Worst 10 officers of each WWII power.

[Grey Wolf]

This kind of thread just lends itself to the simplistic “great men of history” view, devoid of context for the most part. Sure the generals get the plaudits when victorious and the blame when defeated, but there’s so much more going on, and of course we have the benefit of hindsight and the lack of any of the pressures they were working under.

True, but there is a lot of nuance in this thread from many people

For example, I am personally more critical of Rommel than most people, because he had no real idea of defensive warfare - his instinct was to retreat to the last fallback position then hold it. Sure, it was a good retreat, and done well, but as strategy it was nonsense. It was a tactical way of looking at things - thus in N Africa once on the backfoot he retreated across the ENTIRETY of Libya and into Tunisia. His plans for Italy would have been to retreat to the far North. In contrast, Kesselring got the idea of strategic retreat - it was to delay your opponents as long as possible, keep them as far away for as long as you could, and make their advance as bloody as possible. Rommel in charge of Italy would have seen the Allies sweep North. Kesselring in charge of Italy made them fight for every inch.

Contrariwse, if you are looking at Montgomery in North Africa he doesn't know what his opponent is doing. It would be quite a jump to assume he is planning to retreat as fast as possible to Tunisia. Strategic logic is that he would make a stand for it, and at the very least defend Tripoli and try to make a bloodbath of it. Montgomery's caution wasn't really a fault in this scenario - it was only when he got to the defensive line that Rommel had put across Southern Tunisia that Montgomery can have understood for sure what the enemy were doing.

If you look at the final play of this - sure, Rommel himself gets out, but Von Arnim has to surrender the vast majority of the German army at Tunis because there was nowhere else to retreat to.

If you compare that to someone like Von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa during World War One, you can see that HIS view of a campaign in Africa was to keep the army in the field as long as possible, by any means, and tie down the enemy by so doing.

Rommel's view was that the campaign was lost, so what was the point of fighting it.

Now, I don't say Rommel was not good at going forward, and he could be quite inspirational in his successes. But he was a commander of two halves and one half, while tactically excellent (a fast withdrawal without significant losses in the face of pursuit) was strategically inept.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

 

[marathag]

. He was a GOOD military technician.

He could attack very well, but sucked at getting attacked, with routs in PI and Korea.
Retreating in good order is one of the harder military skills

 

[marathag]

BUT, the bugout was sanctioned and ordered

Compare what OP Smith did at Chosin, vs everybody else bugging out.

 

[McPherson]

Retreating in good order is one of the harder military skills.

Which is why I value SPRUANCE; more than MacArthur. It takes a man with firm moral character, to face down an inherited staff, full of "questionables", like the one Halsey left behind (Miles Browning and company.) for Spruance to handle (Add Mitscher to that rotten mix. GRRR.) and get decent performances out of them and then to weather the sniping from them when those suddenly would be gung-ho gerbils want to "attack, attack, attack" when the smart play is to run like hell after the successful sucker punch and then only turn to fight when the enemy shows the white feather.

 

[mattep74]

Himmler once given a general's command was useless

How good was Paulus before he got trapped in Stalingrad?

A member of the chief of staff and had not much experience of leading troops in the field

 

[mattep74]

Germany
Himmler as army group commander, had he been a regular general that screwed up that bad Hitler would have ordered him shot

 

[tomo pauk]

Beaverbrook was not an officer, but he wasn't great at running war production during BoB, and he spent 1942 pushing Allanbrooke to invade France with 1-3 divisions against 10-15 German divisions.

Pray tell, how comes that Beaverbrook was a wrong person to run the war production during the BoB?
Sources for him pushing Alanbrooke in 1942 against the odds?

I believe in results - Monty delivered them while fighting and beating the world's best army on multiple occasions

Monty beating the world's best army on multiple occasions - care to elaborate?

 

[Derek Jackson]

Sir Arthur Harris distorted priorities, wasted the best and bravest of Britain's young men and probably strenghtened German civilian resistence to the Allies

 

[bpbruce]

Pray tell, how comes that Beaverbrook was a wrong person to run the war production during the BoB?
Sources for him pushing Alanbrooke in 1942 against the odds?



Monty beating the world's best army on multiple occasions - care to elaborate?

Beaverbrook made his production numbers look good, but his 1941 retirement 'for his health' was no loss. Milward- 'War, Economy, and Society' p 181 'When Beaverbrook insisted on production rather than development during the Battle of Britain it caused serious delays in producing better equipment later.'
Sources for him pushing Alanbrooke to invade France when outnumbered- Alanbrooke's Diaries.

 

[unclepatrick]

Pound, though he did suffer from hip problems and had a brain tumor which might have had something to do with it.

And he did ask two or three time to be relieved due to health reasons but each time, his request was refused.

 

[unclepatrick]

Auchinleck

IIRC, he was the General who when commanding the Eight Army in Egypt was asked how long it would take to get the troops ready to fight.
He gave Churchill a answer and Churchill did not like his answer, so Auchinieck was replace with Monty. And Monty took twice as long to prepare the troops than Auchinleck said it would .

 

[Cryhavoc101]

IIRC, he was the General who when commanding the Eight Army in Egypt was asked how long it would take to get the troops ready to fight.
He gave Churchill a answer and Churchill did not like his answer, so Auchinieck was replace with Monty. And Monty took twice as long to prepare the troops than Auchinleck said it would .

The Auk was a good commander but he was worn out having been both the overall commander for the entire Middle east and then having to jump in and take over from Ritchie

His handling of the Mursa Matruh was okay

He certainly stopped the rot - whether or not he was capable of preparing his troops in the time he claimed (which was Sept at the earliest) is an unknown

I suspect that he could not

That Monty was able to convey his intentions and needs and make Winston dance to his tune when the Auk could not. Winston had bullied him into attacking in August before he eventually fired him - bringing in Gott (who was killed when his plane transporting him to North Africa was shot down resulting in Monty being given the job) and Alexander.

This ability to not only resist such pressures but having the moral courage to tell the prime minister to 'mind your own business' makes him the better commander in my eyes.

His excellent relationship with Alanbrooke who was CIGS and who trusted him implicitly also made things difficult for the Prodder in chief to pressurise him into attacking before he was ready.

Monty was a Regular Army officer who had lots of contacts in the British army structure, the Auk had spent much of the interwar period in India with the Indian army and was an unknown by comparison.

He was also able to deal with the 'Trade Union' mindset of the various 'arms' and nationalities that formed the 8th army to such a degree that had not been achieved by his predecessors.

He filled London with officers he had fired who told everyone who would listen what a useless shit Monty was.

But after he won at El Alamein their credibility was obviously ripped to shreds.

 

[Driftless]

Where does Auchinlek fit on this good/bad spectrum. Superficially, it has always struck me that he was plugged into some terrible situations, but lacked the ability to dig his way out. i.e. he was plugged into the Norway Campaign when it was already a complete shambles. Just how good/how bad was he?

*edit* ninja'd

 

[tomo pauk]

Beaverbrook made his production numbers look good, but his 1941 retirement 'for his health' was no loss. Milward- 'War, Economy, and Society' p 181 'When Beaverbrook insisted on production rather than development during the Battle of Britain it caused serious delays in producing better equipment later.'
Sources for him pushing Alanbrooke to invade France when outnumbered- Alanbrooke's Diaries.

Thank you for feedback.
Beaverbrook was in position to either have it's pie, or to eat it. That he decided to eat it (= out-produce the Germans in fighters by 2:1) is a far better choice than to have it (= RAF FC is outnumbered in the air during the BoB). About the 'better equipment' being delayed - what is that equipment? IMO it can't be fighters, and RAF certainly introduced bombers that Germans were not in position to follow either in capability or in quantity within 6 to 18 months after the BoB ended.

 

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

Answering the actual question:

Japan - Lt. Yoshito Kawabata. In 1942, he was sent straight from training to the the mountains of New Guinea as a replacement. He was ordered to take a 14-man squad on a flank march to attack an Australian position. He couldn't read a map, got lost, and insisted on fording a river where the current was deep and fast. Three men were swept away and drowned. As the survivors mustered on the far side, the squad sergeant muttered something uncomplimentary. Kawabata heard him, and angrily shoved him to the ground. The sergeant called him a "a stupid ______", and Kawabata drew his sword and killed him. Kawabata then led the remaining men into a dead-end cleft in the rocks. They were able to climb out, except for the man who slipped, fell six meters, and broke his leg in two places. By this time, night was falling, but Kawabata insisted on force-marching in the dark for several hours. Two more men fell behind and wandered off into the jungle. By 11 PM, the men were exhausted, and even Kawabata accepted they must rest. He woke early, and decided to fill everyone's canteens in a nearby stream. But he forgot to put decontamination pills in the canteens. He resumed the march, but within an hour three men had collapsed with dysentery. Finally Kawabata and his remaining four men reached the Australian post to be attacked. The men were exhausted, feverish, and demoralized by the losses en route. Kawabata yelled at them, slapped them with his sword, and drove them forward. Of course all that yelling had alerted the Australians. And they had strung barbed wire around their position. The Japanese staggered forward and were caught on the wire. Three Australians opened fire with Owens guns, killing all four. Kawabata, who had hung back to prevent falling out, was clipped on one ear. He was seized with terror, and ran away. About 200 meters away, he tripped and fell. His panic ebbed somewhat, and he realized that he had failed completely and disgracefully. So he committed hara-kiri.

US - Major Terence Brannigan. He was XO of a logistics unit in Marseille, which in late 1944 was handling 3,000 tons of supplies every day. It occurred to Brannigan that no one would notice if some of that enormous stream was diverted. Brannigan was from the West Side of New York City; several relatives including two of his brothers were in "The Westies", the Irish mob that controlled the rackets in that area. So he had no trouble contacting the Marseille underworld and finding black-market buyers for gasoline, food, and tobacco. He recruited some like-minded junior officers, sergeants, and privates. Soon they were raking in over $100,000 a week. Those who wouldn't cooperate were run out of the unit, often with phony court-martial charges. One officer was framed for the murder of a French prostitute. Would-be informers got beaten up; at least two were murdered at Brannigan's instigation. The CO was blackmailed: Brannigan tricked him into signing incriminating documents and threatened retaliation against his teenaged grand-daughter back in New York. Within two months, Brannigan had corrupted or silenced the entire unit, and had corrupted several officers and men in the MPs. However, after about three months, French police raided a nightclub/casino/brothel suspected of sheltering deserters from the Free French army. A US MP sergeant came along, in case there were any Americans there. They found a room full of American cigarettes and a ledger recording payoffs to Brannigan's gang. The hammer came down; the officers in the unit were all imprisoned, the enlisted men all sent to front-line duty aside from a few who tried to escape by desertion. The CO was not charged, despite Brannigan's attempts to implicate him; but he was condemned for negligence; he shot himself when he learned the full scope of Brannigan's crimes.

Etc.

(These are of course fictional cases. But does anyone doubt there were real-world equivalents?)

 

[Roches]

Himmler once given a general's command was useless

How good was Paulus before he got trapped in Stalingrad?

Not excellent, but that might even be more attributable to Hitler's bad-officerness than Paulus'. Paulus would have been great commanding, say, part of Army Group Center along a quiet section of the front. Stalingrad, however, considering the importance Hitler ascribed to it, needed a great commander. Manstein, who was a decent leader but evidently something of a self-serving careerist, seems to have tried repeatedly not to be that commander.

To the generals’ credit, it’s almost like they knew Stalingrad would be the Heer’s undoing, and Paulus got the short straw. And, to Hitler’s discredit, he could have assigned Manstein, Guderian, Rommel, etc., to Stalingrad, if he really needed it so badly. (Y’know, if you want to cut off river traffic, a bunch of artillery along the Volga doesn’t necessarily need to even be in a city...) Hitler was highly inconsistent about whether Stalingrad was the most important prize of the whole Eastern campaign, or a meaningless location that just happened to be called Stalingrad, even though it wasn’t strategically significant at all.

I'll nominate Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny for the Soviets: the two of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union who weren't shot on Stalin's orders before 1941. Also Kulik. Since it’s widely believed that Tukachevsky was the USSR’s Basil Liddell Hart when it came to tank warfare, maybe Stalin didn’t shoot the right ones... (Budyonny did have, however, some of the coolest facial hair sported by a general officer since the American Civil War.) Dmitry Pavlov came to mind, since even Stalin didn’t shoot many generals out of season, but I'm not sure about him. He may have just been unlucky enough to command a sector that was doomed to be overrun.

 

[unclepatrick]

He was XO of a logistics unit

My Grandfather was a marine in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War.
He use to say that there was a special circle of Hell for Logistics Officers and Sergeants.
He use to tell the story of his unit when they were on Peleliu.
His Lieutenant send a Sergeant back to get more ammo.
The Sergeant returned to tell the Lieutenant that the Supply Officer would not give the unit more ammo till the Lieutenant came there and fill out forms in triplicate .
This is while the Company is actively fighting the Japanese.

 

[unclepatrick]

True, but there is a lot of nuance in this thread from many people

For example, I am personally more critical of Rommel than most people, because he had no real idea of defensive warfare - his instinct was to retreat to the last fallback position then hold it. Sure, it was a good retreat, and done well, but as strategy it was nonsense. It was a tactical way of looking at things - thus in N Africa once on the backfoot he retreated across the ENTIRETY of Libya and into Tunisia. His plans for Italy would have been to retreat to the far North. In contrast, Kesselring got the idea of strategic retreat - it was to delay your opponents as long as possible, keep them as far away for as long as you could, and make their advance as bloody as possible. Rommel in charge of Italy would have seen the Allies sweep North. Kesselring in charge of Italy made them fight for every inch.

Contrariwse, if you are looking at Montgomery in North Africa he doesn't know what his opponent is doing. It would be quite a jump to assume he is planning to retreat as fast as possible to Tunisia. Strategic logic is that he would make a stand for it, and at the very least defend Tripoli and try to make a bloodbath of it. Montgomery's caution wasn't really a fault in this scenario - it was only when he got to the defensive line that Rommel had put across Southern Tunisia that Montgomery can have understood for sure what the enemy were doing.

If you look at the final play of this - sure, Rommel himself gets out, but Von Arnim has to surrender the vast majority of the German army at Tunis because there was nowhere else to retreat to.

If you compare that to someone like Von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa during World War One, you can see that HIS view of a campaign in Africa was to keep the army in the field as long as possible, by any means, and tie down the enemy by so doing.

Rommel's view was that the campaign was lost, so what was the point of fighting it.

Now, I don't say Rommel was not good at going forward, and he could be quite inspirational in his successes. But he was a commander of two halves and one half, while tactically excellent (a fast withdrawal without significant losses in the face of pursuit) was strategically inept.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

I understand what you are saying Grey but can you really compare a World War One Commander who engaged in Guerilla Combat with a Tank Commander in World Two?
Can you even try to use Guerilla Tactics with Tanks? Von Lettow-Vorbeck could be behind enemy lines with no contact with his supply lines and carry on a fight.
But Tanks need things like Fuel and Ammo that require those supply lines. Rommel really did not have that opinion,

 

[S. Marlowski]

There are two that I would like to bring up

that is both Generals Weygand and Gamelin, in which both of them totally costed France in 1940.

 

[Cryhavoc101]

Thank you for feedback.
Beaverbrook was in position to either have it's pie, or to eat it. That he decided to eat it (= out-produce the Germans in fighters by 2:1) is a far better choice than to have it (= RAF FC is outnumbered in the air during the BoB). About the 'better equipment' being delayed - what is that equipment? IMO it can't be fighters, and RAF certainly introduced bombers that Germans were not in position to follow either in capability or in quantity within 6 to 18 months after the BoB ended.

Beaverbrook made that telephone call that resulted in Nuffield losing control of Castle Bromwich Assembly to Vickers and ultimately allowing Spitfire production to rapidly ramp up.

He also brought some much needed sanity to the ordering of weapons.

Basically the army knew that the next class of tank would be ready in say 3 months so they ordered only 3 months of the current tank - Beaverbrook weighed in and made sure that this would end up being 6 months worth of orders as he understood how industry worked and as a result the order did not end up being 2x as many tanks but 3x as many tanks or more.

He understood that between delays and retooling for the next version of weapon weeks if not months of production would be lost as all the suppliers for said system changed over and learned the new system.

The same with Engine and Weapon production - particularly post Dunkirk.

And so on.

People bemoan the delay to things like the 6 pounder and Griffon engine development but maximising production by minimising the disruption to the current systems they would bring was the right choice.