Most humiliating defeats in History

What about Little BigHorn
??

 

Who was left to be humiliated? That victory was so complete that there were no losing combatants left to feel humiliation! I think the US Army chalked the loss up to Custer's incompetence and left it at that (other than to use the battle as justification for greater force on its part).

 

Tet was a defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, not the Americans. Unless of course, you believe what you read in the newspapers.

 

I would nominate Pearl Harbor as one of the most humiliating defeats for the United States. That's one of the reasons why Americans were so enraged by it, and why they were so determined to crush the Japanese Empire.

An example of humiliation resulting in a burning determination to exact revenge.

 

What difference is there between , say, Arnhem and Goodwood? You did get ahead but you did not reach the main goal. Which means the operation failed.

Then again we all have a personal view on these things so your view is ok with me.

 

I think defeat encompasses "the failure to achieve all that is expected." For example, outside of military endeavours, when Appalachian State beat Michigan last year (in American football), it was a crushing defeat because Appalachian State was supposed to lose by so much. If Michigan had won that game by one point with a last minute field goal, it would still have been a victory for App State even though they would have lost the game.

Defeat is failure in the face of expectation. The more I learn about WWII, the more I think we have to question the meaning of victory. Was Pearl Harbor a true victory for the Japanese? I would say no because (i) they failed to send in the final wave of planes which could have eliminated so many more ships, and (ii) they failed to damage any aircraft carriers because they were out at sea. Pearl Harbor caused great loss of life and much damage to collateral vessels but not the real damage that Imperial Japan needed to achieve in order to keep the US out of the Pacific war for enough time for Japan to consolidate and reinforce its position.

With that in mind, victory defeat should be measured as a metric of performance as considered against (i) relative fighting strength, (ii) relative technological sophistication, (iii) casualties, (iv) expected vs actual time for achievement of victory, (v) strategic importance of specific action, and (vi) length of time that victory can be sustained. What else might we add?

 

Dgmitchell,

the Japanese themselves if I recall it correct actually wanted to buy time to create the defensive ring around them and in that sense they did it and the operation in their view was a success with the following gains after that. Then again the defensive ring did not hold but that is another matter.

Just my couple thoughts on this....

 

Yes, they did want a defensive ring and it did not hold. That in large part can be attributed to the decision not to send in a final wave of aircraft and poor intelligence on the location of the AC carriers. That is why I would say that Pearl was not a complete victory for Japan.

No argument that it was a disaster for the USA as well . . . .

I don't want to turn this into a "what if" thread. Just trying to find an equation by which we can define defeat.

 

Going further back into time I believe one should quote:

- the Battle of Teutoburg 9a.d. when Armenius's Germanic tribes defeated three entire Roman legions (16.000) men

-also Poitiers in 732 when the Francs crushed the Arabs and stopped the advance of Islam in Western Europe.

-Lepanto in 1571 whne the Venetians and their allies crushed the Turks in a huge sea Battle.

-The Invincible Armada in 1588 when Spain lost most of it's fleet

 

But what was the main goal ????

According to Monty in the instructions given to 2nd Army on the eve of the operation it was as follows;
""Notes on Second Army Operations
16th July-18th July

1. Object of this operation.
To engage the German armour in battle and 'write it down' to such an extent that it is of no further value to the Germans as a basis of the battle.
To gain a good bridgehead over the River Orne through Caen, and thus improve our positions on the eastern flank.
Generally to destroy German equipment and personnel."

They achieved these objectives, gaining a good bridgehead over the River Orne, casing the Germans losses of over 90 tanks and SP guns, 80 plus A/T and artillery weapons, and around 6,500 casualties in personnel, against Allied losses of 361 tanks and 4,120 personnel.

 

-The battle of Coronel
-Operation Jubilee
-The battle of Samar
-The battle of Fredericksburg
-Singapore and Hong Kong
-Dien Bien Phu

 

According to Vice Admiral Paul A Wenker, the German Ambassador to Japan during WW II, The Japanese never followed up their offensive successes by consolidating their defenses in the SRA. They never achieved success in that sense.

See;USSBS: Interrogations of Japanese Officials -- 70/359

 

If you consider the amount of tanks and bomber power used I cannot personally believe they never went for the breakout idea...but this is my problem like earlier mentioned...

(And perhaps Ike´s too??)

Kursk in Normandy: Operation ... - Google-teoshaku

I have always wondered why Monty informed of total success etc when it was not the case by then?

 

La noche triste??

 

From a naval perspective:

The Graf Spee incident was badly handled by the German skipper. He could've fought his way out and destroying the ship....what a shame.

The sinking of the Hood. The Brits loved that ship. That it was destroyed so easily by the Bismarck had to be humiliating.

Others:

Early WW2 for the Americans-Pearl Harbor and the Corregidor Surrender.

Battle of Manila Bay-1898. A technologically superior American Navy badly thumps the Spanish fleet.

Custer's Last Stand-nuff said.

War of Northern Aggression-specifically The Battle of Antietam. Late in the battle it turned out that the creek around which where most of the fighting took place was less than three feet deep. 50,000 lives because of really bad recon.

From a Texas perspective-the fall of the Alamo and Goliad, then the defeat for the Mexicans at San Jacinto. The Texans literally caught the Mexicans with their pants down and made them pay for it, and the Alamo, and Goliad.

 

I think we are loosing focus, humiliating does not mean shattering in a material sense but in a moral sense.
There are two main groups of battles that fit the definition:
a) Battles where the looser was expected to win but lost instead, as in dgmitchell's football example. Loosing is always humiliating but loosing against a force believed inferior is a lot more so, most "colonial" defeats fit in this group. From a larger perspective these battles may be "decisive" as well as "humiliating" but are not necessarily so.

Compare Teutoburg and Cannae, in both battles a strong Roman force was wiped out by a theoretically inferior enemy, so from a military perspective both are humiliating defeats. But in the first instance the Roman leadership lost confidence and accepted the Rhine as a barrier never to be crossed again while in the second they just raised new legions and went on fighting.

b) The other case is battles that generate a negative morale effect greater than the actual outcome justifies, they may even cause a turnaround in the way the contestants see the whole war. Relative losses are not really relevant, what matters is that before the battle the looser believed he was wining and the battle shattered that confidence. Such battles are measured by results vs expectations and can be strategic defeats even if from a tactical or operational military perspective the result is a draw or even a victory for the "loosing" side.

Tet fits this group perfectly, the US confidence in having already won was shaken by it even if in losses and terrain actually controlled at the end of the battle the VC and NVA suffered a defeat.

In ww2 there is evidence that Singapore and the loss of PoW and Repulse had a very different morale effect on the British than the roughly similar, in a pure body count perspective, loss of the Philippines and Pearl Harbour had on US forces.
The sinking of the Hood, had it not been avenged a few days later, may also have had a moral effect much greater than the loss of a single ship would normally do.
Stalingrad broke the German Army's confidence in victory, with a more "normal" German leadership it could have ended the war in early 1943.

IMHO mutual bloodbaths like Goodwood does not belong to either group, it had no long lasting morale effects on either side.
The scuttling of the Graf Spee is an instance of the breakdown of morale of a single individual decisevely affecting the outcome. Nothing humiliating here unless you believe the Germans, unlike everibody else, are immune to battle stress.

 

Unfortunately I own a copy of this book
It is without question the worst book I've ever owned.
The so-called author is a wargamer who has tried his hand at writting a history book, he is no historian.
To show you how ill-informed he is, he claims amongst other things in this book that Rommel died of his wounds when his staff car was shot up, and the caliber of the 17Ib was 88mm.

ps; if you go on the Amazon UK site you will find a review by me where I state that I would not recommend the book to anyone.

I stand by that statement

 

Very good point.

A good comparison would be the Hood / PoW-Repulse.

From discussions with my father who remembers well the effect in Britain of both incidents, the loss of Hood was a great shock which was almost immediately offset by the 'revenge' of Bismarck being sunk. And certainly the Bismarck was in no way under-rated.

But the loss of Prince of Wales / Repulse caused a deep feeling of total disbelief and shame. The UK population simply couldn't believe not only that both vessels had been sunk - but also that it had been done by 'the Japs'......

 

If it's about suffering a humiliation, then I nominate what is known in the Philippines as La Naval de Manila. It was a series of naval battles between Dutch and Spanish ships that occurred in the Philippines in 1646.
The Dutch fleet outnumbered the Spanish ships by more than three to one but despite the superiority in numbers, the Dutch were still defeated.
Today, this is commemorated as a religious festival in the Philippines because more than four centuries ago, the Spaniards told my ancestors that the Spaniards won with the help of divine intervention. And that explanation became tradition.

 

Nobody mentioned Crete 1941. Germans were so close to defeat there.