My choice for '14-'18 remains, however, Verdun, where both sides blundered, the Germans in attacking and the French in defending ("at any cost," the age-old formula for military stupidity), and the consequences were so historically immense. Let us, however, take this list in chronological order.
Tsushima, 1905. By the end of the 19th century, Japan, awakened from a centuries-long slumber, was expanding into Manchuria and Korea. Inevitably, she encountered Tsarist Russia, pushing southward from Vladivostok. Equipped by the British, Japan's navy was probably the best trained and most efficient in the world -- moreso, even, than the Royal Navy of that time. In February 1904, the Japanese -- in a mini-Pearl Harbor -- inflicted a stinging defeat on the Russian fleet, at her key base of Port Arthur, knocking out seven battleships at a cost of two of her own.
Outraged at this humiliation by a tiny country of paper parasols and Madame Butterfly, the Tsar decided to send a fleet round the world to reinforce Vladivostok and avenge Port Arthur. Its commander, an irritable 53-year-old aristocrat, Admiral Zinovy Petrovich Rozhdestvensky, seemed to have reckoned that it was doomed from the start. His ships were "untested or badly built" and he had "not the slightest prospect of success."
It began badly. In the North Sea, the Russians ran into some British fishing trawlers, taking them to be Japanese and sinking one at 100-yard range, killing two British fishermen. Public opinion clamored for war with Russia; in consequence, all British coaling stations along the 5,000 mile route were denied to the Russians. After nearly eight months at sea, his 42 ships had reached 50-mile wide Straits of Tsushima (meaning "Island of the Donkey's Ears" in Japanese) between Japan and Korea. Neither ships nor crews were in any condition to fight.
Early in the afternoon of May 27th, 1905, Admiral Togo was waiting, and in a classic naval maneuver, he twice "crossed the T" of Rozhdestvensky's column. Within minutes, the leading three of Russia's battleships were wrecks; Rozhdestvensky was so wounded that he had to hand over command. At 1130 hours on the following day, the Russians ran up the white flag, to the surprise of the Japanese, steeped in the samurai traditions of no-surrender. Only two Russian destroyers and a light-cruiser limped into Vladivostok. There were 4,830 Russians killed, at a cost of 700 Japanese.
It was the most complete naval victory in history. In Russia, news of the defeat provoked the 1905 Revolution, opening the door to Lenin 12 years later. Japan, filled with a sense of invincible Imperial destiny, became a major power, with dire consequences down the line.
Verdun, 1916. After the Battle of the Marne in 1914, when the Kaiser's armies failed to defeat France, the Germans stood on the defensive in the West while they attacked in the East. Only once, until 1918, did they deviate from this strategy -- at the beginning of 1916. The Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, a withdrawn, unpopular figure with a curious mix of ruthlessness and indecision, came up with a novel concept in the history of warfare.
Instead of trying to defeat the French outright, he would bait it into defending a point in the line it could not afford to abandon. There he would "bleed it white", the very terminology of a war which, more than any other, treated soldiers' lives as little more than corpuscles.
He selected Verdun, rated the world's strongest fortress, with a centuries-long tradition in la défense de France, and only 150 miles east of Paris. The 1914 campaign had left it in a narrow salient, vulnerable on three sides to overwhelming German superiority in heavy artillery.
On the 21st of February, 1,220 German guns opened up on a frontage of barely 8 miles, launching the most savage artillery barrage in history. The French lines sagged but held, at tremendous cost. The immortal slogan "They shall not pass" was coined. In what became an affair of national honor, France rose to the bait. For ten hideous months history's longest battle raged.
The tragic irony was that Verdun also bled the attacking Germans almost equally. What began as a small affair resulted in combined casualties of over 800,000 men -- most of them inflicted in an area not much bigger than New York's Central Park.
Verdun cost Germany her last chance at defeating the Allies in the West, but the impact on France, elevating the defeatist Marshal Pétain as its hero, went far deeper. French losses led to the demoralization that defeated her in 1940. The Pyrrhic victory par excellence, Verdun was a murderous blunder for both sides.
Hitler declares war on the United States, 1941. Most historians rate Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, to have been his worst military blunder (from five possible candidates) of the entire war. I, however, disagree. I think that his almost casual declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, proved to be even more decisively disastrous.
It wasn't necessary. Four days after Pearl Harbor, the US had made no moves against Hitler. Consider the state of the war from the German point of view: it clearly made sense to keep America out of the war. Despite the huge support ("all short of war") that the US had been providing Britain since 1940, the U-Boat campaign was going extremely well. By 1941, sinkings had reached a peak, at which rate Britain would have lost fully one-fourth of her merchant fleet within the coming year.
In the US, the "America First" movement still had considerable support. A Gallup Poll of October 22, 1941, reported that only 17% of Americans actually favored war with Germany, and as late as the summer of 1942, polls showed that nearly one-third favored a compromise peace with Germany. "I can see why we're fighting the Japs," commented one respondent, "but I can't see why we're fighting the Krauts."
After Pearl Harbor, it was only natural that the powerful "Pacific First" lobby, headed by the redoubtable Admiral Ernest J. King, then CinC US Atlantic Fleet and subsequently Chief of Naval Operations, would urge Roosevelt to attack Japan, then Germany.
If Admiral King and the "Pacific Firsters" had had their way, Britain and an almost mortally wounded Russia would have been left to fight Hitler alone. Had Russia been smashed in '42, as was all too likely, a subsequent Anglo-American victory in Europe using conventional weapons would have been inconceivable.
Why, then, did Hitler take this fateful decision? Like Saddam Hussein half-a-century later, he fell prey to his own propaganda, accepting poor intelligence, coupled with his own parochial ignorance, into grossly underestimating US military potential. Secondly, he was convinced that the war in Russia was as good as won. Information available in Moscow since glasnost now confirms that as of December, 1941, Hitler had good reason to judge Stalin to be in the market for a separate peace.
His miscalculation was the West's salvation.
Singapore, 1942. On Sunday, February 15, 1942, British Lieutenant General A.E. Percival, with moustache and rabbit teeth, surrendered Singapore, reputedly the world's most impregnable bastion, and over 100,000 troops to a motley force of Japanese of little more than half that number (62,200) under General Yamashita. A heavy share of responsibility fell on Churchill, who wrote years later that it was "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history."
Churchill's eyes were riveted on Hitler -- on Europe and North Africa. His policy on the Far East was to rely on the Americans and "hope for the best." But America had her hands more than full after Pearl Harbor. The legendary 15-inch guns of Singapore faced out to sea, not towards the narrow strip of water called the Johore Strait, only a few hundred yards separating Singapore Island from the supposedly impenetrable jungle of Malaya to the north. No effort had been made to form a Malaya defense force.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese landed at Khota Bharu in the north of Malaya, and began working their way down through the jungle. The following day, two of the most powerful ships in Southeast Asia, the Repulse and the almost new Prince of Wales (which had taken part in sinking the mighty Bismarck the previous year), headed north to intercept the landings. But as his escorting aircraft carrier, Indomitable had run aground off of Jamaica, the commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, was dependent on local airfields for air cover.
So Phillips decided to head back to Singapore, but not wanting to break radio cover, he failed to request air cover. He was spotted by Japanese planes on December 10, and within minutes, the two great ships were sunk. Phillips and 700 men went down with them.
Abruptly, the balance of the whole campaign shifted. Malaya lay virtually unprotected from the sea. The back door to Singapore was now open, its British, Australian, and Indian defenders demoralized by the loss of its two capital ships. A month later, Yamashita captured Kuala Lumpur, with vast military stores. By the end of January, Percival had withdrawn to Singapore Island, but he still had a force far superior to the attackers, who were exhausted and nearly out of ammunition.
On February 8, Yamashita's men crossed the Straits. A week later, the "impregnable" fortress surrendered, without much fight, and despite Churchill's order for "every inch of ground to be defended." One of Yamashita's senior officers wrote later, "If the British had held out a few more days, they would have defeated us."
At a cost of 3,500 killed, the Japanese had smashed forever the British Empire in the East, and with it the myth of White Superiority. Had the defenders foreseen that three-and-a-half years of captivity in the most atrocious conditions lay ahead -- many of them were among the 12,000 POW's who died on the Burma Railway -- they might well have fought on.
Advance on the Yalu River, 1950. On September 15, 1950, the troops under the command of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, CinC of the UN Command since July 10, landed at Inchon. The landing followed a surprise attack by Kim Il Sung's Communist North on June 25, which had all but defeated the South Koreans, and the handful of Americans rushed from Japan to support them.
One of warfare's most inspired amphibious operations, Inchon caught the North Koreans completely off-balance and changed the course of the Korean War. By the beginning of October, MacArthur's victorious forces were pursuing a broken enemy across the 38th parallel. Brimming over with hubris and determined to smash the Communist forces once and for all, MacArthur convinced President Harry S Truman to allow him to proceed to the Yalu River, the sensitive border with both the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. This despite intelligence from Delhi that China would intervene.
Undetected by Western Intelligence, hundreds of thousands of Chinese "volunteers" began infiltrating by night, with great skill, across the Yalu. As the UN forces moved north from Pyongyang, MacArthur's commander, General Walker, found himself heading with a mixed force of 100,000 men into rugged, wintry country, and covering a front several times wider than the much more defensible 38th parallel.
Inevitably, the force became divided. On November 25, as Walker was preparing his final blow, the Chinese struck with devastating force along the Chongchon Valley, with eight armies of thirty divisions, totalling more than 300,000 men, several times the available strength of the UN forces. It was a great ambush.
Walker's right wing crumpled. Swiftly, the line buckled, and MacArthur's troops, in an unparalleled reversal of fortune, reeled back to the 38th parallel. For the US forces caught up in the "bug-out" in appalling winter conditions, it was one of the worst defeats in American history.
Thirteen thousand casualties were suffered in withdrawal, and the legendary, untouchable, invincible MacArthur was sacked a few months later. But the longer-term consequences were far greater. The Korean War could no longer be won, by either side, and would drag on for another two-and-a-half bitter years, costing 54,000 American lives and many more Koreans and Chinese. The PRC became a major power.
As a decisive defeat of the West by the East, it stood in line with Tsushima and Singapore, and led to Vietnam.
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NOTE
I have not included any blunders post-1950, for a variety of reasons, chief among them being a lack of blunders on the scale of the above. The only candidate that I see possibly emerging is the Coalition's decision not to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 1991, though it remains to be seen how much of a blunder that was.
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