Wars aren’t won by strategy and fighting spirit alone.
Technology, development, and policy all play a key role in one nation’s victory over another.
But what happens when these go wrong? Backwards technology, stagnant development, and stupid
decisions have all lead otherwise-functional military forces to an early grave.
In this video, we shed light on some of the worst policy mistakes of the Second World War.
Lurking silently beneath the waves, submarines are the perfect ambush predators.
With one swift torpedo strike, they can spell the end for a ship and its crew.
But to do this, their torpedoes have to actually work.
The US Navy began the war with a small supply of largely untested torpedos. The institution
responsible for naval procurement, the Bureau of Ordnance, had faced serious cutbacks during the
Great Depression. Each torpedo cost them about $170,000, and they just didn’t have the budget
to blow them up in testing. Torpedoes were also extremely complex to manufacture—limiting supply.
Until November 1943, US Navy subs were armed with the infamous Mark 14 torpedo. This weapon had
four major problems: 1) it ran deeper than set, 2) the contact exploder didn’t work,
3) the magnetic exploder went off early, and 4) it often ran in a circle and hit the submarine that
fired it.[1] With a weapon like this, a submariner’s job was practically impossible.
In April 1943, USS Tunny was positioned to fire on three Japanese aircraft carriers.
The captain fired every tube, releasing ten torpedoes. Seven exploded early while
the remaining three swam off in the wrong direction. The carriers escaped undamaged.
In July, USS Tinosa fired 15 torpedoes at a Japanese tanker.
Of those, one exploded early, three dived away into the depths,
and no less than 12 clanged off the target’s hull without exploding.
When sub captains began reporting these serious and dangerous faults, the Bureau of Ordnance
initially refused to believe them. It took 21 months of constant harassment to get the problems
fixed, and once they were, the US submarine fleet became a potent threat in the Pacific.
While the US Navy did get its torpedoes sorted out eventually,
the Japanese were still having issues right to the end. Though, their problems
weren’t technological. Instead, they were giving new meaning to the term “infighting.”
As the Japanese Empire modernised in the 19th century, the old feudal clans donned new hats and
became the politicians, admirals, and generals of the new age. Their old rivalries were as
fierce as ever and effectively split the empire into two factions. One faction
controlled the Army and the other controlled the Navy. Between them was a sea of hatred.
The Army claimed control of the land while the Navy dominated the seas, but this caused
more problems than it solved. Neither side could agree on whose job it was to intercept American
air raids. The Army claimed the bombers flew over the ocean to get to Japan, so it was the Navy’s
problem. The Navy argued the planes bombed ground targets, so it was the Army’s problem. Meanwhile,
no one was putting up a strong defence against air raids, and Japan’s cities were levelled.
Things were so dysfunctional that the Navy maintained its own land force with,
among other things, paratroopers, a tank corps, and artillery.
The Army followed suit, operating their own aircraft carrier and submarines.
Additionally, almost none of the Army and Navy’s ammunition and machine parts were interchangeable.
A house divided against itself cannot stand,
and it’s genuinely amazing that Japan stood up to the Allied onslaught as long as it did.
In January 1945, the British deployed their latest tank,
the Comet, on the battlefield. It was cause for celebration among the men of the tank corps.
Why? Because for the first time in the entire war, the British made a tank that wasn’t a deathtrap.
Just like the Americans, the British were keen to cut military spending during the financial
hardship of the Great Depression. The Royal Navy and RAF were seen as key for national defence
and ate most of the military budget. The Army was stuck with the leftovers.
The Army’s conservative leaders planned on fighting the Great War a second time,
so they envisioned an ideal tank, then split it into three. They wanted lightweight and fast
recon tanks, heavily armoured infantry-support tanks, and quick “cruisers” to destroy other
tanks. They barely had the budget to develop one tank, and now they were developing three.
Development was fraught with difficulty, and standardisation across the designs was
nonexistent. When they were put into action during the Battle of France, these issues began to show.
The cruiser-type tank designs were difficult to manufacture and therefore only a few
were available in 1940. There simply weren’t enough to stop a panzer attack.
As for the infantry-support Matilda Mark-one tanks,
their armour was thick enough to protect the crew, but their machine guns couldn’t dent enemy armour.
After the loss of nearly all their vehicles at Dunkirk, the Brits decided any tank was
better than no tank, so they continued to produce inferior vehicles. Throughout North
Africa and Italy, British tanks were always outgunned and outclassed by their enemy.
This only changed when huge numbers of Shermans arrived from the United States.
From supplies shortages to obsolete equipment and Mussolini’s antics,
the Italian Army of World War Two had to put up with a lot.
But none of these factors crippled its effectiveness alone—that was done by its officers.
What are we talking about? Poor leadership. Many of the issues Fascist Italy faced during the
war can be traced back to uninspired, incompetent, or corrupt leadership.
Pre-war Italy was poorer and generally less developed than the major powers of Europe.
The Italian middle-class, where the officer corps is traditionally recruited from,
was much smaller than that of Germany, France, or Britain. Italy was also very culturally divided,
with officers from the northern and southernmost regions often unable to understand each other.
The national army had only existed for 70-odd years, and tradition was weak. On a small scale,
elite units such as the Bersaglieri marksmen and Alpini mountain troops
maintained their traditions, but they didn’t exist for regular units,
where officers were encouraged to make political connections instead of learning the art of war.
Corruption and nepotism were rife, and this was commonly how officers were promoted.
The officers received a greater food allocation than the men, meaning they ate well while
the soldiers went hungry. German officers were outraged when they discovered Italian
soldiers begging Wehrmacht cooks for food. Rommel summarised the German view on the Italians simply:
"The ordinary Italian soldiers are good, their officers are worthless."
On July 23rd 1942, Rostov-on-Don was abandoned by its Soviet defenders. The
city was given up without much of a fight. The fleeing Soviets were
demoralised and weak, desperate to avoid the seemingly unstoppable Axis advance.
Stalin was furious and responded with the now-infamous Order
227. It stipulated every soldier must fight to the death, established penal units,
and gave special “blocking units” permission to execute anyone accused of panicking or cowardice.
It applied to officers the same as it did to soldiers, demanding they take “Not one step back!”
In the three months after its inception, 24,000 soldiers were sent to penal battalions
and 1,000 more were executed under Order 227.
Officers could find themselves in hot water for failing to carry out Stalin’s orders fast enough,
so they went overboard catching supposed deserters and spies. Some soldiers were thrown into penal
units for making jokes or cooking bad food, others for stopping to help wounded comrades.
Order 227 was supposed to galvanise Soviet morale and help them better fight the enemy,
but it had the opposite effect instead. Commanders were forced to waste manpower
on useless blocking units, and lost valuable officers to the penal battalions.
Most of the time, the blocking units were stuck in the rear pulling guard
duty and cleaning latrines while the other soldiers fought at the front.
After three months, the Red Army high-ups decided
they could no longer afford this colossal waste of manpower, and scrapped the idea.
Speaking of colossal wastes of resources, we have the German late-war tank developments,
specifically the Panzer eight or Maus.
Development of this steel behemoth began in 1942,
but it wasn’t until June 1944 that the design kinks had been worked out and a
prototype was ready for testing. The Maus was monstrous, weighing close to 200 tonnes.
It packed a 128mm main gun with a coaxial 75mm gun and needed a 12 cylinder aviation engine to get it
moving. Its 3.7-metre width and incredible weight prevented the tank from crossing normal bridges.
The solution? A second Maus would feed the first electrical power while it drove
across the river bed. Using a snorkel, the tank could submerge in up to eight metres of water.
That’s right. In the late stages of the war, when Germany needed all of its resources to fight the
encroaching Allies, Hitler was building submarine tanks. The project was ludicrous from the start.
Experience battling on the Eastern Front had taught the Germans that manoeuvrability and speed
could be just as important for winning a battle as armour and guns. Heinz Guderian, the Nazi
in charge of the panzer forces, tried to tell Hitler this, but the Fuhrer refused to listen.
The steel from just one Maus could have built 21 108-millimetre howitzers. When you need
every weapon you can get, which would you rather have?
THOSE were six stories of the worst military policy mistakes of the Second World War. But
what do YOU think? Why do YOU think the Bureau of Ordnance refused to listen to submarine captains?
How much do YOU think Italy’s poor wartime performance was down to leadership?
Did YOU know the Germans built a submarine tank at the end of the war? Let us know in the comments!