have the resources to invade and capture Rome.