Missing In Action: 5 Armies That Vanished From History

Thanks to GPS, satellite imaging and digital communication systems, it’s uncommon for so much as a solitary soldier to go missing on the battlefields of the 21st century. But in ancient times – when civilizations often knew precious little of the world outside their sometimes narrow boundaries – it was apparently possible for entire armies to march against a foreign foe and fall off the face of the earth altogether, without conclusive explanation.

Myth has undoubtedly embellished – and in some cases overtaken – the truth behind the famous tales of vanished forces such as the Legio IX Hispana, which seemingly advanced into Scotland to subdue the Picts in 117 AD and never came back, or the 50,000-strong Army of Cambyses II, which is said to have been consumed by a powerful sandstorm in the Egyptian desert in the 6th century BC.

But their stories represent some of the most strange and compelling legends in military history, and all may have kernels of truth at their core. Here’s our list of five armies that have notoriously gone MIA.

1. Legio IX Hispana

Fiction has definitely propelled the legend of the Legio IX Hispana – also known as the Roman Ninth Legion – which has it that this elite regiment of veteran soldiers 4,000-strong disappeared from Roman records after 117 AD because they marched against the Pictish tribes of Scotland and never returned. The popular theory is that they were ambushed and cut down to a man, and it has captured imaginations.

A best-selling children’s novel – The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, published in 1954 – used the story of Legio IX Hispana as the background for a boys-own adventure tale about a young centurion’s quest to retrieve the eagle standard of the vanquished army, which was led by his father. Not just one but two films based on the legend of the Ninth are set to arrive in 2010 – Neil Marshall’s bloody epic Centurion, and an adaptation of Eagle of the Ninth by Kevin Macdonald.

It hardly matters, then, that plenty of evidence has been discovered to suggest that the Ninth Legion didn’t actually disappear at all in 117 AD, but rather was disbanded or transferred to a different part of the Roman Empire (before probably being destroyed elsewhere some years later). The myth, as is so often the case, is much more entertaining.

2. The Army of Cambyses II

Persian King Cambyses II is said by Greek historian Herodotus to have sent a force of 50,000 men to threaten the Oracle of Amun at Siwa Oasis in the far west of the Egypt desert in 525 BC. But they didn’t make it – after a week of walking, the army was reportedly consumed by a massive sandstorm. “A wind arose from the south, strong and deadly,” wrote Herodotus, “bringing with it vast columns of whirling sand, which entirely covered up the troops and caused them wholly to disappear.”

They were never seen again, and no remains were ever located. But many explorers of different (and often dubious) stripes have tried to find traces of Cambyses II’s ill-fated warriors in the last couple of centuries – Count László Almásy (on whom the novel and film The English Patient was based), geologist Tom Brown, British Army officer Orde Wingate and American journalist Gary S. Chafetz to name just a few.

Most recently, in November 2009, two Italian archaeologists, Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni, announced the discovery of human remains, tools and weapons dating to the era of the Persian army in a rock shelter – a natural hiding place from a sandstorm – in the Egyptian desert near Siwa Oasis. Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) was quick to slam their claims: “The Castiglioni brothers have not been granted permission by the SCA to excavate in Egypt,” he said in a press release, “so anything they claim to find is not to be believed.”

3. The Legions of Crassus

Roman general and politician Crassus was the wealthiest man in Rome and the world, who won a historic victory over the armies of the legendary Spartacus (as portrayed in the classic film of the same name) in the Third Servile War in 71 BC. Crassus’s ambition got the better of him however, when in 53 BC he invaded Parthia – against the Senate’s wishes – and suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Carrhae. He was later murdered by the Parthians, after being lured to their camp for parley.

Every single one of his surviving legionaries was thought to have been put to the sword. But a legend has persisted for centuries which suggests that some of them in fact met a very different fate. Inhabitants of the Chinese village of Liqian, near to the Gobi Desert, are said to be descended from Roman legionaries; 145 survivors – so claimed Oxford University Professor Homer Dubs in the 1950s – of Crassus’s army, who fled eastwards after Carrhae, working as mercenaries before settling and intermingling with locals.

A visit to Liqian by scientists in 2007 did indeed find a number of people there with European characteristics such as blonde hair and green or blue eyes, and distinctly un-Chinese noses. DNA tests have been taken in the hope of investigating the theory further, although it’ll of course never be possible to prove conclusively that they descend specifically from members of Crassus’s army.

4. The Norfolk Regiment

This isn’t an ancient army, but rather a British unit dating from the First World War. Their fate – recorded in an official dispatch of December 11, 1915 as “a very mysterious thing” – is one of the most eerie and tragic disappearing-soldiers stories in history though, so it’s worth including.

During the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915 the “1/4th Norfolk Regiment” is said to have been observed marching into a mysterious loaf-shaped cloud while assaulting a hill. After an hour they hadn’t emerged; when the cloud lifted, not a trace of the unit remained. All kinds of wild theories as to their disappearance have sprung-up since, ranging from brutal Turkish atrocities to – most fancifully – alien abduction.

The truth was actually ascertained in 1919, when the Graves Registration Unit searched the battle site and found that the Norfolks had actually gone on to assault a second Turkish position, then become cut-off and gunned-down or taken prisoner. But much fascination and conjecture over this incident still endures today, and it was even dramatised in a BBC feature-length drama All the King's Men in 1999.

5. The Legions of Varus

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD was one of the most comprehensive and crushing defeats the Romans ever suffered – it effectively ended Roman expansion into northern Europe. Publius Quinctilius Varus was the ill-fated general whose three legions (out of Rome’s 28 legions total) were ambushed en route to winter camp by a unification of Germanic tribes under the prince Arminius. All three – the XVII, XVIII and XIX, numbering more than 15,000 men total – subsequently disappeared from the face of history completely. It would be six years before their fate was learned.

Varus was a foolish general. Unsuspecting of Arminius – whom he trusted as an ally – he allowed his forces to be caught strung-out and unprepared along a narrow forest road. The few survivors of the ensuing bloodbath were either ritually sacrificed on stone altars, crucified on sacred oak trees or burned alive in wicker cages. Varus himself opted to commit suicide rather than face capture.

It’s said that it the Emperor, Augustus, only learned of the defeat when he was forwarded Varus’s severed head by Morboduus, the King of Bohemia, after Arminius had presented it to him in a bid to show off. The full extent of the gruesome fate met out upon Varus’s force was only discovered in 15 AD, when the general Germanicus staged the final, brief Roman crossing of the Rhine, and found piles of bones scattered around the forest. The legion numbers XVII, XVIII and XIX remained erased forever from the records, and Rome never again fielded more than 25 legions.

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