I think you history buffs will find a lot to hate in this article.
Robert E Lee had some successes, but was not an especially effective general, and there are far greater ones left off the list. Two examples might be England’s Henry V and America’s Andrew Jackson. And I hear that Genghis Khan guy was pretty good, not to mention Hannibal, Frederic the Great and Jan Sobieski.
Napoleon? Well, he’s on the list and Kutuzov isn’t, but the last I heard, Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 men and was lucky to return with his horse and a couple of stale baguettes. Kidding aside, he left about 500,000 of his men dead in the Russian snow. As I’ve noted several times, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was arguably the single stupidest thing any human being has ever done – in any field, not just restricted to the military. So he was bold and won many victories, but is maybe not the best general of all time.
(Yes, I know that Andrew Jackson was a despicable human being, but his military record was astounding. I suppose you could posit that his legendary victory at New Orleans was the result of incompetent opposition, but either way it was one of the most impressive triumphs in military history. He cobbled together a rag-tag army, and absolutely slaughtered a force of 8,000 British regulars, losing only 13 men in the process. For decades, January 8th and July 4th were celebrated with almost equal fervor.)
Literally missed the guy who essentially came up.with the tactics that ended WW1
Sir General Monash
That was a lopsided trade. You guys gave the Brits Monash, they gave you Gallipoli.
Btw, the Hoodoos punked on us. Originally supposed to hit here (DC) Nov. 2020, eventually rescheduled for this month, and then canceled the whole US tour a couple of months ago. Oh well, Tojo never made it to Darwin either.
Bastids… hoodoo gurus are not my scene tho :p
Gallipoli was fubar from the start, and set up by old Winnie Churchill himself. Took him a while to recover from that.
Although seen as a coming of age for ANZAC’s, the campaign was unfortunate for the 9 countries of the Entente – 50,000 dead and the Turks lost 55,000 dead. 105,000 dead out of 555,000 combatants.
Monday is ANZAC day
Lest we forget
There was also Timur the Conqueror AKA Tamerlane. Came a few generations after Genghis Khan, distantly related to, dreamt of reuniting the fragmented Mongol Empire. From Samarkand, was pretty successful, is argued to have been a great general. But I mention more because I draw a straight line between Timur’s terror tactics & present-day Russian practices AKA war crimes.
Napoleon’s Russia campaign produced probably the most famous piece of cartography ever, Charles Minard’s informational graphic showing the temporal and geographic decimation of La Grande Armee:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Minard.png
No Caesar, but fucking Leonidas. Kinda sets the tone. Epaminondas, Scipio, Hannibal, Marius, Marlborough, Prince Eugene, Frederick, Greene, Suvorov, Wellington, Grant, Sherman, Subotai, Oda, Belisarius: all have better cases. Alexander and Napoleon are the only ones I’d keep. Nelson, great as he was, was not a general. Cate probably can’t name ten admirals, which might be how he got here.
Point taken, there’ve been many military commanders who deserve mention in this conversation. I like Grant because of his scathing diss on Lee—called him a wuss—that he didn’t have the grit of a pro, a “real”, warrior… Didn’t understand, hate & properly recoil from the ugliness of all-out war.
Let’s say, Lee was Bill Walsh to Grant’s Bill Parcells.
I can’t imagine that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia could’ve been any stupider than Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Hitler had total control of continental Europe and had Stalin in his back pocket staying out of things. Not only was the invasion unnecessary at that time, it was done way too late in the year causing them to hit the Russian winter sooner rather than later.
Hitler’s invasion could have worked if
1. He hadn’t delayed it to straighten out Italy and Yugoslavia.
2. He and the Japanese had hit Russia with a full two-front war before involving America. America was not going to intervene to save Russia.
Granted, those are just hypotheticals, but the plan had some hope, whereas Napoleon’s plan was a suicide mission. It was not only doomed by the Russian winter, but by the sheer impossibility of feeding and supplying 600,000 men in a foreign country, full of hostiles, with no modern surveillance equipment to identify possible threats from partisan ambushes.
Napoleon’a army was totally crushed, despite the fact that they won every battle, even Borodino, and occupied Moscow. So the result they received was the best possible outcome. Imagine how bad it would have been if anything had gone wrong! It was just an utterly bad idea in every way, made even more foolish by the fact that (1) there was nothing of significance to gain, and (2) there was no possible way to administer Russia permanently, even if it was conquered – as Kutuzov demonstrated to Napoleon by simply evacuating Moscow. Napoleon seemed to have absolutely no grasp of reality, no understanding of the weather systems in Eurasia, no grasp of the truly immense distances involved in Russia. It’s even difficult to imagine what he conceived the best possible case to be.
I used to think that it could well have succeeded but have pretty much gone the other direction since I wrote my senior thesis on Barbarossa in ’73. That paper actually won a prize which as I recall financed two movie dates, a pizza run, and a Baskin & Robbins. Since then, have read just about everything written about the first campaign and have changed my basic outlook,
The Japanese would have made a difference but wanted no part of the Sovs after their little playdate with Zhukov in Mongolia.
Basic problems included not enough troops (AGs North and South probably each needed another full infantry army), not enough war materials- they never had nearly enough gas for tanks, trucks, and planes, bad plan, horribly bad intelligence both on the opponent and the country, hubris, racist assumptions, logistical incompetence, and an abundance of captured material they couldn’t maintain or provide parts for (the Renault trucks had a nasty problem with their axles snapping in response to Russian roads). And Russia itself: shitty
roads, distances, different rail gauge, horse-killing grass, dust (hell on tank engines), mud, and eventually the winter (although Barbarossa was essentially a worn-down husk after the mud stopped the October offensive, well before winter). Not to mention a tough infantry, good tanks and guns and, after a while, some terrific generals.
The plan assumed that, after the Red Army allowed itself to be completely encircled and destroyed west of the two Western rivers in 6 weeks, the rest of the campaign would consist of road marching to the end line. Not quite. The Wehrmacht was supposed to be a reduced force of occupation by year’s end (the pathetic amount of winter clothing actually sent was based on that assumption).
The Potsdam (Bundeswehr) volume and several books by an Aussie named Stahel do a very good job describing the planning and logistical idiocies underlying the campaign and the effects of attrition before the fall. War without Garlands by Robert Kershaw is a very good survey.
And if I ever get the sucker written, you can read The Book LOL.
As I understand it, it’s silly to talk about Hitler’s eastern front as if he’d have been better off leaving Russia alone. I’ve read a recent account by a historian of Ukraine that had Hitler not coveted Black Sea access & the rich soil in Ukraine’s south, WW2 might not have happened at all.
Not to say that Hitler was error-prone, but he did make some rather bad calls.
So how would you have improved on his way of not leaving it alone?
Actually, he did very much need Ukrainian grain and the Caucasus oil. And after the Non-Aggression Pact, Stalin was providing all he needed.
For me, the oddest part of Operation Barbarossa has always been Stalin’s gullibility. There was a guy who had never trusted anyone in his life, then he finally takes a chance on trusting someone and who does he pick? Adolph Hitler. What are the odds?
Well, I didn’t mean to suggest Hitler shouldn’t have left Russia alone, nor that he wouldna been better off. What I meant was just that what he needed & what he oughta were moot—suffocated by his wants (what he coveted).
As I then said, there are lots of things Hitler did do, that I hope, in his shoes, I wouldn’t have done. Like, maybe, I didn’t have the right stuff to author Mein Kampf. My German isn’t that good, for starts. 🙂
I couldn’t exactly figure out what you meant there. If Hitler was a perfectly rational sort, he wouldn’t have gotten into a war in the first place without a huge reshuffling of the diplomatic deck.
The war he downright lusted for was in the East – lebensraum and the destruction of “Jewish Bolshevism” but how he was supposed to be able to do that without having to fight a lot of other countries, including possibly us, was probably an unsolvable problem. In the end he just did what he felt like doing, unfinished war in the West be damned.
Exactly. Second-guessing Hitler’s “logic” is to project our own thought process onto an irrational actor. If only these decisions coulda been made by someone other than Adolf Hitler… The world coulda woulda shoulda been a better place.
People saying Putin is crazy are making a similar mistake. We, accustomed to shoe-horning all value judgements into monetary terms, eagerly jump to the conclusion that Putin’s situation must be intolerable.
Sure, Putin’s actions make no sense in our way of looking at things. It’s just, it does make sense in his mind. I’d say he’s got stuff wrong, but that’s hardly the same thing as being crazy.
I’m outraged at the exclusion of General Tso. He is both fiery and tasty at the same time. A clear #1.
How can we ever dream of long-term superiority over China when their top food guy is a general and we have none ranked higher than Captain Crunch and an honorary Kentucky Colonel.
Well, we do have General Mills.
And General Foods. He was so great at food that they named it after him.
China has General Electric.
I’m not military expert but WTF? This isn’t even a list of the best “Western” Generals. Any list of greatest generals in history has to include Genghis Khan. Washington was pretty good, but if it hadn’t been for the French both for military might and strategy, he’d have been crushed and we’d all still be colonies. You’re right about Lee. If you are choosing a Civil War General, I’d think Grant might have something to say about this choice. This list didn’t touch China, Japan, India at all. Jesus, modern generals have quoted and studied Sun Tzu for centuries. The guy literally wrote the book on military strategy. This is nearly “clickbait” journalism at best.