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May 24, 2007
Great Blunders In Modern History
by Jack Lee
As a fan of history, especially military history, it's been my observation that some of the most idiotic decisions ever, were made by people you would expect to be the most informed and brightest among us. If history teaches us anything it's don't believe everything your leaders tell you! Being a healthy skeptic is far better.
Let me give you a few examples: In WWI the British Admirals believed submarine warfare was ungentlemanly, if not outright impractical. The British Admiralty failed recognize the dangers of German U-boat attacks and therefore sent most merchant ships out unescorted and they were sunk by the scores. This almost starved England into submission. Get this...English harbor defense was a matter of a few teams of sailors in row boats armed with wooden mallets. Should a sailor spot a periscope lurking about, he was ordered to row towards the periscope and bop it with the mallet. I kid you not!
Thanks in large part to the British Admiralty, the record for ships sunk by a sub still belongs to Germany's U-35 in WWI with 94 confirmed kills.
The Battle of Verdun in WWI has to be one of the top blunders in our time. Germany lured the French to defend an area about the size of Central Park and then opened up on them with 1,220 guns! This is an area barely 8 miles wide folks! The French took the bait and they stupidly held because the commanders were too prideful to fall back. The immortal slogan "They shall not pass" was coined. It became an affair of national honor for the French and for ten months history's longest battle raged and it eventually took over 800,000 lives...pretty much for nothing.
The Battle of Verdun was small time compared to what started WWI....a simple mistake over a murder. It was a mistaken belief by the leadership of 3 nations that it was Serbian Nationals that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Bosnia, when it was actually just a few anarchists sent by a handful of dissident Russian army officers that held a grudge against the Archduke. It was never any government conspiracy, but the acts of a few individuals. As a result of mutual protection pacts, even England was dragged into the European war and eventually America.
Ironically, the Archduke was a man of great vision and he had big plans for sharing his power with the people. This was revolutionary and it was about to transform Imperial Europe. Had he lived would have reformed the massive Astro-Hungarian Empire into a sort of United States of Europe and that would have eliminated all the reasons for WWII and Hitlers rise to power.
It was Col. Billy Mitchell who warned us nearly a decade before Pearl Harbor was attacked that Hawaii was prone to a surprise air attack by Japanese. Tacticians laughed at this as totally absurd. Even after USAAF planes proved it could be done in an airpower exercise, they still didn't take any precautions and you know the rest of the story.
In WWII the famous Maginot Line of hardened gun emplacements and underground bunkers nearly bankrupted the French government. They felt they had built the ultimate defense against Germany only to discover to their chagrin that when war broke out the German armored forces merely did an end run around the vast network of fortifications. France collapsed in a matter of weeks.
France fell quickly because their battle plans were based on slow infantry movements, not high speed armor. Time and again the French rushed to defend towns only to discover the Germans were already there or the Germans had already passed through and now they were cut off. Keep in mind the French and British forces had Germany outnumbered, but they had failed to see the new tactics coming and were still using the rules from WWI. The result was a total rout.
The German high command in WWII did a pretty good job of it overall, but their nemesis was their own leader, Adolph Hitler . He meddled in their war plans and made no end of bad moves. Hitler failed to see the need for long range bombers, failed to develope nuclear weapons and failed to give Admiral Durnitz an adequate supply of U-boats, which was one of the Nazi's most effective weapons early in the war.
Regarding fighting a war on two fronts, another Hitler inspired idea, his famous quote after 18 months on the Eastern front was, "If I had known they had so many tanks I wouldn't have invaded!" (Russia of course) In a way one could say we owe Hitler a debt of thanks for derailing his own war machine. Without his enormous tactical blunders we might all be speaking German!
Posted by Post Scripts at May 24, 2007 05:50 PM