List Of Noteworthy Historical Military Units

Basic Information

This page is a list of particularly noteworthy (or weird) military units. And to be fair, military unit is applied pretty loosely. Some of these (especially in the earlier sections of the list) are outlaw raiders, warrior castes, soldier sub-types, and other groups or notions that don't necessarily have the formal organization and state-sponsored authority that military unit might imply. This is just a "greatest hits" of interesting military and para-military groups and categories that would be pretty cool to work into an RPG. Some are elite warriors with incredible training, others are just famous or equipped with cool toys.

Ancient World

• Atrenian Scorpion Handlers - the city of Hatra (in what is now Iraq) employed clay pots full of scorpions as thrown weapons
• Carthaginian navy - the finest in the world at the time, as befitting a major Thalassocracy like Carthage
• Companion Cavalry of Alexander the Great
• Gaesatae - Gaulish warriors who fought in the nude to intimidate their enemies
• Extraordinarii of Ancient Rome - elites who screened the legions while on the move
• Immortals (Achaemenid Empire) - a body of heavy infantry always maintained at fighting strength of 10,000 men. Rewarded with the finest food, jewelry, and camp followers
• Medjay - Rangers, royal guards, metropolitan police and elite wasteland patrol of Ancient Egypt
• Numidian Cavalry - the best light cavalry of the ancient world, used by Ancient Carthage to great effect in the Second Punic War
• Praetorian Guard protected the Emperors of Ancient Rome
• Sacred Band of Thebes - An elite warrior band of 150 homosexual couples in Ancient Greece
• Sea Peoples - Ancient Egypt was attacked by "the Sea Peoples" in a series of invasions and raids from 1210 BC to 1100 BC, but historians don't know who these mysterious people were or where they really came from other than the Mediterranean Sea

Middle Ages

• Bohemian War Wagon - peasant levies in closed-hull wooden wagons. They would shoot crossbow bolts out of small firing ports of these mobile armored (animal-drawn) vehicles.
• Kheshig and Khevtuul - Day shift and night shift of the royal guard for Genghis Khan
• Knights Templar - Catholic military order that protected pilgrims to the holy land, waged crusades, built a thousand fortresses, started banks, were eventually wiped out by the church they served, and are at the heart of 9 out of 10 conspiracy theories.
• Mamluk - Heavily armored slave cavalry of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. They were still around at the time of Napoleon Bonaparte and impressed him so much he brought 150 mercenary mamluks to Waterloo.
• Varangian Guard - An elite unit of Norsemen mercenaries who served as the royal guard for the Byzantine Empire
• Viking - sea-borne norse raiders who traveled across a surprisingly large part of the world
• Viking Berserker and Ulfhednar - elite norsemen who frenzied like a bear or wolf.

Napoleonic Era, Colonial Era, American Civil War, etc

• Abraham Lincoln's Air Force - hot-air balloons most used for observation and spying, had telegraph wires to send messages to the ground.
• Austrian Windbüchsenjäger - armed with the Girandoni air rifle
• Confederate Bushwhackers and Union Jayhawkers - Guerillas and partisans in the American Civil War
• Deliler - "wild" cavalry units of the Ottoman Empire dressed in leopard or hyena skins and tasked with causing as much fear and panic for the enemy as possible. Their training involved repeated bare-handed strikes against wet marble to toughen them up.
• Eagle Warrior of the Aztec Empire were elite warriors who had earned promotion by either capturing 20+ prisoners, or committed 20+ acts of bravery.
• Jaguar Warrior were soldiers but also police of Aztec Empire. They enjoyed elevated status, banquets, and concubines.
• Moose Cavalry of Sweden. Mooses are huge, great in snowy terrain, and weirdly enough, horses tend to fear them.
• Potsdam Giants - A unit of soldiers from Prussia whose height _minimum_ was 6 foot 2 inches (in an era when average height was just 5 foot 6)
• Rough Riders - 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, fielded in the Spanish-American War
• Tigermen - soldiers of the Qing Dynasty in China. They fought as skirmishers, and would also go on raids to scare enemy horses away (via looking like tigers, as well as by using firecrackers)
• Zulu Vutwamini - a unit of 3,000 women warriors serving King Shaka of the Zulus

World War Two

• Alamo Scouts - Elite volunteer teams who operated behind Japanese lines.
• Antonov A-40 - a winged tank! an armored glider built by the Soviet Union
• Armored Mini-Train of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway was built in anticipation of needing to resist Operation Sealion
• Blocking Battalions - Soviet troops deployed to the rear with orders to shoot any friendly units attempting to retreat
• Dutch Bicycle Infantry - not just scouts, 5600 fighting men on bikes
• the Ghost Army - a small group of artists who used inflatable tanks to convince Hitler that the allied forces waiting across the channel were more massive than they were, and that the real invasion would be somewhere other than Normandy
• Kamikaze - Japanese pilots who volunteered for suicide missions, crashing their planes (or one-man submarines) into allied ships.
• Long Range Desert Group and Popski's Private Army - vehicle patrols operating hundreds of miles behind enemy lines in the deserts of North Africa.
• Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate - Fooled the luftwaffe into bombing the wrong places in the African desert
• Monuments Men - tasked with protecting cultural and artistic treasures from the Nazis and the general destruction of war
• Code Talkers - Native American soldiers in the US Marine Corps and other units used codes based on their native languages to coordinate tactical plans in real-time via encrypted-on-the-fly communication.
• Night Witches - Night-time all-female soviet biplane bombers. Their planes maximum speed was less than the stall speed of the Nazi fighters they battled.
• Technical Air Intelligence - an allied group tasked with capturing, recovering, and reverse engineering enemy aircraft
• Unit 731 - innocuously named Japanese atrocity factory.

Vietnam War to today

• American Tunnel Rats - crawling with a flashlight and pistol to clear and destroy Viet Cong tunnels
• Crossbow Corps and Voluntary Military Force of the tiny republic of San Marino
• First Earth Battalion - New Age supersoldiers using remote viewing, psychic warfare and The Men Who Stare At Goats
• Jegertroppen - Norwedian all-female special forces unit
• Kurdish YPJ - the Kurdish Women's Protection Unit is an all-female militia that has fought against the Islamic State
• US Navy Dolphins - cetaceans trained to locate and mark underwater mines. The secretary disavows that any dolphin has been trained to kill yet.
• Viet Cong Death Volunteers - suicide bombers, and volunteers to fight to the death so others could escape during retreats

Sources

Bibliography

1. Quora - The long string of people posting their arguments for the most unusual military units in history at Quora was where I mined a huge chunk of the above.

2. military history now on Commandos of the Ancient World

Game and Story Use

• In a history or alternate history game of the appropriate era, any of the above could serve as terrifying villains or colorful mooks, allies or origin stories for the PCs, or just the sweep of history passing in the background.

The lists above are a good start, but no doubt I've missed a lot of memorable memorable units that would make for great gaming and stories. Feel free to add your favorites to the lists above.