You Have Failed Me.../Real Life: Difference between revisions
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(Created page with "{{trope}}Examples of [[{{ROOTPAGENAME}}]] in [[{{SUBPAGENAME}}]] include: * Admiral John Byng had failed England at the Battle of Minorca. ** "Sometim...") |
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** 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 [[Obviously Evil|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 [[Driven to Suicide|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.
** [[Villainous Breakdown|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 [[Pragmatic Villainy|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.
** As field kitchens were crucial for winter warfare, this isn't quite as silly as it sounds.
*** It's still barbaric and excessive to ''kill'' loyal people for that.
** Stalin [[The Purge|had also executed many high-ranking officers]] (read: ''90% of his officer corps'') ''before'' the war started because he was pathologically afraid of them turning against him, [[Hoist by His Own Petard|which was a great part of why the Russian military failed so miserably]] during the Winter War; they had almost no veteran tacticians left. Nobody dared to contradict Stalin, lest the same thing happen to them. Ironically, as a result, when Stalin was dying in his room, no doctor dared to enter, due to their fear that he'd randomly have them executed; therefore [[Karmic Death|Stalin died in agony as a result of his own purges]].
* 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 [https://web.archive.org/web/20060526044422/http://www.vectorsite.net/avil2.html 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 [[wikipedia:Zhu Tao|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 [[Attack! Attack! Attack!|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, [[Romance of the Three Kingdoms|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.
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** 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
** 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 [[Reassigned to Antarctica|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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