MacOS Leopard bash echo not interpreting escape sequences

I just hit this incredibly retarded irritating gotcha in Mac OS Leopard. Luckily, unlike this poor bastard, it only cost me an hour.
Bash echo is supposed to interpret \ escape sequences (e.g. \n) if you supply it a -e flag. This works from the command line. It works in shell scripts. [...]

Apache server redirects using MacOS Server Admin

Note to self before I delete this entry.
This will redirect an entire site:
Server Admin -> Your server -> Web -> Your site -> Aliases -> Url Aliases and Redirects
Type = RedirectMatch
Pattern = .*
Path = http://example.com