Top 10 Greatest Military Blunders of World War II
There’s
no doubt that the Second World War was the greatest conflict in modern
history and the one event that continues to impact our world to this
day. Consider how the world would look today had it not been fought, or
had Japan and Germany won? And, even more intriguing, what if B had
happened instead of A and the world taken a different direction as a
result? It staggers the imagination.
The
fact that it turned out the way it did, however, was the result of a
number of factors, both positive and negative. What’s perhaps most
important in understanding why one side won and the other lost is in
recognizing that victory was not determined so much by who won the most
battles—although ultimately that was a factor—but by who made the fewest
costly mistakes. With that in mind then, below is my list of the ten
greatest blunders, missed opportunities, bad judgment and just plain bad
luck committed by both sides that were instrumental in either
lengthening the conflict or in managing to snatch defeat from the jaws
of victory.
(Tie) PHILIPPINES LIBERATION, 1944
Not
a defeat, but an unnecessary operation that may have extended the war
by months. After having been kicked out of the Philippines two years
earlier, General Douglas MacArthur was itching to get back and convinced
Roosevelt that he might lose reelection in 1944 if he didn’t liberate
the island chain he had so ineptly tried to defend in 1942. However, by
1944 the Japanese air and naval presence on the island had been largely
nullified and it was too far from Japan to be of use as a base from
which to launch raids on its cities, leaving little reason to invade the
place other than because that’s what Douglas wanted (and what Doug
wanted, he usually got). The time spent securing the islands and the
resources committed to doing so delayed the more important invasion of
Okinawa in 1945 and probably extended the war by several months—but at
least it gave MacArthur the chance to wade ashore at Leyte Gulf to
proclaim that he had returned. 
This
is the battle which essentially cost the Germans the war. Hitler’s
ambitious plan to seize the oil-rich Caucasus region of the Soviet Union
in the summer of 1942 ground to a halt on the shores of the Volga River
at a city named after the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. After months of
brutal fighting that left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides and
the city leveled, Hitler’s man on the spot, Field Marshal Von Paulus,
found his army entirely surrounded and was forced to surrender over a
quarter million men in February of 1943. Had Hitler allowed him to
withdraw a few months earlier when victory was truly out of reach, it
would probably have staved off Germany’s ultimate defeat by months or,
possibly, even years (giving them the time needed to develop an atomic
bomb, perhaps?) 2. DUNKIRK, 1940
Having
successfully encircled the combined Anglo-French army in northern
France and Belgium in June of 1940, German forces were poised to deliver
the coup d’grace to the allies when Hitler inexplicably ordered his
armies to halt their advance just miles short of final and total
victory. It was said he did this to make a point to his generals that he
was the hero of the day, not they. As a result, over 300,000 British
and French soldiers were able to be evacuated to England before the
noose was closed, allowing them to fight again. Had they not been
evacuated, it is doubtful the British could have stood up to the Germans
and Italians in North Africa the following year, potentially altering
the outcome of the war by permitting the axis to take Egypt and the
oil-fields of the Middle East—in which case it really would have been
game over. 3. PEARL HARBOR, 1941
A
well-planned and executed operation that resulted in a spectacular
victory for Japan, it also planted the seeds for their own eventual
defeat. In concentrating their efforts on the largely obsolete
battleships, the Japanese pilots failed to knock out the major
infrastructure on the island—the oil farms, repair shops, and munitions
storage facilities—that made it possible for the Americans to use Pearl
Harbor as their forward base of operations throughout the war. Had they
done so, it would have forced the U.S. to fall back to the west coast,
making operations in the Pacific far more difficult and probably
extending the war by a year or more. The Japanese also failed to sink
the aircraft carriers—their primary targets that were out to sea at the
time and a force that would come back to extract retribution later on—or
attack the submarine pens. This was truly a case in which short-term
victory resulted in a long term defeat. 4. INVASION of the SOVIET UNION, 1941-1945
Hitler’s
ambitious plan to defeat Communism on his own doorstep by knocking out
the Soviet Union in one bold move very nearly worked, but it also forced
him to fight a two-front war against two enemies—the USSR and USA—that
far outmatched Germany in terms of manpower and industrial capability.
After Stalingrad (see below) in 1942, Germany was on the defensive and
defeat, pending some miracle weapon that never managed to emerge, was
inevitable. Had Hitler finished off England first and secured his
western front before taking on his Soviet foe (and staying out of war
with America in the process) history could well have had a very
different ending. 5. THE LONDON BLITZ, 1940
With
the fall of France in June of 1940, England stood alone against the
Germans, making the likelihood of a sea-borne invasion of
England—already in the planning stages—a very real possibility. Only
Britain’s undersized air force—the RAF—stood in the way of keeping the
German’s much vaunted Luftwaffe from seizing air control and making a
sea invasion possible. At first the Germans were winning the war of
attrition by attacking British airfields, but after a small-scale RAF
bomber raid on Berlin on August 25th, 1940 (which did little
real damage) enraged der Fuhrer, Luftwaffe Air Marshal Goering decided
to retaliate by switching targets from the RAF airfields to London. In
doing so, he gave the British a much needed chance to regroup and rearm,
the result being the Luftwaffe’s eventual defeat and the cancellation
of the invasion of England a few months later6. PHILIPPINES DEFENSE, 1942
General
Douglas MacArthur’s hare-brained scheme to defend the entire
archipelago from the Japanese in the spring of 1942 was doomed from the
start. Scattering his supplies of food and ammunition throughout the
islands in hopes of defending every square inch of the place only ended
in disaster for his men when he was quickly forced to abandon the
plan—along with the stockpiles of food and ammo—and pull them all back
to the Bataan Peninsula. After a few futile months of resistance, over
76,000 American and Filipino troops were starved into surrendering,
leading to the greatest defeat in American military history. Not to
worry, though; ‘ol Doug high-tailed it out of there before the end came
and spent the rest of the war lobbying to be awarded the Congressional
Medal of Honor for his brilliant defense of the place (which he got, by
the way).
7. MAGINOT LINE and the FALL of FRANCE, 1940
Having
apparently learned nothing from World War One, the French set about
creating an impenetrable line of fixed defenses on its border with
Germany guaranteed to keep the Huns at bay. Called the Maginot line, it
proved to be every bit as formidable as advertised; the problem was it
didn’t go all the way to the coast, leaving a hundred mile wide gap that
the Germans were able to plow through with relative ease in the spring
of 1940, thereby encircling the British and French Armies in Belgium and
handing the French a humiliating defeat that they don’t like to talk
about to this day. Debate rages whether the Maginot Line would have
stopped the Germans even if it had been complete, but considering how
much warfare had changed since the trench warfare of World War One, it
probably would only have slowed them down. Once the Germans breached it
at any point, most likely the results would have been the same—just a
little later in being realized. 8. ITALY’S INVASION of GREECE and EGYPT, 1940-41
With
dreams of restoring the glory that was Rome, Mussolini unleashed his
oversized but inept army against Albania (yes, I said Albania) and
Greece in the summer of 1940, and decided to push into Egypt from his
colony in Libya as well. Not remarkably, Mussolini had his head handed
to them by the British-Greek forces in the Balkans and the
British-Allied forces in Egypt, forcing Hitler to have to send in his
army to save his hapless ally. This ended up costing the Germans dearly,
for it pulled valuable resources away from other fronts and delayed
Hitler’s time-table for the conquest of the Soviet Union (see below),
gumming up the whole affair. Chances are had Mussolini followed Franco’s
lead in Spain and simply had Italy remain neutral, Germany may have won
the war. 9. ANZIO, 1944
What
is not well known to the average history buff is that American troops
had a golden opportunity to finish off the Germans in Italy early on
with their surprise landing at Anzio, Italy—a quaint little place just a
hop, skip, and a jump from Rome. So taken by surprise were the Germans,
in fact, that a few yanks in jeeps managed to drive all the way to Rome
without hindrance, demonstrating that the way was open for allied
forces and portending a major disaster for the Germans dug in to the
south of the city. Unfortunately, the allied commander of the operation,
Major General John P. Lucas, proved to be a bit timid and decided to
consolidate his beachhead before pushing on to Rome, which gave the
Germans time to move their forces and contain the Americans there for
the next few months and costing Lucas his job. Had the man shown a
little Pattonesque-like bravado, the Germans might have been forced back
to the Austrian frontier two years earlier than they eventually were
and countless allied and axis lives might have been saved in the process.
10. (Tie) KURSK, RUSSIA, 1943
Having
apparently learned nothing from the trouncing he had just taken at
Stalingrad six months earlier (see below), Hitler decides to launch yet
another big offensive against the now large and well entrenched Soviet
defenders, this time at a place called Kursk (an important industrial
city some 300 miles south of Moscow). Billed as the largest land battle
in history, the Soviet lines bent but didn’t break, and ended up costing
the Germans pretty much the rest of the best of its army and air force
and initiating Germany’s long and slow retreat back to Berlin, with all
the unfortunate consequences for Hitler and the German people that
eventually entailed 
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