biggest idiots in war history may have its fair share of Heroes but it has twice as many fools from an arrogant General who was literally told that he was walking into a trap but went there anyway to a brain dead halfwit who killed 90% of his country's male population in an unwinable War here are some of History's biggest idiots torpedo man Lon Dawson for our first P brain Pratt let's go back in time to World War II it was a sunny afternoon on November 14th 1943 and President Franklin D Roosevelt was aboard the battleship USS
Iowa crossing the Atlantic Ocean on his way to a very important meeting stopping off at Cairo first his ultimate destination was the Middle East once in tan Iran he was going to coordinate military strategy against Nazi Germany with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill of course of course being the commanderin-chief he had a formidable escort safeguarding the USS Iowa from potential threats was the USS Cogswell the USS Young And The Destroyer William D Porter since the Seas were teaming with German OTS the Convoy also had to maintain a strict radio silence
for the entire Journey while on Route Roosevelt who was actually paralyzed from the waist down and wheelchair bound in private requested to observe an air defense drill Target balloons were released and then expertly shot down by Gunners from the Iowa and Porter in fact it went so well that Lieutenant Commander Wilfred a Walter decided to order a follow-up drill this would involve a simulated torpedo attack on the president's ship the key word here is simulated during this type of exercise the Torpedoes primer is supposed to be removed so it doesn't shoot out of the tube
and become live aiming straight for the USS Iowa the first two Torpedoes stayed put as planned everything looked like it was going to go by without a hitch and then torpedo man Lon Dawson entered the scene he'd been entrusted with loading the third and final torpedo so you can imagine the horror on his face when it whooshed out of the loading chamber heading straight to the ship carrying the leader of the Free World he'd forgotten to remove the Dank primer Panic swept through the deck they only had a couple of minutes to warn the Iowa
of their impending doom but they couldn't break radio silence at first Commander Walter used a signal lamp to get the message across but he communicated wrongly that the torpedo was coming from the wrong side then he followed it up with another incorrect message that told the Iowa that the porter was reversing by this point enough valuable seconds had been wasted so the captain grabbed a radio and yelled come right come hard right as the explosive zipped towards him President Roosevelt remained remarkably calm as soon as he had heard about it he had actually ordered a
secret service agent to wheel him to the deck for a better view in contrast his Entourage were supposedly a lot less chill fear during an assassination attempt it was rumored that every single gun on the Iowa was aimed towards the William Porter although this can't be 100% confirmed meanwhile the secret service agent rather uselessly tracked the torpedo with his gun not sure what he was expecting to achieve there by the time they received the radio transmission it was actually too late for the Iowa to maneuver but luckily the torpedo veered away and exploded about 3,000
yard to the rear of the USS Iowa in the aftermath the torpedo man dos was arrested becoming the subject of an inquiry in Bermuda before being transferred to face a general court Marshal eventually he was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor however because it was an accident President Roosevelt intervened and the bungling Seaman was freed General Luigi [Music] cardor we've all seen them and we all resent them since the beginning of recorded time the slightly spoiled and dimed Children Of The Rich famous and successful have been handed jobs that they're just not that good
at in modern terminology we'd refer to this special breed of tryhards as nepo babies which brings us to General Luigi Cardona the father of this Infamous Italian World War I Commander was the celebrated count Raphael kador in the mid 19th century he had played an instrumental role in the unification of Italy following his successful capture of Rome in 1870 naturally his son followed in his footsteps but there was just one problem l IGI Cardona was a talentless buffoon using his political connections to the king of Italy Victor Emanuel III he was appointed Chief of Staff
of the Italian army fighting in World War I Italy entered the conflict in 1915 with one of the smallest major armies having only about 875,000 men and 180 artillery pieces to put that into perspective at the start of World War I France's Army numbered just over 2 and 1/2 million so what did Luigi Cardona do with his his weak Force he pursued the highest operational Tempo possible between May 1915 to October 1917 the French launched or supported five major military operations in that same period the Italians carried out a total of 11 major operations yep
you heard that right 11 and most of them failed miserably you see cardona's policy was to go on the offensive all the time even if there was very little chance of winning and there was very little chance of winning because a significant amount of the battles he directed occurred at the isonzo River Basin one of Italy's main wartime objectives was to take the Strategic Port City of triest where the austr Hungarian Navy was stationed however in His Infinite Wisdom this Italian imile chose the worst route ever to get there the asuno River Basin not only
borders the impassible Alps to the east but contains an annoying river that disrupts the battlefield in addition the terrain is extremely Rocky which makes artillery strikes and other fragmentation weapons even more lethal oh yeah and it's also basically impossible to dig a trench into rock now some say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results but this could easily work for stupidity as well hemmed in by the mountains that made Battlefield breakouts virtually impossible in essence Luigi Cardona launched the same hopeless offensive 11 times in a
row only twice did he achieve favorable casualty rates and when he inevitably failed this Italian ignoramus blamed his own men rather than his own poor tactical decisions believing that discipline and morale were all that was required for victory he convicted a whopping 3.6% of his entire Army on disciplinary or cowardice charges the irony was though that kadora himself was a huge coward his last disaster class was the 197 Battle of caporetto for over 2 years the Italian forces had Advanced no more than 20 miles then within just 3 weeks they lost 100 miles of territory
as a result of this joint austr Hungarian and German attack as his forces lost ground kadora fled back to Padua in Italy while at the same time ordering that officers of retreating units be shot his failure was so spectacular that the French were forced to send six divisions to stabilize the Italian front he had so poorly mismanaged finally in November 1917 the Arrogant cruel and Luigi cardor was stripped of his command much to the relief of everyone puus quintius vus before disaster tarnished His Image forever Roman general puus quintius varus had been a favorite of
his blood relative Emperor Augustus who had personally installed him as the governor of several major provinces but the hauy and incompetent varus who viewed anyone who is not a Roman citizen as lesser being was in no way suited to the position he was according to one Roman historian a man more accustomed to the Leisure of the camp than to actual service in war in the year 9 ad while the governor of Germania varus received reports of tribal unrest spilling across the border in response the pompous general made for Northwest Germany convinced that the uprising was
no more than a small disturbance that he could easily Crush believing the participants to be merely inferior bar Arians Vos did not prepare his men for a large scale battle and even allowed them to take their wives and children with them on the assignment like it was a family vacation what Vos didn't realize was that he was cluelessly walking straight into a trap organized by armenius a prince of the Germanic chuski peoples who at least for that moment were allies of the Romans having received a Roman education in his youth as a hostage he knew
that an utterly self-confident dummy such as vus was likely to investigate the incident which armenius had engineered himself without the proper precautions but then a rival Chieftain provided Intel that put the entire plan in Jeopardy armenia's father-in-law and enemies seses repeatedly warned vus that he was in grave danger but the snobby Romans simply brushed it off as a lowly interf Family Feud and ignored him accompanied by armenius and a sizable band of Germanic Warriors Vos LED three Legions the 17th 18th and 19th Claus a throng of camp followers deep into tutor Forest suddenly his Germanic
allies vanished and all at once vas's front columns were ambushed at the same time a violent storm erupted transforming all available paths into quagmires and ripping branches off surrounding trees then the entire Germanic Force rushed out of the undergrowth throwing volleys of javins at the Shell Shocked Romans the Romans managed to repel the first wave but as the rain fell the legionary Shields became water logged and too heavy while the drenched longbows of the Imperial archers became practically useless knowing the game was up vus and his commanders ended their own lives as the men women
and children of the losing side were massacred or taken alive to be sacrificed to the pagan gods Muhammad II of quasam genis Khan what do you think of when you hear this name if this very utterance makes you imagine ruined smoking cities and blood soaked streets strewn with corpses then you're pretty close to the truth over the course of two decades Mongolian warlord genas Khan carved out an Empire that stretched from the Pacific coast of Korea all the way to the shores of the Caspian Sea his successors would later extend this out to Hungary to
make it history's largest everland Empire which was about the size of Africa overall it's estimated that genas Khan was responsible for the death of up to 40 million people but he wasn't just a bloodthirsty conqueror it might be hard to believe but many of his most trusted field commanders were actually former enemies and when he wasn't annihilating civilizations he was actually establishing peaceful trade relations with them with this in mind this makes the actions of Muhammad II all the more puzzling this dimwitted dunce was the king of the empire of quarum which occupied vast stretches
of Central Asia and Persia for about two centuries since the year 1077 in 1218 genas Khan sent a trade Caravan to establish Commerce links with this Central Asian Kingdom however suspicious that they were spies a local Governor had them all arrested and executed apart from one dude who ran back to the Mongol Chieftain and told him what had happened genghiskhan was absolutely Furious but being the measured Statesman he could be he sent a follow-up diplomatic mission to Muhammad to demand Justice his terms were not unreasonable all he wanted was for the guilty Governor to be
executed and a bit of cash to smooth things over it was at this point that Muhammad made a decision of mumal stupidity instead of establishing friendly relations with the Fearsome KH who had just subjugated much of northern China he proceeded to behead the Diplomat sent to convey the message the old saying goes that pride comes before a fall and in this case it was the fall of an entire civilization what followed was the systematic destruction of the empire of quarum which over 2 years was reduced to nothing by the K's vengeful hordes to give a
sense of scale the sprawling Iranian Metropolis of Nish shabor had an estimated 1.2 to 5 million citizens when the Mongols left there were only 400 survivors when they found the governor who had murdered the original trade Mission there was no mercy shown they poured molten metal into his eyes mouth and ears to kill him Game of Thrones style in the end and luckily for him Muhammad died of natural causes before the Mongols could catch him in total his boneheaded actions led to the deaths of between 2 to 15 million people and that's a low-end estimate
Francisco Solano Lopez as we've seen there are a lot of contenders for history's biggest idiots but our last blows them all out of the water Solano Lopez was the eldest son of dictator Carlos Antonio Lopez who ruled the small South American country of Paraguay for about 20 years during his father's Reign Lopez was sent on a diplomatic mission to France in 1853 and while there he developed a Fascination for one of France's most iconic conquerors by the time of his return He worshiped Napoleon bonapart whose Empire spanned all the way from Northern Spain to Moscow
at its height when Lopez assumed power in 1863 he tried his best to imitate his Hero at the time of his accession the landlocked Paraguay was the only South American nation that didn't have a coastline which meant that they were missing out on profits from foreign trade furthermore it was among the weakest of the continent's powers wanting to open up his country to foreign trade and to establish Paraguay as a major player in the region he formed an alliance with another smaller power Uruguay the idea was to form a third Regional block that could challenge
the domination of the much larger and more powerful Brazil and Argentina obviously Brazil wasn't too happy with this so they invaded Eur way in 1864 to make their feelings known in response Lopez declared war on Brazil by sacking the Brazilian province of matago but he also had to send reinforcements to Uruguay to help them out the thing is though to get there his troops had to March through Argentina and the paraguayan president hadn't asked for permission when the argentines objected to this Solano Lopez who styled himself El supro made the unbelievably foolish decision to declare
war on them as well then to make matters even worse Uruguay which was quickly defeated by Brazil was also prompted to declare war on Paraguay through a combination of ignorance hubris and sheer stupidity salano Lopez had committed his country into a fight they could not win in May 1865 Brazil Argentina and Uruguay signed an agreement called The Triple Alliance within a month they had already demolished the paraguayan Navy and gained a foothold on the strategically important pirani river which meant Paraguay was no longer able to supply its armies in Argentina in other words within a
month El supro had already lost because he had no other choice but to go on the defensive his defeat at the Battle of tuyuti the largest engagement of the war a year later would set the tone for the next four years against all military logic he ordered his men to trudge through a swamp towards fixed enemy positions with virtually no artillery Support over the course of a single afternoon his entire Army one of the biggest he had ever had at his disposal was decimated and 6,000 laid dead on the blood soaked mud by January 1869
the paraguayan capital of aunion had been captured and Lopez was forced to retreat to the hills with whatever was left of his ravaged ranks increasingly desperate and paranoid he recruited women children and the elderly into his force and executed anyone who even hinted that he should surrender his victims included Military Officers cabinet ministers foreigners and even his brother and brother-in-law who were shot for treason on March 1st 1870 Lopez made his last stand at the Battle of sokora against the Brazilians while fighting alongside his troops he was severely injured by a lance as he scrambled
into a river to escape he was put out of his Misery by a Bullet to the Head this leads us to a statistic that defies belief according to the highest estimates roughly 2/3 of Paraguay's population of 525,000 had died by the end of the war as a result of combat deaths disease hunger and exhaustion this includes a staggering 90% of all paraguayan males I'll repeat that 90% leaving only about 28,000 alive this makes it proportionally one of the costliest conflicts in all of history and all because one Napoleon wannabe thought he could defeat the combined
might of three nations at once there is no other word for it this guy and indeed all others on this list are total idiots at simple history we've been working with talented artists on something truly special a collection of official premium wall art that captures history's most incredible characters these aren't just amazing pieces of art they're Timeless Treasures designed to inspire and Spark conversations for years to come as a thanks to you our amazing simple history Community we're offering an exclusive 25% off these prints unlike fleeting Trends or short-lived crazes these prints are designed to
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