Worst Military Underperformance

Johnny Cope and the Battle of Prestonpans has to rank highly.
I think this is unfair. The position the Government forces were not expecting the attack to come from the direction it did because of the boggy land. The Jacobites had a stroke of luck in a local who could lead them to a path through the bog. The weather was also an advantage, being misty and as such limiting visibility, so the first Copes force knew about the assault was when the rebel forces were bearing down on them.
 
Well, yes, I assume that Tobruk was what he was referring to as "losing your main forward logistics centre". Not exactly an inspiring sequel to the previous siege.
Correct. After Kasserine senior British officers would criticise an inexperienced ally and refer to them as "our Italians". Given the 8th Army's standard of competence for most of 1942, where the armour in particular displayed no learning curve whatsoever, this goes somewhat beyond a ludicrous lack of self-awareness.

The DAF's performance, OTOH, was excellent.
 
Correct. After Kasserine senior British officers would criticise an inexperienced ally and refer to them as "our Italians". Given the 8th Army's standard of competence for most of 1942, where the armour in particular displayed no learning curve whatsoever, this goes somewhat beyond a ludicrous lack of self-awareness.

The DAF's performance, OTOH, was excellent.

Maybe someday they'll figure out they were only facing the Heer's B-team at the time. I can only imagine how someone like Manstein would have left them in tears.
 
And Eisenhower compounded that weakness with his defense policies. Why did anyone ever call him a great president? Because of a farewell speech about a social ill he hadn't lifted a finger to stop?

Ike is consistently ranked in the top ten of US presidents, and with good reason.

He wasn't responsible for Korea, but ended it; and more to the point, managed to keep the US clean out of any war at the height of the Cold War. (He worked very hard to keep the US out of Indochina, and advised Kennedy and Johnson to do likewise, with little success.) His foreign policy looks generally quite adroit in hindsight.

I think Ike was as aware as anyone about the limitations of U.S. ability to fight a large conventional war, and his decision to emphasize instead a (more affordable) strategic nuclear buildup worked out; by the time he left office, there surely *was* a missile gap, but it was entirely on the side of the United States; the U.S. could have destroyed the USSR as a nation state by the early 50's, and even by 1961 Soviet ability to strike back was severely limited. Which surely had something to do with the relatively restrained Soviet posture in that period.

For a guy who seemed to be playing golf every day, Eisenhower looks pretty good compared to virtually any of his successors, and plenty of his predecessors.
 

Deleted member 1487

Correct. After Kasserine senior British officers would criticise an inexperienced ally and refer to them as "our Italians". Given the 8th Army's standard of competence for most of 1942, where the armour in particular displayed no learning curve whatsoever, this goes somewhat beyond a ludicrous lack of self-awareness.
Well in 1942-early 1943 the US lacked combat experience unlike the Brits, so despite their failings, they had fixed their worst mistakes, while the US was learning the hard way...with training wheels.

Maybe someday they'll figure out they were only facing the Heer's B-team at the time. I can only imagine how someone like Manstein would have left them in tears.
DAK was not the B-team and even the US forces noted how German combat quality declined the further they advanced into Italy, so I think they understood they were not facing the best that the Germans ever had. And had the Brits face Manstein in the desert....ouch.
 
DAF: Desert Air Force, which has been misread as the Akrika Korps (DAK).

I wasn't specifically responding to that line, for what it's worth; hell, I was less referring to the DAK as Rommel specifically, who the British overrated to feel better about themselves.
 
They're the new Italians.
I've always understood the Italians to have had the opposite problem.

Rather than being in the right place to excell but failing even so, the problem seemed more like the Italians were always sent (by their higher leadership) to such awful places and in such terribly disorganized ways that the generally decent performance of individual units was useless.
 

hipper

Banned
Eighth Army at Gazala. Divide your army up into formations that cannot support each other; utilise your armour in packets small enough for an outnumbered enemy to be able to defeat them consecutively; lose your main forward logistics centre and strongpoint (35k prisoners). All in all, about 50k British/Empire/Allied casualties, to about 6k Axis.

if you look at the 8th army dispositions at Galaza and compare them with Rommels dispositions at El Alemein you wont see much difference. the initial performance by the British Armour was not too bad after several days of fighting Rommel's armour had taken heavy casualties and he was cut off from his source of supply being trapped against the entrenched front line brigades in their fortified Boxes.

his advantage had been his superb intelligence from the good source - read about colonel Bonner fellers which enabled him to precisely attack the Indian motorised infantry brigade and the HQ of the 7th armoured division

the British Forces can be criticised for the slowness of their counter attack, advance warning of this attack enabled Rommel to withdraw his frontal defences and exposed the British armour to unsuppressed anti tank gun fire.

The rest of the Battle shows Rommel to his best advantage attacking and pursuing in his own style which made him a dangerous opponent.

I don't think that the battle would have been so lopsided without the intelligence advantage Rommel Had. rather than any particularly poor performance by Imperial forces.
 
if you look at the 8th army dispositions at Galaza and compare them with Rommels dispositions at El Alemein you wont see much difference. the initial performance by the British Armour was not too bad after several days of fighting Rommel's armour had taken heavy casualties and he was cut off from his source of supply being trapped against the entrenched front line brigades in their fortified Boxes.

Yes, Rommel initially got much wrong at Gazala, including underestimating the Free French.

I don't think that the battle would have been so lopsided without the intelligence advantage Rommel Had. rather than any particularly poor performance by Imperial forces.

The British performance was poor; it suffered from Auchinleck providing advice on initial battlefield dispositions from Cairo, the 7th armoured division failing to respond to radio reports of the German advance and getting its HQ overrun, and a failure to organise a prompt or co-ordinated counterattack when Rommel was pinned against the minefields.
 
Iraq should institute NKVD style companies it is stupid but might necessary.

We have hotest contestants. Italian vs Iraqi army.
 
The Imperial Russian Army during the Crimea War:
  • The logistics were so awful the French Imperial Navy went quicker from Marseille to Sevastopol than did the Imperial Russian Army for crossing the 80 kms separating Odessa from this same city
  • Entire units starved and froze to death after their commenders embezzled their supplies
  • The troops were mostly illiterate serfs forced to serve for 25 years
A thread has been made here about this.

Considering the backwardness and many problems Russia and its armed forces were plagued with in the 1850s, I'd not call its showing in the Crimean War an underperformance. The Russians simply were technologically, militarily and organisationally worse in most things. On the contrary, I think people at the time thought that war was actually an underperformance by the British and the French who had a definite edge on the Russians in technology and the quality of their forces, but failed to capitalize on it as well as they should have. See the Allied Baltic campaign which achieved very little even if the Anglo-French fleet was lightyears more modern than its Russian opponent.
 

Deleted member 1487

but that's at least partly due to poor radio discipline in the 8th army, and this is about military underperformance they can be blamed for poor radio technique but not for the poor security of an ally
Doesn't mean it wasn't a critical part of the intelligence puzzle.
 
From what I've understood Zhukov wanted to prevent the German 9. Armée to retreat back to Berlin and instead encirle and destroy it outside the city. Anything but a brutal frontal assault on the Seelower Höhen might have allowed the Germans to retreat back into Berlin and make that fight all the more harder. Or so I've understood it.

Heinrichi had no intentions of retreating back INTO Berlin. He wanted to retreat to Elbe and surrender to the Americans. Off course the Russians did not know that. Trouble with Zhukovs attack plan was that he forced parts of 9th army into Berlin when they really wanted to retreat to Elbe
 
You all know there are 1001 things that determine the outcomes of battles and wars. But sometimes,all the factors seem to be good and yet a debacle occurs. This tread is for you to mention the armies who performed much worse in a skirmish/battle/campaign/entire war than they should have regarding the relative strength,training,equipment,terrain etc would make us think. This doesn't necessarily have to be defeats,a victory that was much closer run and with much heavier losses than could be reasonably anticipated count too.

Every Russian battle with the Swedes in the Great Nordic war were Charles XII was near the battlefield until Poltava
 
The first coalition should be ranked in there I believe.

They expected, and were expected, to totally crush their foe.

History shows how thoroughly they failed.
 
Top