Thought of The Day - Heroes and Planners pt2

I just watched an interesting documentary which reinforced my thoughts on the Heroes Vs Planners debate. It was about a raid in world war two where Commandos destroyed a dry-dock to prevent the use of the most powerful battleship ever built. It was an unquestionable success, the dry docks were destroyed, the Germans were unable to use the ship in the Atlantic and it was eventually sunk in a Norwegian fjord having never sunk any other ship. Ok so it is impossible to say what might have happened if it had been able to operate in the Atlantic; maybe it would have been destroyed some other way or maybe it would have decimated the British navy. The real benefits of that act of planning will never be known and therein lies the rub.

The men who planned and executed that raid were heroes by any way you would care to measure and yet the only memorial is a small plaque on a small rock in a harbour. The problem was because the battleship had never been involved in a battle, because no lives had been lost to it yet, because the threat it posed had never been proven it was an act of planning to render it useless.

This is not to belittle other heroic acts that are remembered because they were in spite of serious fuckups. Just to highlight that even people who are heroes might not be recognised because they planned and prevented the fuckup in the first place.