“I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President…I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the laws for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.” - Truman on MacArthur, though in the context of Korea not WWII.
:smack:
Uh…besides that. 
Although the generic part about all generals I had forgotten, and is noteworthy, although it was about simply being dumb.
Extraordinary.
Regarding the Pearl Harbor raid, I’d say the biggest failure was collecting all of the planes together on the airfield to protect against sabotage or ground attack rather than spacing them out to protect against air attack. At the end of the battle, only eight American pilots got into the air to engage the enemy.
Regarding MacArthur’s air forces at the Philippines, I read years ago that they did launch air patrols to keep watch for the Japanese attack, but in a spectacular case of bad timing, landed to refuel just as the air attack came. Couldn’t tell you what the book was though, I read it for a report I wrote for a paper in 2001. The same book also suggested that MacArthur’s indecision was a mix of information overload and shock at the sudden outbreak of war (I’m not sure what position MacArthur was in to get a read on the political situation compared to anyone stateside).
As far as the European campaign goes, I’d also have to say Italy in general seems to have been a mistake in hindsight. I would have suggested Vichy France as the logical second (third if you count the air campaign) in Western Europe.
Regarding the bombing campaign, the direct effectiveness of it is hotly debated, especially before they focused on petroleum production rather than trying to take out ball bearings and such. The indirect effectiveness is a bit more positive, as the Axis powers were required to commit substantial resources to air defense that were unavailable at the front lines. A particular American failure from that campaign in general would be Operation Tidal Wave, a USAAF attack on Romanian oil facilities that resulted in the costliest USAAF defeat of the European Theater, with 53 planes and 700 men killed or taken prisoner (out of a total force of 177 bombers)
Pretty unfair and out of context. It’s hard to make an argument that the US should have mobilized in early 1940 because of yet another European war.
It’s even harder to make a case that we should have gotten into a massive Asian war then or earlier, too.
Other than, of course, in complete retrospect with the 20/20 vision of details we did not know then and future twists we had yet to learn. --Unfair.
We got into the war at just the right time. It was everyone else who jumped the gun and started early. Bad form!
Also, I like how everybody gets on the US for not joining the war until 1941, and yet Mexico gets a pass for waiting until 1942 to join in.
And of course, the ultimate Lame Duck prize goes to the Russians, who didn’t fully join the war until August of 1945, when they finally decided to help their American and British allies fight against Japan (and which was most certainly not an opportunistic land grab against an all-but-defeated opponent)
Pretty much everything I’ve read indicates that if we’d tried to take on the Japanese attack fleet, at sea or in the air, we’d have had our ass sawed off and handed to us. Had we sailed out to meet the fleet, we’d have lost all our ships, men and planes. Had we been better prepared for an air battle over Oahu, we’d have changed the outcome only slightly but lost most of our pilots.
A number of very insightful historians have characterized Pearl Harbor as a terrible loss that we actually won - we raised the ships, we saved many of their crew and our pilots, we regrouped from a position of considerable strength… and then we did the ass-kicking just a few months later, and never really stopped until August 1945.
It’s entirely possible the battle would still have gone south for us due to the numerical advantage the Japanese airpower would have enjoyed, but I’m curious how ready and alert anti-air gunners would have fared (getting the ships out to sea not only allows them to move around/get sunk easier, but also keeps them clear of each others’ lines of fire, a major problem for the Navy gunners during the battle with the ships tied up to the piers).
Not to mention that a fleet out to sea has to be found to be sunk, and the Japanese managed to lose at Midway against a relatively uncoordinated American air attack (at no point did the US forces manage to mass their airpower for a single attack, and in fact the first few waves of American bombers were sent right into the sea or failed to connect with their targets entirely). Then again, the American aviators outnumbered the Japanese aviators at Midway, even if they didn’t sync up properly, and the Japanese ultimately got caught with most of their planes refueling when one of the American waves finally managed to connect with them.
I dunno about Italy, while a very hard slog with a lot of mistakes made it did accomplish its main goals; knock Italy out of the war as an Axis power and tie down German divisions that would be far more detrimental were they deployed in France or the Eastern Front. Plus we had the troops and equipment, we had to use them somewhere.
I think we can file this in with people who say America ‘saved us in WWII’, if not said ironically. Cod history, in other words.
I don’t really follow, other than to note the irony of post/username.
I don’t know any arguments for US involvement prior to mid-1941 that aren’t entirely based on 20/20 hindsight. We were not yet a superpower and other than protecting our own interests in the Americas, we weren’t looked to as an automatic ally in every regional war.
ETA: Or did you mean the entire OP?
Just that if not said tongue-in-cheek it’s a ridiculous sound-bite, that reminded me of that other …oversimplification about U.S. involvement but from the other side of the pond, the America saves the day trope.
So… the US should have mobilized in late 1939? By what logic?
No, I’m agreeing with you you turkey! In that people who say the US entered the war 2 years late are to be put in the same category as people over there who say that America saved our arses; soundbite history that betrays ignorance of the period (unless said tongue in cheek, as I believe BOOM! was).
“Turkey” - I haven’t heard that since junior high.
Okay. Just couldn’t quite parse where you were going with the logic.
I despise historical retconning based on what “everybody knows”… decades later. Those who opposed early involvement had good points in their favor, by what was known and understood at that time.
It’s a perfectly cromulent insult! Evidently me no speak words good.
I think America did all it could prior to 1941 t help the Allies without declaring war and FDR knew that wasn’t possible at that time. He did give as much aid as possible and built up a reserve merchant fleet which was needed before Liberty ships started coming on the scene.
As to the OP- greatest US military mistakes? Kasserine Pass was a classic case of amateur versus professional but I don’t know whether the operation itself was a mistake. The handling and commanders were not covered in glory.
I would discount Pearl Harbor in that the Japanese sunk what were eventually useless battleships that couldn’t have kept up with the new carrier forces.
MacArthur and the Philippines has to be up there, but I also agree with that ego whore Mark Clark wanting to be the first into Rome. Admiral King was an out and out prick but at that level he has a few competitors.
I think you could probably advance a case that Eisenhower allowing the Soviets to occupy Berlin was a mistake but that may have been more political than military.
I don’t think it has been mentioned yet but the loss of the Indianapolis and the subsequent lack of rescue was horrible. Didn’t cost thousands of lives but it should never have happened.
But, yes, MacArthur and his doing nothing.
Completely agree, but by the time you’re down to one ship and a few hundred casualties, you’re going to have quite a few “mistakes” on the list. I think the answer will lie in events that affected the total course of the war.
Given how many really stupid mistakes Germany made, it is amazing how few the Allies did. At least, that’s how I perceive the big picture.
Did either Axis power ever crack any significant military encryption, for example? At least, after 1942 or so? I know some old and lightweight consular codes were broken in the pre-US involvement years. But we were reading the top-level material for both the Germans and Japanese early on, and kept the secret (Coventry - 'nuf sed), and maintained that huge edge all the way to the end.
ETA: Just to be clear - “we” means the allies, not the US.
Amateur Barbarian, I agree and I must admit I am struggling with a “mistake” as compared to a military screw up, which I think the Indianapolis was.
Was MacArthurs failure to get off his arse and alert his forces a mistake or an operational blunder? I’d think a mistake and I also think King and his refusal of the convoy system becaude of his anti British stance were mistakes.
Overall though, I doubt whether there were things to compare with the Great War such as Verdun.
I don’t think we can place much blame on Eisenhower, the post-war division of Germany had been already been decided (probably too early, the western Allies advanced further than anticipated and had to withdraw from some areas for the Soviets). He already knew that Berlin was squarely in the Soviet zone of occupation, West Berlin notwithstanding.
Had he tried, an open western breach with the Soviets may have come even earlier; the Russians would have been outraged that the prize of the “Lair of the fascist beast” had been snatched from them (and from Stalin’s view, the nuclear research going on at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute).
Of course, the “eventually useless” battleships bit is misleading. Several of those same battleships would see action later in the war, including both protecting the carriers (even against aerial attack, battleships remained pretty hard to sink throughout WWII when allowed to defend themselves), and on occasion, laying into enemy surface ships (the Battle of Surigao Strait had many of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor dropping the hammer on Admiral Nishimura’s Southern Force, which had the bad luck to sail headlong into the Americans’ guns).
And most importantly, nobody really knew battleships would be useless. Even with the primacy of the Aircraft Carrier, battleships still saw some use into the 1990s, though not as shipkillers.
I may be getting WWI and WWII mixed up, but I seem to recall the delay in adopting the convoy system was a shortage of escorts/screening units. Gather a bunch of sheep together and not enough sheepdogs, and all you have is a buffet for the wolves. The idea was that while a lone freighter was more vulnerable, a submarine would only be able to attack one freighter at a time instead of finding multiple targets at once.