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The Mediterranean theater of WWII saw several generals who served predominantly just in this theater. Guys like Montgomery, Eisenhower, Patton, Juin, and Truscott all left the theater to the broader Western Front. This one is to rate the generals who did not. But what about the Allied generals who never left?

In my opinion rating these guys works as follows:

1) Archibald Wavell. Operation Compass was the only time in WWII that a Western army showed the flair for armored warfare that marked both sides on the Eastern Front, and he also managed to win an unbroken string of Allied victories in Syria, Iraq, and North Africa up to Greece. He did, however, fall like a house of cards once Rommel launched his first major attack.

2) Harold Alexander was the man that did the most to win the Tunisian Campaign, which was perhaps the greatest single Allied victory of the war on the democratic side, and the only one with prisoner hauls to rival those of Bagration and Jhassy-Kishinev and Stalingrad. On the other hand he single-handedly ensured that Sicily would be a prolonged bloodbath and a strategic German masterpiece, and his handling of Italy was worse than Haig in WWI by far, on par with Luigi Cadorna.

3) Auchinleck has to his credit stopping Rommel's offensive cold at First El Alamein. But then again this is the guy who was responsible for one of the worst British clusterfucks of the entire war and inadvertently began the process leading into the nightmare that was the Italian campaign. Like Wavell he also was working on a Dolchstosslegende to excuse his failures.

4) Then there's Clark and Leese. Clark was the guy who was most like a stereotypical Soviet general on the Allied side: perfectly happy to waste lives for useless goals, prone to unimaginative frontal slugging, ensuring both Salerno and Anzio were flops, while at Monte Cassino his handling of the entire battle was atrocious, as was his tendency to blame his men for his failures ala Auchinleck and Wavell. Leese was a wooden Monty knockoff who lacked Montgomery's abilities to at least perceive that some of the time the whole recreating WWI battles thing needed to be changed and to make the use of firepower effective.

So I'd rate them thus with Wavell at the top, for all his flaws, in achieving the greatest victories of any of them over the widest areas, and both Clark and Leese decidedly at the bottom for belonging to the Blackadder version of WWI more than the real-life version of WWII.

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