Curb Stomp Battle/Real Life

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Military

World War II

• The Pacific War, the U.S. vs Japan subset of World War II, rapidly devolved to this as the war progressed as the battles below show. Justified, as it was primarily a naval and air war that favored the side with the greatest ability to outproduce the other; in this case, by far the largest industrialized economy in the world facing off against a resource-poor nation that had already been at war for 5 years.
  • The United States with the help of Britain had broken Japan's message encryption system and knew the majority of the Japanese fleet movements, troop movements, deployments, fleet strengths, and basically all communications. Japan would not have won even if they had the same industrial base. In addition to this, Japan was operating under a traditional doctrine where battleships were the key and carriers were support for them. The Americans progressively saw Carriers as key and Battleships as support for them. Fundamentally this meant that Japan was throwing away tactically and strategically more valuable carriers to defend less important battleships. Bad video game analogy: The pacific war was akin to a game of StarCraft 2 where the US side had a 5000 mineral and gas lead; a map hack; 250 APM; and had a perfect unit balance with carriers as their principle offense, while Japan had decided it would mass battleships. Curb stomp was the only possibility on the high seas.
  • Operation Ten-Go was the last real naval battle of the war, pitting the famed Yamato, a light cruiser, and 8 destroyers against 11 carriers, 6 battleships and dozens of supporting vessels on the US side. The battle lasted just under 2 hours and resulted in 12 US casualties. The Japanese lost their flagship, the cruiser, half the destroyers and thousands of seamen.
    • Note that the Yamato and her escorts didn't fight any US warship; they were sunk by a massive air attack much before they could reach the Allied fleet. The 12 casualties were the crewmen of the planes that were down. What caused more damage (and much less than what the Japanese lost) to the US fleet was a largue wave of kamikaze attacks that took place during the same time.
  • Japanese land forces also had outdated equipment and tactics; while their light tanks were decent vehicles, they used outdated tactics, using them primarily to support infantry rather than vice versa. American Sherman Tanks easily outclassed Japanese tanks in every way, and they didn't use outdated tactics. The basic Japanese GI was also at a severe disadvantage compared to his American counterpart; infantrymen were almost always issued the Arisaka bolt action rifle, whereas American soldiers got semi automatic M1 Garand rifles, submachine guns, and flamethrowers. This, among other factors, meant that land battles usually had a ration of about 5 Japanese soldiers to every 1 American killed, at best. Usually it was far worse.
• The Battle of the Philippine Sea AKA the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot: The Japanese lost 3 carriers, 2 oilers, 600 planes and all-but-lost 6 other ships (The Other Wiki lists them as "heavily damaged"). The United States lost... 123 aircraft... and 80 of those planes had their crews survive (virtually all the US losses due to aircraft running out of fuel and having to ditch in the ocean before the could get back to their carriers). At the end of the battle, the Japanese fleet had only 35 airplanes in flying condition.
• Savo Island, one of the few WW 2 Pacific Theater examples of a curb stomp of the Allies by Japan after the opening months of the war. The cruiser fleets were about equal in main gunnery, and the Allies had a much larger destroyer screen, but Japan managed to sink 4 cruiers and crippled several other ships while suffering only minor damage (they did lose 1 cruiser to a sub attack after the battle had ended). It came as a big shock at the time, but in hindsight, it became obvious that Japan had won because IJN sailors were very well trained specifically for nighttime combat, and because their cruisers were armed with deadly long-range torpedoes that the American & Australian cruisers did not possess. The important of these "long-lance" torpedoes was really made obvious 2 months later, when a similar-sized Allied fleet faced 2 Japanese battleships but no heavy cruisers, and the result was a much more even fight.
• Subverted in the famed engagement between Task Force 77.3 (AKA "Taffy 3"), a small American force of escort carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, and Admiral Kurita's Center Force, a large force of battleships and cruisers, during the Battle off Samar. What should have been one of the most brutal curb stomps in modern naval history (Taffy 3's carriers did not even carry armor-piercing bombs or torpedos for use against capital ships)ended in a Japanese retreat despite heavy American losses.
  • Essentially, the small force fought back so aggressively, with destroyers closing to point-blank range to launch torpedoes and try to cause some damage to the enemy ships with their guns, and fighters and bombers harassing the ship's gunners with fragmentation bombs and strafing runs that the Japanese assumed that they were merely delaying Kurita's force while reinforcements rushed to the scene. In reality, this was merely a case of the task force commanders finding themselves backed into a wall.
    • The vision of huge battleships and cruisers charging down on little escort carriers and destroyers is so compelling that most people conveniently forget that Taffy 3 was supported by Taffies 1 and 2 and the three forces together wielded nearly twice as much total air power as the entire U.S fleet had at the battle of Midway. Moreover, Kurita's force had been under nearly continuous air and submarine attacks for almost 48 hours and the constant U.S. air attacks made accurate gunnery nearly impossible. While all honor is due the brave men of Taffy 3 in reality it was Kurita who was outgunned, as the the results of the battle showed.
    • The mere appearance of all those ships would be enough to warrant a psychological defeat. The question of whether the ships were carrying the right kind of ammunition would be merely academic to a commander in the field. A rule-of-thumb assessment would point to a single conclusion: "We're outnumbered, let's get the hell out of here..."
      • The US forces were badly outnumbered. 21 to 13 in terms of actual ship engaging. What gets left out is that the three largest us ships in the battle each weighed as much as one of the three main guns of the Japanese flagship, which in terms of tonnage was as large as the entire us force during the engagement.
    • The best example would be the USS Kalinin Bay forcing the withdrawal of the Chokai in a gun battle. Yes, a Escort Carrier armed with a single 5" gun defeated a Heavy Cruiser with 10 8" guns in a gun battle. The Chokai was forced to withdraw after its number 2 turret was disabled by the Kalinin Bay. It was admittedly a lucky hit, while the 5" shells couldn't pierce the Chokai's armor they could set off the torpedoes in their launchers next to the turret, crippling the Chokai's #2 turret, steering and engines, forcing it out of formation and turning it into a sitting duck for aircraft.
• The Battle of Cape Matapan in World War 2. The British run into a powerful Italian battle group off Gavdos and retreat, covered by aircraft and a smokescreen. The aircraft damage the Italian cruiser Pola, so the Italians send two cruisers (Zara and Fiume) to escort the stricken Pola whilst their battleship (Vittorio Veneto( continues on. Unfortunately, the Italian cruisers didn't have radar. The British, who had been biding their time, do. Night falls. A British battlegroup including the battleships Barham, Valiant, and Warspite ambushes the three Italian cruisers and two escorting destroyers, opening fire from 3.5 kilometres away (point-blank range in naval terms). In three minutes, the Italian warships were sunk. The only Italian response was some panicky and ineffectual AA-fire.
• Kasserine Pass. America's first confrontation with the Wehrmacht in WW 2 proved to be a total rout, as the outnumbered Germans chased the Americans all the way back to British lines.
  • Made even worse by the fact that the troops that broke through the American lines were not the Africa Korps but Italians, the Butt Monkeys of the Axis. OK, they weren't normal Italian troops but the elite Bersaglieri (so elite that Rommel himself plainly admitted they were better than his own German soldiers), but they remained underequipped as any Italian soldier in the war.
• During World War 2 in France, there was Operation Dragoon, launched mainly by the American forces. It ended with 140,000 German soldiers either dead or captured (this was especially crippling because Germany was running out of professional soldiers). American losses? 2,000 killed or captured.
• Lasting only 12 days, the Italian invasion of France over the Alps in June 1940 did not go as planned, despite the Italians outnumbering the French 20:1. Keep in mind that the French were, at the same time, getting invaded by Germany.
• Apparently Mussolini really sucked at invading over mountains; he tried the same in Greece, and here is what happened: for every Greek who died, 10 Italians were killed and 20 were captured. (Sadly it didn't save Greece from occupation, because Germany did it more effectively. Poor Greece got curbstomped in turn.)
• Japanese tanks versus American tanks (and later, Soviet tanks) in World War II. The Japanese Army's tanks had been designed with the outdated World War I doctrine of tanks serving purely as infantry support platforms instead of vehicles designed to face armored opponents. This meant that in pretty much every engagement with American tanks, especially against the workhorse Sherman tank, Japanese armor was hopelessly outclassed. By the time the Japanese came up with tanks which could theoretically fight against a Sherman on somewhat even terms, it was too late. These later designs never made it to the front. Even if they had, the sheer numbers of American tanks and the veteran experience of their crews would still have curb stomped the lower number of later Japanese designs with their inexperienced crews anyway.
  • The Japanese tanks were similarly outclassed during the Battles of Khalkin Gol. All of the tanks they could throw at the Soviets were simply outclassed by even Soviet light tanks. As one Japanese tank officer put it, "...no sooner did we see the flash, then there would be a hole in our tank! And the Russians were good shots too!
  • Honestly, it was about time the poor Sherman had it easy - they spent a lot of time getting curbstomped themselves in Europe and Africa. Watching your shells bounce off German armour at point blank range while their 88's are able to blast clean through your entire tank (and the one behind you!) from 3000 meters out? Definitely a curbstomp, there.
    • Honestly, the Shermans didn't have that bad a time. And when introduced in 1942 and 1943? They were honestly the best tanks on the battlefield, easily outclassing the Panzer III's in both armor and firepower. With the introduction of the up gunned Panzer IV, Panther, and Tiger though, the Shermans were outclassed...but there was just so much of them.
    • The Germans got their comeuppance when the British came in with Sherman Fireflies, at Norrey-en-Bissen the 3rd company of 12th SS Panzer Regiment, 12th SS Panzer Division lost 7 of its 12 panthers to 9 Shermans of 1st Hussar, 5 of which were lost to a single Sherman Firefly, who fired only 6 shots in the engagement. That's right, a single uparmed Sherman whacks 5 Panthers in 6 shots. A similar engagement happened at Tilly-sur-Seulles, one Sherman Firefly takes out 5 Panthers (2 from the first position, 3 from the second), this time in only 5 shots.
  • The Japanese tanks were so hopelessly outclassed by allied Shermans that the Sherman crews had to shoot shrapnel grenades to destroy the Japanese tanks - an anti-tank grenade just pierced the side of the Japanese tank, flew right through and piereced the other side, going out altogether. Unless it hit a vital part of the tank or magazine, all it did was a small hole on the Japanese tank. Shrapnel grenades would penetrate the thin Japanese armour and explode inside.
    • Likewise, even the hopelessly obsolete 40 mm British 2-pounder gun was perfectly viable at Pacific. The Matilda tank - dubbed "Queen of the Desert" in 1941, but completely obsolete in 1943 - became "Queen of the Jungle" in 1944 by the Australian troops. The Japanese simply had nothing to match Matilda and its heavy armour.
• The German 8th Panzer Division gets totally owned on August 14, 1941, by 5 Soviet KV-1 tanks, when the latter ambush the Germans near Krasnogvardeysk. For most of the battle, the Germans had no idea where the fire was coming from and were shooting in the general direction of the Soviet tanks, while tank commander Lieutenant Zivoniy Kolobanov specifically ordered his five tanks to attack one at a time and then retreat back into cover. Basically, Kolobanov set up his ambush near a road in a swampy area and then blew up the leading and the tailing German tanks before they even knew what hit them, trapping the entire column. Anyone who tried to move got stuck in the mud. The whole thing turned into a shooting gallery. In the end, the Germans lost 43 tanks with no casualties on the Soviet side. Needless to say, Kolobanov got the Order of Lenin for this.
  • Previously, a single KV-2 tank held the entire 4th Panzer Army pinned near Raseiniai, Lithuania, for an entire day. The tank crew only bailed when they ran out of ammo.
  • It should be noted that the Germans were using vastly inferior tanks at the time, that couldn't punch through the armor of the KV tanks. Things turned for the worse for the Soviets when the Germans started putting F La K-inspired 88mm guns on their tanks.
    • It should also be noted that the KV-2 was armed with a massive 152mm howitzer, wich could be used to destroy concrete bunkers!
• The German blitzkreig in the early years of the Second World War.
  • And how. Germany and France had always been arch-rivals and usually fairly equal in power, which is why World War 1 lasted as long as it did. In all four years of the war, the German army never reached Paris. With blitzkreig, the Germans overran the French and conquered Paris in a matter of days.
  • The real trick was how France utterly fouled up their tank deployment, which was otherwise on even terms with the Germans in terms of numbers, and supposedly had a (slight) technological advantage: France had no armour divisions in reserve, with their armour divisions already committed to the Low Countries. The Armoured Infantry divisions couldn't respond in time as they lacked the necessary mobility. Despite coming up with the Hedgehog defense, France could never counter-attack due to the losses they had taken, and the Germans managed to overrun them eventually.
• A subversion — during the beginning of World War II, the German Army was at the top of its game and the British Army was a mess. An invasion of Britain would have likely been a brutal and unimaginably bloody curb stomp. Luckily, the Royal Air Force defeated the German Luftwaffe and headed off the Nazi invasion.
  • The curb-stomping prevented was that of the Germans. Operation Sealion was such a misguided disaster-in-waiting that various wargame scenarios (carried out by military planners since then) have conclusively demonstrated that an invasion force in 1940 would have been annihilated. In attempts to give the Germans a chance, some scenarios simply had the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy simply not present to get involved in the battle, and still the invasion force was easily defeated. Even in simulations where the entire Royal Navy, RAF, British Army and the Canadian divisions present in England were simply removed so the Germans faced zero organized military opposition, they still suffered over 30% casualties with no one shooting at them.
  • In some ways, it is unfortunate that Operation Sealion was never attempted, as it would have been a humiliating and possibly war-shortening German defeat for several reasons - chief amongst which was that the Germans only had stolen river barges to carry their men across and a small navy to defend them, a tiny weather window, and determined British resistance. A final, and less glorious reason: The standard inventory for an invading German soldier did not include a gas mask. British contingency planning (in extremis) called for immediate gas attacks on any German beachhead, to be followed, in necessary, by gas attacks on German cities, to be followed, if necessary, by anthrax-ing Berlin.
• Russia, by contrast, is the poster boy for subverting this. For example, the Winter war against Finland (in 1939-1940) was originally planned to last three weeks and fought just with forces stationed around Leningrad. It became a three month campaign with forces brought from the whole Soviet Union. In the end, the Soviet Union did gain some land, but at the cost of 125,000 soldiers, a crapload of tanks and a third of the planes they brought. The Fins lost a fifth of the men despite having no tanks of their own (excluding those taken from the Soviets) till the end of the war.
• The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are classified on Wikipedia as a battle.The casualties section lists 140,000 to 266,000 Japanese causalities and 0 American Causalities.
• The French Char B1-bis heavy tank in WWII were pretty damn formidable, despite being based on, by then, an outdated design paradigm. German tankers had a healthy respect for them. One tank named Eure took 140 hits without any real damage and single-handedly took out thirteen German Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs. Too bad the French had outdated tank tactics and insufficient logistics.

Everything Else

• Crassus vs the Parthians Youtube link. You know how in some games let you fire arrows all day. And sometimes in those games, if you might be able to micromanage a horse archer to eventually kill off a bunch of melee infantry without him getting any injuries. Well because logistics are a thing in real life, you can't do that. You'd run out of arrows. Unless you bring an obscene amount of arrows, which the Parthians did.
• The 2011 Libyan Civil War became this thanks to the UN intervention.
• Elphinstone's Defeat in the First Anglo-Afghan War was, and arguably is to this day, the worst disaster in British military history. After abandoning a fortified position in Kabul, General William George Keith Elphinstone decided to march his 4,500 men to the garrison of Jalalabad. 90 miles away. In winter. With some 12,000 civilians in tow. The outcome should surprise nobody. Flashman says it best:

"For pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgement - in short, for the true talent for catastrophe - Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day. Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganised enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again."

• Battle of Shewan. 30 Marines were ambushed by 250 Taliban insurgents carrying mortars, RPGs and various other small arms. The end result was 50+ dead Taliban insurgents and no dead Marines (2 were injured).
• How about the 1st Gulf War? Western media played up the training and equipment of battle-hardened Republican Guard units ("We will need 10,000 body bags to bring back our dead"). Coalition forces braced for heavy casualties from chemical weapons and Saddam Hussein announced that his entire country was ready to fight to the death in the "Mother of All Battles." Today, military science classes teach that the majority of Iraq's 25,000 military casualties were unfortunate conscripts who simply couldn't find anyone to surrender to fast enough.
  • The success of Operation "Desert Storm" can be summarized here. Youtube link
  • Bill Hicks lays it out:

"Remember when it started? They kept talking about the Elite Republican Guard in these hushed tones. "Yeah we're doing well, but we have yet to face...the Elite Republican Guard." Yeah, like these are ten-feet-tall desert warriors. <stomping noises> Never lost a battle! <more stomping noises> We shit bullets! <even more stomping noises> Well, after three weeks of continuous carpet bombing and not one reaction at all from these fuckers, they became simply, "the Republican Guard." Not nearly as elite as we have led you to believe. And after another week of continuous bombing and no response AT ALL, they changed from the Elite Republican Guard to The Republican guard to "The Republicans made this shit up about there being guards out there; we hope you enjoyed your fireworks show!"

• • A specific example was shown on the Discovery Channel in an episode of Extreme Machines, "Tanks". In one campaign of the ground wars, the allies' M1 Abrams battalion reduced the Iraqis' tank battalion (comprising of Russian tanks) to mere plies of scrap in just a few days, with no allied losses.
    • To be fair to the Iraqis, they were fighting with inferior tanks.
    • Indeed. Their T-72s were a previous generation of tanks. and used Iraqi made shells. While they took pride in manufacturing them, it meant that the frontal armour of a M1 Abram was almost completely invulnerable. The tv show Greatest Tank Battles broke it down to essentially: The Iraqis actually were good, they used good tactics and good equipment, if we had invaded in the middle of the cold war. We might as well have been aliens from space.
  • The second invasion of Iraq was just as bad. There are reports of entire armored divisions suffering a single airstrike. The survivors then immediately surrendered to the squad of troops that had called in the strike.
    • Troops nothing. Some of the Iraqis surrendered to journalists.
• Any pre-Waterloo (which was "a damn close run thing") battle that the Duke of Wellington commanded became this. Aside from Vitoria, he was always outnumbered, usually vastly, had skilled but easily distracted cavalry (e.g. Britain's heavy cavalry obliterated everything they faced in their first charge at Waterloo, and were promptly destroyed by French reinforcing cavalry), was usually outgunned, and politicians in London tried to trip him up every step of the way, not to mention the ones in Spain. The only thing he really had on his side were the superbly trained redcoats and military nous, with which he obliterated French army after French army, eventually reaching France itself.
  • Apart from sieges, which he hated. Although he did win most of his siege operations (Burgos Castle being an exception), his tactics in all of them were straight out of the field manuals.
  • Special mention to the Battle of Assaye, which Wellington considered his finest victory: In the red corner, we have 4500 Sepoys and Redcoats, with 5000 irregular Indian cavalry. In the blue corner, we have 70,800 Indian troops... oh wait.
• Operation Flash With both forces being roughly equal (7200 on Croatian side vs 8000 on Serbian) Croatian Army lost 204 men (42 killed, 162 wounded). Army of SAO Krajina lost at least 1700 (190 - 280 killed 1500 captured).
• The Spartans had the reputation of being the best and toughest soldiers in Greece. Some armies preferred to flee in shame rather than risk a fight with them. Surprisingly, though, there are quite a few occasions in which the Spartans get utterly curbstomped.
  • On Sphacteria in 425 BC, a unit of professional Spartan heavy infantry surrenders to untrained Athenian rowers armed ad hoc with javelins.
  • At Lechaion in 390 BC, a column of Spartan hoplites is toyed with by Athenian light infantry mercenaries until the survivors break and run for the nearest allied city. The Athenian army does not suffer a single casualty.
    • The above two examples are textbook cases of why ancient Greek hoplites needed either cavalry or light infantry to protect them from skirmishes. Just because the Spartans were badass, that does not mean they were any exception.
  • At Tegyra in 375 BC, the Theban Sacred Band, 300-strong, suddenly encounters an army of 1,200 Spartan soldiers. The Thebans are undaunted and proceed to thoroughly kick Spartan ass.
    • This battle effectively dropped the Spartans from the position of badasses of the Aegean to a second-rate backwater overnight.
      • The Battle of Leuctra. The battle was featured on an episode of the BBC show "Time Commanders" which uses the Rome: Total War game engine and has normal people group in teams to re-play the battles. At the end, they'd show them how the actual battle played out, using blocks on a physical map. So smashing was the Theban smashing of the Spartans, that the guy used his foot to kick the Theban blocks into the Spartan blocks, making a real mess. The Spartans lost 400 Spartiates and their King.
    • Interesting trivia, the Sacred Theban Band was an elite unit of gay lovers selected out of the normal Theban army. The idea behind it is that there is none (or few) things stronger then love. It was possibly one of the most unbreakable units mankind has ever had. At some point the Theban army faced a much greater army of Macedonians. The Theban army broke and fled, except for the Sacred Band which held it's ground until they were either all killed or 254 killed and the remaining 46 too wounded to fight on. (Historic sources disagree on that.) The unit was never recreated.
    • The victory was not all that surprising. Spartan traditional tactics were the same as what Theban contractors taught their ancestors centuries earlier. While the Spartans had based their entire society around perfecting this style of battle, Thebes had made some major improvements in that time.
• The Battle of Watling Street. According to Tacitus, the grossly outnumbered Romans of 10,000 soldiers won against about 100,000 Britons, with the Roman casualties of only 400 while the Britons lost 80,000 fighters. While modern historians regard those figures as exaggerations, it's certain that the Romans achieved a decisive victory despite being heavily outnumbered.
• Hannibal Barca of Carthage delivered three of these in a row to Rome during the second Punic War, first at the Trebia, second at Lake Trasimene, and then finally at Cannae, where it's estimated that somewhere between 40 and 70 thousand Romans died in a single afternoon, while Hannibal only lost a few thousand.
  • Hannibal Barca essentially doomed himself, as he started the campaign with some 80,000 soldiers and hundreds of elephants, went through Southern Gaul (modern-day France) and wasted some 30,000-40,000 troops to garrison the area, then decided rather than battering through Roman lines to get into Italy, he'd slip in through the Alps... where HALF his men died and ALL of his elephants got too sick to fight or died. He essentially lost 3/4ths of his army without fighting the Romans once. The fact that he accomplished anything in defeating the Romans is just testament to his tactical genius, but he was still doomed from the start.
  • Apparently, he was hoping for the local cities under Roman control to revolt and join him after curb stompings he had done to Rome; however, they rather liked Roman rule.
    • Hannibal's various early battles with the Romans are all curb stomp victories, but only in a tactical sense. In the wider strategic context, each was but a Pyrrhic Victory. Hannibal lacked the ability to actually capture any large Roman cities (most notably, Rome itself), which ultimately doomed his campaign to failure from the start--he could not break the enemy's will nor his ability to fight, which eventually allowed the Romans to starve him out with scorched earth tactics, and launch a counter invasion of Carthage, both of which forced him to make his way home, and end up being defeated by Scipio Africanus, a Roman general that studied his tactics. The man is considered one of history's greatest tacticians, but as a strategist, he was ultimately found lacking.
• The Six Day War was a Curb Stomp War. At the start of the war, the Syrians and Egyptians were spouting rhetoric like "We will drive them into the sea," and "This time next week, we will be having lunch in Tel Aviv." Six days, a preemptive strike destroying their air forces, and several botched operations later, they were begging for peace.
  • Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Sudan actually. And the casualties were 983 killed on the Israeli side and roughly 11,000 on the Arab side.
• Even more so is the Yom Kippur war. At the start the Egyptians and Syrians got a quick victory. But by the time Israel put its armies together they start knocking their armies back to their borders. The Syrians and Egyptians were so badly beaten that they decided to simply abandon their tanks for the Israelis to salvage. The Israelis eventually bypass Egypt's defensive umbrella, and trapped their 3rd army.
  • In the naval theater the Israelis pretty much owned the waters, that the Egyptians had to ask the Soviets to intervene.
  • The first few days of that war was this trope for the Israelis, though.
  • Israeli victory was a close one--at a great cost in men at materiel and without achieving a decisive victory. Success at the end was proven hollow and the Israelis had fallen short of its self-proclaimed invincibility.
• The Seven Weeks War (or Austro-Prussian War) of 1866. On the left, representing 600 years of Habsburg might and majesty, we have the Austrian Empire! On the right, we have the upstart Kingdom of Prussia, led by Otto von Bismarck! This will be a lively, close battle and... oh, wait, Austria's already down for the count.
  • Same with the Franco-Prussian War
  • It probably helped that Austria had pretty much not been a military power since the Napoleonic Wars? Prussia had a policy of never attacking anyone who could remotely stand up to them. They only got into World War I because they weren't expecting the UK to enter, meaning it would've been them, Austria, and the Ottomans against France, Russia, Serbia and Belgium.
    • First, that was Imperial Germany, not Prussia. Second, yep Prussia never attacked anybody who could stand upto them.
      • In 1866 Austria was generally tipped to win the war because the Austrian army had acquitted itself quite well against the French and Sardinian armies in Northern Italy in the 1840s and 1850s, i. e. against another major European power, while Prussia had not been in what was regarded as a "real" war since 1815, unless you count the German-Danish War of 1864, in which Prussia and Austria ganged up on a minor power.
• The 1868 expedition to Abyssinia is this. The British expeditionary force pretty much had no resistance from Emperor Tewodros forces' because most hated him and gave up. The one major battle they had was a massive victory for the British. When they got to the Imperial palace they laid in siege for two hours, killing 700 Ethiopian soldiers and wounding twice that amount, and the British lost no men at all, with only 10 wounded.
• The Battle of Austerlitz: the French lost 1,300 troops compared to the Russo-Austrian's loss of 15,000.
• The Anglo-Zanzibar War. In thirty-eight minutes, five Royal Navy ships and 150 Royal Marines took down the Sultan of Zanzibar, inflicting 500 casualties and having one sailor slightly wounded. This still stands as the shortest war in recorded history.
• The not-so climatic Battle of Maaten al-Sarra during the Toyota War. After spending almost a decade fighting in their homeland, Chad took the fight to their Libyan adversaries. On September 5, 1987, the Chadians launched a surprise raid at a Libyan airbase, where their officers mistaken them for reinforcements. The ill-prepared Libyans were utterly annihilated, losing over 1,700 soldiers, 70 tanks, 30 APCs, 26 aircraft, and almost all of their communications and anti-aircraft defenses. The Chadians, on the other hand, only had 65 deaths and 115 wounded. A victory "to be written in gold letters in the great book of victories," indeed...
• The Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. The British had 386 deaths, 1,521 wounded, and 552 missing, with a grand total of 2,459 casualties and losses. The Americans, on the other hand, had 55 deaths, 185 wounded, and 93 missing, with a grand total of 333 casualties and losses.
  • It's worth it to note that among those 386 KIA for the British Army were two general officers: the army commander, General Edward Pakenham, and his second-in-command, General Samuel Gibbs. A third British general, John Keane, was also wounded in the battle.
  • Also of note, the one who led them to "victory" was a certain officer named Andrew Jackson.
• The entire Spanish-American war was this - it was over in just 10 weeks, during which the Spanish lost every single battle. Over the course of the entire war, the US suffered about 360 casualties, compared to over 3,500 casualties for the Spanish!
  • During the Battle of Manila Bay, Dewey's squadron sank 8 Spanish ships and lost 1 man . . . to heat exhaustion.
    • The US fleet was so dominant that it even took time out for breakfast midway through the battle, then returned to the curb-stomping.
  • Similarly, the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, during the same war, saw the destruction of 5 Spanish ships compared to 1 US sailor killed in action. The captain of a sixth Spanish ship decided to scuttle his ship rather than engage the US fleet.
  • Most U.S. casualties during that war were not from enemy action but from improperly-canned meat.
• The Battle of Agincourt in the Hundred Years War. Two thirds of the French were either captured or killed, with 1500 important French nobles among them. The English lost less than 100 men. This was mostly because the French had already used the same strategy two times, having been annihilated both times, only this time charging on foot instead of using their horses. At a well-defended position with only one approach. With mud that sucked down the heavily-armored French knights.
  • And lots and lots of arrows.
  • It wasn't arrows that did the French in, according to John Keegan. It was the French pressing themselves in in a mass to the point their heavily armoured knights were encumbered by their own weight; and then it was the English Archers' spontaneous decision to charge in in close hand-to-hand with these toppling-over knights, killing them (dispatching them, really) with daggers.
• The Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson had 33 ships, while the French and the Spanish had 41. The British did not lose a single ship and only lost 458 men (including Nelson himself). The French and the Spanish lost 22 ships and had over 3000 dead and 7000 captured.
  • One could argue that curbstomping their opponents at every turn was the modus operandi of the Royal Navy nearly throughout the Age of Sail. They regularly took on superior numbers of superior ships and won because they were better trained and had better tactics. The only major sea battle of the Napelonic Wars the Brits did not curbstomp their opponent at was Copenhagen, where the Danes had the support of shore batteries and forts. So great was the Royal Navy's well-founded belief in its own superiority that when American ships proved able to successfully fight British ships that were lighter than them in the War of 1812, the Royal Navy underwent a brief crisis of faith rather than immediately realize the problem was they were sending ships with 16-pounders against those with 24-pounders.
    • Not really the case. The main opponent of the Royal Navy in the Age of Sail was the FRENCH navy, which in all three major naval wars of the period (Seven Year's War, The American Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars) was hemmed in by such restrictive rules of engagement that made a decisive victory impossible (the standard French tactic was to target an opponent's masts and rigging at range, which was excellent at slowing and disorganizing ships, but poor at sinking them. During the Revolutionary War, Admiral Graves's fleet at Boston was twice saved from annihilation by French timidity. Losing that fleet would probably resulted in Britain losing all their colonial possessions in the Western Hemisphere.) The result of this was that British tactics calcified to the extent that, during the American Revolution, major battles were lost because the British captains could not conceive of even the simplest changes to the Fighting Instructions.
    • That had more to do with a broader calcification of naval tactics - the adoption of the line of battle formation by all navies of the period resulted in the practice of both sides laying alongside each other and battering the hell out of one another until they were exhausted, preventing decisive victories. It was British innovation in this area, with men like Hood, Jervis and, ultimately, Nelson, who developed the new doctrine of "total annihilation" that paid off at Trafalgar and Cape St Vincent. The argument that the British only did well against the French would hold a lot more weight if Britain did badly against better opponents - they didn't. Admiral Duncan smashed the Dutch at Camperdown and Nelson beat the Danes at Copenhagen. Only the U.S.A in the War of 1812 managed to get the better of the Royal Navy, and that had a lot to do with the Royal Navy's lack of decent ships and crew in the theater (it is an open question as to how well the US Navy would have done against Britain's best, and indeed in the most evenly-matched fight of the war, the HMS Shannon vs the USS Chesapeake, Shannon came out on top).
• The (First) Matabele War of 1893–1894 lasted roughly three months and involved two curbstomp battles (Bembezi and Bulawayo) against the Matabele by the BSAP and associates. The fate of the Shangani Patrol, hunting the fleeing Matabele army, is arguably yet another Curb Stomp Battle by the British, despite losing in the end (42 men versus an estimated 3,000, managing to kill around 500 before running out of ammunition). At the end of the war, around 100 men on the British side had died--taking more than 10,000 Matabele with them.
• The Battle of Diu in 1509. An Egyptian fleet of over 250 ships cornered an 18-strong Portuguese fleet in the Indian Ocean and...was annihilated.
• The Battle of Tsushima. At the beginning of the battle, Japanese superiority didn't seem so overwhelming. In the end, Russia lost nearly the entire fleet, including all 8 of their battleships and all 3 of the smaller coastal battleships. Japanese losses? Three torpedo boats. To the present day, the word "Tsushima" in Russian is synonymous with utmost defeat.
  • The entire Russo-Japanese War was a series of curb stomp battles with varying victors, but no battle was more completely one-sided than this one, made all the worse by the fact that the Russian armada had sailed almost all the way around the eastern hemisphere only to be so thoroughly destroyed. The once-proud Russian navy was wiped out, not to return again until the Cold War, while the previously dismissed, resource-poor tiny island nation of Japan was left with no real naval rival in the Pacific for 36 years, when it made the tactical mistake of delivering a curb-stomp airstrike on a previously dismissed nation across the ocean at Pearl Harbor.
• I think the majority of battles fought by the Mongols could probably fit into this category.
  • But then they got curbstomped by the Vietnameses and the Mamluks.
• Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. Charging a mile over open ground in the teeth of the full force of the Union artillery and infantry (a massive rebel artillery barrage was supposed to clear out the defenders first, but due to overshooting and faulty ammo did almost nothing) led to the attackers taking four times the casualties as the defenders; roughly 6500 to 1500.
  • "You know what's gonna happen? I'll tell you what's gonna happen. Troops are now forming behind the line of trees. When they come out, they'll be under enemy long-range artillery fire. Solid shot. Percussion. Every gun they have. Troops will come out under fire with more than a mile to walk. And still, within the open field, among the range of aimed muskets. They'll be slowed by that fence out there, and the formation - what's left of it - will begin to come apart. When they cross that road, they'll be under short-range artillery. Canister fire. Thousands of little bits of shrapnel wiping the holes in the lines. If they get to the wall without breaking up, there won't be many left. A mathematical equation... But maybe, just maybe, our own artillery will break up their defenses. There's always that hope. That's Hancock out there, and he ain't gonna run. So it's mathematical after all. If they get to that road, or beyond it, we'll suffer over fifty percent casualties. But, Harrison, I don't believe my boys will reach that wall." - Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, CSA (attributed)
• The Battle of Navarino. An Allied fleet of British, French, and Russian ships under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Codrington was sent to enforce an Armistice between the belligerents in the Greco-Turkish war. To that end they approached the harbour of Navarino where a Turko-Egyptian fleet of 89 ships carrying more than twice the heavy guns of the Allied fleet was docked. The Greek fleet (under the command of Lord Thomas Cochrane) broke the armistice and the Turko-Egyptian fleet tried to leave harbour but were prevented.
  • Days passed and the troops from the Turko-Egyptian fleet were put ashore where they began taking out their frustrations on the local Greek population. Codrington decided he would need to take his ships into the harbour to safeguard those civilians and supervise the behaviour of the Turko-Egyptian fleet. When Codringon was warned off he sent a reply saying ?I am come not to receive orders but to give them; and if any shot be fired at the Allied fleet the Turkish fleet shall be destroyed.?
  • Warships from five nations crowded together in a smallish harbour? No surprise when a shot was fired, a boat from the frigate HMS Dartmouth was fired on with muskets and the men on the frigate returned fire with muskets. Then the Turks opened fire with cannons at the French flagship Sirene and firing became general. The Turko-Egyptian fleet lost 60 ships with 6000 dead and 4000 wounded. The Allies had some ships damaged and had 174 dead and 475 wounded.
• The War of 1592 between Korea and Japan was interesting in that the war consisted largely of curbstomp battles that went two different ways in two different theaters.
  • On land, Japan was definitely the deliverer. Korea's Joseon dynasty was terribly unprepared for war, having become complacent by centuries of mostly peace. The country was run by an incompetent weak king and corrupt infighting aristocrats who ignored numerous warning signs of Japan's impending invasion and refused to spent more money on defense. There was little regular standing army and the scholar-class's dominance of Korean politics meant that military matters were largely belittled and ignored. Japan, on the other hand, was ruled by the samurai and it was recently united and was itching for some more war after centuries of civil war. Oh, and the Japanese had guns while many of the Korean army had barely ever seen them before in their lives. Needless to say, Japan managed to take over 3/4th of the Korean peninsula in matter of months after curb stomp battle after curb stomp battle.
  • On sea however, the story was a bit different. Korea had a small and outnumbered but competent navy trained by centuries of fighting against Japanese pirates. Korea had been one of the first adopters of naval artillery in the world and by the time of the war, their ships were bristling with cannons, to the tune of up to 50 cannons per ship. Japanese ships on the other hand, were designed for speed and boarding tactics and were too flimsy to carry many cannons. Needlessly say, it is difficult to board ships when you are being hit by cannons. Also, it helped that the Koreans had a few turtle ship which in addition to looking cool, happened to perfectly counter the Japanese boarding tactics, almost exactly like how those spiky turtles counter Mario jumping on their back. In addition, the leader of the Korean navy was Admiral Yi Soon-Shin, who was a Four-Star Badass to say the least. Utilizing tactics taking advantage of the Korean Navy's technological superiority and greater knowledge of the local currents and terrain, he managed to win battle after battle without hardly losing any of his forces. However, a Japanese double agent managed to get him demoted to a common foot soldier, taking advantage of Korea's infighting ruling class. Yi's successor promptly managed to get lured into a trap, and lost 157 ships out of 169 ships of the entire Korean Navy. Yi was hurriedly reinstated. In an incredible Crowning Moment of Awesome of naval warfare, in the Battle of Myeongnyang, with 13 ships (the extra ship having been scrounged from somewhere), Yi went up against 133 Japanese warships and 200 support ships. By the end of the battle, 31 Japanese ships were sunk and over 90 were crippled. The Korean Navy lost 2 soldiers. Not 2 ships, 2 soldiers. The difficulty of supplying through naval routes and the assistance of Ming China as an ally of Korea meant that the Japanese were forced to withdraw from the war.
• The Battle of the Golden Spurs in Flanders (1302). 9000 Flemish infantry, mostly civilians and peasants, against 8000 French troops including some 2500 cavalry (mostly knights). The outcome seems obvious, right? Wrong, by the end of the battle some 100 Flemish had died as opposed to 1000 French while the remaining French fled the battlefield. July 11th is still the official celebration of the Flemish Community.
• The Battle of Hallidon Hill towards the end of the Scottish War of Independence. The Scots reckon that they can avenge the old humiliation of losing Berwick-Upon-Tweed. They outnumber the English by 4,000 men. Then the English archers open up, just as sleet begins to fall on them. By the day's end, the English have lost a handful of men. The Scottish army has been annihilated.
  • Another example from the same time period: The Battle of Neville's Cross during the Hundred Years War. The Scots, urged on by the beleaguered French, invade England, initially walking unopposed through a country stripped of fighting men. However, the Archbishop of York manages to scrape some forces together, and heads to stop them. He steals a march on the Scots because their armies are too busy sacking Hexham to notice him. At Neville's Cross, the English finally meet the Scottish Army under King David II Bruce. Once again, the longbows do their deadly work - two of Bruce's nobles desert him and King David ends his great invasion as an English prisoner.
• The Battle of Longewala. The Indian forces numbering in only 120 but have 4 jet Hawker Hunters, against the Pakistan forces of 2800 men, 65 tanks, and 138 military vehicles. The invading Pakistan forces lost 200 soldiers and 36 tanks and 100 other vehicles. Indian loses 2 men.
• The Battle of Flodden the English army of 26,000 men, faced off the Scotish army of 34,000. The English fend off the Scotish forces suffering 1,500 casualties while the Scots lost 17,000 men. Among the dead was King James IV along with several prominent nobles.
• The Battle of Kapyong in The Korean War had the hastily put together brigade of Canadian and Australian soldiers to defend against an entire Chinese division. At one point, the Canadians even called down artillery fire on their own positions because they were so overwhelmed. And when an Australian major called a US general for backup, the general thought he was a spy, as he believed that all their soldiers there were wiped out. The battle ended with 31 Australians killed, 10 Canadians killed and over 1000 Chinese killed.
  • Battle of Chipyong-Ni also qualifies, though to a lesser extent. 4,500 surrounded (mostly American) soldiers in extremely well prepared defenses against an entire Chinese division of 25,000. Result? 2,000 Chinese dead plus 3,000 wounded against a mere 51 killed and 250 wounded on the UN side.
  • The entire Korean War was this following the UN's intervention. Even China's victories were horribly Pyrrhic.
• During his invasion of India in 1398, Timur (AKA Tamerlane) was faced with 120 war armorclad elephants with poisoned tusks. Knowing that elephants are easily frightened, he gathered all his camels and ordered them lit on fire and sent them towards the charging elephants. Seeing screaming, burning animals running towards them, the elephants turned tail and ran back, stampeding the Indian forces, leading to a Tatar victory in minutes, making this a literal Curb Stomp Battle (minus the curb). Thinking that no one would use the same trick against him, Timur than had those elephants added to his army, first forcing them all to kneel before him.
• During la Noche Triste (the Night of Sorrows), Cortés and his Tlaxcaltecan allies attempted to flee Tenochtitlan under cover of night after the death of Moctezuma II. A one week cease-fire was arranged, and the Spaniards had agreed to return the Aztec's gold in exchange for the Aztecs allowing them to withdraw peacefully. Instead, the Spaniards took as much gold as feasible and soldiers were permitted to carry as much as they were able. They were discovered while trying to flee, and were attacked by Aztec warriors. Sources disagree on the total casualties, with Cortés reporting more than 150 Spaniards and over 2,000 allies being killed. Many of those that had died were burdened by the gold they were trying to take out of the city.
• The Battle of Fidonisi during the Russo–Turkish War of 1787–1792 was this, despite only one ship actually being destroyed. Russian Admirals Voynovitch and Ushakov (2 ships-of-the-line, 9 frigates, 22 support and fire ships) vs Turkish Kapudan Pasha (chief admiral) Hassan el Ghazi (17 ships-of-the-line, 8 frigates, 3 bomb ships, 21 support ships). The Turks had a numerical advantage in both cannons and manpower of over 2-to-1. Also, the Turkish ships-of-the-line featured heavier guns. While most of the Russian fleet formed a standard firing line, Ushakov took his ship-of-the-line and 2 frigates and closed in to the head Turkish ships, surrounding them and catching them in the crossfire until heavy damage forced the Turkish ships to retreat. Ushakov then moved on to the next ship, and so on. After the Turkish flagship suffered heavy damage and retreated, the rest of their fleet turned tail and ran. There were no casualties on the Russian side.
  • Ushakov proved himself a master of naval warfare, eschewing traditional line of battle tactics in favor of precise close-range combat involving focusing the fire of several ships on a single target. Most of his greatest battles against the Turks involved his forced being outnumbered and outgunned.
• This trope is how Ricky Gervais hilariously sums up the Falkland Islands war.
• The Battle of Cartagena de Indias, which was a naval invasion where the Spaniard Blas de Lezo defended with 4,000 men, 6 ship of the line and numerous shore batteries while the British against the British who had 27,400 men 29 ships of the line, 22 frigate, 135 transports and other crafts. What should have been should have been a curb stomp battle for the British the brilliance of Lezo lead to him losing 800 dead, 1,200 wounded,6 ships lost,5 forts,3 batteries and 395 cannons while the British lost 9,500–11,500 dead,7,500 wounded and sick,1,500 guns lost,6 Royal Navy ships lost,17 Royal Navy ships of the line heavily damaged,4 frigates and 27 transports lost.
• The late 19th century French invasion of Madagascar was pretty much this: while invading a country larger than their own homeland, the French only lost 25 soldiers in combat. Of course, they then had to lose forty percent of their forces to malaria, but that's another story…
  • And then Vichy France got curb stomped in turn when the British took Madagascar after Vichy France allied with the Nazis.
• In the 1791 Battle of the Wabash 920 US Army soldiers faced about 1,100 Native American warriors. By the end of the battle, nearly the entire Army force was wiped out, with 623 soldiers being killed, and 258 being wounded. (Wich was a quarter of the entire army's strength at the time!) In contrast, only 21 Indians were killed.
• The Battle of Lexington and Concord. Started as one for the colonists, and then their reinforcements arrived. The British lost over 250 men. The colonists lost around 90. More importantly, the colonists made the British Army run like scared schoolgirls- a feat that nobody believed was possible.
• The battle of Narva (1700). Around 8000 Swedes all but annihilated a Russian army more than three times their size.
• Imperialism. It's a curb-stomp battle almost by definition.^[context?]
• Thanks to taking on the enemy while they were resting, the Texan soldiers in the Texan Revolution killed 630 Mexican soldiers and captured another 730 Mexicans in eighteen minutes. Furthermore, there were only 9 Texan casualties, and the leader of the Mexican army (Antonio López de Santa Anna) was apprehended shortly thereafter, effectively ending the war and creating the Republic of Texas.
• The Battle of Trenton during The American Revolution. Despite snafus in bringing their artillery over the Delaware River, and the fact that a Tory farmer saw them coming and reported them, the Hessian mercenaries in Trenton had no idea the Americans were coming because they were all dead drunk (it being Christmas Eve). The ensuing Dawn Attack was an overwhelmingly lopsided victory for the Continental Army: enlistments shot up, the Army got a crapload of fresh supplies, and a sizable section of the British forces in America were taken out of action.
  • This was all due in part to a platoon of roughly a dozen rebels coming out of the woods a few hours after Rahl (the Hessian commander) got his warning and put his troops on alert. In a three-minute skirmish, they killed one Hessian and wounded another before fleeing into the woods, taking no casualties themselves. This lead Rahl to making what would literally be the fatal mistake of deciding that this was Washington's big attack and telling the men to "Stand down and enjoy the holiday". And a few hours later the REAL Continental Army showed up, leading to the aforementioned battle and Rahl's own death.
• In 2006 three Somali pirate skiffs fired at the USS Gonzalez, a modern US Navy destroyer. The Gonzalez, with some assistance from another US warship, the USS Cape St. George promptly sank the pirate ships.
• The Gaza War between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the end result was Israel only loosing 13 men(3 civilians), while Gaza lost 1417 militants.
• The First Barbary War. The US Navy only lost 35 men, while the Berbers lost about 800 men.
• The Battle of Culloden. Eight thousand drilled and well-equipped Hanoverian/Government soldiers decimated seven thousand Jacobites, with the Jacobites losing 1500 to 2000 men against the Government's 50 in around an hour of fighting. Notable reasons for this utter curbstomp included: bringing four-pound shot to fire from three-pound cannon; composing the Jacobite army of mostly poorly led, equipped, and supplied clan levies; ignoring the only experienced commander on the Jacobite side; and selecting a wide, open moor to fight the battle, even though the central tactic of the Highland Charge would be open to Hanoverian round and canister shot the entire time. In just one hour, the Jacobites lost twenty five men for every Hanoverian killed, at least - the Hanoverians, to add insult to injury, proceeded to massacre the wounded. They then proceeded to utterly destroy the Highland Clan system and society that produced much of the Jacobite levy in the first place.
• The U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden's compound on May 2, 2011, where no U.S. soldiers were even harmed, and Osama got one RIGHT between the eyes.
• The War of the Triple Alliance resulted in 75-90% of the male population of Paraguay dead. Turns out going to war with over half your continent at once is a bad idea.

Sports

• The New Orleans Saints vs. the Indianapolis Colts football game October 23, 2011 (Saints 62, Colts 7). The game also contained examples of Ho Yay and Foe Yay, both involving Saints' tight end Jimmy Graham.
  • That's nothing. 1940 NFL championship game: Chicago Bears 73, Washington Redskins 0. Ouch.
• A lot of football experts thought Florida in 1995 would beat Nebraska. However, Nebraska and its fans had the last laugh, as the Cornhuskers beat the Gators 62-24 to win its second consecutive national title.
• Anderson Silva, the current Middleweight UFC champion, has delivered a few of these. Coming off a lukewarm record in other promotions, Silva made his UFC debut by mauling the rugged Chris Leben in only 36 seconds. He next faced Rich Franklin, the two-time defending middleweight champ. Silva pummeled Franklin with punches and knees for three minutes before Franklin dropped with a shattered nose. When Silva moved up a weight class to face James Irvin, some wondered if Silva could handle a seasoned striker who outweighed him. Silva knocked Irvin out with a single punch just 1:01 into the first round. When Silva went up in weight again, he faced the former light heavyweight champ Forrest Griffin. Silva massacred Forrest in under four minutes, spending most of the fight with his hands down and contemptuous of Griffin's power.
  • UFC light heavyweight Lyoto Machida (15-0, 7-0 UFC) had an odd form of curbstomping where he would make good opponents look bad by nullifying all of their offense and landing perfectly timed strikes. Machida uses a family variant of Shotokan karate combined with other MMA disciplines in a unique style that perplexed his opponents. FightMetric has the numbers, along with his career numbers. However, Machida's dominance would fall threatened after lackluster performance against Mauricio "Shogun" Rua and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson.
  • Controversial heavyweight slugger Kimbo Slice was scheduled to fight Ken Shamrock in the main event for Elite XC: Heat until Shamrock dropped out. Seth Petruzelli, a virtually unknown light heavyweight with a mediocre record, was pulled from his scheduled fight literally minutes before the event to face Kimbo. Petruzelli dropped Kimbo with a jab in 14 seconds.
    • This one was so bad that Elite XC folded almost immediately after the fight (due to mismanagement but also because the league was trying to build Kimbo Slice into the next Hulk Hogan, which failed due to the loss and Slice's lack of skills).
  • In 2003, Fedor Emelianenko challenged the then-greatest heavyweight ever in Antonio Rodrigo "Minotauro" Nogueira. He was viewed as not standing a chance. He proceeded to spend twenty minutes absolutely torturing Nogueira, assailing him with unbelievably powerful punches. In December of 2004, he did it again. Fedor has gone on to crush many more opponents, but he's always the clear favorite.
  • Pretty much the only way to describe BJ Penn vs. Diego Sanchez UFC 107, where the victor took more strikes to the head celebrating than his opponent landed in five rounds.
  • The very first UFC champion, Royce Gracie, curbstomped just about everything in sight from UFC 1-5 due to his opponents' unfamiliarity with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. UFC 2 was the most telling, as both he and Patrick Smith demolished three opponents to reach the final, and he proceeded to demolish Smith.
  • Bas Rutten, a great fighter from the early days of MMA, did this to Jason Delucia in a Pancrase fight. Throughout the fight Delucia claimed Bas punched him in the face multiple times (closed fist strikes to the face were banned). After getting a yellow and red card, essentially losing 30% of his paycheck, Rutten proceeds to utterly demolish Delucia with body shots so powerful he actually ruptures Jason's liver.
• In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu:
  • Roger Gracie went on an unprecedented streak in the 2009 and 2010 World Jiu-Jitsu Championship ("Mundials") of sixteen straight submission victories, submitting everyone he faced except for the 2010 super heavyweight division finals... who instead was defeated on points, 13 to 2. (His "absolute" division finals opponent was uninjured, so Roger won that by default.)
    • Just to make it crazier, in the 2009 Mundials every submission was by mounted choke.
• In Boxing:
  • The lead up to the recent Manny Pacquiao vs. Ricky Hatton fight was built as perhaps the toughest challenge of the rising Pacquiao's career, who himself had curb-stomped his last two opponents, including the great (albeit way past his prime) Oscar de la Hoya. Hatton was close to his peak, bigger, and was unbeaten at 140 lbs, "his" weight. Come fight night, Pacquiao proceeded to absolutely destroy Hatton, using his blazing speed to beat Hatton consistently to the punch. He knocked Hatton down twice in the first round (the first one a right thrown before a Hatton left hook which Pacquiao smoothly ducked under in the same motion), then proceeded to put the solid-chinned Hatton out cold with a massive left hand at the end of the second round.
  • Mike Tyson vs. Michael Spinks in 1988. A blind guy in a wheelchair could've put up a better fight than Spinks did.
    • Mike Tyson's famous comeback bout in 1995 against Peter Mc Neeley: The much-hyped fight broke the record for Pay-Per-View earnings. Mc Neeley took such a pounding his trainer entered the ring and called off the fight after just 89 seconds in the ring. There were accusations that the fight was set up to guarantee a victory, while Tyson was angry that he wasn't able to properly finish the fight.
  • Joe Louis/Max Schmeling II. Schmeling had handed Louis his first defeat, which was considered by Nazi Germany to be a triumph for the "Aryan race." Several years later, the two fighters faced down in a rematch. This time, Schmeling went down in two minutes and four seconds, after being knocked down three times and throwing only two punches in the entire fight.
  • Joe Calzaghe vs Peter Manfredo Jr. Despite remaining totally unbeaten throughout his career, Calzaghe still somehow managed to gain a mild reputation as being an overrated fighter with a habit of dodging his way out of "proper" fights. Peter Manfredo Jr., winner of Sylvester Stallone's television reality series The Contender, judging from pre-fight interviews, evidently agreed with this summation. Thought the ensuing match didn't exactly put paid to the nastier rumours surrounding Calzaghe's prowess, it certainly brought Manfredo Jr. down a few pegs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv Ump 5 m Qed Y
  • In 1919, at Toledo, Ohio, excitement was rising for a boxing match for the World Heavyweight Title. It was Jess Willard -who had a serious weight and height advantage over his opponent- versus Jack Dempsey. In the first round, Dempsey knocked Willard over seven times, reputedly causing a broken jaw, broken ribs, fractured cheek bones, and a number of broken teeth. Willard looked like he'd been through a car accident.
  • In 1999, the World Wrestling Federation hosted Brawl For It All, a legitimate Toughman Contest-style tournament amongst wrestlers who were Real Life tough-men. Surprising everyone, perennial curtain-jerker Bart Gunn ended up winning. As a true test, he was pitted in a match at Wrestlemania XV against Toughman legend Eric "Butterbean" Esch, a massive man known for his knockout power. Butterbean knocked Gunn unconscious in 27 seconds, effectively killing his career in North America.
• In a MMA vs. Boxing fight at UFC 118, Randy "The Natural" Couture fought James "Lights Out" Toney. James threw exactly one weak, wild punch before being taken to the mat and forced to submit to an arm triangle at 3:19 of the first round.
• During the making of Enter the Dragon, a Too Dumb to Live challenger to Bruce Lee broke into his home and scared his children, Brandon and Shannon. An enraged Lee sent him to the hospital with one kick.
  • Heck, Bruce developed Jeet Kune Do because he felt his curb-stomp battles were taking a tad too long.
  • Bruce took down a Black-Belt Karateka in 15 seconds.
  • One of Bruce's film extras once taunted him, calling him "more actor than fighter." This kid was fast, strong, and bigger than Bruce Lee, and a "damned good martial artist." Bruce went on to drop the kid to the ground, and nail him repeatedly in the face until he was out.

• Bulgarian Women's Ice Hockey Team in 2010 Winter Olympics Qualifier. Losing to Slovakia with 0-82, losing to Italy with 0-41, losing to Latvia with 0-39, and losing to Crotia with 1-30.
  • Keep in mind a hockey game is 60 minutes long and each goal only counts for one point: the Slovakians were scoring, on average, once every 43 seconds.
  • Then Canada come and curb stomped Slovakia in the actual Olympic tournament with 18-0.
  • Speaking of Canadian curb stomps, the Canada-Russia game on the men's side of the same Olympics has to be mentioned. Many of the best NHL players play for either team, so everyone naturally assumed this would be a close affair. What actually happened was, as some forum-goers put it, Team Canada going Super Saiyan and utterly dominating the Russians 7-3. While the score doesn't seem that one-sided, keep in mind that the score at one point was 6-1.
• National Hockey League:
  • 2011-12. Calgary Flames 0, Boston Bruins 9.
  • On January 23, 1944, the Detroit Red Wings delivered one to the New York Rangers, a 15-0 blowout, which remains the largest margin of victory by one NHL team to this day.
• Thai folklore contains an example of a possible real-life curbstomp battle. From Nai_Khanom_Tom The Other Wiki:

At the time of the fall of the ancient Siam capital of Ayutthaya in 1763, the invading Burmese troops rounded up a group of Thai residents and took them as prisoners. Among them were a large number of Thai kickboxers, who were taken by the Burmese to the city of Ungwa.
In 1774, in the Burmese city of Rangoon, the king of the Burmese, Hsinbyushin (known in Thai as "King Mangra"), decided to organize a seven-day, seven-night religious festival in honor of Buddha's relics. The festivities included many forms of entertainment, such as the costume plays called likay, comedies and farces, and sword-fighting matches. At one point, King Hsinbyushin wanted to see how Muay Boran would compare to the Burmese art Lethwei[citation needed]. Nai Khanom Tom was selected to fight against the Burmese champion. The boxing ring was set up in front of the throne and Nai Khanom Tom did a traditional Wai Kru pre-fight dance, to pay his respects to his teachers and ancestor, as well as for all the spectators, dancing around his opponent, which amazed and perplexed all the Burmese people. When the fight began, he charged out, using punches, kicks, elbows, and knees, pummeling his opponent until he collapsed.
The referee however stated that the Burmese opponent was too distracted by the kick, and the knockout was invalid. The King then asked if Nai Khanom Tom would fight nine other Burmese champions to prove himself. He agreed and fought them all, one after the other with no rest periods in between. His last opponent was a great kickboxing teacher from Ya Kai City. Nai Khanom Tom mangled him by his kicks and no one else dared to challenge him any further.
King Mangra was so impressed that he remarked, "Every part of the Thai is blessed with venom. Even with his bare hands, he can fell nine or ten opponents. But his Lord was incompetent and lost the country to the enemy. If he would have been any good, there was no way the City of Ayutthaya would ever have fallen."

• The 1916 college football match between Georgia Tech and Cumberland remains the most brutal curbstomping in the history of organized American football. Tech won the game by a score of 222-0, scoring touchdowns on almost every single offensive play, racking up almost 1,700 rushing yards and 32 touchdowns, and not even attempting a single pass play. Cumberland finished the game with -82 offensive yards.
  • In fairness to Cumberland, they had cancelled their football program before the season, but remained contractually obligated to play this game, so they made a team of fourteen young men who would clearly not have made any team under normal circumstances.
• In the FIFA World Cup final, the most comprehensive wins have been 1958 (Brazil 5-2 Sweden), 1970 (Brazil 4-1 Italy) and 1998 (France 3-0 Brazil).
• The biggest wins in the Champions' League finals:
  • 1959-60: Real Madrid 7–3 Eintracht Frankfurt
  • 1968–69: AC Milan 4-1 Ajax
  • 1988-89: AC Milan 4-0 Steaua Bucureşti
  • 1993-94: AC Milan 4-0 Barcelona
  • 1999-2000: Real Madrid 3-0 Valencia
  • 2003-04: Porto 3-0 Monaco
• The biggest wins in the English Premier League:
  • 1994-95: Man Utd 9-0 Ipswich
  • 2009-10: Tottenham 9-1 Wigan
  • 2009-10: Chelsea 8-0 Wigan
  • 1998-99: Nottingham Forest 1-8 Man Utd
  • 2009-10: Chelsea 7-0 Stoke
  • Sunday 28 August 2011, Tottenham Hotspur 1-5 Man City and Manchester United 8-2 Arsenal.
• Other notable wins:
  • In 2001, Australia beat American Samoa 31-0 during the World Cup qualifications, setting a world record.
    • During their World Cup bid in 1998, Maldives was outscored in total 59-0 over the course of six games, including a 17-0 loss to Iran.
  • In 2010 FC Barcelona recorded a 5-0 against Real Madrid, the most expensive team in the world.
• September 21st, 2011, Serie A: Novara Calcio, in their first home game in the top tier of italian football after 55 years in lower division, beated 3-1 Inter Milan, the club FIFA World Champion at the time. Novara is a city of 90,000 people just 40km far from Milan (1,500,000 peple); Novara had a season budget of 9 millions €, Inter instead had 145 millions to spend on its players.. When in May 2010 Inter Milan won the UEFA Champions' League, Novara was still in "Prima Divisione" the 3rd Division, and were 33 years since they played in a higher division. Last time Novara won over Inter was in 1939. Needless to say, Inter Milan fans didn't take it well...
• Super Bowl XIX was expected to be an epic struggle between two great teams: the 1984 Miami Dolphins and San Francisco 49ers. The first quarter proceeded as everyone had expected; that it would be a fantastically exciting battle between the top two offenses - between Dan Marino and Joe Montana. Then they played another three quarters... The Dolphins went scoreless after halftime and the 49ers ended up winning 38-16.
  • Another notable one involving Marino was his final pro game, a 2000 playoff game where the Jacksonville Jaguars clownstomped his Dolphins 62-7.
  • The 49ers had a tendency to do this a lot. They absolutely shitstomped the Denver Broncos, 55-10, in Super Bowl XXIV, and they creamed San Diego 49-26 in Super Bowl XXIX.
  • The Dallas Cowboys' 52-17 win over the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII was not as close as the score makes it appear.
  • The Buffalo Bills demolished the Raiders 51-3 in the AFC Championship game in January of 1991.
  • Quintessential NFL curb-stomp: The Chicago Bears defeated the Washington Redskins 73-0 in the 1940 championship game. End of discussion.
  • December 6th, 2010, the New York Jets faced the New England Patriots. In previous weeks it seemed like it was going to be a difficult game for the Patriots, with both teams coming in at 9-2. However...when it came down to it, the Patriots won 45 to the Jet's...3.
  • The aftermath of the above was even weirder -- the Patriots went into Chicago during the first big snowstorm of the season in the upper Midwest and delivered a full-service beatdown to the 9-3 Bears, blanking them at the half 33-0 for a final score of 36-7. Meanwhile, Jets coach Rex Ryan was openly mocked in the New York papers and they lost the next game to the mediocre Miami Dolphins in a 10-6 snoozer. (In soccer terms, that's sort of equivalent to grinding out a 2-2 tie and losing on a penalty kick.) Some Pats fans noted that there might be a touch of irony that a previous generation's Pats lost Super Bowl XX to the 1985 Bears in a curbstomp almost as humiliating as the current team had delivered to the Jets the previous week.
  • It's even stranger when you remember that that's one of New England's smaller curb stomps. Ever since their undefeated 2007 regular season, the Patriots have usually had at least one game like this per season. This includes the 2007 season's 52-7 win over the Washington Redskins, 56-10 win over the Buffalo Bills, the 2008 season's 41-7 win over the Denver Broncos, 47-7 win over the Arizona Cardinals, and the 2009 season's ridiculous 59-0 win over the Tennessee Titans.
• The USA 2008 Olympic Basketball team curb stomped most of the planet at the Beijing Olympics. Named the Redeem Team as a play on the 1992 team's nickname of The Dream Team and as a indicator of how the team had struggled for a decade, they beat China by 31 points, Angola by 21 points, Greece by 23 points, reigning World Champion Spain by 37, then beat Germany by 49 points and easily made it to the knockout round. Once there, they beat Australia by 31 points in the first round, Argentina (who was the favorite coming into the Olympics) by 20 in the second round, then faced a rematch with Spain in the finals. Even though it was the only game the USA played that was remotely close, they still won the Gold Medal by a score of 118 to 107.
  • While we're at it, the original 1992 Dream Team, the first Olympic team that NBA players were allowed to participate on, contained ten hall-of-famers and is pretty much the greatest team of all time. It utterly humiliated any and all of the outclassed teams it came into contact with, from the opener against Angola (won by 68) to the Gold Medal game against Croatia (won by 32), with coach Chuck Daly never feeling he had to call a time out. Likewise, the 1996 was only slightly less dominant, winning each of its games by an average of 31.8 points. It wasn't until the 2000 team (which won gold, but only after several close calls) and the 2004 team (known as the "nightmare team", losing to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina before beating Lithuania in the rematch for the bronze) that it ever seemed like the rest of the world wasn't going to be forever curb-stomped on the court.

This high school girl's basketball game had a final score of 108-3.

• Horse Racing legend Secretariat's thirty-one-length victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, which won him the Triple Crown. He set a record for a mile-and-a-half on dirt that is not only still standing but that has not even been approached; then he proceeded to set a track record for the mile-and-five-eighths while coasting out from under the wire.
• At Game 6 of the 2008 NBA Finals, the Boston Celtics managed to wrap-up the series and win their 17th NBA title by defeating the Los Angeles Lakers 131-92. The 39 Point margin is the largest margin of victory of a series-winning game in the history of the NBA finals.
• 2011 Ice Hockey World Championship final. Sweden(5 championships) was confident that it would easily defeat Finland (1 championship). Finland proceeded to win 6-1, with only swedish goal made by half-finn...
• Aleksandr Karelin is widely considered the best Greco-Roman wrestler of all time, with only one defeat in his thirteen year professional career. Almost all these matches ended with his opponents scoreless.
• In handball, Australia is usually a well liked underdog, who often gets curb stomped by the biggest nations in the sport, especially Scandinavians. Iceland 55-15 Australia (2003) is the biggest win since 1958, and Australia got curb-stomped by runners-up Denmark at the last world championships (2011, 47-12). Australia has only ever won one match (while they've participated in 6 tournaments), which was against Greenland (in 2003).
• In the round of 16 of the handball Champions League 2012, Barcelona played against Montpellier. Barcelona in handball are comparable to, well, Barcelona in football, while Montpellier is the best team in the French league (one of the best leagues in the world). Montpellier recorded a two goal victory at home, but when they came to Barcelona to play, the home team won 36-20.
• The ninth inning of Game 7 of 2001 World Series. The Diamondbacks had their way with Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer ever who only managed to get one out.
• Geelong's defeat of Port Adelaide in the 2007 AFL Grand Final. Geelong: 24.19 (163), Port: 6.8 (44)That's the highest grand final margin EVER.

Politics

• Ronald Reagan's 1984 electoral victory saw him winning 49 states. Mondale took Minnesota and D.C.
  • Reagan's support was better distributed but previous candidates in previous elections got more votes than he did (58.8%). Lyndon B. Johnson got 61,1% in 1964, Richard Nixon got 60.7% in 1972 and Franklin D. Roosevelt got 60.8% in 1936.
• In the first two American presidential elections, nobody even bothered running against George Washington and inevitable curb-stomps were averted. Washington stepped down from the presidency after his second term precisely because he felt that his presence was keeping American democracy from developing properly.

Other

• Every day, one of these takes place between a housefly and someone with a fly swatter.
  • i don't know, some of them are tricky.
• Killing insects in general. If you find a wasp nest on your property, you'll probably take some Raid and spray them all to death... while all the poor things can do is attempt to sting you.
  • Although, if you're allergic to wasps (or whatever thing you're "fighting") it becomes a bit more difficult.
• What happens when 30 hornets invade a colony of 30,000 honeybees? This trope...
• The 1997 North Hollywood Shootout was (almost) a curb stomp battle between two gun men and the police. You'd think the police against two guys would be the ones stomping curb. Nope. The two robbers were wearing body armor and were wielding automatic weapons, forcing the police to stay behind cover as the two made their escape. For about half an hour, the two shooters fired as they pleased at the officers, impervious to whatever fire could be returned. But during the escape, the two were split up, allowing the police to flank them separately. After almost an hour of kicking ass, one robber shot himself in the head, and the other bled out after being shot in the legs and captured. The Los Angeles police actually started issuing armor-piercing bullets and rifles as standard equipment afterwards.
  • To the LAPD's credit the only two fatalities were the two gunmen, although 19 others were injured
• The trial on Proposition 8's Constitutionality, Decision Here. The defense (not including the state, who took their own stand by refusing to contribute to Proposition 8's defense) called two witnesses, one of which testified on one small point which he later reconsidered, and David Blankenhorn, who . . . well, quotes from the decision stay it best: "Blankenhorn’s opinions are not supported by reliable evidence or methodology and Blankenhorn failed to consider evidence contrary to his view in presenting his testimony. The court therefore finds the opinions of Blankenhorn to be unreliable and entitled to essentially no weight." There were other witnesses, but they were withdrawn due to supposed fear for after the court case was to be televised, and mysteriously not called back when the courts did not televise the case. What does that amount to? That's right, the defense had no credible witnesses. Meanwhile, the prosecution had nine expert witness and eight lay witnesses.
• In 1998 at the Quake Delica tournament, Thresh (considered at that time to be the best Quake player) fought against Billox on q2dm1. It was Thresh's Quake 2 deathmatch debut and he just completely mopped the floor with his opponent. The match can be seen here and here. The final result? Thresh beat Billox 56 to -1.
• At the fighting game tournament EVO (year 2002), USA (Whose team consisted of Alex Valle, Justin Wong, Mike Watson, JR Rodriguez and Gee-O) went head to head against Japan's best players (Nuki, KSK, Chiikyuu, Mester and Tokido) in a 5vs5 Street Fighter 3:Third Strike battle. The final score? 22-3 in Japan's favor.
• * Don't bully Zangief, he'll kick your ass. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAuwOEwJ2UQ&feature=player_embedded
• A unique example is a turtle faces off against a shark: the turtle wins! http://youtu.be/foBxvwOnEB0
• There's a video out there of a karate instructor going to encounter a pimp after his actions caught his attention and interrupting a session with his class. The pimp attempts intimidate the master, the woman with him trying to pull him back. When the pimp gets too close, the master strikes him with on chop to the neck. As the woman and his driver are trying to get the still knocked out pimp to his car (a taxi, mind you), the instructor looks back at his filming students and just shrugs his shoulders.