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Bad ideas in military history

HansMustermann

Penultimate Amazing
HansMustermann
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Mar 2, 2009
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This isn't necessarily about just equipment designs (since we already have some old threads about the worstest warships/tanks/whatever), but general brainfarts by someone at the top.

My (first) nomination would be the WW2 Volksjäger program. By the end of the second world war, Germany had this idea to
A. produce the cheapest jet aircraft, out of the cheapest possible stuff, with the most unskilled labour (often slaves), and
B. give Hitler Youth children a few hours of training on a glider, and throw them at the enemy bombers.

Each of those ideas failed spectacularly on its own. The cheap plywood often came unglued in mid air, control surfaces could break if you didn't know how far you can push them (e.g., on the He 162), etc. And that's if you were lucky and it was put together decently, which most often wasn't the case. The combination even more so, as some guy who's only been trained on a glider would definitely not know how far he can push the rudder.

To add to the problem, since the USAF and RAF had switched to bombing the refineries and railways, the Luftwaffe was pretty much running on fumes, and the industry was running short on resources.

Yet someone thought it's a great idea to throw a full fuel tank and a perfectly good jet engine into the great thrash can in the sky, by putting them in a poorly made plane, piloted by an unqualified pilot. Not a whole lot came back, is all I'm saying. While hundreds examples were captured after the war, it was more like in the factories.
 
I don't think anyone thought it was a great idea. I think everyone involved agreed it was a desperate idea. I think the blunder was not in choosing marginal strategies in extremis, but rather in refusing to recognize that no desperate measures would be enough, and that the time to surrender had come.

Like I bet if NATO* had been slower to respond, and Ukraine had resorted to similarly desperate measures in the interim between the outbreak of hostilities and the arrival of NATO support, you wouldn't be pointing and laughing at Zelensky and Zaluzhnyy for their foolish strategies. You'd be crossing your fingers and hoping it worked long enough for western Europe to get its act together and save the day. For Nazi Germany, the foolishness wasn't in the strategies, but in the lack of hope for any possible salvation.
 
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Trebuchet said:
The US Navy's recent warship programs, DDG1000 and the Littoral Combat Ships, are both abject and very expensive failures.
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DDG1000 got ambushed by the end of the Cold War, and the diminished economies of scale that made it a waste of money in limited numbers.

The LCS program was just a clownshow, even taking into account the military's long-established pattern of "inconclusive prototype compettion, inconclusive prototype competition, new weapon based on incremental improvements lifted from the preceding competitions".

At least it looks like we'll finally be getting a modern frigate from the LCS mess, though.
 
Let's see... Bad ideas...

Iraqi Republican Guard digging in south of Kuwait City, to meet the Coalition counteroffensive head-on, without properly considering the implications of:

* The Coalition cutting off access to supplies and reinforcements across the river to their rear.

* The absolute shooting gallery of the one road back to Baghdad.

* The willingness of the coalition troops to their front to just bulldozer-bury them in their trenches.

* The vast desert on their right flank, and the capability of Coalition logistics to exploit that wasteland for an overwhelming encirclement.

I can kind of forgive them that last one, though. I think it's very hard to really grasp just how deep the US military rolls.
 
Another WWII-era bad idea: Anti-tank dogs.

The Russians trained dogs to associate the underside of tanks with food, strapped mines to them and released them on the front lines. Unfortunately they had trained the dogs using their own tanks, which had Diesel engines. The German tanks ran on petrol and therefore smelled different, so the dogs only associated food with the underside of Russian tanks…
 
Mojo said:
Another WWII-era bad idea: Anti-tank dogs.

The Russians trained dogs to associate the underside of tanks with food, strapped mines to them and released them on the front lines. Unfortunately they had trained the dogs using their own tanks, which had Diesel engines. The German tanks ran on petrol and therefore smelled different, so the dogs only associated food with the underside of Russian tanks…
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Serves them right! :mad:
 
No matter how good your arms and tactics were the last war, someone has learned from you and can counter it.

Some tactics first used by British commando units in North Africa have just been used again by Ukraine and worked great. Once. Doing it again might be the greatest blunder of the war.
Or not. It's all about changing up details and keeping very quiet before doing it.

Hindsight is 20/20, in war it's more than a sincere oops and people die. If you were wrong it was your people.

The Iraqi forces knew the deserts were impossible to navigate. They always got lost and confused. GPS changed that. In one battle and one war.
After that near every idiot with a cellphone has GPS.
Including the Iraqi army.
 
Mojo said:
Another WWII-era bad idea: Anti-tank dogs.

The Russians trained dogs to associate the underside of tanks with food, strapped mines to them and released them on the front lines. Unfortunately they had trained the dogs using their own tanks, which had Diesel engines. The German tanks ran on petrol and therefore smelled different, so the dogs only associated food with the underside of Russian tanks…
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It sounds like a Looney Tunes cartoon meets Stephen King.
 
theprestige said:
I don't think anyone thought it was a great idea. I think everyone involved agreed it was a desperate idea.
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Most likely, yes. I still maintain that it was also a counter-productive idea.

theprestige said:
I think the blunder was not in choosing marginal strategies in extremis, but rather in refusing to recognize that no desperate measures would be enough, and that the time to surrender had come.

Like I bet if NATO* had been slower to respond, and Ukraine had resorted to similarly desperate measures in the interim between the outbreak of hostilities and the arrival of NATO support, you wouldn't be pointing and laughing at Zelensky and Zaluzhnyy for their foolish strategies. You'd be crossing your fingers and hoping it worked long enough for western Europe to get its act together and save the day. For Nazi Germany, the foolishness wasn't in the strategies, but in the lack of hope for any possible salvation.
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Well, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Ukraine's plans worked, while some of Germany's WW2 plans were downright counter-productive. Not just inefficient, but literally worse than nothing. As in, they not only achieved virtually nothing, but actually also wasted resources that could have been better used elsewhere.

Sometimes the options aren't just 1. do dumb thing X, or 2. just surrender. Sometimes you can do Y or Z instead, which would help more.


As a side-note: You also have to understand that a lot of the Nazi decisions were not just because they thought it would help (even a little) in actual battle. Some, like the Vergeltungswaffen (vengeance weapons) were for example approved because Hitler thought it would have propaganda value. Hell, switching the Battle Of Britain towards bombing London was just because of propaganda value, even though it was a thoroughly losing move. Or pursuing some of the giant tank concepts were just so his best buddy Porsche would have some of the government pork pie.

So you can't even always assume that something was actually thought of as an actual solution to an actual military problem. In fact, some were greenlit AGAINST the wishes of the actual military. Sometimes the problem to solve was just keeping Hitler in power. Is all I'm saying.
 
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I know I keep on about this: Russia not having a professional NCO system. They are key to getting recruits ready asap. I've heard it said the cruellest thing an NCO can do is follow his officers orders to the letter.
 
In WW2, the kamikaze was the most effective guided missile in history. It's been surpassed for accuracy since then, and of course for speed, but as a cheap, flexible means of delivering a helluva payload you couldn't beat it today.

It was a bad, a very bad idea. Special Attack used up planes and especially pilots prodigally. It damaged the morale of both naval and army air forces. The Allies were so dismayed by this demonstration of alienness that they grew vicious enough to rejoice at the firebombing campaign, and at the advent of the atomic bomb.

Japan could have withdrawn to the home archipelago and hoarded its planes while training aircrew, and just possibly might have avoided the catastrophic destruction that occurred.
 
Mojo said:
Another WWII-era bad idea: Anti-tank dogs.
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Memorably detailed in a tongue-in-cheek article with rules (and errata) for ASL in ASL Annual '90. The problem with training with friendly vehicles was covered in errata included with the original article:
C13.1011 ADD "Should there be two equidistant vehicles in Motion, the MD will move toward whichever of the two is friendly; if neither/both are friendly, use Random Selection to determine the MD's target."
 
Might be a good idea to separate desperation weapons from those where there was adequate time and resources and you still get crappy results anyway. There are many bad ideas in many categories.

A few that may not be the worst ever.

Operational stupidity. Custer at the Little Big Horn. Ignores orders and charges in a day early. Gets himself and many others dead.

Waste of resources. British battleships at Gallipoli provided fire support for the ground troops. Only thing is, they only had armor piercing shells and no high explosive ones. Many shells buried themselves in the dirt and did not deliver the damage needed. Instead of starting a program to develop new HE rounds for existing ships, the royal navy decided to build a new class of battle cruiser to carry short barreled 18" guns that would only fire HE rounds and no armor piercing making them useless against ships. It gets dumber from there. Those ships with the 18" guns did become the first aircraft carriers. But they then decided to put the 18" guns on submarines. A follow on issue to the original problem showed up again at the start of WW 2 when the British army decided tanks should fight tanks and have guns that only fired armor piercing rounds and not HE. They had other infantry support tanks that only fired HE and no armor piercing.

Desperation stupidity. I'm going to go with the Russian mobilization effort. Some of them appear to be headed to Belorussia, which signals something even dumber may happen.
 
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Doubt said:
Might be a good idea to separate desperation weapons from those where there was adequate time and resources and you still get crappy results anyway. There are many bad ideas in many categories.

A few that may not be the worst ever.

Operational stupidity. Custer at the Little Big Horn. Ignores orders and charges in a day early. Gets himself and many others dead.

Waste of resources. British battleships at Gallipoli provided fire support for the ground troops. Only thing is, they only had armor piercing shells and no high explosive ones. Many shells buried themselves in the dirt and did not deliver the damage needed. Instead of starting a program to develop new HE rounds for existing ships, the royal navy decided to build a new class of battle cruiser to carry short barreled 18" guns that would only fire HE rounds and no armor piercing making them useless against ships. It gets dumber from there. Those ships with the 18" guns did become the first aircraft carriers. But they then decided to put the 18" guns on submarines. A follow on issue to the original problem showed up again at the start of WW 2 when the British army decided tanks should fight tanks and have guns that only fired armor piercing rounds and not HE. They had other infantry support tanks that only fired HE and no armor piercing.

Desperation stupidity. I'm going to go with the Russian mobilization effort. Some of them appear to be headed to Belorussia, which signals something even dumber may happen.
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There’s so much wrong concerning the statements of the British ships and tanks that only a [citation needed] could save it.
But to help you.
British battleships did always carry high explosive rounds. Besides, armour piercing round did also carry an explosive charge, if not as big as of the he rounds. You would not want to be anywhere near them if these armour rounds went bang!
The battleships used in Gallipoli were the older ones that had no place in the line of battle but still could be used for something useful here. Those and some newer ships that used that spell there as a kind of working up period.
There was ever only one large light cruiser with a single 18” gun (HMS Furious) and the best thing that ever happened with her was being changed into an aircraft carrier.
No submarine ever carried an 18” gun. This is pure nonsense. The M class submarine carried a 12” gun. The guns made for Furious in the end were used on monitors.

British tanks were indeed hampered by their use of the 40 mm gun (an excellent AT gun for the day), but not as you say.
The stupidity was that the infantry support tanks were the ones that had said at gun and thus had no usable HE performance.

The first sentence of your post is a good one though.
 
My memory is not entierly correct. But you are not doing any better.

erwinl said:
There’s so much wrong concerning the statements of the British ships and tanks that only a [citation needed] could save it.
But to help you.
British battleships did always carry high explosive rounds. Besides, armour piercing round did also carry an explosive charge, if not as big as of the he rounds. You would not want to be anywhere near them if these armour rounds went bang!
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"Moreover, naval armor-piercing ammunition intended to sink ships in sea battles was poorly suited to dealing with land targets where a higher explosive content was desirable. Often, messages from forward observers took too long to reach the ships."

https://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2021/09/naval-gunfire-support-at-gallipoli.html

Yes, I was aware that AP rounds are explosive. They are still a poor choice for shore bombardment. They have smaller explosive charges and tail mounted delay fuses. The ground ends up absorbing most of the blast after they bury themselves. Couple that with the poor firing angles and they are not doing nearly what is needed. The end result you get bad ideas like the 18" gun instead of what they really needed.

And yes, you don't want to be where an AP shell hits. But the area of effect ends up being way smaller than what you get from the proper HE shells. Do you have a source stating they actually had HE rounds?

The battleships used in Gallipoli were the older ones that had no place in the line of battle but still could be used for something useful here. Those and some newer ships that used that spell there as a kind of working up period.
There was ever only one large light cruiser with a single 18” gun (HMS Furious) and the best thing that ever happened with her was being changed into an aircraft carrier.
No submarine ever carried an 18” gun. This is pure nonsense. The M class submarine carried a 12” gun. The guns made for Furious in the end were used on monitors.
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You are correct about the sub and the monitors. I was wrong on those points. But Furious was supposed to be a battle cruiser and not a light cruiser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Furious_(47)

"HMS Furious was a modified Courageous-class battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy (RN) during the First World War."

British tanks were indeed hampered by their use of the 40 mm gun (an excellent AT gun for the day), but not as you say.
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Oh really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_tank

"While the 2-pounder gun had good performance when the tank was introduced, ammunition supply was focused on solid armour-piercing (AP) rounds."

The cruiser tanks had the guns. But the army thought they did not need those HE rounds. The Germans did not play by those rules so again, no HE when they needed them.

The stupidity was that the infantry support tanks were the ones that had said at gun and thus had no usable HE performance.
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You are less wrong on that than I am. Matilda I had a heavy machine gun. No HE so I am wrong on that But no AP gun either. Matilda II had the 40 mm gun and no He rounds so you are right on that part.

The first sentence of your post is a good one though.
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No worse of a post then your correction.
 
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theprestige said:
Come on. You know better than this.
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Double checked it. Yup. I was relying on bad info. Still a stupid weapon thanks to fallout.

There is more than one version of the W54 warhead. Largest is 1 kiloton yield and still does not reach that far. The one on the Davy Crocket used .2 Kt.

For those wanting to see effects on a map:

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

For those wanting to know where I went wrong:

https://www.defenceview.in/w54-how-...t-nuclear-bomb-that-can-be-put-in-a-backpack/
 
Doubt said:
My memory is not entierly correct. But you are not doing any better.



"Moreover, naval armor-piercing ammunition intended to sink ships in sea battles was poorly suited to dealing with land targets where a higher explosive content was desirable. Often, messages from forward observers took too long to reach the ships."

https://roadstothegreatwar-ww1.blogspot.com/2021/09/naval-gunfire-support-at-gallipoli.html

Yes, I was aware that AP rounds are explosive. They are still a poor choice for shore bombardment. They have smaller explosive charges and tail mounted delay fuses. The ground ends up absorbing most of the blast after they bury themselves. Couple that with the poor firing angles and they are not doing nearly what is needed. The end result you get bad ideas like the 18" gun instead of what they really needed.
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That's more an issue of faulty fuses, than using the wrong kind of shell.
It does not matter if the fuse is in the nose or in the base of the shell, as long as it works, as soon as there is the right kind of shock. But if you're shooting at fortified emplacements (like maybe concrete forts, you'd want a base mounted fuse, to have the most chance of the fuse actually working.
And yes, you don't want to be where an AP shell hits. But the area of effect ends up being way smaller than what you get from the proper HE shells. Do you have a source stating they actually had HE rounds?
[\quote]
Full HE shells, the British didn't have many of, as far as I know. What they did have was a Semi armor Piercing HE shell (a shell halfway in between a HE shelff and an AP shell and which was more or less the go to shell for the British in the first half of the Great War, for both armored and non armoured targets.
Source: Jutland from the German perspective. (which I don't have at hand at this moment).

You are correct about the sub and the monitors. I was wrong on those points. But Furious was supposed to be a battle cruiser and not a light cruiser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Furious_(47)

"HMS Furious was a modified Courageous-class battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy (RN) during the First World War."
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Yeah, These three ships were a bit of a hot mess.
They were ordered as large light cruisers, which I have also called them in my post. More often these are indeed classified as battlecruisers. The amount of turrets (only 2, and only 1 for Furious), meant that they were really not ideal for shooting at ships. Where you'd need a certain number of shells to be 'in the air', in order to have ore of a chance of hitting the other ship. Even the Renowns with 6 guns in 3 turrets were, in my opinion, marginal in this respect.
I see them more as insanely fast monitors, but without any armour, and lacking the one aspect that made monitors so useful, namely being cheap. Something that these three ships were not.
So yeah. Hot mess.

Oh really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_tank

"While the 2-pounder gun had good performance when the tank was introduced, ammunition supply was focused on solid armour-piercing (AP) rounds."

The cruiser tanks had the guns. But the army thought they did not need those HE rounds. The Germans did not play by those rules so again, no HE when they needed them.



You are less wrong on that than I am. Matilda I had a heavy machine gun. No HE so I am wrong on that But no AP gun either. Matilda II had the 40 mm gun and no He rounds so you are right on that part.
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yeah really.
The 40mm was, in its day a very good anti tank gun. Had a good bit of penetration, but no explosives in these AT rounds to do additional damage after said penetration had happened. This lack of explosive filler was what made them such a good penetrating shots.
A bit like modern days, where the best armor piercing ammo from tanks don't have any explosive filler.
You're right about the Matilda I tank, but as there were only a few (some 140) built of these I had omitted them.
But with some 3000 Matilda II tanks and some 8000 Valentine tanks built, almost all of these had the 40mm gun, the British had a firm view about how they wanted to arm their infantry tanks.

Their cruiser tanks had the HE guns in the end though (first examples excepted)
No worse of a post then your correction.
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Well I was a bit cranky last night when posting, So I apologize concerning my tone.
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sackett said:
In WW2, the kamikaze was the most effective guided missile in history. It's been surpassed for accuracy since then, and of course for speed, but as a cheap, flexible means of delivering a helluva payload you couldn't beat it today.

It was a bad, a very bad idea. Special Attack used up planes and especially pilots prodigally. It damaged the morale of both naval and army air forces. The Allies were so dismayed by this demonstration of alienness that they grew vicious enough to rejoice at the firebombing campaign, and at the advent of the atomic bomb.

Japan could have withdrawn to the home archipelago and hoarded its planes while training aircrew, and just possibly might have avoided the catastrophic destruction that occurred.
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It was a very inefficient idea even for accuracy, for one technical reason. Bear with me if you want to be horrified.

The Zero tended to become almost impossible to steer at very high speed, such as in a dive, because air pressure on the control surfaces meant you needed more force on the (non-assisted) stick to move them than a human could apply. It didn't even have hydraulic assist like later allied aircraft. It was utterly unfit for dive bombing because of that.

Now... a well trained pilot knew how to deal with it. Like when to boom and zoom, and when to hit the air brakes and turn on a dime.

The vast majority of kamikaze pilots not only were virtually untrained, but were not even told about this issue.

The result was that they entered a dive, and then suddenly the stick froze centered, and they couldn't apply any correction at all, or even continue the curve they had planned for the dive. Not only most only hit the ocean, but they couldn't possibly hit anything else than the ocean, given the absolutely minimal instruction they had been given. They'd get to meet their ancestors while still not even understanding WTH just happened with their plane.

So yes, it was THAT wasteful. Thousands of young men and thousands of airplanes were thrown into the great thrash bin in the ocean, with almost literal zero chances to achieve anything else.

Yes, some kamikaze did hit, but most of those were the semi-competent pilots who had flown the thing before, and who would have done more good for Japan if they were kept as instructors or whatnot.
 
Although if you want an even more horrifying Japanese WW2 idea, they actually had a literal Zapp Brannigan idea for the defense of their homeland. The plan was basically to conscript the whole 70 million population of Japan, including women, children, elderly, everything, and throw them at the Americans should they land in Japan. They didn't even have actual guns for the VAST majority of them. They were supposed to just charge with sharpened bamboo poles and whatnot. What made it a Zapp Brannigan plan was basically that they just expected that eventually the Americans would get fed up with slaughtering millions of civilians and give up.
 
Speaking of Japanese suicidal ideas that were horribly wrong, though, take the Kaiten. You know, the kamikaze torpedoes.

Now the Kaiten itself had enough problems as it is, including an ungodly long preparation time that had to be done at periscope depth, which tended to get the sub carrying it also sunk.

But the bigger problem was the Kaiten training program. It literally involved someone piloting a dud one at 35 mph (56 km/h) at a hard target... without a seat belt. Probably more died in training than actually in combat.

And that got even worse with a type II Kaiten, which was powered by peroxide. Essentially it had the Komet problem that a rupture would dissolve the pilot. Now picture that routinely happening in training.

Actually make it even worse than a Komet, since the Kaiten also needed oxygen for the pilot to breathe. Which was provided by a peroxide container in the cockpit.
 
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theprestige said:
Let's see... Bad ideas...

Iraqi Republican Guard digging in south of Kuwait City, to meet the Coalition counteroffensive head-on, without properly considering the implications of:

* The Coalition cutting off access to supplies and reinforcements across the river to their rear.

* The absolute shooting gallery of the one road back to Baghdad.

* The willingness of the coalition troops to their front to just bulldozer-bury them in their trenches.

* The vast desert on their right flank, and the capability of Coalition logistics to exploit that wasteland for an overwhelming encirclement. I can kind of forgive them that last one, though. I think it's very hard to really grasp just how deep the US military rolls.
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Part of the problem was that the Iraqis didn't understand the capabilities of the then-new technology of GPS. They thought it was impossible to cross the desert without getting lost.
 
SpitfireIX said:
Part of the problem was that the Iraqis didn't understand the capabilities of the then-new technology of GPS. They thought it was impossible to cross the desert without getting lost.
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I remember seeing a documentary not long after which near or at end had a scene with a UK officer marking the location of a grave of Iraqi dead on a GPS tablet and the voice over describing that as a potent symbol of the war.
 
SpitfireIX said:
Part of the problem was that the Iraqis didn't understand the capabilities of the then-new technology of GPS. They thought it was impossible to cross the desert without getting lost.
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See, even when I try to come up with an obvious military blunder, I still end up back at people doing the best they can with the equipment and information they have.

I know there are real blunders, but I don't really go for Hans's paradigm of every sub-optimal plan or design being the work of clueless idiots, and never ever a series of difficult trade-offs made by reasonably competent people limited by technology, information, or other exigencies.

Was Market Garden a blunder? Or was it a risk worth taking? Was Pear Harbor a blunder? Or was it a reasonable strategy based on a miscalculation of US capacity and resolve? Was Omaha Beach a blunder?
 
Back when the History channel was doing actual history…. One of the commentators referred to the thing as “the stupidest weapon ever devised”.

When I was a medic in Germany back in the mid-60s, I was assigned to support the Davy Crockett platoon. (You’re not allowed to shoot or blow anything up without a medic present)

Most of the time, we went out in the woods and blew things up with explosives. This because the DC was so secret that the guys had to know how to blow it up if they were over-run. Like kids with C4 and TNT instead of firecrackers.

We did one practice shot. The weapon had a 20mm “spotter” gun slung under the barrel. The round from this matched the trajectory of the bomb. So…. Your forward observer (not the best job in the army….) would be downrange and would “walk” the spotter rounds in on the enemy column or formation. Then (presumably) he’d get out of Dodge.

Back at the gun, the launcher, a modified recoilless rifle, would be set up with the bomb and the propellant charge, and everyone would get into the armored personnel carriers and “button up”. The gun would be fired remotely.
The idea was to shoot over a handy hill or whatever to avoid the worst of the blast.
 
Exactly. The principles of surviving a blast from within the blast radius are well understood and widely applied. I'd give examples, but I firmly believe they go without saying.
 
Off hand, I can think of four serious military failures which were based on seriously flawed and seriously foolish assumptions that made by those who started the hostilities to begin with.

In World War II, Hitler really did believe that he could conquer, and hold, vast amounts of territory based on the assumptions that Germany was somehow vastly superior to the other that he got Germany war with.

Also, in World War II, the Japanese really did believe that after their attack on Pearl Harbor that the United States would not fight Japan and thereby allow Japan to carve out its own empire in the Eastern Pacific.

In the Vietnam War, both Kennedy and Johnson really did believe that advanced military of the United States would soon be able to establish political victory, and thereby the United States would be able to install the government of its choice in all Vietnam and provide all of the people of Vietnam with peace.

In the Second Gulf War, the stupid, idiotic, lying, POS George W. Bush (and many of his flunkies) really did believe that once Saddam was out of power, then the United States would be able to install a democratic government in Iraq and at the same time, the United States would be able to assert its powers over the remaining areas of the Middle East.
 
Napoleon wanted the vast agricultural lands of western Russia.
Hitler wanted the vast agricultural lands of western Russia.
That area is now Ukraine. And now there's Putin....
 
I've got one: Former Yugoslavia, the 90s... Flying a second-generation stealth plane along the same route so many times that someone was finally able to jury-rig a detection system good enough to enable a shoot-down on that route.
 
theprestige said:
I know there are real blunders, but I don't really go for Hans's paradigm of every sub-optimal plan or design being the work of clueless idiots, and never ever a series of difficult trade-offs made by reasonably competent people limited by technology, information, or other exigencies.
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I didn't necessarily say that they were clueless idiots. Well, not in this thread. Yet. *ahem* I'm just saying that some ideas are really bad ideas. It may not be obvious at the time, but they turn out to be counter-productive anyway. The trade off might just turn out to be valuable equipment or resources traded off for... getting some of your troops killed.


That said, I can also tell you plans which were known not to work before they even started. The lowest hanging fruit and best known is operation Ten-Go, aka the last sortie of the Yamato, in which pretty much everyone involved knew was a pointless suicide mission. Even the admirals most in favour of it, their best argument was basically... well... it might distract the US Navy supporting their Okinawa invasion for a day or so. But the Emperor had asked why is the Navy not supporting the defense of Okinawa (mind you, ASKED, not ordered) so off they sent nearly four and a half thousand men to their deaths, for the honour of the Navy.

That was the tradeoff: some thousands of lives and tens of thousands tons of steel, in exchange for not looking like useless pussies in front of the Emperor. That was it.

And I mean, it's not even JUST the lives and the ships. They didn't know yet they'll get nuked and surrender. They had plans for the defense of the mainland, as they expected the Americans to eventually land in Japan. They could have used the Yamato as a massive artillery platform (even if for a short while) if it came to that. But nope, let's have it commit sudoku instead :p

Hell, even in the short run, it meant diverting fuel and supplies from more useful operations, when Japan was running low on both. Not my retroactive guess, but an argument actually made by Atsushi Ōi before the operation.

Idiots? Maybe not. Honourable warriors, even. Nevertheless, one of the most pointlessly counter-productive ideas of the war.
 
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Using outdated bombs seems to be a perennial favorite, it was a significant contribution to the 1967 fire on the USS Forrestal.

The Forrestal and the Enterprise both experienced significant fire cause by the unplanned firing of Zuni rockets. The bad idea there was probably just an over-reliance on a sketchy weapon.
 
HansMustermann said:
To add to the problem, since the USAF and RAF had switched to bombing the refineries and railways, the Luftwaffe was pretty much running on fumes, and the industry was running short on resources.
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I thought I read somewhere once that jet fuel was not in such short supply. All the prop-driven aircraft of the era used gasoline, as did the German trucks and tanks. There was less demand for the heavier fuels and as such they remained more available.

But poor metallurgy in the jet engines limited flight training time anyway.
 
Something seems to be missing about this idea of it being impossible to get around in the desert without getting lost. Before GPS, and even if we imagine a place with no landmarks of any kind at all so it's essentially like an ocean with sand instead of water, and even if we throw compasses out because there's so much other metal sitting around in a military environment, they still had reliable speedometers, odometers, clocks, the sun, and understanding of geometry (for using the sun to determine direction based on time of day & time of year). And that's without making people learn to use the stars.
 
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