Crazy Enough To Work / Real Life

Military

• Generals throughout history could occasionally get away with pulling off ostensibly insane stunts by exploiting this trope, usually involving an attack so unlikely (say, through a seemingly insurmountable desert, swamp or mountain range), the enemy is caught completely off guard (think the Blitzkrieg in the Ardennes Forest). If it's crazy enough, the enemy will never see it coming, and it just might work. Murphy's law of war states: "If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."

Antiquity to Early Modern

• Alexander the Great's Siege of Tyre. The city was impregnable from land and sea. It was a goddamn island. So what did Alex do? Turned it into a peninsula. You can just hear the Tyrian general's Flat "What" as he saw it going on. The Tyrians reacted quickly to the situation and managed to hold off Alexander for a while by employing their sea advantage to hold up Alexander's initial attempt at a causeway. Only when Alexander tried again, this time with ships helping in the work, were the Tyrians defeated.
• Hannibal Barca's conquest of Italy in 218 BC. The Romans never expected anyone to be crazy enough to march over the Alps with an entire army complete with cumbersome war elephants, and certainly not for it to work. He did lose half of his army and most of his war elephants doing it, but still got it through and had Rome on the run for nearly 15 years.
  • In the end, the Romans won by outcrazying Hannibal. Invade Africa and attack Carthage directly (either getting Hannibal's leaders to surrender or forcing Hannibal to return home to defend them)? Costly, but doable. Invade Africa with only infantry and raise cavalry among Carthage's allies? A bit crazy, but Carthage's allies were more favorable to Rome, and with a few legions in support, they could finally rebel. Invade Africa with an infantry army composed of fresh recruits and the survivors of Hannibal's greatest victory? Crazy. Yet, Scipio Africanus destroyed Carthage's home troops and forced an armistice before a frantic Hannibal could return, and when Carthage broke the armistice and sent him Hannibal he defeated him too in spite of being outnumbered.
  • Notably, when Hannibal's army had just annihilated their best legions and was actually at the gates of Rome, leaving only a skeleton crew to defend the city itself, they sent an expeditionary force off to reinforce one of their overseas colonies (probably done solely to psych Hannibal out, but even so...) This was done because the Romans knew Hannibal's one weakness: he lacked the numbers to sustain either a siege or an attrition campaign. Hannibal could deal with the attrition campaign by outrunning the Romans, but he could never conquer a Roman stronghold (as shown by the strongholds of Placentia and Cremona, placed in Hannibal-friendly territory, the first of which resisted to the Gauls' siege for years, and the second resisted the entire war), much less Rome itself and the Roman-friendly populations around her. In the above-mentioned situation, the Romans didn't just send an expeditionary force to reinforce their overseas colonies (cutting off Hannibal's possible reinforcements in the process) precisely because they knew this, but auctioned the land he was camping on to drive the point home (the land was sold at the price of free land).
• The Romans later did something like this during the siege of Masada. The fortress of Masada lay on top of a mountain and could be accessed only from a narrow road, meaning it couldn't be conquered by force, only by trickery (how the Jewish rebels had conquered it in the first place: they entered with a supply caravan), and trickeries couldn't be attempted in that situation. The Romans built a mountain-sized siege ramp to reach the fortress in force and with their siege engines, at which point the defenders killed themselves before the Romans could breach the walls.
  • During the Siege of Alesia, the besieging Roman army under Julius Caesar received news that a massive Gallic relief force was coming. What did Caesar do? Break the siege and withdraw? Finish the siege before reinforcement arrived? Nope. He instead doubled down and built another layer of wall, so that when the relief force arrived, they had to besiege the Romans who were besieging Alesia. And it worked! Despite repeated assaults from both sides of the wall, Caesar's army held out long enough for him to lead a decisive cavalry rear charge that routed the entire relief army. The defenders surrendered shortly thereafter.
• Zhuge "Sleeping Dragon" Liang was a Chinese general famous for his masterful battle strategies and deceit. Once during the War of the Three Kingdoms, he was trapped in a town with only a handful of soldiers and an opposing army of a hundred thousand men approaching fast. He immediately sat himself atop the city walls with the gates wide open, calmly playing a lute. The leader of the enemy army, Sima Yi, was quite familiar with Zhuge's ingenuity and, thinking this was all a big setup for a deadly ambush, immediately retreated. Keep in mind that Sima Yi wasn't an idiot as he and his family would be the ones to eventually succeed in conquering all of China.
• Looking for leverage against the Aztec Empire, Hernán Cortés secured the support of the Republic of Tlaxcala with the help of some convenient intermarrying, but he was aware that not even Tlaxcala had enough resources for a direct attack on the Aztecs to be feasable. He instead gathered his expedition, traveled diplomatically to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and essentially told Emperor Moctezuma how awesome would it be for him and his empire to pledge his loyalty to Charles V, all while seeking for allies within the local nobility to pressure the emperor and, eventually, arresting him and making him a hostage on his own city. The plan was successful in that an overwhelmed and confused Moctezuma did accept (your mileage may vary on whether he was playing along, though), even if everything unravelled when a rival conquistador demanded Cortés' presence elsewhere and his chosen lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado absolutely screwed it up by committing a massacre in Tenochtitlan.
• During the Italian Wars the French army led by King Francis I had besieged the city of Pavia in a way that echoed Caesar in Alesia, taking refuge in the walled Visconti park, which partially enveloped Pavia, to be protected from relief forces while he comfortably bombarded the city into submission. When the imperial relief army led by Charles of Lannoy and Fernando de Ávalos arrived and probed the situation with skirmishes, they judged the French position so difficult to assail that forfeiting Pavia and seeking a better engagement seemed much more useful, especially given that the relief army was undersupplied and the French were aware of it. At the last moment, fearing that the French might come out and chase him if he simply left, Ávalos decided instead to go for it all: he ordered a night raid with his entire army, piercing the Visconti walls and launching a total attack against the French camp, aspiring to capture Francis and some commanders or at the very least inflict enough damage to disable the French from pursuing him. The French, however, were caught entirely surprised and crushed in midst of their discoordination, and when Francis tried to mount a desperate counterattack, he was taken down and captured just as Ávalos wanted.
• When Francisco Pizarro arrived in the city of Cajamarca, where he expected to meet Inca emperor Atahualpa, he found it empty and an Inca army of at least 30,000 warriors shadowing it. Even worse, his native spies brought info that Atahualpa was interested in getting ahold of the Spaniards so they could "share" with him their advanced weapons and impressive war beasts. Some in Pizarro's meager 150-men expedition suggested to just flee for their lives, but Pizarro, aware that he had very few local allies in the Inca Empire yet and that even those would likely abandon him if he just escaped from his showdown with the emperor, decided to instead play it cool and turn the trap into a chance. He camped in Cajamarca and traded friendly messages with Atahualpa, inviting the emperor to come as if he suspected nothing, and the overconfident Atahualpa did so. Pizarro then simply attacked, captured Atahualpa and ordered an attack with all of his guns and horses, capitalizing on the subsequent confusion to rout the Inca army division that followed the emperor.
• Napoleon's standard modus operandi was this, earning him a lot of apparently impossible victories (and half of his four decisive defeats when his foes were smart enough to realize what was going on). Some examples:
  • He's facing a well-equipped Royalist insurrection in Paris with an outnumbered army. To counter this, he fired cannons loaded with grapeshot (essentially transforming them into giant shotguns), causing the Royalist attack to lose any semblance of cohesion due to surprise and the losses incurred (a cavalry charge finished the job, causing the insurrection to dissolve). Grapeshot was not the crazy part (in fact, it was a standard load for cannons of the era), but using them in urban warfare was.
  • In his First Italian Campaign, he won at Montenotte because he loaded his cannons near the breaking point to fire at extremely long ranges, knowing he would be able to replace the damaged cannons with ones captured in battle. At Lodi, he won by charging the enemy guns (he had timed the enemy's reload speed, and knew that they could only fire once before his men were on them). At Arcole, he won by losing a few battles on purpose to lure his enemy to a prepared killing ground. To cap it off, he conquered the fortress of Mantua by forcing enemy relief forces into the fortress, causing them to exhaust their food supplies faster.
  • The Egyptian Campaign started with Napoleon running Nelson's blockade by having his fleet set sail during a storm (he knew the harbour better than Nelson, and knew that the only refuge for the blockade ships would have prevented them from noticing him slipping away). Napoleon's army was starved, demoralized, and fighting against the strongest cavalry in the world. The square formation solved that, as did pointing out that the members of said cavalry went to battle wearing all of their jewels (the Battle of the Pyramids was such a Curb-Stomp Battle that the name of his foes, the Mamelukes, is now synonymous with 'idiots' in Italy). Then, Nelson destroyed his fleet, preventing him from receiving reinforcements or returning home in case things went bad. No problem, he would just return to France by conquering the entire Ottoman Empire, using locally-raised troops to replenish losses. The latter was one of his decisive defeats because British admiral Sidney Smith, who Nelson had left to keep an eye on the situation, realized what he was planning and reinforced/resupplied the fortress of Acre enough that it repelled Napoleon's siege (Napoleon would later be forced to abandon his army to return to France with a single ship).
  • The Second Italian Campaign started with another, with the Austrians blocking the way to Italy near Nice and him pulling a Hannibal and entering Italy over the Alps (something supposed to be impossible with cannons). Also, at Marengo, the Austrians had all but defeated him when Napoleon noticed he was about to receive reinforcements and had his troops launch an immediate counterattack right when the Austrians were preparing for the post-victory pursuit (though the timing of that counterattack owes much more to Generals Marmont and Kellermann Junior: together, with eighteen guns loaded with grapeshot fired at point-blank range (Marmont did learn his artillery tricks from Bonaparte) and something like two hundred heavy cavalrymen, they managed to hold off the attacking Austrian column (more than 5000 men) long enough for General Desaix to get the reinforcements into battle formation).
  • At Austerlitz, Napoleon was outnumbered and outgunned by the Allied army. His opening move was to retreat from the Pratzen Heights that dominated his chosen battlefield and letting the Russians occupy it. Between that, Napoleon feigning being hopelessly outmatched and knowing it and some of his troops retreating at what appeared to be the wrong moment, the Austrians and the Russians launched their attack... leaving the Pratzen Heights free for Napoleon to reoccupy while placing themselves in the best place to be shelled. In a partial subversion, Russian general Kutuzov had seen through Napoleon's plan right away, but his plan to retreat to HIS chosen battlefield was overruled and, after placing all the troops under his command on the Pratzen, he was ordered to abandon them.
  • At Somosierra, Napoleon faced a highly fortified, windy mountainous ravine that was his only way towards Madrid. Instead of assaulting in full force, he sent his personal retainer unit of cavalry (several hundred at most). Taking the Spaniards completely by surprise, they scattered the dumbfounded defenders for long enough that the rest of the army could secure the positions. Notably, historians debate whether this was the plan, an awkward result of misunderstood order to scout ahead, or the cavalrymen wanting to show off.
  • The Russian campaign was supposed to be another: a sharp attack into Russia (something that was considered a suicidal attempt) to destroy the Russian army and force the Russians to join the alliance against Britain. Sadly for him, after the first few defeats, the Tzar placed Kutuzov into command, who completely outmatched him at a strategical level and ultimately kicked him out of Russia, aided by Scorched Earth tactics and General Winter.
  • Leipzig was the result of the Sixth Coalition pulling this on Napoleon: left with no generals capable of defeating Napoleon on the battlefield (with Kutuzov dead by an illness and the future Duke of Wellington being busy in Spain), the Allies fixed a few strategic objectives (including avoiding battles with forces commanded directly by Napoleon until they had mustered overwhelming force) and left to their armies to try and achieve them independently from each other. This not only gave them the overwhelming superiority they aimed for, but, when used on a tactical level at Leipzig, resulted in Napoleon rebuffing an Allied attack only for two other Allied armies showing up to prevent him from finishing the job on the first Allied army, ultimately forcing him to retreat with a crippled army and leaving almost half of it (including one of his marshalls) dead, wounded or captured. The gambit worked partly because the coalition had the help of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a former buddy of Napoleon who had been elected the crown prince and regent of Sweden, who knew the tactics of Napoleon inside-out, and therefore Out-Gambitted his former boss.
  • The very fact that Wellington fought at Waterloo was crazy: his army was outnumbered and outgunned, most of it was comprised of raw recruits (while Napoleon's army was entirely composed of veterans), and he had no heavy cavalry. On the other hand, the plan was to resist and bleed Napoleon long enough for Blücher to bring his army on Napoleon's flank while he was fully committed, and that was exactly what happened.
  • Napoleon's Marshals could come up with crazy plans of their own. The most famous example has to be Lannes and Murat seizing a vitally important bridge... by walking on it and claiming that there was an armistice.
• George Washington's desperate attack at Trenton during The American Revolution should have been a suicide mission. The weather was awful, and his army was small, undisciplined, had lost every recent battle it had fought, and needed to launch a coordinated attack across an ice-choked river at night. And do it all on the sly, before his troops mutinied and deserted back to their homes. Of course, the unwitting Hessians knew all this too and thought that because of all this, Christmas of 1776 would be a fine time to let their guard down and scale back patrols. It wasn't.
• In the Eastern Theater of The American Civil War, the Confederates put this trope to work early and often. The Union always had more men, so the only way for the Confederates to win battles was to innovate- often to the point of weirdness. It sometimes meant luring the Union generals into making fruitless attacks, and sometimes meant making their own unorthodox attacks at vulnerable spots. Robert E. Lee was a fan of the trope, and Thomas Jackson was the master gamesman of it. Ultimately, the trope was subverted. Jackson, the best practitioner of it, met an untimely death, hurting the Confederate's ability to deliver these types of battle plans. Also, for most of the early war these tricks were being played out against George McClellen, who was perhaps the most overly cautious general in American history, as despite having an army that was much larger and better equipped than Lee, he was paranoid that he was always on the verge of being outnumbered and therefore was extremely prone to hesitation and ordering preemptive retreats, making it quite easy for Lee and Jackson to psych him out. By the time he was finally removed from his post, his replacements in the Union Army had learned to simply expect the unexpected from the Confederates, and to retain the initiative in spite of it.
  • General Grant, the General that would eventually win the war for the North was also known for this. Unlike many of his predecessors, he wouldn't retreat after a loss with General Lee. Instead he just kept marching. He had the manpower to continue flanking Lee until the South simply ran out of troops. General Sherman too, Grant's best friend and second-in-command, was a modern day general. He separated himself from his supply line and his men foraged and stole their supplies instead. He pillaged the country and destroyed the civilian infrastructure that the Southern armies relied on for their supplies, an incredibly forward thinking concept of scorched earth policy.
• Giuseppe Garibaldi once decided to conquer the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (the southern half of modern-day Italy) with a thousand under-armed people (one of them was a woman), facing off against one hundred thousand well-armed soldiers who knew he was coming. About six months later, Garibaldi had an army of fifty thousand, half of which defeated the last, under-armed, and demoralized remnants of the army of the Two Sicilies. It succeeded for just one reason: the enemy knew the enemy force was coming but not that Garibaldi was in command. Two years earlier Italian unification patriot Carlo Pisacane had led a similar expedition that had ended with the lynching of the invaders at the hands of the citizens (it helped they had broke out a number of inmates from a prison, thus adding plausibility to the government's description of them as a mass of brigands and murderers), and the Two Sicilian commanders expected a repeat, assuming that the invaders actually ran the blockade (they did), and thus warned the people. The one difference was that Garibaldi was well known as a freedom fighter and had been smart enough to invade Sicily proper, that didn't like the government of Naples and was thus able to start an insurrection and cause mass desertions in the enemy army.
• Sardinia was scarce in cavalry, as both Sardinia proper and the mainland were mostly mountainous lands with little space for the horses. They raised the Bersaglieri, assault infantry noted for their good aim ("bersagliere" is Italian for "sharpshooter"), their wide-brimmed hat decorated with capercaille plumes (that shielded their eyes from the sun and helped aiming), and running all the time, and expected them to hold off cavalry charges with a square formation and then countercharge as they regrouped. They had the chance to try it only once, but when they did they routed a Russian Army.

World War I onwards

• During World War I, the Italians mounted torpedoes on commercial speedboats, called them MAS and used them as patrol ships and harbour raiders. The Austrian flagship was sunk by two of those speedboats.
• The Canadian 85th Highlanders of Nova Scotia battalion in the Battle of Vimy Ridge captured a vital linchpin in the Germans' defence, Hill 145. In the snowy battle, preceding attacks on Hill 145's artillery fire failed to suppress the defenders, who shredded the unfortunate infantry attacking their position, and with few men available, the 85th Highlanders were called up to take the position. Unbeknownst to the 85th, their preliminary artillery barrage was canceled due to the close proximity of their jumping-off trenches to the enemy lines, so the zero hour of their attack was met with silence...and nonetheless a battle cry rang out among them and they charged forward, largely surprising the Germans defending Hill 145 who knew that significant artillery barrages meant an attack was happening and figured no one in their right mind would attack without them. It probably helped that the unit was up until this point, totally green and used only for work parties.
• In the World War II, this is what Hitler was hoping for in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944: he ordered an offensive feint north and south of the Ardennes Forest, and then concentrated the majority of his troops to attack through the forest. Tracked vehicles (like tanks) are not generally able to make good time in forests, which would stall any attack, and it was also the dead of winter, meaning even infantry movements would be slow and perilous. Hitler's hope was that Allied Command would get reports of an attack through the Ardennes and dismiss it as completely ridiculous since it was a strategic nightmare, and by the time they realized it was real, Hitler's forces would have broken through and been on the offensive in Allied territory. Eisenhower, however, decided that the first report he received of an attack through the Ardennes signaled a major offensive, and sent all available forces in reserve (at the time, not a lot) to counter the attack while continuing the true offensive north and south of the forest. The result was the Battle of the Bulge and the effective shattering of German offensive power for the remainder of the war: Germany ended up on the defense for the next 6 months before they collapsed completely.
• Like the French, the Belgians figured that an attack from the Germans was coming sooner or later, and they built a fortress to cover the most likely avenues of approach. The Germans responded by coming at it from what at the time must have seemed like the most unlikely avenue — the top.
• In the same war, the British were seriously thinking about making aircraft carriers out of ICE. The idea was that they would mix sawdust with the ice, which would hold off the ships from melting long enough, and be strong enough to double as armor. The main reason they were going forward with it was that it would require far less steel, which the blockaded Britain had very little of. However, it was subverted when they figured out it would take more steel to make the refrigeration units needed to construct them than it would take to just make an aircraft carrier, and ultimately averted before any serious work began, as America with its unfettered industrial might was chipping in, and improved Allied air power was steadily one-upping the Wolfpacks; the situation no longer required such desperation.
  
  Mythbusters decided to recreate this. They ended up substituting newspapers for sawdust, which on the small scale was much stronger than the sawdust. It worked better than they hoped and they were able to stay afloat for almost an hour. Adam Savage proclaimed the myth "Plausible, but ludicrous" as it wouldn't have been practical to do.
• Similar to Hannibal's example above, the Maginot Line during World War II was very lightly defended near the border with Belgium, in part because it was believed nobody would ever be crazy enough to try to send tanks over the uneven and heavily forested Ardennes. Which, of course, was exactly what German forces did, bypassing the strongest part of the Line and sending the French forces into chaos trying to repel it.
• The Italian Maiale (Italian for "pig") was a long-ranged but slow-moving torpedo with a detachable warhead that was supposed to be steered in an enemy harbour by two frogmen, who then detach the warhead, place it on the hull of an enemy warship and then leave before they explode and sink the ship. In World War II, two British battleships were sunk in Alexandria's harbour, among similar raids performed by the Decima Flottiglia MAS
  
  The effectiveness of these kind of raids was such that the Allies tried to copy them with mixed results, and when Italy switched sides they called in the members of the Decima who remained with the King's government and had them train their special forces.
  • Barely less crazy was the British attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto a little over a year earlier. It was an attack considered to be impossible due to the limited depth of the harbour, until the British figured out how to compensate.^note Air-dropped torpedoes needed a minimum depth of water, or they would hit the bottom and get stuck in the mud. The British modified their torpedoes so they didn't dive as far. The Japanese were paying close attention and used the same tactics and modifications at Pearl Harbor. Result: only two attacking aircraft lost for a cost of one battleship sunk, two more damaged, and more damage to several smaller ships.
  • The Decima also raided Gibraltar successfully six times. That is not the crazy part, as by then the tactics were tested. The crazy part went with the last three raids, as they came not from a submarine as usual but from a derelict merchant ship on the Spanish coast near Gibraltar that had been modified in a base.
• Operation Chariot during World War II, also known as "The Greatest Raid Of All". The town of St. Nazaire in France had the only drydock capable of holding the massive Nazi battleship Tirpitz and thus the only port from which the battleship could attack Allied convoys supplying Britain with food. So, it was decided the drydock had to be destroyed. Unfortunately, a naval operation would be too dangerous and an air-raid too inaccurate. So, the British Commandos - the forerunners of the SAS - decided on a new plan: they would embark 265 of their best men onboard a flotilla of Motor Launches, tiny wooden ships with practically no armor and minimal armament. They would be accompanied by the ancient HMS Campbeltown, a WWI-era destroyer that began her career as the USS Buchanan, which would be packed with large amounts of high explosive and disguised as a German destroyer. The destroyer would ram the dock gate and then explode, taking the drydock out of commission. Meanwhile, the Commandos would run around breaking things before embarking on the Motor Launches for the return to Britain. It was Crazy enough to half-work - the gate was rammed, the Commandos destroyed things... and then found that most of their tickets home had been sunk. Most of the survivors surrendered after being surrounded and running out of ammunition, with 5 escaping overland to Spain. The Campbeltown, embedded in the dock gate, waited until the following day to explode, by which point it was crawling with enemy troops. The explosion totally wrecked the dock gate, and scattered bits of German so far and so high that human remains were still being found in 1968. The drydock was disabled for the rest of the war. The entire operation was so ballsy that the Germans sent messages to the British recommending that the raiding party be decorated for their gallantry and the British handed out medals based on those recommendations.
• The Inchon landings in The Korean War. The difference between high tide and low tide at Inchon was very nearly 30 feet in the late summer — not really suitable for amphibious landings since the ships launching landing craft would be likely to get stuck in the mudflats when the tide went out (and get stuck period six months later). So, the North Koreans weren't concerned with defending it. That was exactly why Douglas MacArthur expected it to work. Using Japanese tidal charts, the UN forces were able to accurately predict high tide and when ships could move in to release landing craft, then pull out before they got stuck in the mudflats. The result led to the first major turning point in the war.
• The Charge of the Heavy Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, during The Crimean War. Lord James Scarlett maneuvers his brigade (roughly 800 strong) into position, only to see 3,000 Russian cavalry appear on a rise to his left, thus having the advantage in numbers and terrain. Scarlett patiently forms his unit, then charges uphill and puts the Russians to rout. Scarlett's foolhardy but courageous action nearly won the battle for the Allies, until an equally reckless, but far less successful cavalry charge later in the day.

Science and technology

• Many variants on this are attributed to Niels Bohr, notably to Wolfgang Pauli, on Pauli's nonlinear field theory: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct." Reputedly, when Lee Smolin was running around proposing that black holes give birth to new universes, Murray Gell-Mann said, "Smolin? Is he that young guy with all the crazy ideas? He may not be wrong."
• Nintendo. The company's willingness to try anything out-of-the-box, especially after failures like the Virtual Boy and Wii U, makes Nintendo an unpredictable wild card with balls of Nintendium.
  • After The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, stores refused to sell video game consoles and people were wary of buying video games. So what did Nintendo do? They packed in the Robotic Operating Buddy (which was a piece of garbage that only worked with two games) with the NES, so they could tell stores it was a toy, and they made it a front-loader so it resembled a VCR more than a gaming console. Nintendo is now considered to have single-handedly saved the video game industry in North America and is one of the richest companies in the world.
  • Fast-forward to 2004. A handheld gaming console with a flip-case design and dual screens, the lower one being a touchscreen? Was Nintendo seriously following up their successful Game Boy line with that? Sony's PSP would kick them out of the handheld gaming market! Turns out touchscreen gaming was a good enough hook for the Nintendo DS to become the second best-selling gaming console of all-time.
  • Come 2006 and we have a console controlled by a motion-sensing remote. Seriously? And it's not even HD? Ridiculous! Ridiculous enough to sell 67 million units in three years.
  • In 2017, they released the Nintendo Switch, a home console that is essentially half-console, half-handheld. Despite early criticism on how viable it would be, since it was effectively just a portable Wii U (you know, that aforementioned failure), it managed to completely outsell said predecessor within its first year.
• When they released the Citroen 2CV in Africa, they included a manual for alternative solutions when parts weren't available, which included things like shoe-laces (because Africa is mostly wilderness, having to resort to a bush repair is a very real possibility).
• The fate of Apollo 13. So your Cool Ship has an explosion literally halfway to the moon. Here's the plan: 1) Use a machine designed strictly for landing and taking off as a lifeboat, even though it will have to support three people for four days when it was designed to support only two people for only two days; 2) Shut down all electricity, subjecting your crew to near-freezing temperatures (not to mention the havoc the frost is sure to wreak with the electronics when you have to turn them back on); 3) Kitbash a working carbon dioxide filter out of whatever you have lying around because the ones in the lifeboat can't handle the workload; 4) Carry out course corrections with an engine unsuited for such fine maneuvering, using such high tech navigational methods as "placing your thumb over the Earth and lining it up with your window frame"; and 5) Literally invent a new procedure to restart all your electronics so as to not blow every fuse in the craft, thus stranding yourself in space. The Subversion of this is, in the hands of ordinary people, yes, it would be Crazy Enough to Work. In the hands of NASA's highly trained corps of Steely Eyed Missile Men, it came off as... almost commonplace. The reality is somewhere in between; they weren't Crazy-Prepared for this type of situation, but they were trained enough not to panic even when Murphy's Law struck (note the tone of the now-famous line, "Houston, we've had a problem."—concerned but not freaked out), trained enough to coordinate with mission control, work out a solution, and get home alive! Apollo 13 was a technological disaster but a human triumph.
  • That may or may not be the point of the Steely Eyed Missile Men; create unusual and ingenious solutions to unexpected problems under tight deadlines. Besides which, while the vague concept may be "just crazy enough to work", there's a helluva lot of effort put into making sure that everything is within the bounds of reality.
  • It was said later that if they had written the Apollo 13 situation up as a training simulation, it would have been rejected as unsolvable. That realization caused an official change of NASA training policy from "anything that's possible to solve" to "anything whatsoever".
• Taking a page from the Steely Eyed Missile Men, a number of folks in commercial aviation likewise summon crazy calm resolve to combat problems that arise. A most recent example, something, probably geese, gets caught in the engines of your loaded Airbus and blows them out. You can't circle back to the airport you left and you won't make the closest alternative. What do you do? Why, you just land the thing in the Hudson River. Captain Chesley Sullenberger and the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 did it.
  • With the help of the US Coast Guard a similar feat was pulled 52 years earlier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And like the above, all survived (except forty-something unlucky canaries in the cargo hold).
  • In the USSR in '63, a TU-124 (Tupolev Construction Bureau Mk 124) jet plane landed on the Neva river in St. Peters... sorry, Leningrad at that time, right between the two bridges on it (distanced about one mile apart!) and having passed just 4 m (13 ft!) above one of them. Originally they were to land in Pulkovo airport after burning out the fuel left in their reservoirs, but when their engines stopped suddenly, they had no other choice but the river... And here's the crowner: the name of the plane captain in question? Viktor Mostovoy (surname derives from 'most' (мост), Russian for 'bridge').
  • Much like Capt. Sullenberger above, there was the incident of the Gimli Glider. on July 23, 1983, Air Canada flight 143 had accidentally taken on far less fuel than they would need to get to their destination ^note this was mostly due to the recent switchover from Imperial to Metric units and a resultant error in fuel loading due to some planes using Metric and others still using Imperial combined with the plane having an inoperative fuel gauge. and had run out completely over Ontario. The co-pilot (Maurice Quintal) should have been thinking Bring My Brown Pants, but the pilot, Captain Bob Pearson, was a glider pilot. He noted they did not have enough remaining fuel to get to Winnipeg (the nearest airport), but they were in range of an old RCAF base, the disused RCAF Gimli, and decided to use the tarmac there to make a glide landing. Unbeknownst to Pearson, Quintal or ATC, the base had been repurposed as a go-cart, motocross, and auto racetrack. And it was in use at that time with spectators and competitors racing. Worst of all, right in their path were two boys on bikes who were so close on their approach that the cockpit crew could see the looks of sheer horror in their faces. And, a gliding 767 is virtually silent. Captain Pearson was able to execute a perfect side-slip glide landing (something never even attempted in a plane that large) and brought the craft down safely (albeit with the nose landing gear failing), and with zero deaths on the plane or on the ground. (Those two boys who by any sane reckoning should have been dead? They lived!) As for Pearson and Quintal? Pearson was demoted and Quintal was suspended due knowingly taking off with the inoperative fuel gauge that caused the emergency landing in the first place. ^note A working fuel gauge is a required piece of equipment meaning that if it was broken the plane couldn't legally fly until it was replaced. They were shortly reinstated after appeal and given high awards from international flying associations for their act. Even crazier, their maneuver was attempted by experienced pilots over and over again in simulations and every single time lead to fatal crashes. This is one of the reasons they were reinstated, they weren't crazy for trying it, they were just that good to be able to pull it off in the first place.

Sports

• The Halloween gambit in chess is a perfect example of this trope: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Nxe5?! Instead of the standard knight game, white sacrifices one of their valuable knights to try and seize the center with pawns and force the opponent's knights back. The faces of people who've seen this opening — right before they are flattened by a march of pawns — is something to be seen.
• In the 2018 Edition of the Giro D'Italia Chris Froome went into the race as a favourite but crashes before the race even began and further crashes during the race along with a somewhat poor performance during the middle stages most had ruled Froome out of even a top 10 finish. A stage 14 win would bring him somewhat back into the race but he would follow up by losing time the following day. What no one expected was that on Stage 19 with over 80 kilometers of tough mountain riding to go Froome would launch and attack so aggressive that it quickly dropped some of the best climbing cyclists in the world. Froome would then continue to gain time on everyone else and move from fourth position in the GC to First gaining over three minutes on reigning champion Tom Dumoulin. He would successfully defend and extend his lead the following day to secure his win and secure a place in history as the first British cyclist to win the race, the seventh cyclist in history to win all cycling grand tours, and the third in history to hold the titles of all three tours and the only one to do so in the modern era calendar.
• Ted Turner, the "Mouth of the South", always seemed to face resistance to his ideas — putting his Atlanta TV station on the satellite for national distribution, starting a 24-hour news network (CNN), a 24-hour animation network, buying a wrestling promotion — and inevitably he'd strike gold in some fashion.
• In robot combat (think Robot Wars and BattleBots), heavy spinning weapons are unquestionably the most dangerous weapon type, with the most powerful ones capable of tearing through metal armour like paper. The accepted tactic for dealing with such heavy spinners? Drive headlong into them. A thick angled wedge or scoop will handily deflect the spinner, slowing or stopping it completely, and also causing the attacking robot to take recoil damage from the impact. You can then just keep on doing this until the opponent's weapon breaks down, leaving them helpless. British robot Behemoth was famous for this tactic, and Robot Wars 2016 champion Apollo used this exact tactic to beat deadly spinner Carbide in the Grand Final.
• In Association Football, there's the Panenka penalty, in which, instead of aiming to the left or right, you simply chip the ball straight down the middle, relying on the fact that a) goalkeepers will invariably dive to either the left or right, leaving the middle of the goal wide open, and b) they'll generally have to dive before you even kick the ball, and by the time they realize what you've done, it's too late for them to change course. It doesn't always work, but when it does, the goalkeeper is left humiliated.
  • Free kicks are arguably the most difficult set piece in football to score from, even more so than penalties, due to the presence of a wall of players ten yards in front of you who will try and block your shot. The sensible approach is to try and hit it over or around the wall, with enough spin that it'll curl round and (hopefully) hit the back of the net. The insane approach, as practiced by Lionel Messi, is to hit the ball along the ground - the wall will reflexively jump, expecting you to try and hit it over their heads, and the ball will pass right underneath them!

Other

• Back when legalized racism was rampant in the USA, no shortage of people were trying to find ways of eradicating it. You wouldn't have thought that simply not taking the bus would make a difference. Martin Luther King Jr. and those who worked with him proved otherwise.
• Politicians, scientists, and relief workers have been trying for nearly a hundred years to bring Africa out of the third world. One young boy, William Kamkwamba, decides to introduce the first ever-steady electric power supply to his famine-devastated cholera-torn village. And he did it with a box of scraps!!! The villagers called him "misala", meaning crazy, right up until the first light bulb lit up in his hands. Okay, he didn't do it in a cave, but he's still a bigger badass than Tony Stark 'cause he did it for real.
• Wait, are you going to play your amp loud, resulting in distortion and then make the guitar loudest in the mix? When Eric Clapton did just that back in the Blues Breakers in 1966, he ended up inventing modern rock guitar as we know it.
• Similarly, Jimi Hendrix stood with his guitar facing the speakers, becoming the first guitarist to use feedback deliberately in his music.
• Norwegian Constituent Assembly: The greater powers had handed Norway over to Sweden in January 1814, while the Danish Governor/Prince Inherent Christian Frederick has a gambit going on to prevent this, and secure Norway for Denmark. So, while every major power in Europe sided with Sweden, pushing Denmark pretty far because of her "international obligations", the Norwegian officials plotted on independence, with support from the Danish governor/regent, making him king of an independent Norway. This triggered more than one Berserk Button, and might as easily have devastated Norway in a destructive war, had Sweden gotten her way. Thus, the plan of drafting a democratic constitution to secure the power base of a Danish prince that was already planning a coup d'état was pretty crazy to begin with - especially when every major power in Europe worked against Norway. It almost worked, considering than internal independence was preserved and that the union with Sweden became looser than originally intended.
• Germany, 2005. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic government was unpopular and behind by around 20 points in the polls against their rivals in the Christian Democratic Union. So what did Schroeder do? He arranged to lose a vote of confidence, knowing this would trigger an election while his party was getting massacred in the polls. Results? The Social Democrats, instead of losing a landslide, came in only 4 seats behind the CDU; as a result, the only viable government was a grand coalition of the SPD and CDU. Quite impressive when you take into account the whole "losing by 20 points" thing from before.
• And speaking of Germany, or more specifically, East Germany, many of the escape attempts over the Berlin Wall were these, from tunnels to zip lines to being smuggled in the trunk of a car. But the absolute biggest example has to go to the 1979 Ballonflucht, in which two families escaped in a hot-air balloon they had assembled in their attic with a burner and basket they had built entirely from scratch. Their flight lasted 28 minutes, but it was enough to get them into the West.
• Writer Stetson Kennedy's plan to beat the KKK in 1946? Have Superman do it. Kennedy infiltrated the Klan and sent details on their rituals to the producers of the Superman radio play, who then wrote in a thinly-veiled Klan stand-in for Superman to defeat. The impact on morale from seeing their children playing "Superman vs. the Klan" like it was Cops and Robbers, plus the loss in mystique from having their secret rites broadcast to the country and revealed to be fairly lame and pedestrian, left the Klan largely out of the picture for several years.
• One would think that the Live-Action TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes would have gone into Dude, Not Funny! territory right out of the gate. Instead, the writers, cast, and crew got it to work hilariously.
• Long story short, NPR's radio adaptation of Star Wars ended up as this, with such highlights as the sheer luck that George Lucas was generous enough to sell the network the radio adaptation rights for one dollar and the fact that NPR was somehow able to make a two-hour movie work as a 13 half-hour serial.
• After the USSR broke up Georgia (the country) became notorious for having the most corrupt traffic police in Eastern Europe. So in 2004, President Mikheil Saakashvili came up with the radical idea to fire 30,000 cops. Many feared that this would create an opening for crime syndicates and further destabilization of the country. Yet miraculously, this plan worked with crime significantly dropped as most of the corruption was caused by dysfunctional law enforcement. Three months later, Saakashvili brought in a new police force and made Georgia one of the most stable ex-Soviet countries.
• Operation Paul Bunyan was a reaction to the murder of two USA officers killed by North Koreans in the DMZ. The officers were killed while trying to cut down a tree that blocked two outposts view from each other. In response to the murders, the US launched a major operation of hundreds of men... to cut down the tree. All they left behind was a stump and a plaque for the dead men. North Korean leader, Kim IL-sung apologized for the killings in response to the show of force.
• Exploited by Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, who claimed to have managed to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from America to Ireland without knowing he was doing it until he looked down about three-quarters of the way to Ireland. Corrigan, who had formerly worked as a mechanic for Charles Lindbergh's Trans-Atlantic flight, had actually dreamed of following in his hero's footsteps. However, the home-modified plane in which he had hoped to carry out the flight was deemed so unsafe by the Bureau of Air Commerce that they would only approve flights within the continental United States. Thus, while carrying out a flight plan that should have taken him from New York to California, Corrigan disappeared while flying eastwards off Floyd Bennett Field, stating that the weather would have made it impossible for a more direct take-off route. Upon arrival in Dublin, he claimed to have followed the wrong end of his cockpit compass, and thus had gone east instead of west. Corrigan's safe landing was followed up by his immediate arrest and his plane was thereafter packed into a crate for a long voyage back to New York by cargo ship (the Irish court forbade Corrigan from flying home). While few actually believed Corrigan's story, which he maintained until his death, his daring won him many admirers at a time when the United States was reeling badly from the effects of the Great Depression.
• The Molasses Gang was a gang from New York during the 1870s. They would ask the owner of the shop to fill their hat with molasses (saying it was a bet to see how much would fit). When the hat was full the gangster would shove the hat onto the shop owner and take what they wanted with no resistance. Also Refuge in Audacity, as they were able to do it for six years because nobody took them seriously.

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