5 Embarrassing Failures History Class Turned Into Victories
History is written by the winners, as the old saying goes. But that's not exactly true -- sometimes history is written by wishful thinking. When the real event isn't quite inspirational or romantic enough, we just make up a prettier version and call it history.
Just consider the way we remember ...
#5. Live Aid
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It was the beginning of the modern era of celebrity activism. Bono would not be out there doing what he's doing without Live Aid.
Getty
Which would be a shame.
How History Remembers It:
It was 1985, and the music world got together to raise money for starving children in Ethiopia via an intercontinental 16-hour music festival known as Live Aid. With record sales, merchandise and video sales, it was estimated that Live Aid had raised a massive 150 to 170 million pounds, or $250 million. You can feed a lot of damned children with that kind of cash. Probably more than once.
No question, it was one of the feel-good events of the decade, and was called "the greatest concert of all time." The event played to 77,000 attendees in England, and 100,000 more attended in the U.S. It was beamed to TV sets worldwide to an audience of 1.5 billion people. Organizer Bob Geldof was given an honorary knighthood in 1986, and to this day, the event is heralded as "the standard by which other all-hands-on-deck rock and charity events are known."
Wikipedia
"Have fun, but not too much because of the children."
The Reality:
Here is where we learn about the sad, unintended consequences of African humanitarian aid efforts. As is often the case in Africa, the famine they were trying to fix in Ethiopia wasn't just a result of not growing enough food -- it was because people were A) being displaced by war and B) under the thumb of a bullshit government.
Now, when another government gives foreign aid to an impoverished country like Ethiopia, the donor government can set conditions, and enforce them. If you blow the money on weapons to fight your civil war, you don't get any more money.
Wikipedia
"Toss the food. We'll break the crates up into cudgels."
But a fundraiser like Live Aid doesn't work that way -- the money is given to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and in order to do their work, they have to work under, and obey, the bullshit government. In other words, all those piles of well-meaning cash wind up propping up the assholes who helped create the famine. It's like buying Christmas presents for the poor kids down the street, only to see the abusive dad sell them for drug money.
tadias
Before inviting Castro over and shooting the breeze.
So for instance, the aid workers who traveled to Ethiopia were forced to exchange the aid money for the country's currency at highly inflated rates, thus inadvertently funding and reinvigorating the evil government. That money also helped fund the government's forced relocation program of thousands of starving people from the south of the country to camps in the north. It is estimated that one in six of those who made the journey died.
Did Live Aid feed a lot of starving people? No doubt. But as others have pointed out, it's entirely possible that the horrible things done with the cash killed as many or more people than the food saved. In the real world, good intentions don't always stand a chance against a bunch of shitheads with AK-47s.
militaryphotos
"We're not poor, look at all the war we can afford."
#4. The Battle of Thermopylae (From 300)
You've probably seen 300. We're guessing that you didn't think that it was an exact portrayal of history -- something about the man with the axe for a hand should have given that away. But whatever liberties the filmmakers took with details like the number of monsters in the Persian army, the basic elements are surprisingly accurate.
That's an authentic ancient Persian weapon grafted onto his hand, we'll have you know.
How History Remembers It:
Xerxes actually did lead the huge Persian army to invade Greece via a narrow mountain pass with steep cliffs on one side and the sea on the other. They were met by King Leonidas (who really was a badass that spouted James Bond-like tough guy lines), and 300 Spartans (well, among others -- we'll get to that). Their brave last stand has gone down in history to the point that today, the word "Spartan" conjures connotations of bravery, heroics and dogged survival. Their name is attached to everything from football teams to engine chassis companies. Hell, they even entered our language as an adjective -- dictionaries define "Spartan" as "rigorously self-disciplined ... courageous in the face of pain, danger or adversity."
Wikipedia
Waving a sword around your exposed dong is pretty adverse, we'd say.
There's even a Facebook group dedicated to renaming Trojan condoms to Spartan condoms, because "nothin gets thru em." Tell us Leonidas wouldn't be proud of that shit.
Wikipedia
"What the hell are condoms?"
The Reality:
Regardless of how brave and selfless the Spartans were in their sacrifice, the facts have gotten a little skewed in the telling. First of all, you need to add a zero to the end of Leonidas's force -- there were about 3,000 troops, if you count the various groups who stayed to help the 300 Spartans.
Σταύρος
"This is SPARTA! And THESPIAE! And THEBES! And ..."
But more importantly, here's the part they didn't mention in the movie. In 300, after Leonidas and his men make their valiant last stand and are killed, the film skips forward to the Persians about to get crushed by a wave of Spartan reinforcements. It implies that the brave 300 had delayed the Persians long enough for help to arrive and finish them off. In reality, Xerxes still managed to invade and ravage Greece, completely sacking Athens after the citizens were forced to abandon the city. They leveled the huge temples on top of the Acropolis and destroyed the city and all the surrounding countryside.
Wikipedia
"It may look bad now, but come back in 2,000 years and there'll be a tree or two."
The Greeks would eventually get their shit together and beat back the Persians (specifically, the Greek Navy), but the Battle of Thermopylae was more like an amazing, miraculous play to stop the opposing team on the goal line, only to have them go ahead and score the touchdown on the next play. Yes, it makes for a great clip in the highlight reel. But it didn't win the game.
#3. The Tet Offensive
In 1968, the Vietnam War was steadily escalating. The North Vietnamese (the commie bad guys) attempted to make one really big overwhelming push and win the war once and for all. Known as the Tet Offensive, the attack involved more than 80,000 troops attacking more than 100 towns and villages, and was the largest military action at that point in the war.
How History Remembers It:
The Tet Offensive signaled the turning point of the war for the North Vietnamese, and against the U.S.-backed South. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., this had started happening:
Wikipedia
Botanical warfare.
The people were starting to distrust their government in a serious way, and President Lyndon Johnson's administration found that it was almost completely unable to convince the American people that the war was still winnable.
Wikipedia
"We have fire-breathing tanks! How can we not win?"
CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who at the time was the most trusted and recognizable name in news, went on TV and declared that the U.S. should basically just "negotiate, not as victors," because at best "the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." Upon hearing this, Johnson was rumored to say, "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
Life
"I think I left it in Arkansas somewhere."
After coming into office, President Richard Nixon initiated a policy of "Vietnamization" and withdrew troops from the region. This meant the North Vietnamese were free to take over South Vietnam, and the whole thing had been one huge, stupid waste.
vietnammemorial
"Don't feel bad, guys. One day, they'll turn this war into some pretty great movies."
The Reality:
The Tet Offensive resulted in a huge defeat for the communists.
Though initially the attacks caught the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces off guard, they pushed back hard and inflicted massive casualties, all but crippling the North Vietnamese military. The failure of the North Vietnamese was so great that far from being a demonstration of their imminent victory, American generals such as William Westmoreland believed that, after Tet, the North Vietnamese army was so damaged that it was finally on the verge of defeat.
Wikipedia
Again, fire-breathing tanks.
But that wasn't the narrative that would survive in the press. Earlier we referred to these versions of history as "wishful thinking," but it's not that anyone short of the Viet Cong were rooting for the Americans to fail. It's just that those who believed the war was a dead end finally had their proof, whether or not the facts on the ground supported it. This was the story everyone opposed to the war had been waiting to tell.
learnhistory
If you hum "Ride of the Valkyries" loudly enough, you can ignore anything.
North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh actually called it a few years earlier when he said his side didn't need military victories, but only needed to hang on until the U.S. got sick of the whole thing and bailed out. So, who knows, maybe treating Tet as a disaster, and thus making it politically easier to start getting out, was the best thing that could have happened. But it's giving a whole bunch of credit to a North Vietnamese army that kind of got its ass kicked.
#5; Live Aid: I had heard that the people behind Live Aid actually did manage to buy food for the Ethiopians but were unable to distribute it due to local interference and it wound up rotting on the beach. This article makes the failure even worse.
Reply#4; Thermopylae: Even in the movie, they say that there were others. They actually showed the Arcadians meeting the Spartans on the road to "The Hot Gates" (Thermopylae in Ancient Greek). That's the scene where Leonidas is asking the men of the allied force what their professions were and then remarking that he brought more soldiers than the Arcadians. Also, in a scene later in the battle, it shows the Spartans falling back and luring the Persians into a flanking maneuver by the Spartan allies as the Arcadians and the Thespians, etc ran down the cliff to smash into them. The narrator says that they (in essence) fight like children but they do their part. Yes, the Spartans had help and yes their help did have a part to play in the battle but that's also like saying that a team of Navy SEALs had help from a local high school. Remember that Sparta trained their men (and to a lesser extent, the women as well) for war from a very young age so they were like special forces soldiers fighting with/against barely organized militia ("ordinary" citizens who happened to own weapons). They knew how to fight well both individually and as a group and the 300 that Leonidas took with him were among the best soldiers in his country. I would think that one of the 300 was the equal or better of any 9 of their allies. However, give the allies their due. "They did their part." Also, Rabbitfoot92 was correct "At the end of 300. . it was showing a much later battle, it wasn't reinforcements showing up 5 minutes later. That's why the guy with the missing eye had an eyepatch instead of just a rag. He obviously wasn't telling the story of the battle 5 minutes after the battle ended. Come on writer, use common sense"
#3 You're correct about The Tet Offensive. I am not entirely certain about the NVA but at the very least, the Viet Cong guerillas were pretty much wiped out after that. They admitted it themselves. Had the U.S. not pulled out of the war, they would have been fighting a severely depleted NVA force, at best. Also, according to Don Harten, B-52 co-pilot, F-105 and F-111 pilot in Viet Nam. In his own words from his book "Arc Light One" . . .
"Chapter Three, shich is an overview of the Cold War leading up to Vietnam, was thoroughly researched and every fact in the chapter was multiply verified. Of course, some tried to modify history - and they succeeded somewhat in the minds of many people - but few revisionists ever were in Vietnam! I was there, literally from this opening shot of the war until the very end. I flew another tour in B-52's, later an extended tour in F-105's and yet another in F-111's during the Linebacker operations that ended the war. we won and later gave it away politically! Result: the Killing Fields."
BTW, Treason is defined as providing aid and comfort to the enemy (usually but not always in a time of war). In "The Tunnels of Cu Chi" by Tom Mangold and John Penycate, it is related by former Viet Cogn guerillas that they used newspaper clipping from The New York Times and Washington Post, among others to boost their own morale and recruit troops. Apparently we have learned nothing from this.
#2; The Miracle at Dunkirk: I have never heard that described as a victory. I have always heard it described as a disaster and "for some reason, the Germans let us go," kind of thing. Every documentary I have ever seen and everything I have ever read mentions leaving all of the equipment behind and only getting the men out. I'm certain they needed some kind of morale boost and remember that "Remember the Alamo!" was a rallying cry for Texas during their war with Mexico. It was a defeat that they managed to use to inspire their troops.
That being said, I did like the article. With the exception of a couple of little pointers, John Champion did a good job writing this one.
Dunkirk and the Battle of Thermopylae were strategic victories, but tactical defeats.
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ReplyI dont think I was ever taught that Dunkirk was a success, not by History class or by my granddad.
ReplyAt the end of 300. . it was showing a much later battle, it wasn't reinforcements showing up 5 minutes later. That's why the guy with the missing eye had an eyepatch instead of just a rag. He obviously wasn't telling the story of the battle 5 minutes after the battle ended. Come on writer, use common sense
Reply300 did actually show the soldiers from other cities(or at least Athens) being involved in the battle, but they are portayed as pretty much useless compared to the awesomeness of the Spartans.
ReplyBut amazingly In some ways this is even more inaccurate than if they had just focused on the 300 Spartans. While its true Sparta had the most well trained and generally skilled soldiers in ancient Greece, its not as if the other cities just sent any old schmucks to battle. And Athens in particular, more specifically the Athenian navy was critical in winning the Persian wars. In many ways probably more so than the Spartan infantry. But the movie 300 doesnt even mention the naval battles or their importance in winning.
It wasn't about the persian wars.... it was about thermopylae only.
300 does mention Athens in the beginning of the movie when Leonidas mentions that they have already said, "No" to the Persian messenger (this is a little before he kicks the guy into the well). The army that the Spartans meet on the way to Thermopylae is made up of Arcadians (who are best known for being good at Pac Man, Centipede, any game you play with tokens). It is also stated that the Arcadian army is made up of blacksmiths, weavers, farmers, etc (basically, your standard partially trained militia; think of our minutemen in the revolutionary war only instead of guns, you give them swords and spears which really take a lot more skill and training to be proficient with) while the spartan army is made up of trained soldiers who had been learning the art of combat from before puberty hit. Also the only naval help, the greeks received at this particular battle was from the sea itself destroying the Persian ships. And all of their vaunted navalness did not help Athens when Sparta came calling some time later. Sparta defeated Athens rather handily (granted, the Athenian Navy DID play a huge part in the Persian wars) when they fought each other. The problem with Sparta was while they were great warriors, they sucked @$$ as rulers.
On Tet you've really bought into Johnson-era Propaganda. Using the phrase "North Vietnamese Army" is a huge tell. Technically this never existed, because the NVA always claimed to be the only legitimate Army in either Vietnam. More importantly the Southerners fighting for Communism were actually native Southerners. They fought mostly using weapons they made themselves in the South, or borrowed/stole from our South Vietnamese allies.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesMilitarily et is analogous to Cold Harbor. Tactically Grant lost that battle, but as a direct result of it he was able to win the war. Same goes with Tet. If the south had been able to keep the Communists from re-growing their entire cadre network in a few years; or the American people hadn't interpreted Tet as proof government claims we were winning the war was inherent BS, maybe we could have won the war. But since neither of those things happened we lost.
So, if I'm reading this correctly, you are agreeing with everything he said (It could have turned into a victory, but the interpretation was wrong), but you decided to declare him ignorant because he called the opposing side "an army".
Great job!
Let someone who is old enough to actually remember the Tet Offensive weigh in. Nobody at the time, and I mean NObody, thought it was a disaster for our side. Everybody knew we killed 10 of them for every casualty we took.
That wasn't the freaking point. The freaking point was that Gen. Westmoreland had convinced the American public that the North Vietnamese were broken and the Viet Cong all but mopped up. Tet revealed that he and the Pentagon had been feeding the American public and media wholly fictitious body counts for years. Of course Westmoreland claimed that, after Tet, the North was on the verge of defeat. He had been saying that for a year and a half BEFORE Tet!
The Viet Cong casualty count alone exceeded by a factor of 200 the total number of insurgents Westmoreland had been telling us were still out there. America was wondering how the communists managed to so precisely coordinate simultaneous attacks on more than 30 key Allied targets with their command and control network "irreparably shattered," as the Pentagon had been telling us.
The reason Tet changed the American will to continue fighting was because everyone, Republicans and Democrats, hawks and doves, liberals and conservatives, finally agreed that Gen. Westmoreland and the whole military leadership was one heaping, steaming, lying sack of monkey turds. Suddenly nobody had any idea how long the thing that was "as good as over" would go on.
50s child,
Stinking hippie. If you were of fighting age during the war, and you weren't there, your opinion is worth spit. My pappy was over there fighting and we basically snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Thank God we didn't do the same in Iraq. The kids of these turd mcmuffins protested that war too.
So basically you weren't there either? Where's your pappy? His opinion is the only one that matters out of all of ours.
And yeah, thank God how Iraq turned out. Just think; instead of total disaster, we could have, I don't know, somehow blown off a huge chunk of the planet with a thousand nukes and sent South America hurtling into space or something, and then we'd only have the misty eyes of the old and the fading photographs in Time-Life books to remember luscious Brazilian asses.
The fact that 50schild said the words "sack of monkey turds" makes me think he's more of a 2000schild......
I'm glad someone outside of military manuals pointed out that about the Tet Offensive. Basically, we won the physical battle, lost the political or "moral" battle.
Replyor, to quote the apt phrase, "lost the war"
You misrepresented why Thermopylae was treated as a victory and exactly how it was fought. Id suggest you use academic sources instead of using the movie 300, it was never treated as a military overall victory. However the battle in the long run had very important implications for the Greeks that eventually allowed them to overcome the Persians. That's why people speak such praise of the battle.
ReplyThe three day delaying action at Thermopylae bought the Athenians enough time to get the hell out of dodge- well, Athens- and man the damn boats. If the Persians had hit Athens two or three days earlier, they would have slaughtered a chunk of Athens' citizen yeomanry that made up the navy.
Us brits love to celebrate triumphant failure. It's our success stories we demonise.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesYeah and the London Olympics......
And the tie games the American's call wins for them. (P.S. Americans-- I'm Canadian, and the fact THAT I CAN SAY IT means that America DID NOT WIN the war of 1812. Sorry, but it's always bugged me)
neither did Canada....
Amundsen is getting a bit more respect here in Norway these days, today he is remembered as yet another heroic norwegian explorer that was the first to reach one of the colder places of the Earth (as if we hadn't had enough of those already, with Greenland, Canada and the North Pole already on our resume).
Replyyou guys just love the cold, don't you?
But -- he ate his dogs.
You totally miss the point about Dunkirk. It's never spun as a "victory," just a heroic, odds-defying operation, which it was. It's a widely known and widely stated fact that the Allies lost tons of firepower there, but it's still less of a loss than thousands of troops.
ReplyAnd lets not forget, when they came back for there stuff, they charged some goddamn interest.
(Western Germany)
Great stuff, very well done!
Replyi'm afraid you got a couple of Thermopylae facts wrong. it was more likely to be 5,700 Greeks, with the entire Athenian navy just offshore fighting at Artemesium. but in the end, almost all of the others left, including the fleet, leaving behind the Spartans, Thespians and Thebans in an army about 1500 strong. They all died, of course. And the burning of Athens was planned by Themistocles - he withdrew all non-crazy athenians to Salamis where he destroyed a good proportion of the Persian fleet. the real failure about Sparta in 500-400BC was Sphacteria, where 120ish Spartans surrendered.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesYeah, Athens were the real ass-kickers in that war, and outside of it as well, and yet 300 had the nerve to briefly insult them, by calling them "man-lovers" when in Sparta seduction of and relationships with (usually younger) men and boys was almost tradition.
Sorry, brief anti-300 rage.
The boy-lovers insult teed me off too. At least Plato (an Athenian) said you should avoid consummating your boy/man relationships, lolz.
Come back with your shield, or on it.
Probably the only thing 300 got right.
I think in the Tet OPffensive, you could call it a victory for the NVA because they accomplished exactly what they set out to do: turn the American citizens against the war. While they got their asses squarley kicked on the way out, most don't belive they ever had any hope of holding the ground they took during Tet.
ReplyActually the goal of the Tet Offensive was to make the South Vietnamese people to rise up in pro-communist revolt. Instead, the Viet Cong's indiscriminate attacks on civilians cost them any support they had.
There was also a theory that hasn't been confirmed that the Tet offensive was just a diversion to let the NVA attack Khe Sanh. Though some say it was the other way around. Nguyen Van Thai (yes, the guy who ordered the Tet Offiensive is still alive and nearing 100) hasn't confirmed either theories.
USA still undefeated!!! oh yeah
Reply Hide All See All 8 RepliesYou completely missed the point.
The strategy for the Viet Cong the entire time to make life difficult of the American's until they got tired of it and left.
Guess what happened?
The Viet Cong made life difficult for the American's until they got tired and left.
When you play right into the hands of your enemy and end up leaving them all the land you were trying to keep from them, it's generally assumed you lost.
your an american you f*****g a*****e hypocrite m**********r how about you get that dick out of your fat ass!@Ophanium
Hey jason, you may want to chill out there tough guy
cough, 1812, cough, cough.
@Geliduss If we had actually lost 1812, we would have gone back to being under the rule of the british empire. We may have lost a few battles, and had our capital sacked, but we never lost the war. Technically speaking the United States of America has never lost a declared war on another recognized sovereign nation.
Dude, The USA got its first tie in 1812. At best, your record is *Way to Many*-1-1. Not a perfect record.
And if you want to talk about individual battles:
Little Bighorn
I win
@Jasonx472
a) What he said was entirely true. America lost Vietnam- which it did- partially due to the turn in public opinion after Tet-which it was. Calling Ophanium an unamerican, hypocritical mofo for using his First Amendment right to freedom of speech is hypocritical in itself. (Not to mention slander and libel, which are genuine restrictions to free speech)
b) This isn't Twitter. no need for the @ sign.@jackass.
@naivesceptic. Notice how the comments appear in the order in which they were submitted. They only way to respond to a comment several entries earlier is by means of the "@" sign. Perfectly reasonable. Now, the big grown-up comment pages (i.e., Lolcats) allow responses to individual entries. Wow.....
I thought it was a matter of historical record that Amundsen did beat Scott to the Antarctic race. Apparently I was wrong
ReplyBut the article says exactly that, so you weren't wrong...
Scott just got all the goodies that Amundsen deserved, because he was dumb enough to die.
It's funny how we Norwegians were the first to explore so many of the cold parts of this world, Leiv Eriksson discovered America (no, it wasn't Erik the Red, he discovered Greenland) Roald Amundsen was the first human being on the north pole, and Fridtjof Nansen with his ship "Fram" (Forward, referring to his hatred of giving up or going back) almost made it to the north pole before frozen in the Arctic ice, he and another dude then tried to get to the north pole by skiing, but had to turn back eventually.
ReplyWhat I'm trying to say is, we norwegians really like cold places.
you guys were the only ones who ever wanted Bouvet Island -- which if I'm not mistaken is the most remote island on earth, tens of thousands of miles from Norway itself, uninhabited, and almost completely covered in glaciers.
Hey, being ever so humble there's no place like home.
Britain likes heroic failures, so we do remember Dunkirk "we retreated awesomely! woohoo" and Scott "he failed and died, hooray!" more than we might if they'd done better. For the same reason that Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards is far better remembered than any British ski jumper who actually won anything.
ReplyNo British ski jumper has ever won anything. Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards is the only British ski jumper ever.