History: Battle of Red Cliffs (208)

The above words by Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War (孫子兵法), arguably the greatest book of military strategy of all time, stress the importance of proper preparation before facing a challenge.  So, it's interesting that Cao Cao, who wrote the first and one of the most influential commentaries on The Art of War, would fail to heed Master Sun's teachings at the Battle of Red Cliffs (赤壁之戰).  Red Cliffs is one of the best known battles in Chinese history, due in large part to a somewhat fictionalized account in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels.  In the centuries since then, Red Cliffs has been further popularized by numerous films, television series and computer games.

In terms of the overall geopolitical situation, by 208, after decades of turmoil and civil war, Cao Cao, prime minister and commanding general of the Han Dynasty, had reunified much of northern China.  However, to win in the South, he would first need to secure the strategically vital Yangtze river.  Two powerful warlords, Liu Bei and Sun Quan, stood in the way:

An interesting fact about Red Cliffs is that we do not definitively know where the battle was fought, with several places nowadays competing for tourism revenue.

What we do know is that, after an initially successful advance south to the Yangtze, Cao Cao put his vastly numerically superior army onto boats and sailed east on the river to meet the combined Sun-Liu forces.  Although a skilled and seasoned commander, Cao Cao displayed little of this at Red Cliffs, relying instead on sheer weight of numbers and brute force.  After an indecisive initial skirmish, the allies tricked Cao Cao with a group of fake defectors who used fire ships to burn up a large number of the Han troop transports.

Cao Cao abandoned his ships and fled northwest through swampland, harassed by the rebels and taking huge losses.  Disease and shattered morale added to his woes.  Eventually, remnants of the imperial army were forced to leave the Yangtze river basin and retreat all the way back to their home base.

As noted above, it is interesting that a talented and successful general such as Cao Cao would make these kinds of mistakes.  My own supposition is that Cao's grip on the territories that he'd recently reconquered was tenuous and that much, perhaps the majority, of his army consisted of forces from these recently reconquered areas and whose loyalty was uncertain.  Thus, he wanted to push forward with the reunification of China while he still had the momentum and strategic initiative, using a rollup strategy.  However, Cao Cao's army also faced numerous challenges, including the great skill of the opposing generals, lack of naval experience, lack of familiarity with the area, etc.

Ultimately, it was a risky move that blew up in his face.

The more prudent approach would have been to wait for a better opportunity.  In the words of Master Sun:

"He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious."