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History is full of brilliant minds and bold strategies — but also some truly spectacular screw-ups. Join us as we count down the most disastrous, embarrassing, and downright baffling mistakes ever made throughout history! From overconfident military campaigns to a submarine sunk by a toilet, these blunders prove that even the most powerful figures can make jaw-droppingly dumb decisions.
Transcript
00:00Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the most disastrous or
00:05embarrassing mistakes and acts of overconfidence throughout history.
00:10While it may seem comical now, the Great Emu War, spanning just over a month in 1932,
00:16was serious business.
00:18Number 10. Napoleon's Invasion of Russia
00:22Given that he was one of the most skilled military minds in Europe, and had most of it
00:26basically at his beck and call at the time, you can understand why Napoleon was a bit
00:31overconfident in deciding to launch an invasion of Russia.
00:35In the spring of 1812, ignoring the advice of his closest advisors, Napoleon invaded Russia.
00:44Never in living memory had so large an army been assembled.
00:48He had 600,000 men, but even this grand army of multinational troops had to eat, and given
00:54that Russian forces practiced scorched earth tactics, burning fields and towns as they
00:59retreated, Napoleon's men starved.
01:02Oh, and attacking Moscow on the cusp of winter was certainly a choice.
01:07Our lips stuck together, one soldier wrote.
01:10Our nostrils froze.
01:11By the war's end, there were one million casualties, with Napoleon's forces accounting for about
01:17half of them. Yikes.
01:19Six months before, he had crossed into Russia with more than half a million soldiers,
01:24confident of victory.
01:28Now, on December 5th, rumors of a coup in Paris forced him to abandon his troops and head back
01:36to the French capital.
01:37Number 9. The Bay of Pigs Invasion.
01:39In 1958, a revolution led by Fidel Castro overthrew the old corrupt regime of the Cuban dictator
01:47General Batista. At first, America welcomed this revolution. But by 1962, the mood had changed.
01:54Since Cuba becoming a communist nation effectively put an ally of their greatest enemy on their
02:00doorstep, Americans were keen to put a stop to this Fidel Castro guy and his friends.
02:05To that end, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to plan an invasion of Cuba.
02:12When John F. Kennedy was elected, he inherited the plan. However, instead of offering direct
02:18American support, Kennedy opted for deniability. So, when the 1,500 Cuban exiles landed at the Bay
02:25of Pigs, they were not, as the CIA hoped, greeted as liberators sparking a widespread uprising,
02:32but instead, quashed extremely quickly by Cuban forces.
02:36It was hoped that the Cuban people would support them and Castro would be overthrown. But it was a
02:42total disaster.
02:43The debacle only increased Castro's popularity, alienated much of Latin America from the USA,
02:49and pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union.
02:52Castro had won this time, but he believed that the Americans might try again. Not surprisingly,
02:59he turned to President Khrushchev for military help.
03:01Number 8. The Maginot Line
03:03Named after the French Minister of War, André Maginot, the Maginot Line was a series of concrete
03:10bunkers and weapon installations built along France's eastern border.
03:14Named for War Minister André Maginot, it was a series of underground fortresses stretching 150 miles
03:21along the eastern border of France.
03:23The idea was to deter an attack from Germany. However, there were two flaws in the plan.
03:29The first was that the border with Belgium was left undefended, partly at Belgium's request,
03:34and partly due to the Ardennes Forest being theoretically untenable to invade through.
03:40The Germans exploited this short-sightedness, going around the Maginot Line by invading France
03:46through the Ardennes Forest.
03:48The second flaw was that French leadership assumed that any attack would be similar to World War I
03:54using trench warfare. However, German forces overran French forces by going through the Ardennes
04:00quicker than they expected. Warfare is an evolving discipline, and if you can't keep up, you'll get conquered.
04:07Number 7. Losing Special Order 191
04:10Knowledge is power, and knowing what your enemy is doing or going to do during war makes you
04:16especially powerful. During the American Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee signed
04:22Special Order 191, giving instructions for troop movements during the invasion of Maryland.
04:28All of this was spelled out in detail in Special Orders No. 191, which were issued to each of Lee's
04:34division commanders.
04:35Four days after it was drafted, a Union soldier discovered a copy of it wrapped around some discarded
04:41cigars at a campsite.
04:43After he and his friends lighted up and were enjoying the cigars, the soldier casually looked
04:48at the wrapper. At the top of the page were the words, Army of Northern Virginia, Special
04:53Orders No. 191.
04:55The order was quickly delivered to Union General George B. McClellan, who redeployed his own troops
05:00accordingly and went on to defeat Lee's forces at the Battle of Antietam. While the impact of
05:06the orders on the battle's outcome remains debated, losing them is still a huge slip-up.
05:11General George B. McClellan was beneficiary of the greatest security leak in American military
05:16history.
05:17Number six, Americans win at Trenton because of an unopened letter. You may have heard of
05:22the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolutionary War, or perhaps of General George Washington's
05:28crossing of the Delaware River. But what you may not know is that the Hussein Auxilaries stationed
05:33there were told they were coming.
05:35Washington hoped that the landing would be completed by midnight.
05:39Except, they didn't pay attention. Colonel Johan Rahl was warned of an impending attack,
05:44but he didn't believe it, and also ignored the letter he received about it, which was later found
05:50unopened on his body. Colonel Rahl was shot from his horse, mortally wounded.
05:56Colonel Rahl reportedly chose to play cards rather than read the letter. Rahl made a stupid bet
06:02with a bit more than money that day, and he and his men lost big time.
06:07Twenty-two Hessians lay dead or dying in the snow. Eighty-three more were wounded. Nine hundred
06:13were captured. Just two Americans had died. Those frozen before the battle began.
06:20Number five. Drunkenly calling for an election. New Zealand has quietly had some of the strangest
06:27political moments ever. In 1984, the country's longest-serving Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon,
06:33decided to call for a snap election on live television, while obviously smashed.
06:39We've got a date, the 14th of July, which we've worked out at the government house as being the
06:46appropriate date. That doesn't give you much time to run up to an election, Prime Minister.
06:51Doesn't give my opponents much time to run up to an election, does it?
06:55Because of Muldoon's inebriated state, the snap election was nicknamed the schnapps election,
07:00a month later after the highest voter turnout ever recorded in a New Zealand election. Muldoon and the
07:08New Zealand National Party were voted out of power. What followed was farce and tragedy. His
07:14gracelessness and defeat surprised no one. Essentially, Muldoon got sloshed on television,
07:20and pushed for an arguably unnecessary election, which came back to bite him and his party in a
07:25big way. Robert Muldoon's remaining days as the national leader would be nasty, brutal, and short.
07:31Number four. Dissing Genghis Khan. History has forever known him as Genghis Khan.
07:37The Khwarazmian Empire was a relatively new state in the early 11th century. Genghis Khan was consolidating
07:43his power in a war against the Chinese, but had also established cordial relations with the
07:48Khwarazmids. However, after several merchant caravans were killed by Khwarazmid officials
07:54on charges of espionage, and an ambassador sent to demand reparations was also executed, Genghis Khan
08:01broke off his war with China and invaded. With these ruthless murders, the Shah had signed his own
08:07death warrant and signaled the end of his empire. Within two years, the Khwarazmian Empire was
08:13decimated, and millions of Khwarazmids were dead in one of history's bloodiest wars. One of the
08:19largest land empires in history was basically annihilated, because Genghis Khan didn't take
08:25kindly to his olive branches being violently rejected. From 1219 to 1220, in a sustained, highly
08:32coordinated, three-pronged attack, the Mongols systematically destroyed the Shah's empire.
08:37Number 3. The Great Emu War
08:40It's 1932, and farmers in Western Australia are nearly overrun by animals. Their wheat crops were
08:48threatened by the arrival of 20,000 migratory emus, who are large, flightless birds.
08:53The series of actions that followed came to be known as the Emu War.
08:58To combat these apparent pests, the military were called in. Three soldiers used high-powered
09:04Lewis machine guns to mow down the birds, and while they did manage to kill several thousand,
09:10the emus still largely outmaneuvered the men. When the army withdrew on November 8,
09:15after six days of battle, two and a half thousand rounds of ammunition had been used
09:20to kill between 300 and 500 emus. Most of them survived and continued wreaking havoc on the farms.
09:28There are not many countries who can claim to have lost a war to birds. Now the war is stuff
09:34of
09:34legend, with stories passed down from generation to generation. Number 2. Battle of Karin Cebes
09:40During the Austro-Turkish War in 1788, the Austrian army was preparing to halt the Ottomans' advance
09:47into Karin Cebes, in what is now Romania. The Battle of Karin Cebes is a legendary disaster
09:54in the annals of military history. Because the Austrians didn't fight the Turks, they fought
09:59themselves. The night before they were set to fight the Ottomans, a group of drunken soldiers
10:04brawled with one another. After somebody yelled, Turks, there was a general panic, since many of the
10:10multi-ethnic Austrian army didn't speak the same language. This led to mass killings among the soldiers,
10:17mistaking one another for the enemy, and as many as 10,000 dying. The quote-unquote battle is often
10:23called the worst friendly fire incident in history. Number 1. U-1206 goes down with a deuce.
10:31During World War II, one German U-boat sank because of the most embarrassing of reasons… its toilet.
10:39U-1206 was near Great Britain, when its captain, Karl Adolf Schlitt, felt the call of nature. While most
10:45submarines used septic tanks at the time, German ones were able to flush while submerged. However,
10:52the mechanism was so complicated, it needed a technician to perform. Schlitt thought he could
10:58figure it out himself. He was wrong. U-1206 began taking on seawater, which reached the batteries and
11:05began generating chlorine gas. Schlitt ordered his vessel to the surface, where three men drowned
11:10after abandoning ship, and the rest were captured. And all because the submarine's captain couldn't
11:17flush his poop. Is there a facepalm-worthy screw-up from history, whose absence from our list reflects,
11:23how shall we say, poorly? Humiliate us with your picks in the comments.
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