Examples of defenders who gave up too quickly or easily in wartime

[Colibri]

@Asuka

This One

<Sample of half of it>

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Colibri
General Questions Moderator

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@nachtmusick

I’d say the main mistake the British leadership made in Malaya and Singapore was underestimating the capabilities of the Japanese, not overestimating them.

I’d say another mistake was underestimating the brutality of the Japanese toward POWs.

The British might have done better to keep on fighting, even if they couldn’t win. Dying in a hopeless battle might be preferable to dying from torture or starvation in a Japanese POW camp.

[nachtmusick]

Yes, but they couldn’t have known that then.

The bulk of the British army in Malaya consisted of formations of poorly trained Indian soldiers who were not willing to commit to defending the British colonial empire. There were still insurrections fomenting in India against Britain when the Japanese attacked. The Indians might have fought well enough if things had gone well for the British, but when the Malaya campaign started going poorly they saw no reason to sacrifice themselves in a foreign land on behalf of a foreign overlord.

But when the Japanese treated the tens of thousands of Indian POW’s as poorly as they treated everyone else, the Indians figured out which side of the world war they were really on. The Indians fought a lot harder from then on, not just in Burma but in Africa and Italy as well.

[Corry_El]

@nachtmusick

1. Yes, but they couldn’t have known that then.

2. But when the Japanese treated the tens of thousands of Indian POW’s as poorly as they treated everyone else, the Indians figured out which side of the world war they were really on. The Indians fought a lot harder from then on, not just in Burma but in Africa and Italy as well.

1. I agree here. The surrendering Allied forces didn’t know how prisoners would be treated and Western prisoners died in Japanese captivity at rates in the 20’s-30’s% range (differing figures, differing nationalities, etc). As no excuse for Japanese behavior, that wouldn’t by itself make it attractive to fight 100% to the death. Soviet prisoners of the Germans died at a distinctly higher rate than that, but again not very plausible to say they therefore all should have fought to the death. It’s just not how it works.

And again, the British problem in Malaya-Singapore campaign wasn’t surrendering once the Japanese were established on Singapore with control of the water supply. It was the many tactical defeats at the hands of a numerically inferior Japanese force that led to that point. Those defeats weren’t caused by insufficient fear of being captured by the Japanese.

2. But I don’t buy that. There are AFAIK no authoritative figures for the death rate of Indian POW’s of the Japanese, but the majority taken at Singapore initially joined the Indian National Army on the Japanese side. Many of them eventually reverted to being POW’s, but the overall death rate of Indians might well have been lower than Westerners, both from that political aspect and the aspect seen for example with British prisoners of Turkey in WWI: Indian soldiers from typically harsher backgrounds survived better than European soldiers in deprived conditions of imprisonment.

And, many of the most horrific stories of Japanese mistreatment of Indian POW’s (using them as target practice, even as food) only came to light much later, recently even. Again we don’t even know now what % of Indian prisoners perished. Mistreatment of Western prisoners by the Japanese was only widely known in any detail from early 1944 (publishing of account of US Army prisoners who escaped from the Philippines in 1943). The realization that the Allies would probably win surely had far more effect on Indian morale in the British Army than real known facts about treatment of Indian POW’s by the Japanese.

[TokyoBayer]

@Velocity

I am writing an article and looking for examples of nations (or tribes, or forts/castles, or other such entities) who were well-off and well-armed and could have very well defeated their invading enemies, and yet gave up too soon and easily because they underestimated their own strength and **overestimated that of the enemy’**s. Does Holland’s surrender to the Germans in WWII count, or were the Dutch really totally out-gunned, for instance?

My bolding.

How could the Dutch have underestimated their strengths? From wike

Dutch strength:
9 divisions
700 guns[1]
1 tank
5 tankettes
32 armoured cars[2]
145 aircraft[3]
Total: 280,000 men 22 divisions
German strength:
1,378 guns
759 tanks
830 aircraft[4]
6 armoured trains[5]
Total: 750,000 men

And

The myth of the general German equipment advantage over the opposing armies in the Battle of France was in fact a reality in the case of the Battle of the Netherlands. Germany had a modern army with tanks and dive bombers (such as the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka), while the Netherlands had an army whose armoured forces comprised only 39 armoured cars and five tankettes, and an air force in large part consisting of biplanes. The Dutch government’s attitude towards war was reflected in the state of the country’s armed forces, which had not significantly expanded their equipment since before the First World War,[36] and were inadequately armed even by the standards of 1918.[37]

There simply wasn’t any way that the Dutch could have resisted the Germans. Once the Germans started bombing the Dutch cities, it was over.

[md2000]

@DrDeth

And how horrible it would have been if he had won. More religious persecution, and likely no British colonies in North America, leading to a really weird Alt Hist with no USA.

@dtilque

Considering that the first colonies were established during Queen Elizabeth’s reign (about 100 years earlier), I have trouble imagining how the British would have no colonies because Charlie won. Admittedly, the subsequent events in the colonies would have been different, so possibly no USA, but they still would have had colonies.

Yes, considering that it was only 30 years before the Revolution, I don’t think it would have significantly impacted American settlement. More interesting, would the Seven years’ War (French-Indian War) of 1759 have happened with a monarch more friendly to France? No conquest of Canada, no expensive army to be billeted in American houses, no tea tax, no large resentment of the crown, etc. My uneducated guess is that many of the economic and political pressures were already there and unlikely to change much with the King.

Plus, at that point it probably would have been difficult to change basic politics. A king of any persuasion would have to listen to parliament or be run out of town all over again. From what I’ve read - this was Charlie’s issue - he didn’t see the groundswell of opinion, so nobody wanted him. He would simply be a replacement figurehead, and being an outsider would probably have even less say on what parliament would do. The days of monarchs ruling England by dictatorship were long gone. Perhaps.

[Sailboat]

@Malthus

I believe you meant Percival.

Slim was a successful WW2 British commander who eventually defeated the Japanese.

Egad, thanks for the correction! No slander to Slim intended. That’s what I get for name-dropping.

[Malthus]

@RickJay

The Siege of Detroit in 1812 is perhaps the most wonderful example.

General Hull’s force defending the Detroit outpost was 2,000 strong and could have resisted any attack the enemy could have mustered. Hull was, however, about as defeatist and pessimistic a man as has ever worn the uniform of the United States Army, and he was becoming convinced he was doomed long before anyone was actually ready to attack him. The British/Canadian/Indian force was commanded by Sir Isaac Brock and Tecumseh, who were, by comparison, excellent officers.

Anyway, Brock knew from intelligence sources that Hull was ready to give up, so he engaged in a variety of deception techniques to convince Hull he had something other that the smaller ragtag force he did. At one point Brock and Tecumseh literally had their men march in sight of American lookouts, duck back into the forest, run around back and march past them again. He sent a letter to Hull saying he demanded immediate surrender and implying his Indian forces might go crazy if a surrender wasn’t forthcoming, though Tecumseh’s men would have done no such thing.

Despite being told by his subordinates that he was being had, Hull panicked and surrendered. There is evidence he may have been drunk. He was court martialed and sentenced to hang for his cowardice, though it was dropped to being tossed from the Army.

The battle was a disaster for the USA. Natives throughout the northern USA rose up to support the British, and Canadians rallied to the cause. the war swung widly in Britain’s favour and much of Michigan and New York might today be Canada except that Brock and Tecumseh got themselves killed shortly thereafter and were replaced by vastly less competent generals, while the Americans replaced their inept generals with capable ones.

Great minds evidently think alike (post 17)

[Malthus]

@Sailboat

Egad, thanks for the correction! No slander to Slim intended. That’s what I get for name-dropping.

Heh, no problem - it was an obvious slip of the mind, I do that sort of thing all the time!

It’s an amusing one, though, because Slim was arguably one of the best generals the Brits produced in WW2, while Percival arguably the worst.

[Sailboat]

Can’t find a citation at the moment, but I vaguely recall in the US Civil War that Nathan Bedford Forrest bluffed a strongly-held blockhouse (a type of fortification) into surrender. Not sure about the composition of forces off the top of my head, but what I read implied the position should have been held.

edit: might it have been this?

Carter’s Creek Station