War Elephants: The Mahout's Chisel, Flaming Pigs and Timur's Fire Camels

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A war elephant's driver, the mahout, carried a chisel and hammer so he could kill his own animal if it panicked and turned on friendly troops. By the later Vedic period in India, around the 6th century BC, elephant warfare was a formal science, and the Mahabharata sets rules under which elephant riders should fight only other elephant riders. The Nanda Empire was credited with 3,000 to 6,000 war elephants and Chandragupta Maurya with 9,000, figures many historians think were inflated to frighten invaders. At the Hydaspes, King Porus fielded 85 to 100 elephants that lifted and trampled Macedonian soldiers, and rumors of thousands more to the east helped turn Alexander's army back.

Alexander kept Porus's elephants, and his successors raced to acquire them. The Seleucids traded eastern territory to the Mauryans for 500 elephants that proved decisive at Ipsus, Pyrrhus shipped 20 to Italy, where Romans called them Lucanian oxen, and Hannibal crossed the Alps, though nearly all his elephants died. Scipio beat them at Zama by opening lanes in his maniples. Armies used males aged 25 to 40, with 60 year old veterans prized, and dressed them in cork lined scale armor and tusk swords. Field cannon ended their front line role, though Siam still fielded elephants with swivel guns in the 1890s.

• Hannibal's survivor in Italy may have been a single large elephant named Surus.
• At Thapsus in 46 BC, Julius Caesar armed his Fifth Legion with axes to hack at elephants' legs.
• Defenders of Megara reportedly drove pitch soaked, burning pigs at the enemy's elephants and caused a stampede.
• In 1398 Timur sent camels loaded with burning straw against the Delhi Sultanate's elephants, which turned and trampled their own army.
• In World War II, William Slim's 14th Army in Burma used elephants to build bridges and haul vehicles out of the monsoon mud.