Dumbest offensive of the 20th century

BlairWitch749

Banned
Post here your gold silver bronze and dishonorable mention for the worst offensive of the 20th century. Things to consider

1. Not doing any recon at all/ completing ignoring intel
2. Ignoring terrain or weather
3. Ignoring state of your troops relative to the enemy
4. Persisting in an offensive that has already failed... ie adding body count purely for ego stroking
5. Squandering superiority


Gold - Market Garden... you have total air superiority to know where enemy reserve divisions happened to be; and members of the royal cavalry had patrolled down hell's highway and reported it was heavily defended with AT guns on both sides of the road... even if it succeeded the Germans would have blown all the dykes and left them in a swampy supply nightmare and created a humanitarian crises in Holland rivaling Stalingrad... not to mention that previous allied and german airborne landings had almost universally resulted in heavy losses and massive dispersion
Silver - The Nivelle Offensive... yea have terrible operational security so the enemy knows your coming, have the enemy withdraw from the salient you are going to attack into a super fortress, attack said fortress without adequet armor or artillery support and then persist in said attack until the army is so bloodied that they have to mutiny
Bronze - Operation Avalanche... you have complete and total air dominence and you land a million miles away from any good objective (with lots of rough malaria infested terrain in the way) and land where the only damn panzer division in all of Italy is; fail
Dishonorable mention - The battle of frontiers/ Russian assault on East Prussia in 1914... sending your men forward without field kitchens in both cases and no boots in the Russian case is destined to have the men be so hungry and tired that they are ripe pickings... idiots
 

BlairWitch749

Banned
other notable failures that deserve mention

The first French assaults to retake Vaux and Doumont at Verdun where the regiment assigned used scaling ladders... standing on top of a fort when the enemy has machine guns and mortars is probably not somewhere you want to be during a pitched infantry battle; the body counts that Mangin drew there should have been worthy of court marshal

The Somme... walking in neat rows against unsupressed enemy machine guns though moonscape with 25 kilograms of supply on your backs; yikes

The mortain offensive... the nail in the coffin of the german army in the west; insane even by Hitler standards

The British battleaxe offensive against Rommel, yes lets just walk right into his anti tank guns without even the pretense of recon or artillery suppression
 

T3h_shammy

Anything in World War I wins. Plain and simple. Market Garden sucked but it wasn't doomed for failure. Any of the major assaults in WWI was.
 

Awilla the Hun

You really don't like the Western Allies, do you...

I'm not sure about "most", but several stick out:

The Ebro Offensive in the Spanish Civil War. Right, you've just paintakingly rebuilt all your armies (but have no ability to rebuild them again.) There is little chance of Britain or France coming to your rescue. The Nationalists outgun, number, and air you. Your army has only 150 artillery pieces, many of which were very old. It is a Spanish summer, and the terrain is really difficult to dig trenches in to (and thus avoid, say, the Condor Legion's Stukas. Oh, and your AA Guns are defective.) So you, of course, attack the Nationalists to gain support, and demonstrate how Glorious Comrade Negrin's Active War Policy is working. The only thing they got right was that they actually drilled for crossing rivers. It was, sadly, only marginally worse than the other Republican offensives.

All the Battles of the Isonzo when the Italians attacked.

I could think of more, but I have an essay to write, so excuse me...
 

The Red

Barbarossa's arguably the most successful and dumbest offensive of the 20th Century.
 
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Mr Qwerty

How about the Italian attacks in southern France in 1940? They got nowhere, and if the Germans hadn't beaten France in the north the French would have kicked Italian ass.
 

MerryPrankster

The Battle of the Bulge:

The Western Allies are going to be a lot more gentle with your defeated Fatherland than the Soviets will be, so you attack them and not the Soviets.

(Seriously, someone on this board suggested the Bulge resources could have been used to pin a Soviet army against the Baltic and mash it, which might delay the terrible vengeance the Soviets and Eastern Europeans took against local German populations.)

I remember seeing on TV that Hitler saw the death of FDR as proof the Allies might split, the same way the death of the Czar and the ascension of a Germanophile successor saved Frederick the Great.

Nutjob.
 

Deleted member 1487

Gold: By far the dumbest, most irresponsible, and silliest offensives ever the Carpathian Winter Battles. It was this that literally destroyed Austria-Hungary as a military power for the rest of the war. http://books.google.com/books?id=CM...v=onepage&q=carpathian winter battles&f=false

Silver: His Black-Yellow offensive in the Autumn of 1915 was nick-named by his own general staff as the 'Fall Fuck-up' where the attacking force lost more men as prisoners than the defenders!

Bronze: A nice runner up is the AH October 1914 offensive in the middle of mud season in Galicia, right after suffering 40% losses in August and September to the entire army.

Dishonorable Mention: Pretty much any Conrad von Hötzendorff-conceived offensive; Tyrol 'Strafexpedition': launched a major offensive in March-April through the Alps. Thousands of men died in avalanches before the offensive even started while moving up supplies and creating supply lines through the Alps.
 
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Gustavus Adolphus

What about that 1 British assault led by 100000 Brits, and Aussies to capture a routing German army but it turned out they faced a German entrenchment, leading to 80000 casualties the Germans were so surprised they let the poor bastards who survived flee...lol
 

BlairWitch749

Banned
The Turkish/Ottoman offensive in the Caucuses in WW1...might have been a good idea not to attack entrenched fanatical Lienz Cossacks... would have been better to not do it in the middle of winter and have all the troops freeze to death
 

Bee

The Dieppe Raid was pointless, poorly planned, wasted many lives and was undertaken over the objections of Montgomery, who accurately told Mountbatten what was wrong with the idea.

The Nivelle offensive and the Somme constituted the most incompetently-planned offensives in WWI. Continued attacks on the morning of the armistice were the most cynically wasteful of soldiers lives.
 

ThatGuyOverThere

I wouldn't really call the Somme a massive failure. The casualties it caused were horrendous, but it took enough pressure off the French at Verdun to prevent their collapse, which after all was its purpose
 

BlairWitch749

Banned
Manstein's counteroffensive against the Mius bridgeheads... yea he crushed the Soviets who had crossed but he needed every single reserve division in the soutern theater which left his left flank basically undefended; which Zhukov exploited and destroyed
 

BlairWitch749

Banned
ThatGuyOverThere said:
I wouldn't really call the Somme a massive failure. The casualties it caused were horrendous, but it took enough pressure off the French at Verdun to prevent their collapse, which after all was its purpose
Click to expand...

The Germans had already wound down their offensive at Verdun, and the French where going over to the offensive; that was strait British propaganda
 

Alien and Sedition Bat

Surely two of the worst-run offensives are the British-French invasion of Narvik in 1940 and the British-Free French effort to take over Dakar later that year. Since these were combined naval and ground operations perhaps they are not the best examples. Both should have been push-overs although the Brits would probably have been forced out of northern Norway anyway in a few months. Dakar is inexcusable--it should have been a win, and if it had been, could not have been reversed by any available Axis forces.
 

Dr. Strangelove

Banned
The battles of the Isonzo. All twelve of them.

So now that we have seen how good franco-british offensives have fared against machine guns in the flat terrain of Flanders, we italians are going to do the same, only while climbing the fucking Alps. Seriously, what could go wrong? Rinse and repeat. Eleven. Frickin. Times.
 
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