In the military realm, the Japanese invasion of Midway seems to qualify. It might well have succeeded in its primary aim of luring the American carriers into fatal conflict if the Japanese codes hadn’t been broken and the battle hadn’t gone lucky for the Americans.
In the non-military realm, I’d suggest Prohibition. It seemed like a good idea and seemingly enjoyed a public consensus. Remember, it not only had to pass Congress but be approved by three-quarters of the states. What no one anticipated was how widespread cheating would be and the mushrooming of organized crime syndicates to supply the hooch.
Would Gallipoli count? My only thought against it fitting is that I’m not so certain it really was considered a good idea at the time, and probably many people expressed doubts.
I suppose you could make the argument that conceding the Sudetenland and (inadvertently) buying time was better than taking a hard line and in effect starting the war a year earlier. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the case made, though. Care to try?
There are a few reasons it might be sub-optimal (assuming, again, that the war is inevitably going to start sooner or later). The most obvious one is that the agreement basically threw away Czechoslovakia’s pretty formidable army: all of their good defensive terrain was transferred without any fighting to the invader, and they were totally demoralized by the whole process of being completely abandoned by the only powers in the region with the power to come to their aid. Moreover, a general war that started with Germany’s army oriented southwards may well have gone differently than the war that (for all intents and purposes) started with the Wehrmacht fully prepared and oriented for an invasion of France.
Plenty of Indians allied with Europeans to fight against their traditional enemies. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time–these newcomers had good weapons, but there weren’t very many of them, and they lived far away, so accepting their help in wiping out your neighbors seemed like a good idea. There was no concept of “Indian-ness” where all the Indians were on one side and the Europeans were on the other. The Europeans were just one more group of people who weren’t members of your ethnic group. Allying with the English to fight the Mohawks wasn’t any different than allying with the Mohawks to fight the English, because both were foreigners.
Same thing happened in India–the British were constantly helping local Indian potentates fight against each other, until the Brits ended up ruling the whole subcontinent. But allying with the British was often a perfectly rational and defensible decision, until it because your turn.
When you think of you enemies, isn’t your first thought, “Kill them all”? Yup, mine too. Genocide always seems like a good idea at first, but it’s a real bitch to get right, and when you don’t, you have angry survivors, whiney descendants, and lawsuits and reparations, etc.
In 1938 Great Britain was protected by a few squadrons of biplane fighters, versus the ME-109s of the Luftwaffe. Its army was at peacetime levels versus the increasing levels of the Wehrmacht. Britain was in no condition to wage war in 1938. Thanks to Chamberlain’s buildups it was somewhat better in 1939 and even better in 1940, but buildups are not instantaneous. Chamberlain, by sacrificing a country from which some of my ancestors hailed, bought enough time that he laid the groundwork for ultimate victory.
Yes, ground forces versus ground forces in 1938 may have given the advantage to France and the UK, but they lacked air superiority, proven to be vital in the next couple years.
The first Spitfire was delivered to 19 Squadron on 4 August 1938. The first Hurricanes were delivered to 111 Squadron in December of 1937. It’s true that the Gloster Gladiator (operational January 1937) was Britain’s front-line fighter, and Britain was in no position to fight the Germans in the air at that time; but there were some Hurricanes and Spitfires in 1938.
But it’s SOOOO Hard to. Nobody can top the Germans for efficiency, and look how many Jews got away! Of couse the Native Americans didn’t have trains plains and automobiles to get away in, OTOH the US army didn’t have Zyklon B either.
Piffle! Trajan did it to the Dacians, before they had any of that stuff and hardly any Dacians got away. He wrote a whole column about it. That column still stands in his forum. Cool, huh?
Dacians? I spit on your Dacians! Barely more than an oversized village. Anyway, maybe the army was exterminated, but the people were pretty much absorbed into the larger Roman/Greek civilization, so I undersand.
Secession. Southerners assumed the North wouldn’t fight, or at least wouldn’t fight very hard. Even at the outbreak of the war, it was thought by North and South alike that the fighting would last a few weeks or a couple of months with at most a few thousand battlefield casualties, and everybody would be home in the fall. Things worked out a little differently.
I don’t think so. Gallipoli was a freaking stupid idea in the first place that would, even if successful (which the inept planning made highly unlikely) have done nothing to shorten the war. Germany had to be bled dry and defeated on the Western Front. Churchill just couldn’t deal with the fact that this meant the navy wasn’t going to be central, so he ended up having a lot of British and ANZAC lives thrown away on a worthless expedition.
Most historians would probably concede that European politicans and generals had learned little or nothing from the American civil war. In particular, Union and Confederate generals in 1861 and European generals in 1914 failed to appreciate just how effective and deadly modern weaponry had become.
Aside from the fact that they were already gearing up, Germany was in no position to go to war at that time. This analysis completely assumes that Germany would have simply attacked and won. This was completely impossible - Poland alone might have been able to beat Germany then. But odds are Hitler’s government would have fallen to such a significant challenge. Instead, democratic rule would probably have re-emerged. Chamberlain didn’t gain any time, because Hitler was gaining power (military and otherwise) faster than England.