Best General from 1730 to 1960

Why? Ultimately it was his campaign that lead to Napleon's downfall.

He had very few tactical successes. He wasn't in charge of the early phases of the war of 1812 (which were also carried out with great discipline and accomplishment). He died before the fighting of 1814 started in earnest.

His great achievement was being well-liked and saving the Russian army's morale in giving a battle when constant retreat created tensions with the officers and soldiers, and in knowing that a retreat afterwards was still necessary.

But arguably he wasn't even the greatest coalition-era Russian general, let alone the greatest coalition-era general, let alone among the greatest generals of all time.
 
18th Century--Fred the Great
!9th Century--Nap
20th Century--Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck (just because my contrarian instincts are aroused on the subject of 20th Cent. generalship ;))
I agree with Von Lettow-Vorbeck. He won every major battle he fought in WW1. He only surrendered because He was order too by the German Government.
 
I agree with Von Lettow-Vorbeck. He won every major battle he fought in WW1. He only surrendered because He was order too by the German Government.

None of his battles was major. He would be a good candidate for best Guerrilla leader ever, or for the guy we most wanted to beat Hitler in the 1933 elections. In this thread, to quote president Bartlett, he is a .22 in a .44Magun world.
 

hipper

Banned
Robert Clive

The Battles of Plassey and Quebec put the British in possession of India and Canada through the whole period under question.

cheers

Hipper
 
When this issue was raised in the past I said it was necessary to divide into categories, like strategic theater commander, battlefield commander, irregular warfare leader, etc. Otherwise you are comparing apples and oranges. If it were battlefield commander alone, I'd say U.S. Grant. However, if one takes an overview of the apples and oranges, I'd say Dwight Eisenhower. He successfully led the most complicated combined arms military enterprise in human history, made very few really bad decisions, guaranteed that the land and air wars were integrated properly, cultivated an historically unprecedented degree of unity between coalition partners, fended off the politicians, appointed the right subordinates (except Monty whom it was politically impossible to get rid of) and--from the evidence of his memoirs of the war in Europe--seems to have always kept the strategic overview in his head as if it were some kind of higher mathematical equation.
 
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Not in rank order; but there are some very good generals outside of the Euro/American field.
  • Võ Nguyên Giáp
  • Tomoyuki Yamashita
  • Geronimo
  • José Francisco de San Martín
  • Simón Bolívar
  • Toussaint L'Ouverture
  • Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce)

A couple other Western generals deserve mention
  • Josip Tito
  • Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov
  • Winfield Scott Hancock
  • Richard S. Ewell
For the list of generals outside the North America/Europe field, I would add José Félix Estigarribia, commander of the Paraguayan forces in the Chaco War of the 1930s.
 
Napoleon fo sho, before we get bogged down in the relativism of the word 'best' and all of its' glory.

Napoleon had a superb instrument in the Republican Army and he did use it effectively in European battlefields either against smaller enemies or against sloppy coalitions. But he had a faulty sense of space, time and logistics that led to his march on Moscow--surely the most incompetent move in the history of modern warfare until Hitler came along. And as a grand strategist--one who can integrate politics and warfare and understand the difference between the possible and the wished-for--Napoleon gets an "F."
 
talking about monty

what would be the biggest windbag of this period.
monty and mcarthur are good candidates for that, any others?

Not an altogether fair question, since the totalitarian systems in both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union did not allow generals to display windbag tendencies (such behavior would inevitably have led Stalin and Hitler to treat them as dangerous rivals, with fatal results). Some of their generals may have had repressed windbag tendencies but we'll never know for sure. As to the Allied generals, the number of windbags was actually pretty small. Patton had tendencies in that direction, but Ike kept him on a fairly tight reign. One might say that Churchill and De Gaulle were political windbags on occasion--that was part of their greatness as leaders, they were representing their nations under unique circumstances, not scheming and conniving and feeding their egos in the MacArthur style. And Monty was no MacArthur either--he probably had a touch of Asperger's syndrome that prevented him from recognizing how outrageous his comments and behavior could be.
 
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