In order to give WW2 a break, I'll mention two mistakes from the Spanish Civil War, which in my opinion is often overlooked in context of military history mainly because it's so overshadowed by WW2.
1-Battle of Guadalajara: Here's where all those jokes about useless and cowardly Italian soldiers were proven to be absolutely right (and a few new ones were started!). Deployment-wise, the Italian and Nationalist troops didn't do anything wrong, plus they outnumbered the Republican forces roughly 2 to 1 and they called upon large amounts of mechanized troops to aid in the offensive. Basically everything that could have gone for the Fascists, went wrong: Poor weather that made armoured forces useless, lack of proper air support, and then there was trusting the brunt of the assault to the Italian infantry (plus the fact that Mussolini himself devised the offensive). The result, of course, was a total disaster for the Italian/Nationalist forces. The battle isn't so much a mistake as more a case of, as said before, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Here's the wiki link, though I recommend googling other sites to read up on the battle.
(Insert 'how many gears does an Italian tank have?' joke here)
2-Charge of the American International Brigades at Jarama: Unlike the previous case, this IS a full-blown mistake, and it belongs to the Republican side this time. The final stage of the basically inconclusive battle of Jarama was the charge of over 400 American volunteers up the rocky, uneven terrain of the Pingarrón hill (and if anyone here has gone trekking over Spain, you can guess how bad that can be) straight into concentrated machine-gun fire, all the while without any real artillery support. Predictably, the American volunteers were slaughtered. A mistake made all the worse by how much of an utter failure the maneouvre was, and by the fact that previous offensives up the hill had met much the same result, so there should not have been any need to repeat the same blunder again.
This is a bit of a rant, but perhaps the worst part of it all is the fact that while the American and British soldiers of the WW2 are constantly lauded and loved for their exploits, the volunteers of the International Brigades (British, American, French, German, Czech, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc) are basically passed under the radar. Why? Because those fighters, who carried out feats of heroism that in many ways rivalled and more than equalled actions carried out in WW2, were in their majority communists and socialists, and they fought on the losing side, so for some reason their exploits don't seem to be as worthy of remembering as those who fought the war that was won. Hell, even Americans who fought in the Lincoln and Washington batallions from 36-39 were persecuted during the McCarthy witch hunts for being left-wingers. I personally find this apparent lack of rememberance towards the Internationals frankly disgusting. OK, rant over.
Re: Worst military mistakes.
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