And when there’s nothing around to eat locusts, locusts like to thrive, swarm over the country and eat everything in their path. Repercussions: Sparrows don’t just eat seeds. The story: As part of a huge push to transform farming into a communist system in 1958, Mao Zedong (the guy that founded the People’s Republic of China) ordered a sparrow genocide in a bid to stop the tiny birds from eating up all the country’s grain seed. Yo, Johnny Depp – see why the Aussie’s are so paranoid about foreign animals coming into their country? They led to the total extinction of entire plant species, and contributed to the demise of native species such as the bilby and the bandicoot. Within 40 years, the critters had spread from Austin’s small garden to the entire country. That happened really quickly and really uncontrollably. Repercussions: You know that phrase, ‘at it like rabbits’? Yeah, that. The story: In 1859, Thomas Austin introduced 24 cute little rabbits to Australia for two simple reasons: as a source of food, and for him and his chums to hunt. A message got to the Prez’s boat, and they managed to evade the oncoming ‘attack’ within the two minutes it would have taken for the missile to strike.
![facepalm you facepalm you](https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/5300afad9254a784be46eaef444e270120ea92a6_1.jpg)
But the best has got to be very nearly killing President Franklin D Roosevelt and a dozen top-ranking naval officers when they accidently shot a torpedo at the ship he was aboard. Porter, or ‘Willie Dee’, has an incredible list of clumsiness to its name, including accidently shooting up a building filled with officers, almost blowing themselves up after dropping an armed depth charge, stupidly driving their anchor into another boat when leaving port, and somehow mistaking a friendly ship for an enemy plane. The story: Perhaps the most accident-prone warship in US naval history, the USS William D.
![facepalm you facepalm you](http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/25600000/Jack-Skellington-Facepalm-jack-skellington-25662231-750-600.jpg)
The US Navy Almost Blows Up The US President Warning, intense levels of ‘they did WHAT?!’ lie ahead…
![facepalm you facepalm you](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/0b/a2/c20ba226c66847fcf17f4ea87a462da1.jpg)
Originally compiled in a recent Reddit thread entitled ‘ What was the biggest fuck up in history’, we give you the most monumental facepalm moments the world has ever seen. Unless you’ve come close to accidently blowing up the President of the United States of America with a torpedo, cocked up on a few sums that caused the loss of a mutli-million dollar space ship, or developed a product that might actually cause the destruction of Planet Earth, your ‘bad day’ is nothing compared these absolute nightmares.