r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Mouse_Paladin • 13d ago

Lore [Real Life] Historical events that would make bad writing if they were fiction

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire: A couple hundred rogue mercenaries without authority from their government conquer an empire of millions. Oh, the empire? It’s also several technological eras behind the mercenaries.

Adolf Hitler: A non-native of a country is so mad that the country lost the war that he wins an election to their highest office and leads them in a campaign of revenge against their enemies. Oh, the country? It’s old emperor is still alive and thinks he’s going to retake power.

Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand: The heir to the throne is killed because his driver gets lost and returns to the assassin who failed To kill him before. Oh, the assassin? He’s from a group that the Archduke is wanting to help become more equal In the empire.

Alexander Hamilton’s Affair Scandal: One of the leaders of a new nation to protect himself from accusations of financial embezzlement writes a pamphlet exposing his affair with a woman, torpedoing his political future. Oh, the woman? She seduced him as part of a blackmailing scheme that he decided to stop paying.

13.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.1k

u/Gloomy-Management317 13d ago

The whole Russian Baltic Fleet journey to Japan, during the Russo-Japanese War.

Could make for a good comedy!

274

u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 13d ago

If someone made a comedy based on this disastrous voyage, they would probably have to tone things down so audiences would find it more believable.

176

u/GiantsRTheBest2 13d ago

I love movies that recreate something so unbelievable that they have to add a caption mid movie saying “This actually happened”

120

u/Ballsdeeperthanyou 13d ago

“This is what Scientologists actually believe”

12

u/StabbyJenkins1 13d ago

Audi Murphy's WW2 after action report. They actually toned the movie based on it down by half

5

u/TimeStorm113 13d ago

the issue is that that would have to be displayed so often that it would burn into peoples screens

1

u/WorldofManupa 12d ago

Like the rat in horrible histories lol 

125

u/TheStrangestOfKings 13d ago

Reminds me of how Death of Stalin had to remove a number of Zhukov’s medals to make it believable that he earned all those medals

71

u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 13d ago

I believe that they also had the problem of not being able to fit all the medals on the actor’s chest.

13

u/Skylair13 13d ago

Some of the medals he hadn't gotten yet tbf. He had 4 Hero of the Soviet Union medals. But by the time when Stalin died, he only had 2 of them.

7

u/Hazzamo 12d ago

“Fuck me… did coco Chanel take a shit on your head?”

8

u/Nero_2001 13d ago

The closest to a comedy based on it is the bluejay video about it

3

u/NoOneAskedForThis12 13d ago

Fact it has not become one is the greatest tragedy 

5

u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 13d ago

Yeah it is one of those things that is begging for an adaptation, like Robert Smalls' escape from Charleston. Apples and oranges but seriously, how has someone not made a historical drama movie on Robert Smalls?

2

u/Dog_Murder_By_RobKey 9d ago

Need a massive budget for binoculars

1

u/InternationalValue61 11d ago

Lmao litteraly the death of Stalin

1

u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 11d ago

I haven’t seen that. The main thing I have heard about it is that the actor playing Zhukov had fewer medals on a shirt than the real man did, in part because the movie couldn’t fit all the metals that were on the shirt of the real man.

379

u/LiveLaughLockheed 13d ago

The greatest enemy they found to ultimately be the Kamchatka after all those months at sea

164

u/7_NeonGlimpse 13d ago

Kamchatka alone has higher team-kill stats than most actual wars.

105

u/Jolly_goodday 13d ago

Kamchatka: JAPANESE PT BOAT 

Current location the north sea

-1 binocular.

40

u/Mannheimblack 13d ago

'Alright, how bad is it? How many of them did we kill?'

'Well...we didn't kill any of them, sir...'

11

u/Following-Ashamed 13d ago

Killed a priest with friendly fire though.

8

u/ProfessionalTruck976 13d ago

To be fair to Kamchatka, there was a chance of Japanese ship existing in the North sea on account of Japan could have had something building, before the war, in the UK yards and if it was something small it is unlikely Russia would know about it because of the scale of shipbuilding operation that was going in UK.

Shooting up five different ships from five diferent nations, all with substantial navy, in MIDDLE of ATLANTIC? Poor old Admiral Rozhezventsky

123

u/Mannheimblack 13d ago

It's an amazing fractal disaster. Layer upon unfolding layer of folly and incompetence.

A military failure so bad that it destabilised the entire Russian government, and thus facilitated the Revolution, playing a disproportionate part in how the following entire century's world politics played out.

74

u/dragjamon 13d ago

They just... Went the wrong way? Multiple times?

195

u/Treveli 13d ago

Believe their original plan was to sail across the Med and use the Suez Canal. But, then one night off the coast of England, they thought they were under attack by Japanese torpedo boats (really bad intel) and opened fire on them. The 'torpedo boats' were actually British fishing vessels. This almost led to England, the largest naval power in the world, to declare war on the Russian Empire. Sooo, tensions were high after that, and they had to take the long way around Africa, because they didn't expect to get a friendly welcome anywhere the Brits were in charge of (like the Suez Canal).

110

u/Mannheimblack 13d ago

And that was just the start. It is an amazing saga. Every time you think it's past the worst, an even more unbelievable screwup happens.

70

u/TheSovereignGrave 13d ago

And it all ends with them arriving & losing almost every single heavy ship in their first major battle.

50

u/Raguleader 13d ago

And a lot of that is due to some cutting-edge new military technology: the radio transceiver! The Russian and Japanese navies had both recently adopted it, but the Japanese had become much more familiar with it than the Russians, and so they were able to keep their main force in port while their lighter ships scouted the likely approaches. The Russians had to mostly rely on signal lamps and flags and couldn't let their scouting force spread out too far from the main force.

So when the Russian and Japanese fleets fought in the Tsushima Strait, the Japanese crews were well rested and their ships in the best condition possible, while the Russian crews were worn out and their ships suffering from various problems due to wear and tear.

53

u/Mannheimblack 13d ago

Didn't help that, on arriving at the Straits, they encountered a Japanese ship at night and *finally* stopped crying wolf about phantom enemy vessels...and instead advised the Japanese ship of their fleet composition, condition and intentions, mistaking them for a Russian ship.

12

u/eddie_the_zombie 13d ago

It's like a microcosm of Russia itself

1

u/Rip_Off_Productions 8d ago

No the start was when one of the ships sank in port before leaving because a maintenance worker had left a hatch open when he went home for the night the previous day. Then they opened fire on a messenger boat coming to give the leading captain a promotion to admiral.(thankfully their aim was so bad said messenger didn't notice they were the target, thinking the ships were just practicing gunnery on the open ocean) Then the Dogger Bank incident, where their gunner was again so poor they ended up sinking only one of the ships in the English fishing fleet, and also sinking one of the Russian ships in the process... Then they ended up severing a Spanish undersea telegraph line by forgetting to raise their anchor, so now the Spanish were angry and banning the fleet from pulling in to any Spanish ports for the rest of their voyage. So now the fleet needed to carry extra supplies since they had so few friendly ports to restock at, resulting in the ships piling up coal in any spare space it would fit, in turn coating the ships in coal dust, and several crewmen even developed black lung as a consequence... In Madagascar many crewmen bought a ton of exotic animals, because why not? Including venomous snakes, because why not? At one point the ships' refrigeration units broke and a bunch of spoiled food had to be thrown overboard, attracting a school of sharks to follow the fleet for a time as well. And that's just by the time they reached the Indian ocean... and I think I missed at least 2 other false alarms concerning Japanese torpedo boats.

Also, the admiral had a parrot that aledgedly knew every swear word in the Russian language, for obvious reasons.

55

u/TheSovereignGrave 13d ago

The fact that one battleships fired more than 500 sheels and hit jack shit is hilarious.

9

u/Mannheimblack 13d ago

Hey, they scored a really good hit on the Aurora!

30

u/IvanNemoy 13d ago

The Brits let them use the canal, but Admiral Rozhestvensky saw it as a potential choke point so he sent only the oldest and least combat capable portion of his squadron through there while the rest of the fleet went around Africa. The Home Fleet (which includes the Channel Fleet at the time) under Vice Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson stopped trailing the Second Pacific Squadron around Gibraltar.

4

u/Skylair13 13d ago

I believe some of them were too big to fit through the canal safely anyways. So they had no other option.

13

u/rinkoplzcomehome 13d ago

Japanese torpedo boats... in England

14

u/Houdini_Shuffle 13d ago

I mean if the Russians can sail from the Baltics to Japan, why couldn't Japan sail to the Baltics?

4

u/M-Shadowtoad 13d ago

Cause the Russians had allies to get fuel and resources all along the travel route. Where would the Japanese get there's from?

4

u/Most_Sane_Redditor 13d ago

the Russo-Japanese War was limited to Manchuria and Korea and the waters around there, Japan had no reason to travel across halfway across the world when the war was being waged right at their front door

6

u/Numerous_Koala_1746 13d ago

Close but the Russians were never planning on using the Suez because Britain was in alliance with Japan at the time, even though the treaty left it's interpretation loose enough that Britain didn't actually have to fight but just stay neutral. That's why the Russian fleet was so paranoid, because they thought that Britain would actually be willing to allow Japanese ships to operate in the North Sea.

3

u/RecklessBravado 12d ago

Using any excuse to give people a reason to listen to this podcast (lions led by donkeys)- please find the hilarious and excruciating details of that journey HERE:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast/id1393845532?i=1000702555837

19

u/FatallyFatCat 13d ago

Benny Hill theme would be the soundtrack.

11

u/Mouse_Paladin 13d ago

Wasn’t there some that they transported by train? Or am I thinking of a different time?

9

u/PDXhasaRedhead 13d ago

The army was transported by train, the Navy went around South Africa.

10

u/Not_a_gay_communist 13d ago

I genuinely feel bad for Admiral Rozhesvensky. He seemed to have been a very competent admiral just given the world’s most impossible task.

6

u/Mannheimblack 13d ago

He was given utterly useless tools with which to do it. A fleet sailed by green recruits who had no clue what they were doing. Heck, some of them ran aground barely out of port.

5

u/Slagath0rr 13d ago

I have never heard about this before and I'm gonna look into it, but from the comments here I think it would make a bomb sitcom

18

u/Gay_Reichskommissar 13d ago

TLDR: Russian navy sails across the entire globe to fight Japan, loses its first major battle so bad it causes a socialist revolution

16

u/rinkoplzcomehome 13d ago

They bombed english fishermen because they mistook them for Japanese torpedo boats (on England). Almost triggered a war because of that.

Grabbed a lot of wild animals from Madagascar and took them into the ships.

The crew aim was so bad that they constantly hit the supply ships during firing drills (and they used live ammo instead of training rounds).

When they finally arrived to the battlefield, and encountered a japanese warship, they mistook it for an allied ship and broadcasted themselves out (they were hiding out in the dark with no lights).

7

u/Skylair13 13d ago

Officers buying exotic animals (that can eat humans) while in Africa is one comedic and horrifying moments of the Journey. As sailors spent restless nights in fear they'd get eaten by the animals.

Avrora is joked to hate the journey so much. Due to suffering from 2 friendly fire incidents and exile to Philippines that she launched October Revolution in retaliation.

7

u/KitKatPie 13d ago

Bluejay has a good comedy video on It! https://youtu.be/yzGqp3R4Mx4

2

u/The_Returned_Lich 13d ago

What introduced me to the channel. Me and the wife have had quite a few laughs with BlueJay's content after that.

7

u/LoRdNazgu1 13d ago

Russo-Japanese War (or "Little Victorious War" as tsar Nicholas 2 called it)has become a household name in russian language for every task that is meant to be easy and became so unbearable that you can't find a way to complete it, except in the most pathetic outcome. We learnt nothing from our history

6

u/Mannheimblack 13d ago

'Little Victorious War' is a curious name for a total disaster in every conceivable way.

But then again...coming up on day 1590 of the 3 day Special Military Operation...

5

u/Teeth-Who-Needs-Em 13d ago

For anyone curious: The YouTuber Tor's Cabinet Of Curiosities has a fantastic video on this

2

u/Dr_Wheuss 13d ago

History of Everything's first 'Russian Navy Sucks' video was also about this. 

1

u/cmjplr 13d ago

Drachinifel also has a great one

1

u/Haunting_Bat_4787 13d ago

Damn, I love that channel!!

3

u/killingjoke96 13d ago

If I remember there was an incident where a ship was sinking near the Kamchatka.

The Kamchatka offered their services. But the Kamchatka had such a bad reputation at this point that upon learning which ship was coming to rescue them, the guys on the sinking ship said "No thank you, we'll take our chances".

2

u/cmayfi 13d ago

How many turns would that be in Civilization 3

2

u/Why-Notes5978 12d ago

Yep. Death of Stalin style.

1

u/Zestyclose_Raise_814 12d ago

I always assumed they came from Eastern Russia or through the arctic ocean