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History’s Most Catastrophic Man-made Errors

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 34 min

Wanggongchang Explosion - Beijing — The Wanggongchang Explosion devastated Beijing. Pintrest

2. History’s Worst Translation Mistake Led to Disaster for Hundreds of Thousands

Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at Potsdam, where a declaration calling for Japan’s unconditional surrender was issued. Deseret News

Given Japan’s reduced but still great power in 1945, America and her allies correctly treated Japan as a formidable foe who was inflicting significant harm every day, and would continue to do so indefinitely if not stopped. So the Allies were not mistaken in dealing with Japan as a menace that needed putting down ASAP.

However, a simple mistake in translation might have determined when and how America went about putting Japan down, and led to the decision to atomically bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As such, it might have been the most momentous translation mistake in history. The result was a disaster for hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese.

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.