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jlf1961 -> We all know Military Intelligence is an oxymoron... (9/4/2016 12:22:48 PM)
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Being a history buff, it is funny to see some of the things that everyone but the Generals in charge knew was a really bad idea.
Take the Maginot line, that line of forts and fortifications built by the French between the wars that stretched from the Swiss border the entire length of the border with Germany.
Great idea except, someone forgot that when German invaded France in WW1, they went through the low countries.
That stretch the French forgot to fortify, so the Germans went around the line and attacked it from the rear, the direction the guns did not point.
Now for the American Army, one of the best examples is Fort Jefferson.
Fort Jefferson was built between 1846 and 1875 on the largest of the Dry Tortugas, a group of islands in the Florida Keys.
There is a reason the islands are called the DRY Tortugas, there are no sources of fresh water on any of them.
No problem, the designers thought of that, and designed channels to direct rain water into cisterns to hold fresh water.
The Army built the fort, lining these channels and cisterns with a lime based plaster, making the water impossible to drink, extremely high alkaline content which basically made it poisonous.
Hence the construction of the first large scale desalination plant.
Now, the fort was still under construction at the out break of the civil war, and was not even finished until ten years after the war was over.
Why is that point significant?
Simple, by 1863, the masonry fort was obsolete. Ships were mounting rifled breach loading cannons that would have turned those brick walls into rubble in a matter of hours.
But, the army, knowing this, continued to build the fort.
Of course, when it was constructed, it was and is the largest masonry fort ever built. The kicker is that, no one thought about the island itself. Technically it was never finished, because the coral base of the island started to collapse under the weight of the structure, and it never had all the cannon it was designed to have for two reasons.
1) The island would never support the fort
2) By the end of the civil war, the island was obsolete and to replace the original cannon with modern guns (for the time) would have bankrupted the country.
WW2, again.
Prior to Operation Market Garden, the RAF flew countless missions over the line of march for the attack.
There were a number of pictures taken of German tanks near Arnham.
The Dutch resistance informed the Allies about the three panzer divisions in the area.
No one believed any of it.
On the other side, a German soldier found the crashed glider of a British officer. Inside he found the complete operational plan of the attack, with which the German army could have flanked the allies and stopped the attack in a day.
The over all German commander took those plans, declared them false (even though all reports of the paratrooper landings confirmed the plans were real) and burned them to keep his officers from being distracted.
Then there was the 8th airforce general who, seeing the damage and losses for american bombers flying unescorted on missions deep into germany came up with the brilliant idea of putting a shit load of guns on B17's so that they could act like escorts.
Great idea, in theory.
However, the men who worked on the forts, flew the forts, knew the forts better than anyone else kept telling him that with all the extra guns and ammo, the planes would not be able to keep up with the bomber formations.
The general ignored these points, ordered 50 of the bombers converted, and....
Well, the nay sayers were right.
The planes were so slow they could not keep up, they barely got off the ground for that matter.
The germans figured out these were not to be messed with when they tried to attack them and found them to have twice as many guns as the regular forts and left them alone.
After 10 missions the project was declared a failure.
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