A good place to start for general knowledge of both is Wikipedia - they're very important events in the history of modern china, and the wiki page for both is good.

I'm not familiar with Wild Swans, but I can give you the broad overview of the Great Leap Forward (GLF). I'm better on the technology/practical side than cultural, someone else can hopefully fill that in.

Essentially, the GLF was intended to move China, especially rural China, towards a modern economy. There were two main avenues for improvement - increased crop yields and steel production.

Unfortunately, the increased crop yields were based on pseudoscience, and China actually invested in practices that required higher labor but lowered yields. For steel production, villages were forced to build furnaces and melt down much of their steel/iron in order to make new tools, but they didn't have the combination of high temperature furnaces and professional skills to make tool steel. The general narrative is that China basically jumped first and thought about the consequences on the way down.

The result was a horrendous number of deaths, mostly from people starving to death because crop yields continued to fall, and the government didn't make provision for failure, because failure wasn't going to be tolerated.

As far as official attempts to stop the GLF, one official who did speak up was Peng Dehuai, the defense minister. He was dismissed and denounced by Mao (the CPC's equivalent of excommunication), and his supporters were purged from the military. This is a fairly common fate for Mao's enemies - he would remove their official position, denounce them, and then their families/friends would be also be removed. Obviously, this has a fairly chilling effect on dissent.

Probably as a result, there was a lot of official misconduct intended to give the impression of success to Mao - there are stories of fields next to train tracks being replanted densely with full grown plants, so that when Mao's train went by the new crop strategies appeared successful. In short, leaders would expend the manual labor of whole groups of workers to pretend the new crop system was working, when it was not - this was a pretty big deal. The whole Chinese government was strongly invested in the success of the GLF, and while its failure really changed the power dynamics of China, it was Mao's first catastrophic mistake, and there wasn't much political space to challenge it during the event. I'm sure there were officials, especially local ones, who did stand up and make choices to avoid complete failure, but at the national level Mao still had a huge amount of political capital, and he was willing to spend it crushing his dissenters as much as pushing his vision for the future of China.

Also why were these put into affect and were there any government officials who realized these were bad policies and did they try to prevent them from being enacted.

Yes there were, but in each case Mao's political clout allowed him to override the opposition.

The GLF for instance, was staunchly opposed by Defense minister Peng Dehui, the commander of the Chinese forces in the Korean War. Peng would later be persecuted by the Red Guards during the Cultural revolution for this opposition.

The CR was much much more difficult to oppose simply because the entire movement was largely a witch-hunt for "revisionists" within the Communist Party. Opposing such movement (or just being Mao's political opponent) openly makes you a target of the red guard: Deng Xiaoping's son was thrown out of a three story window and became a paraplegic for life. Peng Dehua was beaten so hard it damaged his internal organs and he would (denied medical treatment on Mao's personal orders), Liu Shoaqi was said to have being denied medical treatment and died in a pool of his own vomit. In other words, its pretty hard to oppose a movement which actively targeted opponents of said movement violently.