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Face Palm Moments: Some of History’s Most Embarrassing Mistakes

Khalid Elhassan March 23, 2025 16 min

Mistakes - Cain, by Henri Vidal, in the Tuileries Garden, Paris — Cain, by Henri Vidal, in the Tuileries Garden, Paris. Wikimedia

12. A Farcical Mistake That Drove the Final Nail Into the Bay of Pigs Fiasco

Douglas A-4 Skyhawks flying sorties over the combat area during the Bay of Pigs Invasion. US Department of State, Office of the Historian

With Castro’s forces now on full alert, any followup strikes by the B-26s would have required fighter protection. So President Kennedy authorized half a dozen fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Essex to fly cover over the Bay of Pigs for an hour on April 18^th, 1961, to protect the bombers as they carried out another strike. However, the invasion, which had already gone from failure to fiasco, was destined to conclude with a farce. In a final face palm moment, the rendezvous between the carrier jets and the B-26s was missed: planners had not factored in the one hour time zone difference between Cuba and the bombers’ base in Nicaragua.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.