Tin Soldiers (Great Military Blunders Documentary) | Timeline

through the ages war and technology have always mashed forward together side by side but during the last hundred years the rapid acceleration of technological expertise has seemed to promise the military more and more it's very alluring and attempting to accept that the premise that there's a technological fix we sent a man to the moon didn't we then why can't we defeat of ballistic missiles technology has provided armies with the key advantages in defeating an enemy increased firepower and destructive capability but recently technology offers an altogether more seductive possibility that maximum military gain can be achieved at minimum human loss it's something to prevent you from needing to put your young men increasingly young women out into the market new technologies promised to make warfare cleaner smarter and above all not precise but it's a promise that is proved impossible to achieve dropping massage many kind of home ground targets even with all the wonderful technology of the United States is still a very imprecise are the combination of high technology and warfare has produced some of the most startling military blunders of the last hundred years [Music] [Music] World War one was technologies first big test in the 20th century the first great industrial conflict with the great economies of the West locked in battle war efforts were expressed in terms of guns and shells but by 1916 the result was stalemate the British decided something must be done the big push became known as it was hoped that it will be decisive it was hoped that a war that had some thought might be over by Christmas 1914 that had dragged on to the end of 1950 could be terminated in 1916 General Henry Rawlinson developed a plan the problem facing Rawlinson's men on the salt is that the Germans have dug themselves in very well and very securely into a series of trench bars rowlandson envisaged an artillery barrage of an unparalleled force millions of shells would rain down on German lines rowlandson decides that the artillery will destroy the barbed wire destroy the German trenches kill the German trench Garrison's once the shells had done their work it would be safe for the British soldiers to advance minimal casualties were expected so it's a classic example of artillery conquers infantry occupiers and the infantry are not expected to fight for the ground because the guns are expected to have done their work and ready the place chosen for battle on the Somme in June 1916 the barrage began with over 1,500 guns brought into action this was total technological warfare the bridger fiying something like a million and a half shells the week before the battle since is a huge Baton Rouge the idea of the Germans surviving was unacceptable they could see the shells falling day after day after day and they couldn't believe that anything would be left alone in fact it was a countdown to one of the biggest military disasters in history a disaster which had its roots in the very early days of the war [Music] 19:14 two years before the battle of the somme early military losses led to an intense recruitment drive of civilians across the country men left their homes and occupations to join the so-called pals battalions the response in Accrington Lancashire was typical in helping to form the army which would fight the Battle of the Somme when war was declared the mayor placed an advert in the local newspaper appealing for volunteers for kitcheners army and Accrington Powell's battalion the answer to the mayor's advertisement in ten days over a thousand men enlisted there were miners cotton workers engineers and so on by the end of 1914 over half a million men had joined but their departure drained the workforce skilled trades were badly hit especially the armaments industry by 1915 a dwindling workforce was making fewer and fewer shells and it was shells the high technology of the day on which the war effort depended the newspapers got hold of the story and a political scandal erupted this was pokey stuff because only just before Asquith the prime minister had said on the advice of the War Office that shale supplies were adequate so the Prime Minister was caught his trousers down Lloyd George the greatest political fixer of the day was called in to sort things out he immediately set about finding another type of army workers to man armaments factories [Music] Lloyd George strikes bargain with the trade units at the beginning of 1915 which effectively suspend the right to strike and also allow what was then called the dilution of labor and what was meant by the dilution of Labor was the bringing in of unskilled workers in the place of skilled workers it was these workers war and an experienced who had to produce the sophisticated weapon the bourse to underpin the big push of 1916 the shell this is an 18 pane of shrapnel shell the shell the prizes of a body and a fuse to activate the shell when you can see hey leave some seventeen parts of this fuse have to be machined to extreme accuracy [Music] so almost in the in the way of a watchmaker producing a precision instrument come together to produce this very complex views which will fail if any a single part doesn't function correctly [Music] the pressure not just to master technique but to increase shell output was intense the result was disastrous roughly 30% of the shells fired at the bottom battle the song are ducks they all failed to explode with predictable results as far as the vacuous kisser by 1916 the piles and shells traveled together to France in preparation for the Battle of the Somme amateurs and danced together [Music] the accountant pals took their place on the front at a village called sare and face to face with the enemy [Music] the Accrington pals were in the trenches were in these Cox's they were known as Matthew Mark Luke and John cops and the German front lines were on the horizon over there this is what was then Norman's land the distance was varied a little but anything from children 50 to 300 yards apparent no more than that as the pounds prepared for battle another technological problem emerged it concerned the great guns firing the vital shells before the Great War guns had been placed in the open but this would make them vulnerable to enemy fire to save lives guns were now placed behind Hills or other cover the guns were are harder to hit but they couldn't actually see their targets now the guns needed to be told where to aim all their considerable firepower was dependent on the very imperfect state of military communications the gun had to be told what to fire an observer had to tell it he had to have been given communications and the best I could do for him was a telephone wire with the telephone which he had to carry with him into no-man's land and ring up the gun and tell it what to do this was not a very good system but there was another technological problem with the shells the guns fired at the start of the war shrapnel shells were mass produced they were designed for use in open warfare but the war was now being fought in trenches and it was the stockpile of shrapnel shells which were being fired on the Somme making little impact on the German defenses shrapnel shell consists of a shell casing full of little tiny hardened steel shrapnel balls which explode in the air and come down in a great shower they're ideal for killing men in open warfare but these were pretty useless for for destroying barbed wire most stop just pinged off the wire very very difficult to cut barbed wire with shredder as their technology collapse around them the British barrage continued remorselessly effect [Music] by this stage of proceedings with the day on which the attack is meant to go in lumen purse painting is difficult and the plan really has become one of those things that it's most too big and too important to actually stop broadly speaking the message of the high command is putting art down the chain of command is the barrage will work commanding officers were parading their men and saying just go over that occupy the trenches you can go over smoking your pipes if you want and as so often in warfare you believe what you want to believe and everyone believed the technology was working after seven days the barrage halted July the 1st 1916 the first day of the Battle of the Somme technology's first test in the battlefield of the 20th century had arrived the advance on the German lines was ordered [Music] zero-hour comes to things happen the shelling lifts for a moment off the German frontline and falls on the second line and the other targets further back the whistles are blown and the men come out of the trenches up the ladders they go through a little gap in their own barbed wire that has been prepared for them and start walking across no-man's land and they're walking in most cases because of the assumption that German defenses live in smash Martin and the Germans are just 10 or 12 yards away coming out standing on top of the parapet shooting at them the machine gun the shooting up there [Music] but if soldiers are hit they hit by Machine and far they're then hit by shellfire one eyewitness said that they were like carves smelling blood they're stopped sadly in their hundreds and thousands on the wire the uncut one in front of the first element engines [Music] major-generals behind them the - Oh behind the same doctor restaurant facade so more and more units have shoveled into the attack but as they looked back towards the Mideast wrenches that you've seen a ghastly sight with the landscape littered with dead and wounded and then it all went quiet that was the end of the first day of the Battle of the Somme except that you've got thousands of men lying out in no man's land unwounded sheltering in shell holes just laying doggo hoping to nobody'll spot them wounded trying to crawl back and 20,000 men dead it was the largest loss of life in any single day of warfare up to that time military technology had failed its first test if you expect too much of a technology which has simply not been proven your soldiers for whom you were hoping that technology would be an advantage will be the people who pay the price for technological failure not a single yard of ground was taken at the ser sector that day the bodies of the Accrington powers lay unburied for nine months until the Germans finally withdrew the British took the empty trenches and buried their dead this is Queens Cemetery it is in reality a mass grave as you can see the headstones are quiet close together as distinct from other cemeteries where there is a distance between them there are 50 of the Powell's are buried in here they were identifiable it was a tragedy and and this place evokes a sense of sadness and of loss which is unequaled when the Great War was over eight million combatants had been killed the public revulsion at such losses encouraged military thinkers to consider how such costly and wasteful battles could be avoided in the future [Music] the British theorist major-general Jesse fuller says that he wants battles which are going to be works of art not dogs of blood technology is one of the ways in which Western governments and their armies think about trying to avoid a rerun of what had happened on Western Front in the first well using technology instead of flesh and blood to keep the enemy out and despite its failure in the First World War it was technology which provided an answer above all it was the technology of airpower which seemed to promise solutions the bomber dream was being created in the aftermath of World War one the search continued for a kind of warfare that would avoid its carnage air power seemed to hold all the answers probably the most important and an original debate that took place between the two world wars was sparked by the army they were arguing that this extraordinary new technology the means of flight had created means to pass over all the traditional horrors the mud and blood of the battlefield and to offer a vision of victory which seemed deceptively seductive to a generation who haunted by what they just endured between 1914 and 18 a newly formed RAF actively promoted what became known as the bomber dream bombers would take warfare right into the heart of the enemy's territory they would be impossible to stop as they were fully equipped to defend themselves [Music] it was going to be self-defending bomber formations the bombers were going to go on their own and they've got these hydraulically operated machine gun turrets and they were going to defend themselves once airborne the Bombers were expected to carry out attacks with surgical precision and it was factories not people that were to be the targets if you could bomb the enemy industrial capacity to such an extent that the supplies ceased to reach the fighting front the enemy collapses from within so Bomber Command was going to attack accurately the German industrial capacity you can't fault the strategy or the optimism to call the bomber dream was of the highest principles the practice proved very different with the outbreak of the Second World War the bomber dream faced its first big test [Music] Frank Metcalf was trying to fly Blenheim 'he's one of the Bombers in which such great hopes were invested in the summer of 1940 fight went to join his squadron and I arrived at the squad room our crew reported into the understand which was the said of the thing to do and he said oh nice to you get yourself a room the boys are out on a show they've gone to raid a German fighter aerodrome in albergue in Denmark no one came back that was day one not exactly very welcome Ike who and I were petrified frankly terrified Frank discovered that the self defending bomber was the first myth that the bomber dream to crumble our losses was simply horrendous by daylight why the Blenheim had one vistors keg on in the back we were faced with me-109 who could do 350 360 with 8 machine guns in the front we have no chance to focus not so we tried to hide in cloud I don't think I ever saw a cloud in that period [Music] bomber crew losses were very high the technology on which they were dependent was simply not up to the job but the truth was that the RAF had failed technically to come anywhere near matching the dream of our power before the war and yet all through 1940 and into 1941 the RAF continued to dispatch the Blenheim on almost suicidal raids which they were shot down in huge numbers because they felt they had to be doing something rather than doing nothing [Music] increasing losses led to a reassessment of the bombing tactics night missions were introduced it was hoped hiding the Bombers under the cover of darkness would help and for a while the losses were reduced but it seemed this had been achieved at the cost of bombing accuracy intelligence reports said targets in Germany were not being hit in the summer of 1941 an alarmed British government asked a career civil servant David butt to investigate he examined photographs in which the crews had claimed to have bombed the target during the moon period in Germany he found that only one in four of those was within five miles of the target in non moon periods that figure was only one in 20 within five miles the target in other words Bomber Command was not hitting his targets bomber dreams promise of precision exposed at the stroke of a civil servants pen the shockwaves were felt in the highest of offices it came as a very bitter shock to Winston Churchill and the politicians in many cases when they dispatch raids the Germans were barely aware of what target the RAF had intended to attack because so few of their bombers have got anywhere near it they'd ended up dropping bombs all over Germany the bomber dreams lack of precision created a precarious situation since Dunkirk the bomber had been Britain's only way of waging war in Europe her very ability to prosecute war against Hitler was now in question in the spring of 1942 a solution emerged and that of course is area bombing and area bombing does kill large numbers of people and it's ironic that the raf who started out with these high ideals of not having people killed finish up killing a lot of people area bombing held up none of the promises precision targeting had offered in minimizing civilian casualties in the firestorms that resulted civilian non-combatants the very people precision bombing had been designed to spare were at the very heart of the destruction the bombers now rain down on German cities what happens the high explosive in the early part of the raid destroys a few houses throws the rubble into the street craters a few roads their job is to stop the fire engines getting around town your big blast bombs blows in the windows over a wide area removes the roof covering twinkling at all four pounded centers fall in large numbers into the rafters because the roofs gone start a fire up there all through the raid a few 500-pound by exposing bombs are dropping and that at that stage they are designed to deter people from coming out and fighting the fires but the fire will spread so all these bombs have got a particular role Bomber Command has become a force of mass property destruction area bombing killed over half a million civilians in Germany a failure for technologies central promise of saving lives the British and Western public still love to cling to certain myths now one of the myths they really like is that the First World War was a bloody catastrophe and that somehow in the Second World War with modern technology and so on we found the means to avoid the bloody catastrophe to win to defeat the evil of Nazism at far lower cost in lives well this of course is a monstrous lie that the loss of life in the Second World War was far greater than in the First World War all that was different was that we the British and the Americans paid a far smaller share of the price that the price still had to be paid [Music] [Music] a quarter of a century later in Vietnam and the Americans were still trying to conduct precision warfare but in terrain like this precision had no meaning the Americans couldn't even see their enemy they were hidden beneath the cover of Viet Nam's jungles and American lives were being lost including those on boat patrols in Viet Nam's maze of rivers but the casualty rate was especially high Admiral Zumwalt was the man in charge he turned to technology as a means to stop the losses the average young man had a 70% probability of being killed or wounded during his years tour we simply had to do something and that was the use of Agent Orange to defoliate the banks and we therefore thought that it was a marvelous solution to a very serious problem Agent Orange was an early form of biotechnology essentially a weed killer 12 million gallons was dropped to defoliate the riverbanks and jungles of Vietnam but it was an unstable mixture contaminated with a deadly agent the Agent Orange which was ordered by the US military was a not very purified mixture it was a mixture which allowed dioxins to be formed dioxins are considered among the most toxic chemicals ever made by man molecule for molecule dioxin is fat soluble if for example it's swallowed in food it will be absorbed and it will be slowly released that sense could be looked on as a time bomb waiting to go off to do its damage as late as 1969 the American government was still assuring its troops that Agent Orange was safe to use admirals and vaults believed them he was so certain he ordered the dropping of the defoliant around serving US naval crews which included his own son Elmo so he was exposed his comrades to restrain operations they ate the food that had been sprayed and they drank the water that had been sprayed so that Navy men were heavily exposed one year later Agent Orange was withdrawn tests showed mice exposed to it dying of cancer in 1975 the Americans pulled out of Vietnam leaving a country ravaged by the effects of Agent Orange huge tracts of land were polluted with deadly dioxins and the people living on the land suffered terribly including those the Americans had been there nominally to protect among the South Vietnamese population a pattern of birth defects and cancers emerged but the long-term effects of Agent Orange were not to be confined to Southeast Asia [Music] Admiral Zumwalt returned home he was promoted to the most senior post in the American Navy the Chief of Naval Operations he retired it was then the legacy of his Vietnam years returned to haunt him and his son in 1983 I receive a call from Joe telling me that he was suffering from non-hodgkins lymphoma came as a terrible shock to all of us [Music] he then became terminal it was clear that Elmo's wife Cathy who had been caring for him at home was getting very tired so our son Jim and I went down to give her a couple of weeks rest our son Jim took the first night duty spending the night in the room with Elmo he woke up at 6:00 he suddenly heard almost stopped breathing and awakened the rest of us and that was the end the use of Agent Orange had turned out to be a particularly insidious form of friendly fire thousands of ex soldiers were diagnosed with health defects years after battle chemical companies who had manufactured Agent Orange paid millions of dollars in compensation but the American government refused to admit liability Admirals impart investigated he found a government allied to technology and willing to defend its interests even when as in the case of Agent Orange things had gone wrong Admiral Zumwalt was leaked a memo circulating around government departments which in essence said to them it would be most unfortunate here any correlation between dioxin and health effects were found because it would be costly to compensate that non-veterans absolutely flagrant admission a design to corrupt a miasma [Music] finally in 1991 the American government conceded its responsibility for the use of Agent Orange no compensation has ever been paid to the people of Vietnam who suffered at its hands at America's memorial to the soldiers who died in the conflict the casualties of Agent Orange are not listed among the dead I made considerable effort to get support from the Pentagon for some way of recording the names of those who were died later from the effects of Agent Orange and general Powell had arriving a very thoughtful letter declining to construct an adjacent memorial in the same year that the American government came clean about Agent Orange it was becoming embroiled in another war a war in which military might and technological know-how seemed finally to have come of age it was 1991 and the Gulf War was beginning 1991 Desert Storm Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait provoked a swift response from the West right from the outset the military insisted this was going to be a different kind of war advanced technology would make it surgical safe and above all smart I'm now going to show you a picture of a luckiest man in Iraq keep your eye on the crosshair and now it is rear view mirror the technology was symbolized by a technical hero the Patriot missile glowing Iraqi Scud missiles out of the sky in a show of accuracy which was hypnotic after achieving the first missile to missile strike in military history it impressed everyone including those in the highest of offices patreon is 4142 forty please engage 41 inter seven it was a strike rate also applauded among American troops bewitched by the protection they believed offered by the patriot the colonists was there because we knew the Patriots were in the area and do the Czar's you knew this God was there but just got relaxed over the whole thing the Patriots role even expanded into politics from the outset of war Saddam Hussein had sought to draw Israel into the conflict by attacking her cities with Scott misses the Americans desperate to keep Israel on side but out of the war offered their strongest bargaining car the Patriot missile but the Americans were saying was that within 24 are most at most 48 hours that would put an end to the missile threat that there would be no reason for Israel to retaliate the Israelis accepted the deal and the war ended without their direct involvement the Patriot returned home basking in success and created its own particular dream finally the ghosts of a century's technological failures in the battlefield could be laid to rest technology had been put to the test of precision and passed a few months after the war's end and inquiry began at one of the most prestigious technical universities in the world a confident Congress wanted to know what lessons could be learned from the Patriots success professor Ted postal was asked to carry out the examination what he found surprised him I quite frankly believed at the time that Patriot had worked I began to collect television video taken during the Gulf War and then it became clearer than that it wasn't even close to intercepting any targets yet alone some targets Hostel gradually became convinced that the Patriots reputation was not borne out by close scrutiny of actual encounters okay here we see two Patriots rising up in an attempt to intercept a Scud that will be coming from the upper left well each one burns out will see the Scud arrive there's a Miss second Miss and then it goes on to the ground where we know it exploded here we have another example in Riyadh we'll see a Scud coming from the upper right there's a Miss a break up a second Miss and then the warhead goes on the ground this engagement was claimed as a success by the US government and it is still being claimed to be a success according to postal a fault in the Iraqi Scot caused it to break up and his descent creating multiple targets crucially the Patriot could miss the Scott warhead hitting the debris instead but it still gave the impression of success Hostel maintained that even when the Patriot got near the warhead it was too late so basically what you have is a is a crossing speed of about three and a half kilometers per second you could imagine the radar sensing that the Scud warhead is nearby under those conditions there would be a short delay in time then the Patriot would explode its warhead exploding fragments out now you can see right away that even if I sense the warhead at the right time with the radar fuse and there's any delay at all this would be a tenth of thousands of a second one ten thousands of a second the fragments under the most ideal conditions would still hit the back end of the Scud it would not actually hit the warhead hostels bindings although disputed by the US Army revealed a very different picture of the Gulf War despite the accolades the Patriot had repeatedly failed to intercept Scud warheads including those falling onto his Rayleigh cities a failure seen in the Patriots very first test of hitting a scart in Israeli skies you know in the sky it looks very very slow and after a few seconds I help the the launching of the Patriot after 6lp 40 seconds I help the bomb I saw the a very big white flash in the sky I thought that the pit road hit discard but after a few seconds I saw the warhead fall in the area of Tel Aviv and then we started to see what [Music] as scud warheads continued to rain down israel's concern about patriot failure began to mount [Music] Washington DC a month into the war continued Scud attacks were pushing Israel closer to declaring war against Iraq High Noon Israel sent her defense minister for a face-to-face showdown with the most powerful man in the world we met in your office and it was say a rather tense meeting because Bush did not like the idea at all of Israel taking military action and he also felt that the Patriots were providing an umbrella defending the Israeli population so was all the excitement about he didn't accept my my figures as a matter of fact my figures were optimistic at alman at the time that the probability of an intercept by Patriot was no more than 20% of an avi no it was close to 0% and he thought it was close to 100% the next day President Bush's confidence in the Patriot remained unshaken and with the arrival of Patriot battalions in Israel all told Patriot is 41 4 42 42 scuds engaged 41 intercepted the war was drawing to a close meaning Israel had no need to engage and in the event a final tragedy hit closer to home in Dhahran only three days from the conclusion of the war a Scud began to fall towards a warehouse of housing American troops and the siren had gone off - one time nobody did too much about it I remember seeing it hit the ceiling the sparks flying from the electric line we heard it hit the concrete floor so like a bus it fell down through there and I remember watching the wall and the ceiling separate from the door the heat the blinding light the blast of air you could actually taste it if he knew anything I knew just to stay put Perry do the dead people the primary to one spot and I would go out and have give last rites and prayers of him had no idea who they were cause so many I'm weren't so bad one of my men carried out a girl and he said she's alive she's alive what do I do and he looked at her and part of her head was missing and he just went wild I mean nobody expects to see this their lifetime twenty-eight people died at Dhahran and scores were injured the Patriots failure to intercept the fatal skirt was blamed on computer error [Music] I generally come to the hospital explain to me what had happened and the patriot is obviously computer operated and every software in the computer it had to be changed every 14 to 17 hours and they had a glitch they have problems with a software and the particular Patriot battery that was watching our area had been up for over $100 so the story I go at was it never even really had picked up on the Scud itself it never fired a rank though the Patriots failures were seen as isolated events in America confidence was undaunted huge amounts were invested in developing similar systems to fight future Wars overall efforts to develop Nash defense increased by a billion dollars because of the Patriots performance Joseph sir in Sione a congressional committee investigator wasn't convinced he began gathering evidence for a forthcoming congressional hearing like professor postal before him when he examined the Army's data on the Patriots performance he found failure classified as success even the very first Patriot interception of a Scud which made its reputation had according to serene Sione never happened the army however argued otherwise they were positive that they had hit a Scud and as proof they said they had recovered Scud debris from the site since that didn't correlate all with the rest of the data we asked that that piece be retrieved and examined given a metallurgical examination about two months later the report came back that no they couldn't really identify it as a piece of the Scud no it didn't have any writing on it that it was a piece of metal that a officer was bringing home as a souvenir he thought it was a piece of a Scud but that's all it was his impression serene Sione concluded that full signals from nearby aircraft had caused the Patriot to fire accidentally into the sky a sky with no scuds in it Washington DC a year after the end of the Gulf War and the congressional hearing into the Patriots performance was taking place the army was still maintaining success the army came up and actually had a fairly bad showing it didn't tell its story and they tended to generally circle the wagons and insist that their story was correct that the Patriot had intercepted Scots but it was the Army's very particular definition of interception which began to dominate proceedings so the army claimed that the Patriot had intercepted the Scots it just means that a patriot in a Scud cross paths the paths and jamming can you say wait a minute get this straight intercept doesn't mean it actually hit it it just meant that they passed each other like ships at sea yes that the general that's correct but for the army the stakes were high as they themselves admitted the existing commitment was just too great for them to concede that the Patriot had failed the growth program that we have the Patriot of the future to defend our soldiers in the futures on the correct asthma and we believe that the US government backed the Army's line with an additional billion dollars already invested no one wanted to admit they might be wrong or to be seen to be skimping on national defense there was tremendous pressure to give the troops the best technology you can afford even if the best turns out to be much more difficult to achieve than you originally thought so government coffers open up to pay for the latest technology the use of technology was still as potent as ever by the time of the next international crisis [Music] in Kosovo the Allies maintain from the outset that sophisticated airpower held the key to victory no ground troops would be deployed in an echo of the bomber dream of the 1940s precision bombing was expected to deliver maximum political impact at minimal human loss it was thought that they could solve complex human social political problems on the ground in Kosovo from a fight level of 15,000 feet and and and a speed of 450 knots of course it was a total failure in practice precision bombing proved as hard to achieve in 1999 as it had done 15 years before I again stress NATO deeply regrets the loss of life from this tragic and Leto was forced to change its tactics just as Bomber Command had done in World War two they say we are not at war with the you Bazaar people they then started to widen their targets to gain for what they call military civilian targets which included apparently petrol stations bridges power stations water plants and they found themselves out to be at war with the Serb people something they said at the start they would not do and whilst the war in the air proved inconclusive events on the ground got worse in Kosovo a million people were forced from their homes I said on the first day we're engaged in a race between NATO's technology and the ethnic cleansing policies of the Serbs and that was a race that NATO lost because NATO attempted to play the game by the old rules of the air war fantasies [Music] the war in Kosovo showed how little a century of warfare has taught strategists about the dangers of over reliance on military technology surgical precision the holy grail of 20th century military strategy remains as elusive in 1999 as it did in 1916 whatever the successes of the air war in Kosovo they were not achieved in the clean smart surgical way promised and just as it was a hundred years ago it's the people on the ground who paid the price NATO in its use of airpower actually killed I think three times more innocent civilians bathe Kosovo Albanians and Serbs and they than they did serve military I think you are actually running a grave risk of being in violation of the Geneva and Hague criticals which which require our competence in war to be mindful of the security of the lives of civilians nobody's yet found a way of winning wars against a powerful enemy without a terrible cost in human life or even have in an argument about who pays the price who is lives velocity you

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Keywords: history documentary, documentary history, Full length Documentaries, 2017 documentary, First world war documetnary, Channel 4 documentary, Documentary, military errors, history's worst blunders, great military mistakes, stories, real, TV Shows - Topic, military mistakes, gulf war, History, Full Documentary, battle of the somme, BBC documentary, worst mistakes in history, Documentaries, Documentary Movies - Topic

Id: CbkJS5cLLOQ

Length: 49min 31sec (2971 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2017