Somehow a fire broke out in the capsule containing three of America's top astronauts whilst on the Saturn Rocket launch pad. The fire nearly wrecked the US space programme and killed three very brave men.
When Winston Churchill was First Sea Lord he thought that the deadlock on the Western Front in World War I could be broken by an attack on Turkey. What followed was the worst planned operation of World War I and the Anzac losses were immortalised in the Mel Gibson movie ‘Gallipoli’.
As the third year of the war in Europe began, President Roosevelt struggled to convince the American people that soon or later they must confront the dictatorships of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor solved part of his problem, but there was still widespread resistance to the idea of joining the fight against Germany and Italy. Out of the blue, Hitler provided the solution by declaring the war on the United States. It was a critical strategic blunder which made Germany’s defeat inevitable.
As the German armies thrust toward Stalingrad in 1942 it seemed possible that they could finally defeat the Soviet Union. But Hitler’s insistence that they must take the city led to the loss of an entire army and was the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front.
How the British government lost some £60 million when it backed an American businessman to set up a factory in violence-stricken Northern Ireland to produce a revolutionary new sports car.
The disastrous ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion and the subsequent Cuban Missile crisis brought the world to the brink of Nuclear War. Was it necessary and how close did the world come to World War III?
On 16 April 1947, at the port of Texas City, failure to deal correctly with a small fire on board a vessel loaded with fertiliser led to the explosion of an ammunition ship. The resultant fires and devastation caused the deaths of 750 people and $100,000,000 worth of damage.
Probably the most graphic bridge failure ever recorded on film, this story explains how not all the world’s bridge structures have been safe.
Probably the greatest of all nuclear accidents yet. Its poisonous legacy still threatens hundreds of thousands of Russian children. How did it happen and is it safe now?
As he watched the second of his Battle Cruisers explode during WWI’s greatest naval battle, Admiral Beatty remarked: “There seems to be something wrong with my ships today.” What was wrong was inherent design faults which made them totally vulnerable to enemy fire.
When Field Marshal Montgomery was racing General Patton into the German Reich he deployed the British Airborne brigades one bridge too far in an attempt to cross the Rhine, and brought lightly armed paratroops up against two crack SS Panzer divisions.
One of the worst blunders in World War II was the failure of German opposition to Hitler to unite against him. Typical was the bomb plot of 1944 at the Wolf’s Lair in the Rastenberg forest in East Prussia. There, a young aristocratic officer called Von Stauffenberg had placed a briefcase bomb under Hitler’s map table. When this failed to kill the Fuehrer the disorganised conspirators were soon rounded up and hanged.
Designed in 1929 as the giant flying boat which would finally bring Trans-Atlantic passenger flights, the Dornier Do-X proved disastrously underpowered and took nine months to reach New York.
Probably the Imperial Japanese Navy’s greatest blunder after Pearl Harbour itself. The wrong aircraft were armed first. The wrong torpedoes were set incorrectly. The wrong bombs and fuses were fitted and the wrong aircraft were sent up at the wrong time. America’s finest Admirals were to press home their advantage.
French commanders in Indo-China thought that they could entrap their Vietnamese enemy by setting up a killing ground at Dien Bien Phu. But their forces were swiftly besieged and outgunned. The fall of this base forced the French to surrender their Far East colonies.
Manned aircraft and torpedoes, speedboats packed with explosives and midget submarines were classic blunders, poorly designed and badly piloted. They failed to achieve any real success at all.
Did the Allies blunder by bombing a beautiful Franciscan monastery when they could have outflanked the crack German troops it contained?
The USAAF belief that its bombers could operate over Germany by day without escort fighters proved to be fatally flawed, as the two Schweinfurt-Regensburg raids in the late summer / autumn of 1943 starkly demonstrated.
During the winter of 1943-44 ‘Bomber’ Harris waged a grim campaign against the German capital, convinced that he could bomb the Third Reich into submission before the Normandy invasion took place. But as the bomber casualties mounted, it became clear that Berlin was too tough a nut to crack.
In the spring of 1942 the British constructed what they thought was an impregnable defence line in Libya. It proved to be fatally flawed and Rommel almost succeeded in driving them back across the other side of the Suez Canal.
By the winter of 1944, the war in Western Europe seemed over. The Germans had been pushed back to their last natural defence line on the Rhine. US troops in the Ardennes sector looked forward to a quiet Christmas. Then came a totally unexpected and massive German assault - but one which should have been anticipated had the Allies' High Command not blundered.
US troops went into the civil war in Somalia with a clear mission statement - to help aid agencies get supplies through to where they were needed. But this was soon and disastrously forgotten amid hot pursuit of the warlords.
No German spy operated successfully from Britain during World War 2. Ill-trained and undermotivated, most were picked up within hours of landing, and ‘turned’ to send back misinformation to their former masters. But the clues to this massive con-trick were there, had the Abwehr chosen to see them.
The struggle between Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces in the Alps was one of the most bitter yet little-known campaigns of World War 1. Eleven costly Italian offensives had failed to break the stalemate. When the demoralised troops were struck by fresh German units disaster ensued. But the Germans were to make blunders of their own
For Hitler and his High Command the crucial question was where would the Allies land to begin the liberation of Western Europe, and where should their armoured reserve be held? Once D-Day came Hitler refused to believe that this was the main assault, and vital counterattacks were fatally delayed.
As Lenin seized power in Russia in October 1917, civil war erupted as counter-revolutionaries attempted to defeat Bolshevism. The Western Allies decided to intervene to aid them. It was an act of pure folly, for it enabled Lenin and his tiny minority of followers to pose as the true champions of the Russian people.
The dramatically changing moods of the sea mean that maritime disasters are sometimes inevitable. But when the roll-on roll-off car ferry The Herald of Free Enterprise lurched to port in calm waters just outside the Belgian port of Zeebrugge and capsized within a minute there had to be other reasons. What emerged was a trail of errors that led to some of the most far-reaching changes in ferry safety regulations.
