Escapecraft

Blackadder51 wrote::O

Very Excitied.

The Bum wrote:

Darktaint wrote:have some light reading on lord mountbatman. (this is from a cracked article i found)
(http://www.cracked.com/article_19587_5- ... n-war.html)

Spoiler! :

On one morning in 1942, the British Lord Louis Mountbatten up and decided to invade France. Normally an easy task for anyone to accomplish, this time there were a few key differences. One, this was in the middle of World War II, so France was being occupied by the Nazis. And two, he did it without bothering to tell anyone on his side.

He literally launched an invasion and didn't bother to let his superiors or just about any of the Allied command know what he was about to do. He ordered thousands of Canadian, British and American troops to capture the French coastal town of Dieppe and create a beachhead. What could honestly go wrong with this?

The Screw-Up:
Since Mountbatten didn't bother to tell anyone about his plans, the force was sent in lacking many things a normal invasion force would have, such as proper resources, intelligence and also the backing of the British Home Command. Generally speaking, half-assed attacks without any support never really end well, and the Dieppe Raid was no exception.

To start things off, Mountbatten's "plan" relied heavily on surprise, of which the British had none since

SPOILER ALERT: the Germans knew they were coming.
From the moment the troops hit the beaches, the whole operation was screwed. Mountbatten had set his "plans" up like dominoes; if one thing went wrong, everything else failed. Sure enough, mere minutes after leaving for the beaches, boats began to get disoriented in the early morning darkness. When the Allied troops hit the beaches, all hell broke loose.

They suffered a mind-blowing 73 percent loss rate. A whopping 100 percent of the equipment (tanks, jeeps, etc.) that landed on the beach was lost. After several hours of fighting, what was left of the Allied troops ran back for the boats in the most unorganized retreat imaginable, leaving the Nazis with a huge victory, and left Mountbatten as pretty much the most hated military figure in Canada.

But It Turned Out ...
It's comforting to know that your disastrous failure could at least show somebody smarter than you how to succeed. That's exactly what happened here -- that clusterfuck of an invasion attempt gave the Allies precious info on how to handle an amphibious invasion in the future, particularly on D-Day.


They now knew they'd need a large artillery barrage beforehand, paratroopers to land behind enemy lines and a far more flexible plan to account for conditions on the shore. It even led to the creation of a special tank just for D-Day, after every tank that landed at Dieppe was destroyed.
After the war, many military commanders remarked at the importance of the Dieppe invasion toward the victory at D-Day, with Winston Churchill himself saying that Dieppe was "an indispensable preliminary to full-scale operations."

But the most important lesson was never put this man in charge.

Lord_Mountbatten wrote:8 hours and counting.

Spyboticsguy wrote:-sigh- I'm going to have to possibly pass this up. Will there be a recording as per the usual?