Throughout history warfare has been littered with appalling blunders leading to humiliating defeats and unnecessary loss of life. We are all familiar with the Charge of the Light Brigade and the horrors of the Somme, but we are less familiar with more recent blunders such as the failure of the Patriot missile during the Gulf War and the long-term effects of Agent Orange, used in the Vietnam War. In this ground-breaking account of thirty such military blunders, acclaimed expert Geoffrey Regan considers why they occur. Sometimes the responsibility lies with leaders: some, like Redvers Buller the most incompetent general of the Boer War are simply promoted beyond their abilities; others such as Field Marshal Montgomery fail as a result of their ambition. Despite Montgomery's belief that he, along with Napoleon and Alexander the Great, was one of the greatest military leaders in history, 70 per cent of his troops were either killed or captured at Arnhem in 1944. Failure can also be the result of poor planning. The Schlieffen Plan, devised in the 1890s, seemed fine on paper but was impossible in practice, as the Germans were to discover in 1914. Another common mistake is to underestimate the enemy. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is the Battle of Isandhlwana when the Zulus defeated Lord Chelmsford's troops in a bloody massacre. Technology is another cause, the most recent such blunder being the Nato bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Kosovo. Inevitably politics also play a part, for example when the Americans attacked Grenada in 1983 they were consumed by Cold War paranoia and believed that Cubans on the island were building a runway for Soviet planes. Geoffrey Regan's Great Military Blunders is a powerful account of many such mistakes — from the Crusades to Kosovo. It is fully illustrated and accompanies the Channel 4 series of the same name, created by Darlow Smithson. GREAT MILITARY BLUNDERS GREAT MILITARY BLUNDERS GEOFFREY REGAN First published in 2000 by Channel 4 Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd 25 Eccleston Place London SW1W 9NF and Basingstoke. www.macmillan.co.uk Associated companies throughout the world. ISBN 0 7522 1844 1 Copyright © Geoffrey Regan, 2000. The right of Geoffrey Regan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Designed by Dan Newman/Perfect Bound Design Colour reproduction by Aylesbury Studios Ltd, Kent Printed by New Interlitho, Spa, Milan This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. This book accompanies the television series Great Military Blunders made by Darlow Smithson for Channel 4. Executive Producer: David Darlow DEDICATION For Andy May ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To say that this book is a joint effort is an understatement. Over 200 experts contributed to the television programme and I was allowed to use the transcripts of their interviews for this book. As a result I had a veritable mountain of material from which to choose, literally a pile of historical wisdom of biblical proportions which drowned my own puny efforts as Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea (an early blunder). Although I have written extensively on the subject of military blunders myself — probably a million words of my own — there were times in this project when I felt like a very greedy 'Little Jack Horner' sitting in the corner and pulling out plums by some of the legends of the profession, like Richard Holmes, Max Hastings, Martin Middlebrook and . . . my pen is petrified with embarrassment and does not know when to stop.Thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for helping with the programme and with the book. Thanks also go to Charlie Carman, Emma Tait and Kate Aaron at Channel 4 Books for tolerating my 'blunderbuss' approach to writing. I would also like to thank the good folk at Darlow Smithson who helped flavour me as 'meat in the sandwich' displayed in the canteens of two different worlds: one, as Series Consultant for a television documentary series and second, as an author in the world of book publishing. Particular thanks go to David Darlow and John Smithson for taking up the idea of'blunders' in the first place and next to the four directors, Kate English, Peter Bate, Jeremy Lovering and Heenan Bhatti who translated an idea into the reality of a successful television series. My thanks go in addition to the members of the four teams who worked on the programmes, including Tim Altman, Erika Dodd, Dominic Sutherland, Kate Shepherd, Emma Jessop, Frederic Casella and Helen Britton. Coping with the demands of an insatiable author was handled with supreme diplomacy by Maxine Carlisle and by her assistants Madeline Eaton, Jane Macaulay and Alison Moody. Finally, I cannot miss the opportunity to thank the indefatigable Daphne Walsh who typed thousands of pages of transcript and as a result could make a fair case for being Series Consultant for any future series of Military Blunders. C O N T E N TS Introduction 8 CHAPTER ONE: UNFIT TO LEAD 10 Twilight of the 'God of Battles' 12 Goering's Flight of Fancy 19 Not Making Waves 25 Pristina - Starting World War Three 29 CHAPTERTWO: PLANNING 32 Operation Fuller and the Channel Dash 34 The Schlieffen Plan 42 Operation Eagle Claw 51 CHAPTER THREE: UNDERESTIMATING THE ENEMY 60 Isandhlwana, 1879 62 The Balangiga Massacre, 1901 72 The Fall of Fortress Singapore, 1942 76 The Battle for Dien Bien Phu, 1954 85 CHAPTER FOUR: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS 94 Townshend of Kut 96 Montgomery of Alamein 103 Mac Arthur of the Yalu 113 CHAPTER FIVE: POLITICS 122 Military Neurosis in Grenada 124 The Fall of the Roman Empire . 133 Fall Guy at the Battle of Hattin 137 Churchill and the Writing of Greek Tragedy 144 CHAPTER SIX: TECHNOLOGY 150 The Patriot Missile 152 Kosovo 161 The British Artillery on The Somme, 1 July 1916 165 The Bomber Dream and the Butt Report 170 Agent Orange 177 References 184 Bibliography 185 Index 186 Picture credits 190 I N T R O D U C T I ON I n an age where selection for military command is more careful and scientific than ever before, where hi-tech weapons have allegedly given soldiers far greater precision in target selection, and where professional training has made the average soldier far more efficient, it is frightening to find that military blunders occur as frequently as ever. Ironically, it is in the field of'friendly fire' that the graph rises most rapidly, and in the infliction of unintended civilian casualties by smart weapons and precision bombing.'Smart','precision' and 'clinical' are the modern buzz words, but they are merely words with no greater guarantee of helping soldiers do their jobs properly than the orders previously barked at them by their NCOs. Today one would hardly expect to encounter senior command officers who believed they were pregnant with elephants or who could not rise from their beds because they believed their legs had turned to glass. Nor would one find officers who were too fat, old, myopic, rheumatic or decrepit to ride their horses, as was not uncommon in the past. While such a parade of freaks, blimps and noodles might once have filled a book of blunders to the amusement of the uninitiated and the despair of the professionals, they do so no more. Today they have been replaced by managers, penpushers and specialists in everything but handling soldiers and 8 INTRODUCTION their weapons. Promotion by weight, length of teeth, notori- called the Atlantic Conveyor. I was sitting in my command post ety and bribery has long since gone, but there are now far too putting the final touches to the plan when a man thrust his head many chiefs and not enough Indians, in the opinion of Colonel through the flap and said: 'Atlantic Conveyor's ^o/ie to the bottom David Hackworth: taking all the helicopters with her.' So it was tear it up and start again. The number of people that are back in the rear has consistently grown The outcome was the phrase beloved of British tabloids - larger and larger, and so America is in a position today where they 'yomping'.The British 'yomped' to Port Stanley. Flexibility won have more colonels than they have machine gunners; they have more the day. computer operators than they have anti-tank warriors. If America were The third chapter covers painting the wrong picture by to go to war, they would find themselves having to gum the enemy to underestimating the enemy, often a product of ethnocentrism death because it's virtually toothless, because it's got this great huge and much associated with colonial warfare. The following logistics tail. chapter looks at the way in which hubris on the part of great commanders can undermine their efficiency and often wreck In the first chapter of the book we examine the problem that what had hitherto been a glittering career. Julian Thompson the 'Peter Principle' has brought to the military profession, reflects on the dangers of too much ego on the part of such namely unfitness to command as a result of over-promotion. senior officers: Professor John Potter has described what happens in battle when stress levels overcome a commander: I think the worst thing that you can ever do is imagine that the whole thing's been laid on for your benefit and that this is going to One of the first signs of somebody getting under pressure and not man- give you a step up into some higher rank. What you actually should aging effectively in a situation is when they lose the ability to handle be thinking about is the people yon command and how you're going the big picture. They focus on little details; they lose emotional contact to defeat the enemy, and not be worrying about Iww you're going to with the reality of what's happening at the front line, and almost work present yourself. in a world of tlieir own. War may be the continuation of politics by other means, as The most famous example of this happened to the French the German military strategist Clausewitz tells us, but once a Marshal Achille Bazaine at the Battle ofVionville in 1870. military solution is undertaken, the politicians must take a Bazaine, a man promoted to supreme command through his back seat and leave the operation to the experts. In the twen- renowned courage in the lower ranks, could not cope with tieth century there have been more meddling ministers, the burden of responsibility, left his staff and went AWOL for backseat drivers and sawdust Caesars than ever before, and an hour, leaving the whole army without direction. When at a time when the conduct of war has become more found by his staff officers, he was quietly siting a field gun and complex. As a result, blunders on a hitherto undreamed-of commanding its crew. Professor Potter records a more modern scale have flowed from the minds of such pseudo-soldiers as example: Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Margaret Thatcher. I can recall a very senior officer who was managing a terrorist situa- In the final chapter, we see that military technology has tion, and the demands grew and the pressure came on that commander, offered warriors false gods, and the opportunities for new and all lie could do was to concentrate on tidying his desk. forms of military incompetence. We see that unjustified belief in the effectiveness of a piece of technology, as with the Patriot The second chapter examines the problems of military plan- missile in the GulfWar and the precision-bombing campaign ning, which attempts to place an inflexible order on what is in Kosovo, can result in avoidable disasters. In other cases, tech- essentially a chaotic activity: war. Major-General Julian nology emboldens a commander into taking risks he otherwise Thompson experienced an example of the friction of war that would shun, as with the first-day assault on the Somme in would have taxed a lesser man. 1916, which resulted from a presumed successful artillery bombardment. The unexpected side effects of military tech- I can remember, for example, in the Falklands War planning to do a nology are examined in the use of the herbicide Agent Orange move by helicopter, and the helicopters were being brought in a ship in Vietnam. 9