by Tom Phillips
By the time everybody has worked out that there aren’t actually any Turks attacking them, quite a lot of the Austrian army has run away, wagons and cannons have been overturned and the bulk of their supplies have been lost or ruined. When the Turkish army do turn up the next day, they discover a number of dead Austrians and the scattered remains of their camp.
Estimates of the losses vary quite dramatically. One source simply says “many” were dead and wounded; another says 1,200 were injured; while the Austrian leader Emperor Joseph II underwhelmingly claims in a letter that they lost “not only all the pots and tents...but also three pieces of artillery.” The most famous accounts of the battle put the death toll as high as 10,000, but that’s almost certainly a number some bloke invented to make the story sound better. In conclusion: something happened, some people may or may not have died, but everybody agrees that it was extremely stupid.
I think this is what’s referred to as “the fog of war.”
Another fine example of effectively managing to defeat yourself came during the Siege of Petersburg in the American Civil War, when the Union troops turned a tactical triumph into a humiliating setback in a particularly inventive way. They had Confederate forces pinned down in the fort, and spent a month preparing for the coup de grâce that would breach their walls in one dramatic maneuver, by digging a 500-foot mine shaft directly underneath the Confederate fort and planting an awful lot of explosives there.
When they blew up the wall in the early hours of the morning of July 30, 1864, the size of the explosion seems to have taken everybody by surprise. It killed hundreds of Confederate troops and left an enormous crater, 170 feet long and 30 feet deep. After about ten dazed minutes spent staring at it in shock, the Union forces attacked—although, unfortunately, they weren’t the troops who’d trained for days in the tactics they’d use to storm the fort once the wall was breached. That’s because the soldiers who’d been trained were black, and at the last minute the commander of the Union army instructed his underlings to swap them out for white soldiers because he was worried how it would look. And so the white troops rushed toward the Confederate position—and ran straight into the crater.
It’s possible they thought the crater would provide good cover. It didn’t. Once the Confederate soldiers had reorganized after the shock of the explosion, they found themselves surrounding a very large hole full of opponents who couldn’t get out. Union reinforcements kept on arriving, and for some reason decided to join their comrades in the crater. The Confederate commander later described it as a “turkey shoot.”
The key lesson in military tactics we can learn from this is: don’t walk into big holes in the ground.
Another essential lesson for any budding military strategists is that communication in wartime is vitally important. That’s something that the Pacific island of Guam learned during the Spanish–American war of 1898, when their colonial masters in Spain forgot to tell them that there was a war happening at all.
As a result of this oversight, when a small fleet of US warships steamed up to a suspiciously underdefended Guam and fired 13 shots at the old Spanish fort of Santa Cruz, Guam’s dignitaries reacted by rowing out to the battleships, thanking the Americans for the generous greeting salute and apologizing that it would take them a while to return the courtesy because they’d need to move their cannons over from another part of the island.
After a few awkward moments, the Americans explained that they hadn’t been saying hello, they’d actually been trying to have a battle, because there was a war on. The dignitaries, who were somewhat miffed to find they were now prisoners of war, explained they hadn’t received any messages from Spain in over two months and were completely in the dark about the whole war thing. They went off to have a bit of a debate about what to do, while one of the local merchants stuck around for a chat because it turned out he was an old friend of the American captain.
Guam officially surrendered a few days later, and has been an American territory ever since.
As a species, we’re not great at the “don’t repeat the mistakes of history” thing. But few examples are quite as glaring as the fact that in 1941, Hitler very precisely copied Napoleon’s fatal mistake from 129 years earlier, one which in both cases utterly screwed their previously quite successful plans to conquer all of Europe. That mistake, of course, was trying to invade Russia.
History’s only truly successful large-scale invasion of Russia—or rather Kievan Rus’, as Russia didn’t exist then—was by the Mongols, and they were fairly unique as these things go (as we’ll see in a few chapters). The Poles managed it for a short while (and even held Moscow for a couple of years) but were still ultimately driven back, while it went extremely badly for Sweden the one time they tried it, ending in a defeat that helped to effectively finish off the Swedish Empire. Basically, “don’t do it” is the lesson we’re learning here.
Of the two leaders, Napoleon’s rationale for going ahead with the plan was marginally better than Hitler’s. For starters, he didn’t have the example of Napoleon’s previous failure as a useful guide. He also had every reason to be confident of victory, given the Harlem Globetrotters–level winning streak his Grande Armée were on up to that point. Additionally, he had some legitimate mild beef with Tsar Alexander, who he thought was undermining his economic blockade of the British, the only other major holdout to his total European conquest. Granted, quibbling over a trade embargo isn’t really a great reason to begin hostilities with a massive country. If Napoleon made one key mistake, it’s that his methods of getting his way pretty much started and ended with “have a war.” Diplomacy and negotiation were not really his strong suit.
With his decision that he was going to invade somebody effectively premade, Napoleon must have thought Russia seemed like a safer bet than Britain, because at least it was overland. And knowing that the Russian climate effectively only gave him three months of invading time, he came up with a strategy: head straight for Moscow and force the Russians into a pitched battle, which he would win thanks to having an army who were actually motivated and good at their jobs rather than a load of mercenaries being ordered around by aristocrats.
Unfortunately, this was one of those plans that sounds great when you say it, but entirely relies on your opponents doing exactly what you want them to do. Instead, the Russians pretty much allowed them to march in. They retreated and retreated, avoiding major battles wherever possible, all the while scorching the earth to deny the French supplies, and simply waited for the winter to arrive and do the job for them. By the time Napoleon realized what the game was, it was too late to get out before the cold bit, and the French were forced into the long, grim death march home with a shattered army. The rest of Europe suddenly saw weakness where previously there had only been strength, and that was the beginning of the end for Napoleon.
In 1941, Hitler was in a similar position: having also discovered the difficulties of invading Britain, due to the whole island business, he, too, decided he had a narrow summer window in which to invade the Soviet Union as an alternative. Granted, he actually had a nonaggression pact with the Soviets at the time, but on the other hand he was a Nazi and they were communists and so he hated them.
Hitler actually studied Napoleon’s strategy and thought he’d come up with a clever plan to avoid the same mistakes. Rather than sending all his forces directly at Moscow, he’d divide them into three, attacking Leningrad and Kiev as well as the Soviet capital. And unlike Napoleon, he wouldn’t retreat at the first sign of winter, but stand and fight. These were both disastrous choices. What he didn’t spot was that although the tactics might be different, the basic plan (strike quickly and decisively, win big battles easily, assume this all leads to the swift collapse of your opponents) remained the same. As did its flaws (relies on opponents to follow your script, no plan B when they mysteriously don’t, still completely ignoring the thing about the Russian winter).
There were plenty of people in the German High Command who could have pointed these flaws out to Hitler, but as soon as he caught a whiff of dissent or skepticism, he would keep them in the dark about his plans, or flat-out lie to them. It was a decision-making process based in equal parts on hubris, wishful thinking and sticking his head in the sand.
The strategy’s flaws were the same as Napoleon’s, and the outcome was roughly the same, too, albeit even more deadly this time around. The Germans made major territorial gains and won some battles, but the Soviets didn’t collapse like the script demanded. They used scorched-earth tactics and kept the Germans bogged down until winter, at which point it turned out that they didn’t have the right clothes, enough supplies or indeed antifreeze for their tanks. Hitler’s orders to stay and fight in the bitter cold rather than retreating didn’t bring him any greater success; it just killed more of his soldiers. For the second time, an army that had conquered much of continental Europe was catastrophically weakened by a needless invasion of Russia, and the tide of the war was turned.
German retreat in Russia, 1944
As a bonus, at about the same time, Germany’s allies in Japan were busy launching their own badly thought-through attack on Pearl Harbor that needlessly dragged a superpower into a war they’d been trying to stay out of. Without those two woefully poor choices, the Axis powers might have won. Proving that just sometimes, humans’ extremely poor decision-making skills can work out for the best in the long run (at least assuming you’re not a fan of Hitler).
With the Americans and the Japanese now engaged in battle on the Pacific, there was a chance to prove that the fog of war can involve very literal fog as well as the metaphorical kind. That was the case on Kiska, a barren but strategically important island in the North Pacific that lies about halfway between Japan and Alaska (of which it is a very remote part). It was one of two islands captured by the Japanese in 1942 at the height of World War II, which freaked the Americans out because it was the first time since they fought the British in 1812 that their territory had been occupied. Even if the territory was extremely small and far away.
In the summer of 1943, 34,000 US and Canadian troops prepared to try and recapture Kiska. They were still bruised and wary from the experience of retaking nearby Attu Island, a brutal and bloody affair in which the Japanese forces had fought to the death. The operation’s commanders were certain that the battle for Kiska would be every bit as ferocious. When they landed on August 15, the Allied forces found Kiska shrouded in thick, freezing fog. In hellish conditions of bitter cold, wind and rain with zero visibility, they blindly picked their way step by step across the rocky terrain, trying to avoid mines and booby traps, while all the time bursts of gunfire from unseen enemies lit up the fog around them. For 24 hours they dodged sniper fire and painfully inched their way up the slope toward the center of the island, accompanied by muffled explosions from artillery shells, the staccato sound of nearby firefights and indistinct shouts trying to convey orders or rumors of Japanese forces close by.
It was only the next day, as they counted their losses—28 dead, 50 wounded—that they realized the truth: they were the only ones there.
The Japanese had actually abandoned the island almost three weeks earlier. The US and Canadian forces had been shooting at each other.
This would probably go down as an unfortunate but understandable mistake, except for one thing. Their aerial surveillance team had actually told the operation’s leaders weeks before the landing that they’d stopped seeing any Japanese activity on the island, and thought it had probably been evacuated. But after the experience on Attu, the leaders had convinced themselves that the Japanese would never retreat, and so dismissed the surveillance reports. It was confirmation bias run wild. They were so certain, they even turned down the offer to fly a few more surveillance missions just to double-check. There’s probably a lesson there about not making assumptions.
Two years later, in April 1945—mere weeks before the end of the war—the German U-boat U-1206 was nine days into its maiden active voyage, patrolling the waters off the northeast coast of Scotland. It was a state-of-the-art vessel, fast and sleek and high-tech, and, crucially, with a fancy new type of toilet that would shoot human waste out into the sea rather than storing it in a septic tank.
The only downside of the toilet was that it was unexpectedly complicated to use. So much so that on April 14, the captain was forced to call an engineer because he couldn’t work out how to get the thing to flush, which is probably not the sort of thing you want when you’re trying to maintain an air of authority. Unfortunately, the engineer wasn’t any better at toilet-flushing. In trying to operate the mechanism, he somehow turned the wrong valve—which quickly caused the cabin to start flooding with a deeply unpleasant mixture of seawater and human excrement.
No, I don’t know who decided “let’s put a valve in the toilets that looks an awful lot like the flush mechanism but instead lets seawater pour into our big Nazi submarine,” but presumably they were from the same school of thought as the guy who put that exhaust port in the Death Star.
The flooding of the cabin with a pungent cocktail of feces and brine would have been bad enough, but things got significantly worse when the sewage leaked down a deck onto the submarine’s batteries, which the boat’s designers had helpfully installed directly below the toilet. This caused the batteries to start spewing out large amounts of deadly chlorine gas, presenting Captain Schlitt with no option but to surface—where he was promptly attacked by the RAF, forcing him to abandon ship entirely and scuttle the vessel. Leaving U-1206 with the unfortunate legacy of being the only craft in World War II to have been sunk by a poorly thought-out toilet.
There are valuable lessons here about the paramount importance of user-interface design in high-pressure environments, and the necessity of physically separating pieces of mission-critical infrastructure, but to be perfectly honest, I only included it because it’s really funny.
Having a plan is obviously crucial to military success. But sometimes it’s possible for a plan to be too cunning and devious for its own good. If you’ve ever played chess against somebody much, much better at it than you, you’re probably familiar with how it goes: you spend ages trying to maneuver them into an extremely clever trap, only to realize that they’ve anticipated every move and you’ve actually defeated yourself. That’s basically what French general Henri Navarre did in Vietnam, except he did it with people rather than chess pieces. Like his earlier compatriot Napoleon, he hatched a plan that was perfect just so long as his opponents did exactly what he wanted them to.
It was 1953, and Navarre’s goal was to inflict a crushing and humiliating defeat on the communist Viet Minh forces (who were doing an annoyingly good job of rebelling against colonial rule in French Indochina) in order to weaken their hand in the imminent peace negotiations. So he decided to set an extremely clever trap for them. He built a major new French base in a remote area, threatening Viet Minh supply lines, and tried to draw them into a fight. The base at Điện Biên Phủ was surrounded by mountains covered in thick jungle, which gifted the Vietnamese the advantage of cover and high ground. The French were a long way from reinforcements. It was simply too tempting a target for the Viet Minh to resist. But (the plan went) superior French technology would defeat them easily: France’s air dominance would allow them to fly in supplies, while French firepower would triumph in the battle, as transporting heavy artillery through the jungle would be impossible for the Viet Minh. Excellent plan. Navarre had his men set up the base, and then waited.
And waited. For months, nothing happened. No attack came. What were the Viet Minh doing?
Turns out that what they were doing was transporting heavy artillery through the jungle. A combination of Vietnamese troops and local civilians spent those months disassembling their weapons, carrying them piece by backbreaking piece across miles of thickly forested mountain to �
�iện Biên Phủ and then putting them back together. After that, they simply waited for the rainy season to start, and once the French forces were stuck in the mud and the French planes couldn’t see where to drop supplies, they attacked. Navarre’s men, who had been expecting doomed suicidal foot charges by peasants carrying outdated rifles, were surprised to come under sustained bombardment from advanced artillery that wasn’t supposed to exist.
The French troops held out under siege for two months before they were overrun. The scale and the manner of the defeat was so crushing and embarrassing that the French government fell, and the Viet Minh helped secure independence for what became known as North Vietnam. After that, the rest is a familiar story: with Vietnam divided into two states, the remnants of the Viet Minh that remained in South Vietnam turned into the Viet Cong, who quickly began a violent insurgency against the southern government. The US decided to get involved to support their allies in the south, because of the whole Cold War anticommunism thing, whereupon Uncle Sam turned out not to be much better than the French at fighting basically the same war. The ensuing Vietnam War lasted for almost two decades, and somewhere between 1.5 million and 3 million people died. All of which happened, in part, because Henri Navarre came up with an extremely clever trap.
But in the annals of military failures, it’s a different front in the attempt to heat up the Cold War that provides the most indelible example—one in which the cognitive biases of a small group of people saw a superpower humiliated by a minnow.
Bay of Pig’s Ear
The American debacle when they tried to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs isn’t just a classic example of groupthink in action—it’s literally where we get the word from. It was coined by psychologist Irving Janis based in large part on his study of how the Kennedy administration managed to get things so wrong.