History BatmanGambit / RealLife

* The [[UsefulNotes/ArabIsraeliConflict 1956 Suez Crisis]] gives us possibly the most poorly-executed Batman Gambit ever to have been tried. After Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, the British and French realized that this was very, very bad for them. They enlisted the help of the Israelis, who, according to the plan, attack Egypt, taking over the whole Sinai Peninsula; when the Israelis got close to the Canal, the British and French would parachute in to separate the Egyptian and Israeli forces "in the interests of international peace and security". The hope was that the international community, and particularly the US and USSR, would be fooled into thinking that the British and French were genuinely responding to an emergency of which they had no foreknowledge. If it worked, it would all be seen as legitimate and have the blessing of the superpowers and the UsefulNotes/UnitedNations, while securing British and French interests in the Canal and giving Israel a gigantic buffer zone against its most powerful neighbor. This [[HoistByHisOwnPetard backfired spectacularly]]: everyone saw through ThePlan, leading both the US and Soviet Union to condemn the three of them, while the UN made them hand back the land they took and otherwise be humiliated.

** So ... when the U-boats saw the Q-ships, they surfaced—only for the crews to remove the fake bulkheads, run up the Royal Navy ensign and fire away. Often they were able to sink the U-boats before their counterparts on the U-boat could even get to their stations. Later on they got even more clever ... the boats would be loaded with light cargo like balsa wood so that it would stay afloat even if torpedoed, encouraging U-boat commanders to surface and finish the job from there. Sometimes the "crews" would even abandon ship to further entice the U-boat up into gun range. About 14 U-boats in all were sunk by the Q-ships, which however was not enough for the Royal Navy to justify the program's continuation in future wars. It didn't help that U-Boat commanders eventually grew wary of the trick, and instead would just [[GoneHorriblyRight torpedo any ship they came across without warning, rather than risk getting shot at]].

* Also during WWII, when the Allies were planning to invade southern Europe from Africa, the British launched a uniformed corpse from a submarine, in an area where the Spanish would recover his body. Chained to his belt was a briefcase that explained that the invasion site would [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial NOT be Sicily]], and hinted instead it would be Greece. The Spanish under Franco, being on friendly terms with the Germans, found the body and gave the evidence to the German embassy, who bought the story, leaving the invasion site nearly undefended. It may also help that the Abwehr, which asserted the authenticity of the documents, was riddled with British agents, including its head, Admiral Canaris.

* Hannibal's victory over the outnumbering [[UsefulNotes/AncientRome Romans]] in the Battle of Cannae was pretty much a result of this. Hannibal curved his battle line forward in hopes of goading the Romans into focusing their attack on their center, in which they did. Hannibal would then use the rest of his infantry to flank the Romans. Meanwhile, his cavalry would need to defeat the Roman cavalry and surrounded the Romans on all sides. Above all, the plan would rely on the Romans going into disarray once they got encircled instead of trying to make a concerted effort to break out. Needless to say, [[CurbStompBattle it was successful]].

* During the [[UsefulNotes/ThreeKingdomsShuWeiWu Three Kingdoms]], Meng Da was planning to defect to Shu. [[MagnificentBastard Sima Yi]] took him by surprise by immediately attacking him well before he was ready, well aware that Meng Da, being familiar with proper protocol, would expect him to inform the court first. Therefore, Sima opted to do the unexpected and strike first. The emperor Cao Rui praised him for the insight.

** Allied intelligence also effectively played the highly paranoid attitude among German spies and their handlers. They used turned German agents to discredit reports filed by (still loyal) spies. As a result, German intelligence dismissed many of its actual spies in favor of one who were getting "better" information (who happen to be double agents). In one notable case, a Juan Pujol García (German codename "Arabel", British codename "Garbo"managed to stall the advance of tanks to counter the D-Day landings by convincing his handlers that the other spies in France has been turned and that he alone knew that [[BlatantLies Normandy was a diversion attack]] meant to pull troops away from the ''real'' landing site. The Germans were so impressed with this and other information he gave them, he was awarded the [[BlingOfWar Iron Cross Second Class]], an award given only on Hitler's personal authorization. For his service to the British war effort, he was secretly made [[UsefulNotes/KnightFever a Member of the Order of the British Empire]] by King George VI. As a result, he was the only person to be given high honors by both sides of the conflict, for doing the same thing.

** Allied intelligence also effectively played the highly paranoid attitude among German spies and their handlers. They used turned German agents to discredit reports filed by (still loyal) spies. As a result, German intelligence dismissed many of its actual spies in favor of one who were getting "better" information (who happen to be double agents). In one notable case, a Juan Pujol García (German codename "Arabel", British codename [[GretaGarbo "Garbo"]] managed to stall the advance of tanks to counter the D-Day landings by convincing his handlers that the other spies in France has been turned and that he alone knew that [[BlatantLies Normandy was a diversion attack]] meant to pull troops away from the ''real'' landing site. The Germans were so impressed with this and other information he gave them, he was awarded the [[BlingOfWar Iron Cross Second Class]], an award given only on Hitler's personal authorization. For his service to the British war effort, he was secretly made [[UsefulNotes/KnightFever a Member of the Order of the British Empire]] by King George VI. As a result, he was the only person to be given high honors by both sides of the conflict, for doing the same thing.

* Music/50Cent pulled off a masterful example of this scheme with his BreakthroughHit, "How to Rob." At the time, 50 was an unknown artist signed to major label Columbia Records, where if he didn't get some attention fast, his music would go under-promoted and he would be lost in the shuffle. So he decided to make a song where he listed off dozens of rappers and R&B singers and how he would rob each one of them, counting on them to find out about it and diss him by name, thereby increasing his exposure. The resulting backlash got him mentions from everybody from the Music/WuTangClan to Music/BigPun to Music/JayZ, putting him on the map in New York and opening the door for a long, successful career.

** Allied intelligence also effectively played the highly paranoid attitude among German spies and their handlers. They used turned German agents to discredit reports filed by (still loyal) spies. As a result, German intelligence dismissed many of its actual spies in favor of one who were getting "better" information (who happen to be double agents). In one notable case, a Juan Pujol García (German codename "Arabel", British codename [[GretaGarbo "Garbo"]] managed to stall the advance of tanks to counter the D-Day landings by convincing his handlers that the other spies in France has been turned and that he alone knew that [[BlatantLies Normandy was a diversion attack]] meant to pull troops away from the ''real'' landing site. The Germans were so impressed with this and other information he gave them, he was awarded the [[BlingOfWar Iron Cross Second Class]], an award given only on Hitler's personal authorization. For his service to the British war effort, he was secretly made [[UsefulNotes/KnightFever a Member of the Order of the British Empire]] by King George VI. As a result, he was [[MagnificentBastard the only person to be given high honors by both sides of the conflict, for doing the same thing.]]

** That said, before he was stationed in Southeast Asia, Colonel Olds was stationed in England as a wing commander at RAF Bentwaters, where he received terrible news: He had made the list for promotion to Brigadier General. Which meant he wouldn't be given a combat assignment. So he got his three best pilots together to put on a very unauthorized air show for an open house over the base. [[MagnificentBastard He got exactly what he had hoped for]]: He got in ''just'' enough trouble to get taken off the promotion list and sent to [[BriarPatching command a combat unit in Thailand]] as punishment.

** Simultaneously, King Leonidas of the rival Spartans was killed at Thermopylae, thus weakening one of Athens' domestic enemies. This may have [[MagnificentBastard been entirely intentional]].

** Among many of its schemes, the infamous Berkley Pharmaceuticals, makers of the Enzyte purported penis-enlargement drugs sold by "Smilin' Bob" in its late-night TV commercials, required that if any customer wanted a refund on the grounds the product didn't work, they would not only have to get a doctor to sign a letter that their penes had not changed size but also to have that letter ''notarized'' ... in other words, they had to let a third ''and'' fourth party know of their shameful secret. A federal appellate judge described this as "[[MagnificentBastard admittedly ingenious]]".

** The American forces present in the battle (The Battle off Samar) were sixteen slow, unarmored escort carriers, with a small screen of destroyers and destroyer escorts. The Japanese fielded four battleships (including their largest, the Yamato, which was effectively a super-heavy battleship), six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and eleven destroyers. The only clear advantage the American forces had was overwhelming air superiority, with 450 aircraft in the fight (though their operation was disrupted by a rainstorm and constant harassment of the carriers by Japanese forces, and the planes were equipped with general purpose bombs for supporting ground troops, rather than armor-piercing bombs and torpedoes for attacking ships).

* This is how the 17th president of the U.S., UsefulNotes/AndrewJohnson, was impeached. Congress passed the (unconstitutional) Tenure of Office Act, which basically said that the president couldn't fire any of his appointees without Congressional consent. The Radical Republicans knew that Johnson would fire his Secretary of War and thus violate this act, so they just sat back and [[PassThePopcorn sold tickets to the trial]].

* A [[UsefulNotes/{{Tunisia}} Tunisian]] get-out-the-vote group had one. On October 18, 2011, five days before elections on October 23 (the first since the Tunisian Revolution on January 14 of that year), they set up a giant poster of former president/dictator Ben Ali on a building near a major intersection. The result? People got so riled up they ''[[MomentOfAwesome tore down the poster entirely]]'', revealing another poster behind it that said "Beware, dictatorship can return. On October 23, VOTE".

* This was implied to have happened in the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in the United States. Six court cases challenging the states of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee all resulted in those states' bans on same-sex marriage being declared in violation of the US Constitution. Those states appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which holds jurisdiction over those states. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit ruled 2-1 that the lower courts' decisions should be reversed, as being in violation of a previous US Supreme Court case, ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Nelson Baker v Nelson]]'' of 1972. The trouble is, the Fourth, Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits had already come to the opposite conclusion, that such bans are unconstitutional. This created particular trouble, as one of the legal issues involved was the lack of recognition by one state of a same-sex marriage performed in another state, and having the law interpreted differently in different parts of the country only increased the confusion. The dissenting judge on the Sixth Circuit remarked in her opinion that "because the correct result is so obvious, one is tempted to speculate that the majority has purposefully taken the contrary position to create the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_split circuit split]]", thus making it more likely that the US Supreme Court would get involved to resolve this discrepancy. It did, and the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges subsequent ruling]] not only overturned the Sixth Circuit decision, but [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome struck down all remaining bans on same-sex marriage for the entire United States]].

** Per the RomanceOfTheThreeKingdoms, it was [[TheChessmaster Zhuge Liang]] playing music while [[AlwaysSecondBest Sima Yi]] was preparing to attack.

** Another Batman gambit in the USAF a few years later ended up creating the highly-successful F-16 Fighting Falcon. At the time the trend for jet aircraft was for heavier and less-maneuverable planes like the F-111 that were meant to engage enemies beyond visual range with missiles; Colonel John Boyd and a group of like-minded individuals dubbed the "Fighter Mafia", however, saw that the technology wasn't up to spec to keep situations from devolving into close-range dogfights with guns, and began pushing for a lightweight and highly-maneuverable fighter. The Air Force initially would have none of it and insisted on sticking to the heavy F-15 Eagle for air superiority - up until the Fighter Mafia [[InterserviceRivalry suggested that the Navy might be working on a lightweight fighter of their own that they could then force onto the Air Force]]. Similar may have played a role in the creation of the F-22 Raptor about 20 years later - the prototype YF-22 only beat the competing YF-23 in agility (the YF-23 was faster and stealthier), but it was also speculated in the aviation press at the time that the YF-22 would be more adaptable for a concurrent program the Navy was running to create their own stealth fighter. The Secretary of the Air Force at the time has admitted that said adaptability was the reason the YF-22 was selected to become the Raptor, and given that the Navy dropped their program within a year of the selection...

** So ... when the U-boats saw the Q-ships, they surfaced—only for the crews to remove the fake bulkheads, run up the Royal Navy ensign and fire away. Often they were able to sink the U-boats before their counterparts on the U-boat could even get to their stations. Later on they got even more clever ... the boats would be loaded with light cargo like balsa wood so that it would stay afloat even if torpedoed, encouraging U-boat commanders to surface and finish the job from there. Sometimes the "crews" would even abandon ship to further entice the U-boat up into gun range. About 14 U-boats in all were sunk by the Q-ships, which however was not enough for the Royal Navy to justify the program's continuation in future wars.

* Also during WWII, when the Allies were planning to invade southern Europe from Africa, the British launched a uniformed corpse from a submarine, in an area where the Spanish would recover his body. Chained to his belt was a briefcase that explained that the invasion site would NOT be Sicily, and hinted instead it would be Greece. The Spanish under Franco, being on friendly terms with the Germans, found the body and gave the evidence to the German embassy, who bought the story, leaving the invasion site nearly undefended. It may also help that the Abwehr, which asserted the authenticity of the documents, was riddled with British agents, including its head, Admiral Canaris.

** Allied intelligence also effectively played the highly paranoid attitude among German spies and their handlers. They used turned German agents to discredit reports filed by (still loyal) spies. As a result, German intelligence dismissed many of its actual spies in favor of one who were getting "better" information (who happen to be double agents). In one notable case, a Juan Pujol García (German codename "Arabel", British codename [[GretaGarbo "Garbo"]] managed to stall the advance of tanks to counter the D-Day landings by convincing his handlers that the other spies in France has been turned and that he alone knew that [[BlatantLies Normandy was a diversion attack]] meant to pull troops away from the ''real'' landing site. The Germans were so impressed with this and other information he gave them, he was awarded the [[BlingOfWar Iron Cross Second Class]], an award given only on Hitler's personal authorization. For his service to the British war effort, he was secretly made [[UsefulNotes/KnightFever a Member of the Order of the British Empire]] by King George VI. As a result, he was the only person to be given high honors by both sides of the conflict, for doing the same thing.

** Allied intelligence also effectively played the highly paranoid attitude among German spies and their handlers. They used turned German agents to discredit reports filed by (still loyal) spies. As a result, German intelligence dismissed many of its actual spies in favor of one who were getting "better" information (who happen to be double agents). In one notable case, a Juan Pujol García (German codename "Arabel", British codename [[GretaGarbo "Garbo"]] managed to stall the advance of tanks to counter the D-Day landings by convincing his handlers that the other spies in France has been turned and that he alone knew that [[BlatantLies Normandy was a diversion attack]] meant to pull troops away from the ''real'' landing site. The Germans were so impressed with this and other information he gave them, he was awarded the [[BlingOfWar Iron Cross Second Class]], an award given only on Hitler's personal authorization. For his service to the British war effort, he was secretly made [[KnightFever a Member of the Order of the British Empire]] by King George VI. As a result, he was the only person to be given high honors by both sides of the conflict, for doing the same thing.

* Two classic "PerryMason moments" in 1990s televised criminal trials were made possible by this trope:

* Robert E. Lee attempted one of these in his first large-scale maneuver into the North. He split his army up into mutually non-supporting groups to go after divergent objectives, which would normally have been very unsound. But he knew that the opposing Union Army was led by George [=McClellan=], excellent at training and good for morale, but exceeding cautious and indecisive in his movements. Lee counted on [=McClellan=] having such a delayed noncommittal reaction upon discovering Lee's invasion, that he would have plenty of time to gather the portions of his army together before battle. He also counted on[=McClellan=] being so worried of even the possibility of a battle where the odds were not with him, that if he ''did'' catch a small portion of Lee's army off guard before it recombined, he would wait and make sure it really was the smaller force it appeared to be before he actually attacked it, giving it time to withdraw towards the other groups. It was a very good assessment of how [=McClellan=] would likely have acted, had a lost copy of Lee's deployment plans not been discovered, giving [=McClellan=] certainly that Lee's forces were scattered and encouraging him to move unusually rapidly so that he could attack right away before Lee was ready, ending Lee's invasion almost before it began. Even so, Lee's gambit still had some payoff, as [=McClellan=]'s attack was still rather ponderous and failed to press it's full advantage of numbers, so that the resulting Battle of Antietam was a draw when the "Lost Orders" could have resulted in a disastrous defeat for the Confederacy.

* Near the beginning of Word War II, Hitler and Mussolini attempted to convince Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco to join their Axis. Franco agreed, on the condition that, after the war, Spain received basically all of North Africa that didn't already belong to Italy. This condition was too much for Mussolini, so Spain remained neutral (if Axis-leaning). On one hand, this can be seen as an example of Franco's ego. On the other hand, it is very possible that Franco deliberately overreached during negotiations in order to stay out of the war, while remaining on better terms with the Axis than he would have if he had outright declined an alliance.

* Robert E. Lee attempted one of these in his first large-scale maneuver into the North. He split his army up into mutually non-supporting groups to go after divergent objectives, which would normally have been very unsound. But he knew that the opposing Union Army was led by George McClellan, excellent at training and good for morale, but exceeding cautious and indecisive in his movements. Lee counted on McClellan having such a delayed noncommittal reaction upon discovering Lee's invasion, that he would have plenty of time to gather the portions of his army together before battle. He also counted on McClellan being so worried of even the possibility of a battle where the odds were not with him, that if he ''did'' catch a small portion of Lee's army off guard before it recombined, he would wait and make sure it really was the smaller force it appeared to be before he actually attacked it, giving it time to withdraw towards the other groups. It was a very good assessment of how McClellan would likely have acted, had a lost copy of Lee's deployment plans not been discovered, giving McClellan certainly that Lee's forces were scattered and encouraging him to move unusually rapidly so that he could attack right away before Lee was ready, ending Lee's invasion almost before it began. Even so, Lee's gambit still had some payoff, as McClellan's attack was still rather ponderous and failed to press it's full advantage of numbers, so that the resulting Battle of Antietam was a draw when the "Lost Orders" could have resulted in a disastrous defeat for the Confederacy.