The Japanese kicked the American's ass at Pearl Harbor.
The focus on battleship row (as well as the Utah and the service ships and cruisers near her) at the expense of drydock facilities, oil storage and submarine yards meant Pearl Harbor could be maintained as the prime Pacific operating base for the entire war, including the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway. Yeah they got their sucker punch in, but there wasn't much to gloat about in the end.
'A small victory that lost Japan the war' as one Japanese admiral put it.
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The focus on battleship row (as well as the Utah and the service ships and cruisers near her) at the expense of drydock facilities, oil storage and submarine yards meant Pearl Harbor could be maintained as the prime Pacific operating base for the entire war, including the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway. Yeah they got their sucker punch in, but there wasn't much to gloat about in the end.
'A small victory that lost Japan the war' as one Japanese admiral put it.
To be fair, my first history lesson about Pearl Harbor was the movie.
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The Ford Edsel, built in 1958, 1959 and 1960, was best known as one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the United States auto industry.
The focus on battleship row (as well as the Utah and the service ships and cruisers near her) at the expense of drydock facilities, oil storage and submarine yards meant Pearl Harbor could be maintained as the prime Pacific operating base for the entire war, including the Battles of Coral Sea and Midway. Yeah they got their sucker punch in, but there wasn't much to gloat about in the end.
'A small victory that lost Japan the war' as one Japanese admiral put it.
True but- weren’t the US ships out at sea and therefore missed? If they were docked, coulda been a much different war.
There's a great documentary that comes on Discovery or History from time to time covering the Cola Wars including New Coke.
It was, without question, a giant blunder that stumbled ass-backwards into a resounding success.
To their credit though, most companies would have carried on in very stubborn ways, instead of acknowledging the error and pivoting quite quickly.
It’s the last point that is really the lesson here. You can recover from almost any mistake, no matter how big and expensive, if you embrace the reality you are in currently vs. the reality in which you were previously.
As for the OP, is it a fact that the iceberg would have held all those people? They would have had to ferry people back and forth in lifeboats I guess.
True but- weren’t the US ships out at sea and therefore missed? If they were docked, coulda been a much different war.
The carriers were out at sea but even without them (and hindsight) there were more strategically important targets at Pearl than battleships, particularly the drydocks and oil storage facilities. If the Carriers has to operate out of San Diego or San Francisco while fleet maintenance facilities were rebuilt it also would have been a much different war. Say they do get in at Coral Sea but instead the Yorktown has to go to Australia for repair; now they’re fighting Midway with only two carriers. A damaged US Navy operating out of a mostly functioning Pearl Harbor was more dangerous than a full strength Navy and a damaged Pearl Harbor.
Even with the focus on battleship row, three of the ships were back in service within a year, and two more were back in service by the end of the war. So It wasn’t even much of a victory in getting their primary targets taken care of. The Japanese Navy probably would have had better results having the battleships respond to the Philippine invasion and taken them on with their own.
Last edited by Roughneck; 04-24-2020 at 04:56 PM.
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Captain Crunch can probably expand on this in much more detail than I can, but a couple of modern military failures:
- Munich Olympic Massacre - Poorly trained police response and communication challenges led to the death of a large portion of Israeli athletes. Silver lining though is that this led to the creation of the German GSG9, one of the world's most elite counter terrorism units
- Aborted Iranian embassy rescue - This was the US attempt and not the famous SAS rescue. Poor equipment, desert sandstorms, and pretty much anything that could go wrong did, as the US were forced to abort the mission when over half of the raiding force was lost before even entering the environment. Led to the creation of SOAR, the US special operations air regiment
- Black Hawk Down, the Somali incident. Poor communications, delayed top down coordination, and intelligence failure led to a company of US forces trapped overnight in Mogadishu surrounded by a hostile city
LChoy
I think that while these were absolute blunders, they don't fit into the epic blunder category.
The type of terrorism at the munich Olympics herald a new age of high profile, and the feeling was that the terrorists were going to kill those athletes anyways so the decision was made to go, and we hadn't seen the advent of the truly dedicated anti terror forces yet.
The whole Iranian thing was a string of unfortunate events more then anything else, and a president that relied on old school recommendations. The intelligence and the equipment was overwhelmingly poor though.
If your looking at historic military blunders.
The Battle of Midway while it didn't break the Japanese Navy it gave the American's the time they needed. Poor command decisions at the sub unit, unit and fleet levels. Poor design decisions and worse damage control decisions in the Japanese Navy , and indecision in terms of rearming and refueling planes all combined to cost the Japanese carriers and allowed American's industrial might to assert itself.
I'd say the Bay of Pigs invasion was a historical world churning blunder as well as the American's failed to provide promised support to the Cuban exiles, and the CIA came across as incompetent.
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The Sicilian Expedition (415-413BC): The Peloponnesian War between Athens and allies and Sparta and allies reached a turning point with the Athenian expeditionary force to Sicily. Athens had aligned itself with Sicilian city states against Syracuse and after a request for aid mobilized the expedition. The goals of the expedition were unclear from the start and posed significant risks sending a large force far from home with enemies in their rear. Despite initial success due to unprepared defenders the force quickly lost momentum due to incompetence in a divided leadership structure. The defences of Syracuse held while a Spartan force showed up in numbers to assist. Eventually the entire Athenian land and sea force was killed or captured into slavery. This loss was a significant portion of the overall Athenian forces and turned the war against them. Soon new allies joined the Spartans and 10 years later Athens surrendered.
The Spanish Armada (1588): King Phillip II of Spain has had enough of Queen Elizabeth I after England's conversion to Protestantism and interference in the Netherlands. He proposes a massive armada to invade England with the main goal of removing the Queen and re-establishing Catholicism. The Armada is troubled from the start being a logistical nightmare requiring troops from Spain to meet up with troops from the Netherlands and carry all required food and supplies. To make it worse Philip puts an aristocrat with no naval experience in charge. Despite the larger size and quality of the ships in the Armada the smaller and quicker English and Dutch navies are able to successfully harass the Armada and prevent the troop pick up. After a English fire ship scatters the docked Armand bad weather forces the Spanish to head north around Britain with many sailors ending up killed or captured on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Overall this resulted in the growth of Protestantism in Europe and making England a major naval power at the expense of Spain.
Battle of Antietam (1862): This was an epic failure for both the Union and Confederacy in the American Civil War. Robert E Lee had taken his Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland in an attempt to take the war to the Union, cut off Washington, and achieve international recognition for the Confederacy. He was followed closely by Union General George McClellan's Army of the Potomac. The first failure was that of a Confederate Soldier who had left Lee's battle plans wrapped around cigars to be found by Union soldiers. The plans showed Lee had divided his army leaving them vulnerable to attack. McClellan then failed in taking advantage of this waiting almost a full day before attacking. This resulted in the Battle of Antietam, a stalemate that was the single bloodiest day in US military history. The Confederates were forced to retreat from Maryland and didn't set foot in the North again until 1863. The Union did achieve a strategic victory but the over cautiousness of McClellan prevented a knock out blow and early end to the war.
The story of Franz Reichelt is sad, silly, and a bit horrifying.
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An Austrian-born French tailor, inventor and parachuting pioneer, now sometimes referred to as the Flying Tailor, who is remembered for jumping to his death from the Eiffel Tower while testing a wearable parachute of his own design. Reichelt had become fixated on developing a suit for aviators that would convert into a parachute and allow them to survive a fall should they be forced to leave their aircraft. Initial experiments conducted with dummies dropped from the fifth floor of his apartment building had been successful, but he was unable to replicate those early successes with any of his subsequent designs.
Believing that a suitably high test platform would prove his invention's efficacy, Reichelt repeatedly petitioned the Parisian Prefecture of Police for permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower. He finally received permission in 1912, but when he arrived at the tower on 4 February he made it clear that he intended to jump personally rather than conduct an experiment with dummies. Despite attempts to dissuade him, he jumped from the first platform of the tower wearing his invention. The parachute failed to deploy and he plummeted 57 metres (187 ft) to his death. The next day, newspapers were full of illustrated stories about the death of the "reckless inventor", and the jump was shown in newsreels.
Famous footage of his fall:
NSFW!
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September 11, 2001 and pretty much everything as a reaction/consequence of it. My phone battery would die if I had to list all the wars, death, and devastation.
Also sparked the term 'normalization of deviance' which is pretty much at the base of most OHS, process and risk management problems.
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Social normalization of deviance means that people within the organization become so much accustomed to a deviant behavior that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for the elementary safety
