Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Biggest screw ups of WWII

All your examples are valid, however, do you realize how a detail change or two would have made things way worse for us. As someone mentioned if the japs had taken Hawaii, or just sent the planes back to clean up the job, the whole island hopping campaign would have been almost impossible.

Tien, mon ami! Une autre temps, une autre guerre.


Tien? my friend another time another war I understand but Tien I don't guess my French is getting very rusty.
Mr. Kaywoodie Cheers NC

NC, Old Slang for "well"

You know those crazy guys. 15 words that mean the same thing!!

Germany spending $3 billion on the V-2 program and getting nothing of strategic value while the US spent only $2 billion and got the atom bomb.

Operation Tiger was big. 700+ killed in a training exercise.

The Morganthau Plan for post war Germany to starve up to 1/3 of the German population to death. Started in mid 1945, by mid 1947 german outrage was so high there was fear the germans would go over to the soviets.

My dad told me on his death bed about his work during the war at the atomic research facility in Washington state. Not high level stuff (he was a clerk) but people of his generation took oaths of secrecy seriously. I had no idea he had worked there.

Japanese attack on Midway. We were very lucky, and it turned the war in the Pacific. The Japanese navy had not suffered a major defeat in a couple of hundred years. They could not conceive of the attack being a failure.

Gen. Lucas not rushing to take the high ground at Anzio. His delay turned what could have a been a brilliant surprise landing and end run around the German lines into a prolonged shooting gallery with US soldiers sitting on the bullseye.

On a smaller scale, the fubar landing of Marines at Tarawa. Someone messed up the tide tables so the landing craft didn't have enough water to clear the reef, forcing the Marines to wade some 400 yards through the surf to the beach under constant Japanese fire.

Not a screw up so much as a bad miscalculation was the failure of US planners to realize the perfect defensive nature of the hedgerows in Normandy.

Taking on the other side, not waking Hitler up for D-day. The Germans' delay in rushing Panzer divisions to counter that landing since they still thought the main invasion would come at Calais. With our supply lines dependent on two concrete piers that still had to get into full operation they had a very good chance of pushing us back into the channel in the first couple of days or at the very least holding us in place while they rushed more reinforcements into the battle.

Kaywoodie
If IRC it was Tres Bien for very well sorry no accents on the keyboard.
Cheers NC

I'm guessing Great Britain.

I may be off, but I think 'tres bien' translates roughly to "very good"

Myron

That is true

Britain, I believe had the largest navy at that time.

but then again, we gave them a ton of surplus WW1 destroyers etc to prop up there Navy....

The USA might of had the largest Navy in 1940.

other big Screw UPs......

The Limeys' belief in Monty....

And the US not putting Patton at the head of the US Army Forces in Europe....

Interesting question. Differing answers.
Quotes, take your pick:
“The Royal Navy, still the largest in the world in September 1939”
“The Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II, at the beginning of the Pacific War in December 1941, was the third most powerful navy in the world.”
“The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) at the outset of World War II in the Pacific was the most powerful navy in the world.”


Britain and the US had to fight a two ocean war, so Japan started with the largest navy in the Pacific. They had ten carriers and we had three. They had ten battleships and we had nine before Pearl Harbor. That all changed at Midway.

As the war progressed, the balance between the Pacific and Atlantic fleets shifted back and forth, but we always had the big dogs in the Pacific.

“By war's end in 1945, the United States Navy had added nearly 1,200 major combatant ships, including 27 aircraft carriers and 8 battleships, and had over 70% of the world's total numbers and total tonnage of naval vessels of 1,000 tons or greater.”

Agree on Patton. The war would have been a year shorter, and the Russians wouldn't have controlled as much of Europe.

Len Deighton wrote a book on this very subject.




I read it over this past turkey season. Singapore was high on his list, but there were a bunch more.

Germany, for instance, screwed up big time not learning anything from the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. General Zhukov showed his capabilities against the Japanese and demonstrated a lot of his winning tactics. When the Germans came up against him, they did not have effective counters.

Germany also screwed the pooch in their assessments of what it would take to win Barbarossa. The generals submitted early estimates that were accurate. Hitler rejected them, so they went back and cooked the numbers. The final logistics were about 30% lower than what was needed.

Deighton was remarkably scathing of Churchill. He blamed him for screwing up in Greece, Crete, and North Africa and getting Britain involved in a short war with Iraqis in the middle of WWII.

The book is a good read but bogs down in the last third or so.

For the Germans, failure to realize that their major code was broken early. Polish cryptographers initiated the process and gave their knowledge to the Brits just prior to the German invasion of Poland...This resulted in the Ultra operation....

The Brits (and Russians by other means) knew what the Germans were up to often before the Nazi commanders.

It never dawned on the Germans that a lost U-Boat may have actually been captured (which did actually happen) and the Enigma cipher machine and books taken intact. HMS Bulldog captured a U-Boat and it's code apparatus intact, unknown to Jerry.

Britain vs. Germany vs. France in 1939:

http://ww2-weapons.com/fleets-1939/

The US in late 1941:

http://ww2-weapons.com/us-navy-in-late-1941/

Japan picking fight with US.

These were the naval production numbers during the war.

United States Japan
Aircraft Carrier 141 17

Battleship 10 2

Cruiser 48 9

Destroyer 349 63

Subs 203 167

Merchant ships
(in tonnage) 33,993,000 4,152,000

Aircraft 324,750 76,320


For an island nation to pick a fight with a nation whose production capabilities were about 12 times greater than them was suicidal.

Above figures are from a fabulous website: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm