The DUMBEST Wars in History - that started for no reason

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]One of these wars was started because a pastry chef complained to a king that some soldiers ate his cakes. Stick around for this one. I'm counting down 10 wars that started for the most ridiculous reasons.

[00:00:14]Let's start with number 10. The war of the stray dog. Greece versus Bulgaria.

[00:00:20]In October 1925, a Greek soldier was standing near the border between Greece and Bulgaria when his dog slipped off its leash and ran across the border into Bulgarian territory. The soldier did what anyone would do. He chased after it. He crossed the border. A Bulgarian sentry saw a Greek soldier crossing into Bulgaria and opened fire. The soldier was hit and both sides started shooting.

[00:00:45]A Greek officer walked into the open waving a white flag to negotiate a ceasefire. The Bulgarians shot him, too.

[00:00:52]The Greek military dictator Theodoros Pangalos gave Bulgaria 48 hours to apologize, arrest the soldiers responsible, and pay compensation to the families. Then, without waiting for the 48 hours to expire, he invaded Bulgaria.

[00:01:07]Anyway, Greek forces occupied several villages near the city of Petrich and were preparing to shell the city itself when the League of Nations intervened, condemned the Greek aggression and ordered a withdrawal. Greece did comply, reluctantly of course, and was ordered to pay Bulgaria 45,000 British pounds in damage. About 50 people were confirmed to have been killed in the fighting, and the entire conflict lasted less than 2 weeks. It all started because a dog ran across a line on a map and its owner went to get it back.

[00:01:39]Number nine, the pig war. United States versus Britain.

[00:01:45]On June 15th, 1859, an American farmer named Lyman Cutler walked out of his cabin on Sanan Island, which is a small island between the US mainland and Vancouver Island, whose sovereignty was disputed between the US and Great Britain, and found a large black boar rooting through his potato patch. The pig belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, whose employees lived on the other side of the island. Cutler shot the pig and the pig's owner, an Irishman named Charles Griffin, demanded a hundred bucks in compensation. Cutler offered him 10 and Griffin refused.

[00:02:18]British authorities threatened to arrest Cutler. The American settlers panicked and requested military protection. The US Army sent Captain George Picket, who would later become famous for Pickicket's charge at Gettysburg, with 66 soldiers. The British responded by sending five warships carrying over 2,000 men. So, the Americans dug in and the British trained their guns on the American positions. For several weeks, the two largest military powers on Earth stood nose tonose on a small island in the Pacific Northwest with cannons loaded on officers waiting for the order to fire. That order never came. Rear Admiral Robert Baines, commanding the British Naval Force, reportedly refused to engage, saying he wouldn't involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig. Well, the standoff continued without violence for about 12 years. Joint military occupation of the island lasted until 1872 when Kaiser Wilhelm the Germany was asked to arbitrate. He ruled in favor of the United States and the only casualty of the pig war was the pig.

[00:03:24]Number eight, the pastry war, France versus Mexico.

[00:03:29]In 1828, a French pastry chef named Remonter, who operated a small bakery in a district of Mexico City, filed a complaint with King Louis Phipe of France, claiming that Mexican army officers had entered his shop, eaten his pastries, and caused considerable damage without paying. He wanted compensation.

[00:03:48]Specifically, he wanted 60,000 pesos, which was an extraordinary sum for a pastry shop, roughly equivalent to what a successful Mexican hienda might earn in several years. The king of France, who had been accumulating complaints from French citizens living in Mexico about property damage, unpaid debts, and general lawlessness, added Ramontel's claim to a broader demand for 600,000 pesos in reparations from the Mexican government.

[00:04:15]Mexico refused. In November of 1838, France sent a naval fleet to the Gulf of Mexico. French warships blockaded the port of Veraracruz and bombarded a San Juan fortress, the most significant military installation on the Mexican coast. The bombardment lasted several days and the fortress fell. A French expeditionary force briefly occupied Veraracruz and the Mexican general Antonio Lopez desenta Anam, that's the same general who led the assault on the Alamo two years earlier, was wounded in the fighting and he lost his leg, which he later had buried with full military honors. Well, the conflict ended in March of 1839 after British diplomatic intervention brokered a settlement in which Mexico agreed to pay 600,000 pesos. A war that involved naval bombardments, a foreign occupation, and the amputation of a famous general's leg had started because a pastry chef complained to a king that soldiers had eaten his cakes.

[00:05:12]Number seven, the war of the oaken bucket, Modina versus Bolognia.

[00:05:18]In 1325, soldiers from the citystate of Modana in northern Italy raided the neighboring citystate of Balonia and stole an open bucket from a well in the center of the city. The bucket was just a common wooden pale used for drawing water. It had no monetary value. It had no significance. It was just a bucket.

[00:05:37]Bolognia demanded its return. Modina refused and Bolognia declared war. Now, the reality was a bit more complicated.

[00:05:45]that the two cities had been on opposing sides of a wider conflict between supporters of the pope, the Gelfs, led by Bolognium, and supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Giblines, led by Mana for generations. The bucket was a provocation, not a cause. But the bucket is what the war is named for. And the bucket is what the two cities fought over in popular memory. Because the Battle of Zapalino fought on November 15, 1325 was triggered directly by the demand for its return. About 32,000 Bolognesei troops marched on Modana to recover the bucket and punish the theft.

[00:06:21]Modina with about 7,000 soldiers met them at the village of Zapolino. The Modernazi won decisively. Bolognia lost about 2,000 men. The Modernazi pursued the fleeing Bolognese all the way back to the walls of Bolognia, captured several outlying forts, and returned home victorious with the bucket.

[00:06:40]Bolognia never got it back. The bucket is still in Modernum. It sits today in the bell tower of the Girandina, the cathedral tower in the center of the city displayed in a glass case. It's been there for 700 years. It's just an open bucket and 2,000 people are believed to have been killed over it.

[00:06:58]Modana kept it and they're not giving it back.

[00:07:03]Number six, the War of Jenkins Ear Britain versus Spain.

[00:07:09]In 1731, a Spanish patrol vessel boarded a British trading brig called the Rebecca in the Caribbean Sea near the coast of Cuba. The Spanish captain, Juan De Leon Fandinho, accused the British crew of smuggling, which was a charge that was probably accurate as British merchants had been running contraband through Spanish colonial waters for years. To make his point, Fandinho drew his sword and sliced off the ear of Rebecca's captain, the man named Robert Jenkins. He then handed the severed ear to Jenkins and told him, according to later testimony, to take it to his king and tell him the same would happen to him if he were caught doing the same thing. Well, Jenkins kept the ear. He put it in a jar, and he pickled it. 8 years passed. British Spanish relations continued to deteriorate over trade, territorial boundaries, and colonial competition. By 1738, the British public was demanding war, and the government needed justification.

[00:08:05]Robert Jenkins was summoned before Parliament. He appeared before the House of Commons carrying the jar. He held up the pickled deer. He described the boarding of his ship, the humiliation of the encounter, and the Spanish captain's threat to the king of England. He reportedly told Parliament that in his moment of suffering he had committed his soul to God and his cause to the country. While the House erupted, the public though was outraged. On October 23rd, 1739, Britain declared war on Spain.

[00:08:35]The war that followed, officially named the War of Jenkins, lasted from 1739 to 1748, by which point it had merged with a much larger war of the Austrian secession. The combined conflicts resulted in an estimated half million casualties across Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Battles were fought from Cartahania to the Philippines. The 7 years war that followed, in which about 1.2 Two million people are believed to have died is considered by many historians to have been a direct consequence of the unresolved tensions left by the war of the Austrian secession. A chain of events that contributed to the deaths of over a million people across three continents was set in motion in part because a Spanish captain cut off an Englishman's ear in 1731 and the Englishman put it in a jar and showed it to Parliament 8 years later.

[00:09:26]Number five, the emu war. Australia versus some emus.

[00:09:32]In 1932, the government of Australia declared war on emuses. The Royal Australian artillery deployed soldiers armed with two Lewis guns. These are beltfed, water cooled military machine guns to the wheat belt of Western Australia with orders to cull a population of about 20,000 emus that had been migrating into farming regions and destroying crops. The operation was authorized by the Minister of Defense.

[00:09:58]It was led by Major GPW Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery accompanied by two soldiers. The three men were issued 10,000 rounds of ammunition and sent into the field to engage an enemy that while flightless stood 6 ft tall and ran at 30 m an hour and had an alarming capacity for absorbing bullets without falling down. The emus were not cooperative. On the first day of operations, November 2nd, 1932, a group of about 50 emuses were spotted. The soldiers opened fire and the lowest gun jammed after the first dozen rounds and the emus scattered. Subsequent engagements followed a similar pattern.

[00:10:37]The emus were fast, evasive, and appeared to operate in loose formations that made concentrated fire ineffective.

[00:10:45]They split into small groups when fired upon. They ran in unpredictable directions. One ornithologist later observed that the emuse seemed to have appointed their own leaders who stationed themselves on high ground to observe the approaching soldiers and signal the flock to disperse.

[00:11:02]Well, after 6 days, Major Meredith withdrew. About 986 emus had been killed out of a target population of 20,000, a ratio of roughly 10 rounds fired per bird killed, with a success rate that the media described, not inaccurately, as a defeat. The Australian House of Representatives debated the results. Big questions were raised in Parliament about the cost effectiveness of deploying military resources against wildlife. Well, a second operation was authorized in December of 1932 with marginally better results, but the emuse's continued to migrate into the farmland the following year and the year after that. Farmers eventually switched to building long fencing barriers, the emu fence, which proved way more effective than the military. The emu war is to this day one of the most frequently cited examples of a military operation that failed against a nonhuman adversary. The Australian military does not list it among its campaigns. The emuse, though, for their part, continue to thrive in Western Australia. Their population's estimated between 600 and 725,000.

[00:12:09]Yeah, they won. The Australian government hasn't attempted a second military operation against them, and the score remains emuse 1, Royal Australian artillery zero.

[00:12:20]Number four, the Cod Wars, the United Kingdom versus Iceland.

[00:12:25]Between 1958 and 1976, the United Kingdom and Iceland came to the brink of genuine armed conflict three separate times, deploying warships, ramming each other's vessels, and cutting each other's cables, and firing live rounds across each other's boughs over fish, specifically over cod. The Cod Wars were a series of three confrontations triggered by Iceland's successive expansions of its exclusive fishing zone from four nautical miles to 12, then to 50, then to 200, each of which threatened to exclude British trwers from waters they had been fishing for centuries. The stakes on paper sound trivial. Who gets to catch cod near Iceland? In practice, the Cod Wars were a genuine geopolitical crisis that threatened the structural integrity of NATO at the height of the Cold War.

[00:13:16]Iceland is a founding member of NATO and sits in one of the most strategically critical locations in the North Atlantic directly at sea lanes through which Soviet submarines would have transitioned into the Atlantic in the event of a war with the West. The Greenland, Iceland, UK gap, known as the Gio gap, was the choke point through which the entire Soviet northern fleet would have to pass. Iceland's position made it indispensable to NATO's Atlantic defense. Yeah, and Iceland knew that.

[00:13:44]During the third and final COD war in 1975 to76, Icelandic Coast Guard vessels and British Royal Navy frigots engaged in direct physical confrontations at sea, ramming maneuvers, net cutting operations, and at least one incident in which warning shots were fired.

[00:14:01]Iceland's foreign minister announced that unless Britain withdrew its trwers, Iceland would close the NATO base at Kafleik and considered leaving the alliance entirely. The threat was existential, though not for Iceland, but for NATO. If Iceland left, the Soviet Union would gain unrestricted access to the North Atlantic. The United States intervened diplomatically, pressuring Britain to back down, and Britain complied. The trollers withdrew and Iceland won. A country of about 220,000 people with no army, no air force, and a coast guard consisting of a handful of small vessels had defeated one of the world's great naval powers by threatening to change its alliance.

[00:14:41]Britain, which had won the Battle of the Atlantic against the German Yubot fleet in World War II, which had projected naval power across the globe for centuries, which maintained one of the largest navies, conceded defeat to Iceland over fish. While the Cod Wars reshaped international maritime law, established the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone that is now standard worldwide, and it demonstrated that in the nuclear age, even the smallest nation could leverage its geography into victory as long as it's willing to bet the alliance on a barrel of cod.

[00:15:17]Number three, the War of the Golden Stool, Britain versus the Ashanti Empire.

[00:15:24]The golden stool of the Ashanti. It's not a chair. It's not furniture. It's the most sacred object in the Ashanti kingdom. The spiritual embodiment of the Ashanti nation itself. Believed to contain the Sunsum, the collective soul of the entire Ashanti people, the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. According to Ashanti tradition, the stool descended from the sky in a cloud of white dust and landed on the lap of the first Ashanti king, Usay Tutu in the late 17th century. No one sits on it, not even the king. The Ashantaheen, the king of the Ashanti, is ceremonially lowered over it without making any contact. The stool rests on its own throne, on its own blanket, and is attended by its own servants. To touch it without authorization, to disrespect it or attempt to seize it would be an act of war. In 1896, the British had exiled the Ashanti king Prempe I to the Sey Shells, leaving the Ashanti people without their ruler, but not without their stool. The British governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Hudgson, arrived in the Ashanti capital of Kumasi in March of 1900 and convened a meeting of the Ashanti chiefs. In front of the assembled leadership in one of the most powerful and sophisticated kingdoms in West African history, Hudgson delivered a speech in which he demanded that the golden stool be brought to him so that he could sit on it. He wanted to sit on the soul of the Ashanti nation. The chiefs went silent. The meeting ended.

[00:16:54]Within days, the Ashanti were at war.

[00:16:57]The rebellion known as the war of the golden stool or the Ya Asantewa war after the Queen Mother who led it erupted across the Ashanti region. Ya Asantewa, a woman in her 60s, rallied the Ashanti warriors with a speech that has become one of the most famous in West African history, reportedly declaring that if the men of the Ashanti would not fight for the golden stool, then the women would. The Ashanti besieged the British garrison at Kumasi for three months. Hajson and his wife had to be rescued by a relief column that fought its way through from the coast. And the British eventually prevailed militarily. But the cost was significant. Thousands of casualties on both sides and a colonial reputation that never fully recovered from the spectacle of a governor who started a war by demanding to sit on a sacred object he didn't understand.

[00:17:46]The golden stool was never surrendered.

[00:17:48]The Ashanti hid it and it remained hidden for over 20 years. In 1921, road construction workers accidentally uncovered it and several people were arrested for stripping it of its gold ornaments. The stool was recovered though and returned to the Ashanti. It remains in Kumazi today under the custody of the Asante and it is still considered the soul of the Ashanti nation. The British never sat on it.

[00:18:12]Nobody ever sat on it. The war that Hodgson started by demanding a chair he didn't understand cost thousands of lives. It humiliated the colonial administration and accomplished nothing because the chair was never a chair and the people he was trying to subjugate understood something about their own culture that the man trying to rule them had not bothered to learn.

[00:18:35]Number two, the football war. Honduras versus El Salvador.

[00:18:40]In June of 1969, Honduras and El Salvador played each other in a two-legg FIFA World Cup qualifying tie. By the end of the month, the two countries were at war. The conflict lasted about 100 hours. Between 2 to 6,000 people are estimated to have been killed, and this is the only war in modern history to have been directly triggered by a football match, or rather by the social explosion that the football match ignited. The underlying cause was not football. It was land. El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. Honduras, its neighbor, is significantly larger and less densely populated. Throughout the 1950s and60s, approximately 300,000 Salvadoran peasants, landless, impoverished, and desperate, had migrated into Honduras, settling on unused land and competing with Honduran farmers for resources and employment. By the late 1960s, Honduran resentment towards the Salvadoran migrants had reached a critical point. The Honduran government began implementing agrarian reform policies that stripped land from Salvadoran settlers and redistributed it to Honduran nationals. Tensions between the two countries were already at the breaking point. The football matches lit the fuse.

[00:19:57]The first leg was played in Tegos Galpa, Honduras on June 8th, 1969. Honduras won 1 Z. The night before the match, Honduran fans surrounded the Salvadoran team's hotel, banging drums, honking car horns, and throwing objects at the windows to deprive the players of sleep.

[00:20:13]An 18-year-old Salvadoran girl named Amelia Bolanos reportedly shot herself after watching Honduras score the winning goal on television. Her funeral was broadcast on Salvador national television and was attended by the president. The second leg was played in San Salvador on June 15th. El Salvador won 3-0. This time it was the Honduran fans who were targeted. Honduran visitors were beaten in the streets.

[00:20:37]Their vehicles were torched and the Honduran flag was set on fire at the stadium. The Honduran team had to be escorted to the airport under armed guard. Honduras severed diplomatic relations. Both nations began mobilizing their militaries.

[00:20:52]On July 14th, 1969, the Salvadoran Air Force launched bombing raids on Honduran airports and military installations.

[00:21:00]Salvador and ground forces crossed the border and advanced into Honduran territory. Honduras retaliated with air strikes of its own. Both air forces consisted largely of propeller-driven World War II era aircraft and the aerial engagements were among the last dog fights in history to involve piston engine fighters. The Organization of American States brokered a ceasefire on July 18th and Salvadoran forces withdrew by August 2nd. The war lasted 100 hours.

[00:21:28]The consequences though were severe and long lasting. Between 2 to 6,000 people were killed, the majority of them Honduran civilians. Over a 100,000 Salvadoran migrants were expelled from Honduras. Many of them returning to an El Salvador that had neither the land nor the employment to absorb them. The returne's frustration and landlessness contributed directly to the social unrest that would within a decade erupt into the Salvador and Civil War, a 12-year conflict that killed over 75,000 people. The football war didn't begin because of football. It began because two countries with deep structural tension used a football match as the detonator. The match wasn't the cause, it was the spark. The dynamite had been piling up for years, but the fact remains. Two nations went to war in the same month they played each other in a World Cup qualifier and the events on the pitch and in the stands were the immediate trigger for everything that followed.

[00:22:25]Number one, the battle of Karan Sebes, Austria versus itself.

[00:22:31]On the night of September 21st, 1788, during the AustroTurkish War, an Austrian army of approximately a 100,000 men was camped near the town of Karen Sebes in what is now Romania, preparing for an expected engagement with Ottoman forces. By dawn, the Austrian army had suffered significant casualties, been thrown into total disarray, and lost the town of Kbes to the enemy. The Ottoman army that captured it had not yet arrived. The Austrians had fought themselves. The Austrian Army of 1788 was not a unified national force. It was a patchwork of ethnicities, languages, and cultures drawn from across the Habsburg Empire. Austrians, Hungarians, Cexs, Germans, Serbs, Croats, Poles, Italians, and Romanians commanded primarily by German-speaking officers, giving orders to soldiers who in many cases didn't speak German. Communication between the units relied on translators, hand signals, and the hope that everyone understood the same words in the same way. They didn't. This was the structural flaw that made the disaster possible. The trigger was schnops. On the evening of September 21st, a group of Hassar cavalry men crossed the Timish River on a scouting patrol looking for Ottoman forces in the area. They found no Turks. They did find a group of Romani travelers selling schnaps. The Hous bought the schnaps and began drinking. Shortly afterward, a contingent of infantry crossed the river, found the cavalry having a party, and demanded a share of the alcohol. The Hous refused. A fight broke out, punches were thrown, and someone fired a shot.

[00:24:07]At the sound of the gunshot, Romanian speaking soldiers in the vicinity began shouting, "Terty, Turi!" or "Turks, Turks!" Believing the shots indicated an Ottoman attack, the Hous drunk and panicked, fled back towards the main camp, the infantry followed, also panicking. As the retreating soldiers poured into the camp in the dark, shouting in multiple languages, other units who had been sleeping or standing watch or preparing for the next day's march, concluded that the camp was under attack. Soldiers began firing at anything that moved. In the darkness, every shadow became a Turk. The chaos escalated with amazing speed.

[00:24:45]Germanspeaking officers trying to restore order shouted, "Halt! Halt!"

[00:24:49]which non-German-speaking soldiers misheard as, "Allah! Allah!" confirming their minds that the camp was being overrun by Ottoman forces. An Austrian Corps commander, hearing the shooting and shouting, seeing what appeared to be a massive cavalry charge coming towards his position, ordered his artillery to open fire. The artillery fired into the darkness. The round struck Austrian soldiers. The soldiers now under bombardment from their own cannons broke and ran. Units stampeded in every direction, crashing into other units, firing at each other in the pitch black, screaming in a dozen languages. The Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, who was personally commanding the campaign and was present in the camp, was thrown from his horse during the panic and allegedly fell into a stream. His guards dragged him to safety in a nearby farmhouse, convinced he was about to be captured by the Turks. There were no Turks. There never had been any Turks. The entire battle, the gunfire, the artillery, the stampede, the screaming, had all been fought against an enemy that existed entirely in the imagination of a 100,000 drunk, exhausted, and terrified soldiers who didn't speak the same language.

[00:25:56]Well, by morning, the Austrian army had effectively destroyed its own camp. The exact casualties, though, are disputed.

[00:26:02]Contemporary Austrian reports mention 150 casualties in the rear guard, a thousand wounded transported to the fortress at Arad, and 538 soldiers missing. Some secondary sources have inflated the number to as high as 10,000, though modern historians consider that unlikely. What's not disputed, though, is the result. When the Ottoman army finally arrived 2 days later, they found the town of Karbes abandoned, the Austrian camp in ruins, and the remains of an army that had broken itself without the Ottomans having to fire a single shot. The Turks captured the town without resistance.

[00:26:38]The Battle of Karan Sebes has been called the worst friendly fire incident in military history. It was caused by schnops, a language barrier, a gunshot that wasn't fired by the enemy, and the specific irreducible fact that an army of a 100,000 men drawn from a dozen different countries couldn't understand each other in the dark. There was no enemy. There was no attack. And there was a bottle of schnops, though, a fist fight and a single gunshot. And then 100,000 soldiers tearing themselves apart in the blackness because nobody could tell anyone else in a language anyone else understood that there was nothing to be afraid of. The most ridiculous war on this list is the only one where the enemy never showed up.