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From catastrophic military campaigns to deadly political decisions, history is littered with fatal errors. Join us as we explore the most devastating mistakes that cost millions of lives! Our countdown includes the Halifax Explosion, Hitler's invasion of Russia, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and more blunders that altered the course of history forever.
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00:00He orders a great leap forward.
00:03China should soon be producing more steel than Great Britain,
00:06with the sheer willpower of the people alone.
00:09Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at 20 blunders from throughout history
00:13that spiraled into deadly disasters.
00:15One of the largest, most ethnically diverse nations in the world has been divided.
00:21One country will now become two, India and Pakistan.
00:27The Halifax explosion.
00:29It was the deadliest game of chicken in Canadian history.
00:33It brought a city to its knees in an instant.
00:36Two square kilometers of Halifax simply obliterated
00:39by the largest human-made explosion prior to Hiroshima.
00:43On December 6, 1917, the French munition ship SS Montblanc
00:48steamed into Halifax carrying over 2,800 tons of explosives.
00:52A Norwegian vessel was steaming through the harbor in the opposite direction.
00:55By the time they met in the narrows, each ship's evasive maneuvers only brought them closer together.
01:01They collided.
01:02The crash lit a fire.
01:03And within minutes, the Montblanc detonated with the force of 2.9 kilotons of TNT.
01:09It was the largest human-made blast before Hiroshima.
01:12The explosion obliterated Halifax's Richmond district,
01:15killing nearly 2,000 people and injuring 9,000 more.
01:19A tsunami surged through the harbor, and windows shattered up to 50 miles away.
01:24There were many never even found, because there was a tsunami,
01:27a wave of water that came up the shore on both sides,
01:30and washed away numbers of people who were never seen again.
01:33The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
01:35On Christmas Eve 1979, Moscow made a huge miscalculation.
01:40The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
01:43And here is the old guard.
01:44Yustinov, Minister of Defense.
01:47Andropov, Head of the KGB.
01:49And Gromyko, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
01:51It was their decision, and theirs alone,
01:53to commit the Red Army to this disastrous enterprise.
01:56The Soviets hoped for a quick intervention to prop up a struggling communist government.
02:01Instead, they stumbled into a decade-long quagmire.
02:04Soviet troops unleashed scorched-earth tactics,
02:07bombings, and landmines that scarred the country and its people.
02:10The war tore Afghanistan apart.
02:13Villages were destroyed, millions fled as refugees,
02:16and daily life collapsed under occupation.
02:18It also became one of the Cold War's bloodiest proxy wars.
02:21The U.S. armed the Mujahideen to fight and outlast one of the world's greatest superpowers.
02:27By the end, at least 500,000 Afghan civilians were killed,
02:30with some estimates running far higher.
02:33Millions more were displaced,
02:35and the USSR had bumbled into its own Vietnam.
02:37And today, the never-ending conflicts still continue in Afghanistan,
02:42a land known since time immemorial as the Graveyard of Empires.
02:46It was the war that changed the world,
02:48and was the starting point for yet another war.
02:51Escalation in Vietnam by LBJ
02:54In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson made one of the most fateful decisions in American history,
03:00increasing U.S. troop levels in Vietnam.
03:02Johnson would use this incident to acquire the power to make war in Vietnam
03:07whenever and however he would choose.
03:09His plan transformed a simmering conflict into a full-scale American conflagration.
03:14Privately, Johnson admitted doubts.
03:17Publicly, he framed escalation as necessary to preserve U.S. credibility.
03:21He refused full mobilization, trying to fight the war, quote,
03:25on the cheap, to protect his domestic great society agenda.
03:28The mistake proved catastrophic.
03:30Johnson's incremental approach failed to control events on the ground
03:34and mired America in a war it couldn't win.
03:36Yes, we've chosen to leave, but we've chosen to leave because it's no longer defendable
03:42with the resources that we have chosen to commit
03:47and the limits that we have put on our involvement in South Vietnam.
03:52More than 58,000 Americans were killed before the war's end.
03:57Estimates of Vietnamese deaths range from 1 to 3 million.
04:00The war left Southeast Asia devastated and Americans' trust in government shattered.
04:05The Battle of Teutoburg Forest
04:07Rome believed Germania was subdued.
04:09That delusion cost them three legions.
04:11In 9 CE, General Publius Quintilius Verus marched 15,000 to 20,000 men into unfamiliar forests.
04:19He placed all of their lives in the hands of his Germanic ally, Arminius.
04:23Arminius was undoubtedly the liberator of Germania.
04:28He fought the Romans when their power was at its height and decisively defeated them.
04:34Though trained by Rome, Arminius' heart belonged to Germania.
04:38He lured the legions into the dense Teutoburg Forest,
04:41where for three days, guerrilla ambushes shredded Roman columns.
04:45Trapped and unable to form proper battle lines,
04:48the soldiers were slaughtered almost to the last man.
04:50Verus and many officers fell on their own swords rather than be captured.
04:54Rome not only lost three legionary eagles, but also its dream of conquering Germania.
05:00From then on, the empire's frontier froze at the Rhine.
05:03Arminius' war of liberation was devastating to the empire.
05:07It constituted the first time in which the Romans withdrew from conquered territory.
05:14The end of Roman imperial expansion can be traced back with real validity to Arminius' victory.
05:21The Irish Potato Famine.
05:23When a potato blight hit Ireland in 1845,
05:25it could have been a crisis the British government mitigated.
05:28Instead, catastrophic policies turned a famine into a man-made catastrophe.
05:32In 1846, the blight returned, and that year destroyed almost the entire crop,
05:40leaving millions of poor Irish people to face starvation.
05:45London clung to laissez-faire non-interference.
05:48They continued to export Irish grain and livestock even as millions starved.
05:53Efforts at relief were bungled, underfunded, or withdrawn far too quickly.
05:57The resulting devastation was massive.
05:59The scars are still felt in Ireland today.
06:02Over a million people died, with another million emigrating out of sheer desperation.
06:07Even today, in the 21st century, Ireland has still not returned to the population levels of 1845.
06:16Ireland's demography was forever altered as a result of both.
06:20Crop failure may have started the crisis,
06:22but the Great Famine was a political failure of epic proportions.
06:25Britain's callous miscalculations and refusal to act decisively were responsible for incredible suffering.
06:32Japan attack on Pearl Harbor
06:33Dawn broke over Hawaii on December 7th, 1941,
06:37and with it came fire from the skies.
06:40Japanese planes roared into Pearl Harbor,
06:42unleashing torpedoes and bombs on the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
06:45The base was attacked by 350 Imperial Japanese aircrafts.
06:51Though the raid only lasted 75 minutes,
06:54the Japanese destroyed or damaged nearly 20 American naval vessels,
06:58including eight battleships and more than 340 airplanes.
07:02Battleships smoldered, aircraft were shredded on the ground,
07:05and more than 2,400 Americans lay dead.
07:08It may have seemed like a stunning triumph for Imperial Japan.
07:11In truth, they had merely woken a sleeping giant.
07:14The attack silenced isolationist American voices, uniting the country.
07:19The full might of American industry was put behind the war effort.
07:23Worse for Japan, the strike missed vital targets like aircraft carriers,
07:27fuel depots, and repair yards.
07:28They were pivotal to America's counter-strike.
07:31In just six minutes, four of the same Japanese aircraft carriers used in the Pearl Harbor attack are destroyed.
07:40And over 3,000 Japanese soldiers are killed.
07:44Instead of breaking American power, Pearl Harbor ensured Japan's road to ruin.
07:49The failed Mongol invasions of Japan.
07:52Kublai Khan could have conquered China, but Japan was his undoing.
07:55In 1274, he launched a fleet of 900 ships.
07:59Unfortunately, the vessels were mostly riverboats pressed into ocean service.
08:04Storms wrecked much of the fleet, forcing the survivors to retreat.
08:08Undeterred, Kublai tried again in 1281 with two massive armadas.
08:12One from Korea carrying about 40,000 men, and another from China with around 100,000.
08:18This time, the mistake was compounded.
08:20The Chinese fleet's hastily built ships couldn't endure the voyage.
08:24When a massive typhoon struck, the armadas were obliterated.
08:27Tens of thousands of Mongol, Chinese, and Korean soldiers drowned.
08:32It was one of the deadliest naval disasters in history.
08:35Japan was spared, and the divine wind, Kamikaze, became the stuff of legend.
08:40The Spanish Armada
08:42King Philip II of Spain sent one of the most formidable fleets ever assembled to crush England.
08:47In the summer of 1588, Elizabeth and the people of England faced an overwhelming threat.
08:55The country was on the verge of invasion by the most powerful military fleet ever assembled,
09:01the Spanish Armada.
09:03In 1588, 130 ships carrying nearly 55,000 men set sail to rendezvous with an invasion force.
09:11On paper, it should have been overwhelming, but mistakes and miscalculations doomed the armada.
09:17The Spanish ships were slower and less maneuverable,
09:20while English fire ships scattered their formation before the decisive battle at Gravelin.
09:24Even worse, the retreat carried them into brutal storms off Scotland and Ireland.
09:28By the time the battered survivors limped home, Spain had lost 44 ships and thousands of men.
09:34To this day, no one knows how many were lost,
09:38but almost half the ships that had sailed from Spain so proudly never returned.
09:43The Invincible Armada proved anything but,
09:47and its defeat marked the beginning of England's rise as a naval superpower,
09:51the Fourth Crusade.
09:53Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Crusade to reclaim Jerusalem.
09:56Instead, it ended with Christianity's deadliest own goals.
10:00Venetian scheming and crusader greed diverted the expedition from Egypt to fellow Christian cities.
10:05In 1202, they sacked Zara in Croatia, a Catholic city, earning excommunication.
10:11By 1204, their eyes fell on the jewel of the region, Constantinople,
10:16the capital of the Byzantine Empire and supposed ally.
10:19The city was stormed, looted, and burned.
10:22Thousands of Byzantines were slaughtered, churches desecrated, and treasures hauled back to Venice.
10:27The empire was carved up, leaving Byzantium fatally weakened.
10:30When the Ottomans finally returned in 1453, they finished the job.
10:35Legend holds that Constantinople fell after another deadly error.
10:39The city guards accidentally left the Kerkoporta gate unlocked.
10:43Russia invades Ukraine.
10:49Eight years after annexing Crimea in 2014,
10:52Russia followed up with a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine.
10:56Vladimir Putin expected the war to end in a matter of days or hours.
10:59Instead, it is still dragging on.
11:02The death toll of Russian troops is staggering.
11:04Some estimates suggest that around a million soldiers have been killed or wounded.
11:08Many of the casualties are now older fighters with little or no training.
11:13Significant numbers have also been recruited from prison.
11:16The attrition rate has forced Russia to conscript new fodder for the war machine.
11:20Economically, Russia faces severe sanctions and a crippling recession.
11:24Russia has been forced to seek economic aid and military armament from China and North Korea.
11:30Western aid to Ukraine has allowed their military in 2024
11:33to launch the first significant military incursion into Russian territory since World War II.
11:39Video shows a Ukrainian soldier driving through the bombed-out Russian countryside unchallenged,
11:45then celebrating driving back a Russian tank.
11:49The Wanggongchang explosion.
11:51Gunpowder has been used by China since the 9th century.
11:55Early Chinese alchemists were trying to create a potion for immortality.
11:59Instead, what they created was a flammable powder that burned down many of their homes.
12:04Despite centuries of use and refinement, Beijing officials were criminally negligent in the spring of 1626.
12:12It never seemed to occur to anyone in power that the center of a densely populated city
12:16wasn't the best choice for storing volatile materials.
12:19Late on the morning of May 30th, for reasons which remain unclear,
12:24the Wanggongchang Armory exploded.
12:26Everything within four square kilometers was all but obliterated,
12:30and debris was launched across the length of the city.
12:32Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed.
12:37And large swaths of the city were utterly destroyed.
12:41The American Invasion of Iraq.
12:43My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations
12:50to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.
12:56The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was driven by the deadly combination of misleading claims and poor assumptions.
13:03The U.S. government convinced their allies that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorism.
13:09There was no link between 9-11 and Iraq, so the Bush administration began manufacturing justifications.
13:16The Bush administration's assertions were later proven false.
13:19No WMDs were ever found, nor was any evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda.
13:24By some estimates, the invasion led to over a million deaths and casualties,
13:30as well as widespread destruction and regional instability.
13:33The U.S. invasion also ultimately played a crucial role in the rise of ISIS.
13:38The economic cost to Americans is hard to pin down,
13:41though some experts believe that the war cost taxpayers between $1 and $2 trillion.
13:46It changed the entire Middle East.
13:49In fact, it changed much of our world forever.
13:53A mistranslation may have caused America's nuclear attacks.
13:56The U.S. had a choice.
13:58An invasion of Japan requiring a million troops or a top-secret weapon.
14:04The Japanese were given an ultimatum, surrender or suffer dire consequences.
14:09After the fall of Hitler's Germany,
14:11the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding Japan's unconditional surrender.
14:16The declaration came with a warning.
14:18Refusal would result in, quote,
14:20prompt and utter destruction.
14:22The culture of Imperial Japan couldn't tolerate public consideration of surrender.
14:27They responded with a statement including the word,
14:29Moksatsu.
14:30The Allies interpreted this as an outright rejection of the Potsdam Declaration.
14:35Moksatsu, they believed, meant to ignore with silent contempt.
14:38They acted accordingly, dropping two nuclear bombs.
14:42When we came back after the surrender,
14:45we came back to the same area and the whole city was completely flat.
14:51It was really devastating to see.
14:53However, some believe Foreign Minister Togo was counseling circumspection and patience.
14:58He hoped that the Soviets would mediate a better deal.
15:01In the years after the nuclear attack on Japan,
15:03people have argued that by Moksatsu,
15:06Japanese leaders just meant, quote, withholding comment.
15:09Truman claimed he never lost a night of sleep over his decision.
15:12And to this day, the United States has never apologized for it.
15:15Still, the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki firmly cemented atomic bombs
15:19as the world's weapons of absolute last resort.
15:22Moctezuma II welcomes the Spanish.
15:25Cortez's legacy is a complex one.
15:28On one hand, he is the conqueror of Mexico.
15:31He brought and extended the Spanish Empire.
15:35But from the indigenous point of view, he was a mass murderer.
15:39Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor,
15:41received Hernán Cortez and his conquistadors in 1519
15:44with a mix of curiosity and apprehension.
15:47According to some historians, Moctezuma,
15:50influenced by a prophecy suggesting that a god would return
15:53in the form of a pale-skinned man,
15:55initially saw the Spaniards as divine.
15:57Cortez, he thought, could be the incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.
16:02He sought to appease them by offering gifts and hospitality,
16:05believing this would prevent conflict.
16:07Cortez was motivated by these treasures and continued towards the city.
16:12He later wrote,
16:13Moctezuma came to greet us and with him some 200 lords,
16:17all barefoot and dressed in a different costume.
16:20Instead, his decision invited invasion.
16:23Cortez and his men exploited Moctezuma's hospitality
16:25to gather intelligence, gain political leverage,
16:28and incite dissent among the Aztecs.
16:31The Spaniards spread disease
16:32and formed alliances with rivals to the Aztecs.
16:35This alliance would be crucial for Cortez,
16:38as the Tlaxcateca helped him navigate the landscape,
16:41served as translators, and urged the defeat of Moctezuma.
16:44Combined with their superior weaponry,
16:46they easily conquered the Aztec Empire completely by 1521.
16:51The wrong turn that triggered World War I.
16:54From a pistol shot at Sarajevo,
16:57the first of the great modern world wars exploded.
17:00And almost overnight, all of Europe was engulfed in conflict.
17:04World War I is infamous in history as an accidental war.
17:08The assassination of one man,
17:09when combined with a series of interwoven alliances,
17:12was a string of dominoes that dragged the world into armed conflict.
17:15But did you know that Archduke Ferdinand was killed thanks to a wrong turn?
17:20The morning of the assassination,
17:22Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his motorcade managed to avoid a bombing by his would-be assassins.
17:26The bomb was thrown by Nadelko Cibrinovic,
17:29a member of the Young Serbian Nationalist Movement.
17:31There are a few injuries, but Ferdinand and his wife are unharmed.
17:35They continued their day until his driver accidentally made a wrong turn.
17:40He attempted to pull the car back in reverse, stalling the car.
17:44Unfortunately, he did so right in front of Gavrillo Princip,
17:47who happened to be on that wrong street at a cafe,
17:50and took advantage of the situation to shoot Ferdinand.
17:53As the crowd tries to subdue Princip, the Archduke and his wife are left bleeding in the car.
17:57Insulting Genghis Khan.
17:59Genghis Khan's legacy today is his reputation as a great conqueror and ruthless ruler.
18:06Under him, the Mongols were able to sweep out of Central Asia and take over most of the known world.
18:13Genghis Khan knew that diplomacy was as useful a tool as conquest.
18:17To that end, in response to the killing of a caravan of his merchants in Khwarazm,
18:22Khan sent a diplomatic mission to Shah Al-Adin Muhammad II of the neighboring Khwarazmian Empire.
18:27His envoys were not greeted warmly.
18:29The Shah, ruler of a vast empire, dismissed the power of the Mongols.
18:34He accused the envoys of espionage and had them executed.
18:37The great Khan did not take this light well.
18:40He launched a savage and devastating campaign against the Khwarazmian Empire.
18:44He systematically pulled Khwarazm apart battle by battle and city by city.
18:4950,000 Tajik infantry poured out of the city to meet the Mongols.
18:54But resistance was futile.
18:56The war ultimately decimated the population.
18:59As a result, the empire was brought to utter ruin by 1221.
19:04The Shah managed to escape his Mongol pursuers only in the spring of 1221
19:09to die a broken and defeated man on a remote island in the Caspian Sea.
19:14The Taiping Rebellion.
19:16It began with a failed exam candidate who claimed he was the brother of Jesus.
19:20It ended with mountains of corpses.
19:23Hong Xiuquan's fanatical movement built a breakaway kingdom
19:26and went to war with the ruling Qing dynasty.
19:28His Taiping Rebellion tore through China for 14 years,
19:32and the cost was almost unimaginable.
19:34At least 20 million people were killed before it ended.
19:37Some estimates climb much higher.
19:39Historians across the board agree it was the bloodiest civil war in human history.
19:44Villages were razed, famine and disease swept the land,
19:47and millions fled their homes.
19:49The rebellion was finally crushed in 1864,
19:52but the dynasty that survived it was fatally weakened.
19:55By 1912, 2,000 years of imperial China were gone.
19:59Stalin's Terror Famine.
20:01In terms of ruthlessness, bloodlust, Stalin remains one of the greatest villains of the 20th century.
20:09To this day, the Holodomor is considered one of the greatest tragedies of Ukrainian history.
20:14A term meaning death by starvation.
20:18It was genocide.
20:19From 1932 to 1933,
20:22Joseph Stalin pushed a brutal campaign of forced collectivization and grain requisitioning in Soviet Ukraine.
20:28Unfortunately, the country was already in the middle of a food shortage,
20:32exacerbated by Stalin's policies.
20:34Records show the Soviets took over 4 million tons of grain from Ukraine alone in 1932.
20:41That same year, a new law punished anyone who took even a handful of grain,
20:46or was caught hiding grain or bread,
20:48with 10 years in prison or the death penalty.
20:52As a result, Ukraine fell into a terrible famine.
20:55By the end of 1933, somewhere between 3.5 and 5 million Ukrainians perished due to hunger and related diseases.
21:03In the fall and winter of 1932,
21:06Soviet police began seizing not just grain, but anything edible, even livestock.
21:13Stalin refused to provide aid, although Russia continued to export grain.
21:18The Holodomor devastated Ukrainian agriculture and local economies,
21:21ripping families to pieces and traumatizing a nation.
21:25Hitler invading Russia
21:27Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union was his greatest gamble of the Second World War.
21:33One problem with narcissistic dictators is that their arrogance often prevents them from learning the lessons of history.
21:40They think themselves special, able to achieve what those in the past could not.
21:44Despite facing a Red Army with almost 3 million men on its western border,
21:50Hitler is confident of victory.
21:51That is one of many reasons why Adolf Hitler repeated Napoleon's classic blunder,
21:56invading Russia.
21:58In 1812, the French emperor pulled together a massive army from his conquests in Europe
22:03and sent this merry band into the frozen Russian winter.
22:06They were almost completely destroyed.
22:09In 1941, Hitler betrayed his erstwhile ally, Joseph Stalin.
22:13Operation Barbarossa was a massive Nazi mobilization to the east.
22:17The Germans saw major victories in Ukraine until they reached Moscow in the winter of 1941.
22:23Their backs were broken and were forced to retreat west.
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22:43Mao's Great Leap Forward
22:44His radical policies had devastated the country and triggered the deadliest famine known to human history.
22:50Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, aimed to rapidly industrialize China.
22:56Forcing workers in the countryside to farm crops on government-run communes
23:00and millions more to manufacture crude steel in homemade blast furnaces.
23:05Like Stalin before him, Mao embarked on a massive forced collectivization effort
23:10and large-scale agricultural and construction projects like dams.
23:14The campaign was a disaster.
23:16Mao's production targets were utterly unrealistic.
23:18The Chinese people were being forced to work tirelessly on land they once owned themselves.
23:24And they were starting to lose morale.
23:25Mao led his nation into the jaws of a deadly and widespread famine.
23:29The deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward are estimated to be somewhere between 15 and 55 million people.
23:36This failed effort hampered China's economy and agricultural output for decades.
23:41The impact was even felt in 1975 with the Banshou Dam disaster.
23:44The dam, built during the Great Leap Forward, was poorly constructed and ultimately collapsed thanks to torrential rains.
23:52As many as 240,000 people died.
23:56History is full of blunders with high body counts.
23:58Did we leave one off our list?
24:00Let us know in the comments below.
24:01The famine is an open wound in Ireland.
24:04It is a glaring wound.
24:06It is a glaring wound.
24:06It is a glaring wound.
24:07It is a glaring wound.
24:08It is a glaring wound.
24:09It is a glaring wound.
24:10It is a glaring wound.
24:11It is a glaring wound.
24:12It is a glaring wound.
24:13It is a glaring wound.
24:14It is a glaring wound.
24:15It is a glaring wound.
24:16It is a glaring wound.
24:17It is a glaring wound.
24:18It is a glaring wound.
24:19It is a glaring wound.
24:20It is a glaring wound.
24:21It is a glaring wound.
24:22It is a glaring wound.
24:23It is a glaring wound.
24:24It is a glaring wound.
24:25It is a glaring wound.
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