Bad, faulty or withheld intelligence.

I recently watched for the second time on British TV a documentary by a group called "The Time Team". Although they generally deal with ancient archaeological projects, this programme was devoted to an incident on the D-Day landings. A British infantry regiment with experience of amphibious landings was given a particular beach to capture, from which they then had to move inland a mile or so and then neutralise/capture three German defence positions of which at least one was strongly constructed and defended ( a 75 mm anti tank gun emplacement).All of these posts had previously been noted by aircraft reconnaissence and the atacking infantry knew of their exact locations.
Having taken the first of the three posts ( a machine gun nest that gave flanking defensive fire to the other positions) they then moved onto the second across a wide and very exposed field which, theoretically, having destroyed the first position, should have been safe. However, even so, I was surprised that any experienced infantry officer/NCO would still have made that approach, given it's horrifyingly exposed nature. Sure enough, the Germans ( past masters in defence ) had set up another machine gun position in an unknown location and very quickly the British sustained a 25% fatality loss when moving against the post before eventually breaking off the attack and attacking from a less exposed direction. Two things disclosed in this programme appalled me. One of which was that the location of the newer German defence work was known to the British planners of the landings, but that they chose not to inform the infantry's C.O. in case it would demoralise his soldiers, and that, given the British infantry landed in a French coastal village and liberated it's inhabitants from German occupation, why on Earth did no officer ask any of the French villagers as to where any German positions were located ? Would you not have thought that after four years of war lessons such as these should have been learned much earlier ?

 

us marine patrols at khe shan in 68 were stepping on minefeilds planted by the us army sf teams only 2 years earlier , all carfully mapped and recorded of course ...simple bonehaed mistakes in war are often costley in human terms , we can only strive to not make the same boners again and again.