Robert Baden-Powell and Siege of Mafeking
During the Boer War, Colonel (later Lord, and founder of the Boy Scouts) Robert Baden-Powell was in command of the garrison in the besieged town of Mafeking in South Africa. He had initially seized the town by bluff during the runup to the outbreak of hostilities, and held on to it with a steady diet of bluffs during the subsequent siege after the war began.
Powell, who had been ordered to raise two regiments of volunteers, began storing his supplies in Mafeking, but was prevented from openly garrisoning the town before the war started because doing so was deemed impolitic and provocative. He hit upon a ruse to get around that, by politely asking the townspeople for permission to send guards to protect his supplies. They consented, and Powell sent in his entire force of nearly 1500 men. When the townspeople protested, he responded that he had never specified the size of the guard.
When the war began soon thereafter, Baden-Powell found himself besieged by a Boer force 5 times more numerous than his own. To keep them wary of a direct attack, he began burying mysterious boxes around the town’s periphery. When asked, he responded that they were powerful new landmines, the latest in British technology. To demonstrate, he had a couple blown up within sight of Boer sympathizers, whom he then allowed to slip out of town to inform the enemy. In reality, the boxes blown up had been stuff with the town’s entire stores of dynamite, while the other boxes buried around the defensive perimeter contained nothing but sand.
Another bluff revolved around barbed wire, of which Baden-Powell had none. Barbed wire was known to be effective in slowing down a charge, and since he wanted to discourage the numerically superior Boers from charging and overrunning his defenses, Baden-Powell set out to convince them that he had plenty of barbed wire. What he did have was plenty of the wooden posts from which barbed wire was strung, so he directed that they be hammered into the ground all around the defensive perimeter. From a distance, even with binoculars, barbed wire is difficult to see, but the wooden posts from which it is usually strung are readily visible, and the sight of a line of such posts in the distance is indicative of barbed wire fences. To further mislead the Boer watchers, Baden-Powell had his men drop to the ground whenever they reached a line of wooden posts, then crawl “beneath” the imaginary barbed wire to get to the other side, before getting back on their feet, dusting themselves off, and carrying on.
With the help of bluffs such as the fake super landmines and imaginary barbed wire, coupled with a heavy dose of stubborn and bloody resistance when the situation warranted, Baden-Powell fought off the enemy and withstood the Boer siege for 217 days, holding on to Mafeking until he was finally relieved by the arrival of a British army that chased off the Boers and lifted the siege.