Tom Phillips - Humans - A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

The only downside of the toilet was that it was unexpectedly complicated to use. So much so that on April 14, the captain was forced to call an engineer because he couldn’t work out how to get the thing to flush, which is probably not the sort of thing you want when you’re trying to maintain an air of authority. Unfortunately, the engineer wasn’t any better at toilet-flushing. In trying to operate the mechanism, he somehow turned the wrong valve—which quickly caused the cabin to start flooding with a deeply unpleasant mixture of seawater and human excrement.

No, I don’t know who decided “let’s put a valve in the toilets that looks an awful lot like the flush mechanism but instead lets seawater pour into our big Nazi submarine,” but presumably they were from the same school of thought as the guy who put that exhaust port in the Death Star .

The flooding of the cabin with a pungent cocktail of feces and brine would have been bad enough, but things got significantly worse when the sewage leaked down a deck onto the submarine’s batteries, which the boat’s designers had helpfully installed directly below the toilet. This caused the batteries to start spewing out large amounts of deadly chlorine gas, presenting Captain Schlitt with no option but to surface—where he was promptly attacked by the RAF, forcing him to abandon ship entirely and scuttle the vessel. Leaving U-1206 with the unfortunate legacy of being the only craft in World War II to have been sunk by a poorly thought-out toilet.

There are valuable lessons here about the paramount importance of user-interface design in high-pressure environments, and the necessity of physically separating pieces of mission-critical infrastructure, but to be perfectly honest, I only included it because it’s really funny.

Having a plan is obviously crucial to military success. But sometimes it’s possible for a plan to be too cunning and devious for its own good. If you’ve ever played chess against somebody much, much better at it than you, you’re probably familiar with how it goes: you spend ages trying to maneuver them into an extremely clever trap, only to realize that they’ve anticipated every move and you’ve actually defeated yourself. That’s basically what French general Henri Navarre did in Vietnam, except he did it with people rather than chess pieces. Like his earlier compatriot Napoleon, he hatched a plan that was perfect just so long as his opponents did exactly what he wanted them to.

It was 1953, and Navarre’s goal was to inflict a crushing and humiliating defeat on the communist Viet Minh forces (who were doing an annoyingly good job of rebelling against colonial rule in French Indochina) in order to weaken their hand in the imminent peace negotiations. So he decided to set an extremely clever trap for them. He built a major new French base in a remote area, threatening Viet Minh supply lines, and tried to draw them into a fight. The base at Điện Biên Phủ was surrounded by mountains covered in thick jungle, which gifted the Vietnamese the advantage of cover and high ground. The French were a long way from reinforcements. It was simply too tempting a target for the Viet Minh to resist. But (the plan went) superior French technology would defeat them easily: France’s air dominance would allow them to fly in supplies, while French firepower would triumph in the battle, as transporting heavy artillery through the jungle would be impossible for the Viet Minh. Excellent plan. Navarre had his men set up the base, and then waited.

And waited. For months, nothing happened. No attack came. What were the Viet Minh doing?

Turns out that what they were doing was transporting heavy artillery through the jungle. A combination of Vietnamese troops and local civilians spent those months disassembling their weapons, carrying them piece by backbreaking piece across miles of thickly forested mountain to Điện Biên Phủ and then putting them back together. After that, they simply waited for the rainy season to start, and once the French forces were stuck in the mud and the French planes couldn’t see where to drop supplies, they attacked. Navarre’s men, who had been expecting doomed suicidal foot charges by peasants carrying outdated rifles, were surprised to come under sustained bombardment from advanced artillery that wasn’t supposed to exist.

The French troops held out under siege for two months before they were overrun. The scale and the manner of the defeat was so crushing and embarrassing that the French government fell, and the Viet Minh helped secure independence for what became known as North Vietnam. After that, the rest is a familiar story: with Vietnam divided into two states, the remnants of the Viet Minh that remained in South Vietnam turned into the Viet Cong, who quickly began a violent insurgency against the southern government. The US decided to get involved to support their allies in the south, because of the whole Cold War anticommunism thing, whereupon Uncle Sam turned out not to be much better than the French at fighting basically the same war. The ensuing Vietnam War lasted for almost two decades, and somewhere between 1.5 million and 3 million people died. All of which happened, in part, because Henri Navarre came up with an extremely clever trap.

But in the annals of military failures, it’s a different front in the attempt to heat up the Cold War that provides the most indelible example—one in which the cognitive biases of a small group of people saw a superpower humiliated by a minnow.

The American debacle when they tried to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs isn’t just a classic example of groupthink in action—it’s literally where we get the word from. It was coined by psychologist Irving Janis based in large part on his study of how the Kennedy administration managed to get things so wrong.

The Bay of Pigs operation was almost certainly the most humiliating incident in America’s long-running and hilarious string of failures to overthrow the government of a small island situated right on its doorstep, although in fairness, it might not be the weirdest. (That would probably be the CIA buying up a large number of mollusks in an attempt to assassinate a scuba-diving Fidel Castro with a booby-trapped shellfish.)

The basic plan went like this: the US would train up a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles who would mount an invasion with American air support. Upon seeing their initial easy victories against the ramshackle Cuban military, the people of the island would greet them as liberators and rise up against the communists. Simple. It was what they’d already done to Guatemala, after all.

The wheels started to come off when John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon to the presidency. The plan had been developed with the assumption that Nixon, previously the vice president and a supporter of the scheme, would be the new man in the Oval Office. Kennedy was considerably less gung ho and, not unreasonably, worried about starting a war with the Soviets, so he insisted on some changes: US backing for the operation had to remain completely secret (so no air support), and the landing site had to be changed to somewhere far from large civilian populations, somewhat undermining the “trigger a popular uprising” element.

At this point it should have been clear that the already fairly optimistic operation should just be scrapped, because it didn’t make even a lick of sense anymore. And yet everybody just carried on as though it did. Questions weren’t asked, assumptions went unchallenged. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, an adviser to the Kennedy administration who opposed the plans, later said that the meetings about it took place in “a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus,” and that even though he thought the plan was stupid, in the meetings he found himself staying quiet. “I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one’s impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion,” he wrote. In fairness, we’ve all been in meetings like that.