You Have Failed Me.../Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Examples of You Have Failed Me... in Real Life include:

  • Admiral John Byng had failed England at the Battle of Minorca.
    • "Sometimes it is necessary to execute one admiral to encourage the others." Since Voltaire said it, you may come across the phrase "pour encourager les autres".
    • It can be argued that it actually worked: the Seven Years War marked the rise of England as the major naval power in Europe, mostly due to the freshly 'motivated' attitude of the RN.
    • Byng wasn't the only one, either. At the time British naval law had a provision that an officer failing "to do his utmost" against the enemy was a capital offense.
    • It also explained why British naval officers were gung ho and notoriously and successfully aggressive- You had two choices- Death, or killing those other guys. Most people chose the second option.
  • To probably no one's surprise at all, Hitler had this one in his cartoonishly evil playbook. As the remnants of the Sixth Army were dying at Stalingrad, with no hope of escape or rescue, he promoted their commander, General Paulus, to Field Marshal. Because no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered, it was obvious to everyone that this was a subtle order for Paulus to commit suicide for his failure to win the battle. Subverting the trope, he didn't.
    • Men lower down on the German army totem pole also tended to suffer this a lot, particularly as war turned against Germany. For example, when the U.S. 9th Armored Division captured an intact bridge over the Rhine at Remagen, the German officers responsible for its defense were quickly court-martialed and executed. By the war's end, German soldiers had almost as much to fear from accusations of 'desertion', 'cowardice' or 'defeatism' from their own side as they did from the enemy.
    • Near the end, Hitler has this Up to Eleven: he thought the entire nation of Germany had failed him. Due to this, his final orders were to destroy the country in a sort of scorched-earth tactic. Fortunately, his generals finally decided he was batshit insane and surrendered instead.
  • Stalin executed many high-ranking officers who lost to significantly smaller numbers of Finnish soldiers during the Winter War. Since "failing Stalin (for the last time)" is not a charge that can be formally brought at a court-martial, one general's official offense was losing twelve battlefield kitchens to the enemy.
  • Stalin was not a forgiving man during the Second World War, either. When production of the Il-2 attack aircraft fell behind schedule, he dashed off a telegram to Ilyushin's plant managers which read "YOU HAVE LET DOWN OUR COUNTRY AND OUR RED ARMY. YOU HAVE NOT MANUFACTURED IL-2S UNTIL NOW. THE IL-2 AIRCRAFT ARE NECESSARY FOR OUR RED ARMY NOW, LIKE AIR, LIKE BREAD. SHENKMAN ... PRODUCES ONE IL-2 A DAY AND TRETIAKOV ... ONE OR TWO MIG-3S DAILY. IT A MOCKERY OF OUR COUNTRY AND THE RED ARMY. I ASK YOU NOT TO TRY THE GOVERNMENT'S PATIENCE, AND DEMAND THAT YOU MANUFACTURE MORE ILS. I WARN YOU FOR THE LAST TIME. STALIN." Ilyushin went on to produce 36,000 Il-2s, making it one of the most heavily-produced aircraft in history.
  • After General Zhu Tao of the Tang Dynasty rushed into battle against two of his rivals and was soundly defeated, he executed two advisers who had advocated attacking immediately instead of allowing his soldiers to rest for a few days.
    • Execution for failure was the standard in Ancient China. Part of why Cao Cao succeeded against Yuan Shao was that the latter kept executing capable generals for failures or for giving advice he didn't want to hear. Even Zhuge Liang (yeah, that one) executed one of his most brilliant generals who lost a crucial battle. According to the book at least, it was because the general failed to take important tactical advice into consideration and Zhuge Liang was reluctant to do it because he considered the other man to be like a son to him.
    • Even earlier, a Han general was captured by the Mongols, and landed his family in hot water for not committing suicide. The furious emperor had his family executed and had the one guy (surnamed Sima, incidentally) who spoke up for him thrown in prison.
  • Cowardly Roman soldiers were punished by being divided into groups of ten and drawing lots, whereupon the unfortunate soldier in each group would be beaten to death by his comrades.
    • This practice is the origin of the word "decimated", which originally meant killing one out of ten, but was later Flanderized to mean "killing everyone".
    • This practice was abolished before the Imperial era. The reason was that brutal punishments have averse effect: they will collapse the already shaky morale altogether. Ordinary soldiers, who face the enemy on the battlefield, consider killing one of their own as a murder. A decimated unit usually had to be disbanded and its soldiers assigned to other units. Decimatio does not mean only losing one tenth of an unit: it means losing the whole unit. Instead punishment of shame, like having to eat only barley instead of wheat or not being allowed to eat sitting were introduced.
  • During the French Revolution, and more specifically during the Revolutionary Wars, generals who failed were executed. This is explained by the fact that i. only traitors could fail considering French "élan vital" couldn't be beat (according to the Convention) ii. most if not all generals were generals during the monarchy, and henceforth considered as traitors, except if they proved otherwise by actually winning.
  • Two notable times during the Greco-Persian Wars. At one time the Persian Army was trying to build a pontoon and it was washed away by the ocean whereupon Xerxes executed the engineers. Another time at Salimis several Phoenician officers came to Xerxes to blame unpleasant fortunes of war on ships from Greek vassal states. At that moment Queen Artimisima was seen sinking a ship which Xerxes thought was an enemy (it was a friendly as it happened, which the queen was sinking for reasons of her own). Xerxes was enraged because the Phoenicians were not doing all that well, and the Greeks were; and ordered the officers beheaded.
    • These are little more than legend, or anecdote, really. The Greek sources also reported Xerxes bringing 2.4 million "slave soldiers" and 1207 warships, while in fact modern historians have reduced that number to 149 thousand troops and 600 triremes.
  • A more pleasant version of this is the massive downsizings in high command that happen during almost every major war. The problem is that the qualities that win promotion in peacetime (administrative skill to put the best light, bootlicking skill to put it cynically), are not the ones that win promotion in a major war (killing people and breaking things). And it is hard to keep the later in check when there are no people to kill and things to break. So more respectable looking officers get promoted which is all very well as a peacetime military's primary mission is simply to remain in being ready for the next war-and hopefully stave off said war by making sure their existence is known. The first year or so of conflict tends to have quite a few Reassignments to Antarctica among the command.
    • The US Army managed to "cheat" this to some degree by holding the Great Louisiana Maneuvers about a year before entering the war (WW II). As a result it was able to single who to downsize early.
    • The US Navy had its own opportunities to test its officers from delicate games of "chicken" in the Atlantic before it entered the war.
      • Admiral Chester Nimitz was a subversion. He believed in being tolerant of officers who were at least willing to look for trouble (and there was never a crippling shortage of those to the Navy's credit), and if they made idiots of themselves he assumed that they just weren't in their proper occupational specialty. As a result some Admirals were disastrous at first but splendid later.
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