Xiang Yu sank his boats and smashed his pots to force commitment

In 207 BCE the crumbling Qin dynasty's general Zhang Han had the city of Julu under siege, and several rebel armies had arrived to relieve it but sat idle in their camps, unwilling to risk battle against Qin's larger force. Xiang Yu, a general in the rebel Chu army, crossed the Zhang River with his own troops to break the siege, but his force was still heavily outmatched, and half-hearted or hedging support from the other rebel commanders meant a normal battle plan risked a slow, containable defeat rather than the decisive break the siege needed.

Exhorting the other armies to fight harder was not going to work — they had already shown, by staying in camp, that they were keeping the option to retreat or wait things out. Xiang Yu needed his own troops to fight as if defeat and slow starvation were the only alternative to victory, and he needed the other rebel commanders to see a force with nothing left to lose.

Sank boats and smashed pots after crossing, leaving no retreat or cooking, so the only path was to win, and allies saw a force with no exit would fight to the end.

Destroying retreat options collapses the decision space to a single path: win or die.

Visible irreversibility signals to allies that you will fight to the end, making them safer to join.

Without a fallback, soldiers' expected value calculation forces full commitment to victory.

When your team hedges, visibly cut off your own fallback to make commitment the only rational move.

With no retreat, his army broke the siege of Julu, routing Qin forces; the camped rebel commanders then submitted to his command. The episode gave classical Chinese the idiom po fu chen zhou, "break the cauldrons, sink the boats," still used today for committing to a course of action so completely that turning back is no longer physically possible.