“Varus! Give me back my legions!” shouted the enraged Roman Emperor Augustus according to ancient Roman historian Suetonius in The Twelve Caesars. Augustus was raging against his losing commander in one of Rome’s greatest military defeats—the disastrous Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, c. September 9 CE. Publius Quinctilius Varus, governor of Rome’s Germania province (modern-day northwestern Germany) since 6 CE, known for favoring mass crucifixion as his preferred “crowd control” method, was tricked into leading three Roman legions (XVII, XVIII and XIX) plus six cohorts of Germanic tribesmen auxiliary troops and three cavalry squadrons—about 20,000 soldiers—into a fatal, days-long “ambush” by tens of thousands of Germanic warriors. Formed primarily of four of the era’s 50 Germanic tribes (Cherusci, Bructeri, Marsi and Chatti), the trap was cleverly planned and orchestrated by a turncoat, Arminius (c. 17 BCE -21 CE), a Cherusci tribesman prince and adopted Roman citizen. Varus’ legionaries, traveling in a thin column stretching from nine to 12 miles long, were encumbered by thousands of civilian camp followers who sloshed alongside them through the mud of the rain-soaked, dense forest bordered by swamps (near today’s Osnabrück, between the Ems and the Lippe Rivers).
The ambush struck Varus’ column when it was most vulnerable. The weather, terrain and the tribesmen’s fortified ambush positions robbed the three Roman legions of their usual keys to battlefield success: mobility, flexibility, and tactical cohesion. The Germanic warriors’
