Last Minute Decisions That Changed History

1. The Last-Minute Personnel Switch That Sank the Titanic

Shortly before the Titanic sailed from Southampton to New York on April 10^th, 1912, the liner made a last-minute personnel change, and replaced its second officer, David Blair, with the more experienced Charles Lightoller. Unfortunately, Blair never got around to giving, and Lightoller never got around to asking for, the keys to a locker that contained the ship’s binoculars. So on its maiden voyage, the Titanic sailed with lookouts who lacked binoculars. In the days before disaster struck, nobody seems to have reasoned that lookouts might need binoculars. Or if anybody did, nobody decided that the ship’s safety might be worth breaking the lock to get the binoculars. It was a bad cost-benefit analysis, that resulted in tragedy.

A Tragic Mistake Revealed

Around 11:40 PM on the night of April 14th, 1912, lookout Frederick Fleet spotted an iceberg in the Titanic‘s path, and alerted the bridge. The officer in charge ordered the engines stopped and the ship steered around the obstacle. However, given the distance to the iceberg when the alarm was sounded, the Titanic’s speed at the time, and the ship’s mass, disaster was inevitable. Basic physics made it impossible for the mammoth ship to maneuver away in time to avoid a collision, so the “unsinkable” Titanic struck the iceberg, and sank. Over 1500 passengers and crewmen lost their lives, making it one of history’s worst peacetime maritime disasters. In the ensuing investigation, lookout Frederick Fleet testified that he would have spotted the iceberg sooner, and the ship would thus have had more reaction time to steer away from a collision if he’d only had binoculars.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

History Net – Field Marshall Erwin Rommel‘s Defense of Normandy During World War II

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Battle of Teutoburg Forst

BBC, September 26^th, 2013 – Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World

Gonick, Larry – The Cartoon History of the Universe: From the Big Bang to Alexander the Great (1990)

History dot Com – When Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot in 1912, a Speech May Have Saved His Life

Ancient Origins – Tomyris, the Female Warrior and Ruler Who May Have Killed Cyrus the Great

Business Insider, June 6^th, 2012 – Here‘s the Chilling Letter General Eisenhower Drafted in Case the Nazis Won on D-Day

Council on Foreign Relations – TWE Remembers: Secret Soviet Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Cuba (Cuban Missile Crisis, a Coda)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Al Mutanabbi

Forbes, August 27^th, 2013 – How Martin Luther King Improvised ‘I Have a Dream’

Ancient Warfare – The Battle of Salamis

History Today – Latimer and Ridley Burned at the Stake

Hornfischer, James D. – The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the US Navy‘s Finest Hour (2008)

Jewish Encyclopedia – Eleazar

Lord, Walter – Incredible Victory (2012)

New York Times, August 7^th, 1995 – Kokura, Japan, Bypassed by A-Bomb

Ranker – 13 Last Minute Decisions That Changed World History

Royal Central – The King Who Was Killed by a Monkey

Telegraph, The, August 29^th, 2007 – Key That Could Have Saved the Titanic

Time Magazine, February 3^rd, 2009 – The Day the Music Died

Ultimate Classic Rock – Les Harvey, Electrocuted During a Concert

History of War – Thomas, Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby c. 1433 – 1504

Unofficial Royalty – Assassination of Alexander II, Emperor of All Russia

Wikipedia – Flight to Varennes

Wikipedia – Humayun