Wouldn't Semyon Budyonny qualify, given how the Germans ran rings round his forces in 1941?
Worst General After 1900
- Thread starter sampleswift
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He is a more complex character than the BuTcHeR hAiG brigade would have us believe. I haven't studied WW1 in much depth but he is not the monster he is often portrayed as, neither is he Julius Caesar reborn.
Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
IMHO Haig's real failing was in pushing offensives too far when (in hindsight) they should have been shut down earlier. The Somme & Passchendaele offensives went on weeks, if not months, after they passed the law of diminishing returns.
On his attitude to casualties, we should consider this. In late '18 he instructed brigades & divisions to push forward even if it left their flanks open. He did this knowing that it would increase casualties - the last 100 Days was ruinously profligate with British Empire lives - but working on the assumption that if it ended the fighting earlier he would save many lives in the future and come out ahead in the long run.
Certainly a far more level-headed commander of the BEF than Sir John French.
Well I wouldn't pick figures such as Gamelin or Vorochilov.
Even if they had really subpar performances during WW2, they were still competent officer during WWI or the Russian revolution. The first one did a good job at the general staff where he noticeably had a role in the drawing of the plan of the Battle of the Marne and later would reveal himself to be a tactically competent officer. Vorochilov had a major role in the defence of Tsaritsyn against the white armies.
Even if they had really subpar performances during WW2, they were still competent officer during WWI or the Russian revolution. The first one did a good job at the general staff where he noticeably had a role in the drawing of the plan of the Battle of the Marne and later would reveal himself to be a tactically competent officer. Vorochilov had a major role in the defence of Tsaritsyn against the white armies.
Both of them were serious examples of the addage that generals fight the last war.
Alright, didn't explain good, but that's what I got for trying to write at 4 a.m. while being a non-anglo. No excuses.
Yes, I knew of the various infighting in the Interwar China and in fact I was also talking of the various cliques' commanders. They were not from the KMT or the CCP, but they were still chinese and controlled various regions of China in the 20's, until they were destroyed or absorbed in the KMT. Example: RNA 26th Division lead by Ma Qi, quite the evil-doer who machine-gunned thousands of fleeing buddhist monks, but somewhat achieved part of his goals before dying.
Yes, the german-trained units were in fact among the elites in the armies of Asia. Well equipped, well trained, your great-grandfather was indeed lucky to be among them. But, just as you said, the RNA had only eight of these divisions (3rd, 6th, 9th, 14th, 36th, 87th, 88th plus another one) and twelve more divisions trained by Germans but with only chinese equipment, while the whole RNA had 133 corps with 2-3 divisions each in 1938 (266-399 divisions total); in its lifetime, the RNA had a total of 515 divisions. So, while there were exemplary units, some of them leaded by capable commanders, those were not the majority. Having good officers doesn't mean having good generals.
In the end, the damning of Interwar chinese military was that many commanders (expecially those who also holded cospicous political power) lacked "how-to-achieve" metods which did not included massacres, pillaging (ex: 1927 Nanking incident) and double-crossing (Sheng Sichai among all). Those could have caused some episodes of absolute uncooperation in the 20s-40s, resulting in terrifying repressions and humiliating defeats.
That's true, in the Battle of Shangai the Chinese troops held fast against Japan, vastly delaying their advance and permitting the evacuation of parts of the city's industries away from the front, in similar fashon to what the soviets did in 1941. Still, a price was paid. Chiang commited all his 80.000 German-trained troops, losing roughly 60% of them; also, he lost 10-25.000 officers from Wamphoa MA and many more thousands potential officers; that plus nearly all his armored vehicles. In practice, the battle was the peak of RNA real strenght, never to be achieved again in the mainland.
That the IJA went hard into monstrosities cannot be denied. Among Unit 731, I could find only four men with "general" ranks: Shiro Ishii (lieutenant general), Masaji Kitano (major general), Otozo Yamada (general) and Shunji Sato (major general). The last two were indicted and condemned in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials (25 and 20 years, but released in 1956).
But here we have a thorny problem. This whole discussion (explicated in the title) is about the "worst general(s) of XX century". But that could mean "worst" for lack of military capabilities or long-term objectives; what's the point of winning some battles only to completely deplete your units? So, if a general employed inhuman tactics, but ultimately won, is he among the "worst"?
Unit 731 and the other Units (100, 1644, etc.) surely were among the worst horrors of the XX century, but they also produced results (tested on civilians outsides the camps, killing hundreds of thousands). When the soviet invaded Manchuria, 9 August 1945, the Kwantung army led by Otozo Yamada was woefully undestrenghted (all trained men were siphoned toward other fronts and what was left was equipped with decades old weaponry), but theoretically ready to use bacteriological weapons. With what effectivness we don't know, since in 16 August 1945 Yamada received and obeyed the order of surrender.
Re: Cadorna... Yeah. I think somewhere in the manual of successful generalship, there's a chapter heading titled "Never be more of a danger to your own men than you are to the enemy"
Not to mention being such an extreme anti-Semite that the other Tsarist officers noticed it.
That's a bit like being thrown out of the SS for excessive brutality. Such people did exist but you really have to wonder...
Only problem with that is, he was tapped to be Chief of Staff after the sudden, unexpected (supposedly), and relatively young (62) death of his predecessor as CoS, Alberto Pollio, JUST before the "July Days" of 1914. Some suspect it was actually an assassination, as Pollio's heart attack was misdiagnosed as stomach troubles and he was given a too-strong "purgative" which finished him off. (Incidentally not the 1st instance of "death by purgative" I've heard of). Pollio was by all accounts a more competent man than Cadorna, BUT was a firm supporter of the Triple Alliance and was married to a Hungarian/Austrian noblewoman. One reason Cadorna was selected as his replacement was that Cadorna was considerable more pro-Entente than Pollio had been.
AIUI his argument was that shooting 50 enemy aircraft down on the way back rather than 10 aircraft on their way to the target meant that there were 40 fewer enemy aircraft in the next air raid.
It's similar to this quote about Douglas Haig.
I'm unsure that weakening Fighter Command 1940-43 was an option. The Luftwaffe could move its pieces around the "European chessboard" quicker than the RAF could because it had the advantage of internal lines of communication and because it was better at it than the RAF. Sending a big portion of Fighter Command overseas at the end of 1940 might have allowed Germans to exploit this weakness. At the very least the remaining Luftwaffe forces in the west could conduct daylight raids on Britain with fewer casualties.
Plus I'm not sure that keeping so many fighter squadrons in the UK was his call. Decisions like that would be made further up the chain of command.
Furthermore, the fighters couldn't sit on the ground and wait for the enemy to attack. It was necessary to use them offensively to be seen to be fighting back for domestic morale and for propaganda purposed overseas, especially after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. AIUI Stalin complained bitterly that Great Britain and later on the United States weren't giving him enough help. Furthermore, the there's still a perception amongst the far left that the western allies deliberately refrained from helping the Soviets as much as they could because they preferred fascism to communism. No Fighter Command offensive would strengthen these views.
Fighter Command's offensive operations didn't draw any Luftwaffe aircraft away from the Eastern Front, but I'm sure there would be numerous, "What if Fighter Command was used offensively 1941-43" threads in the TTL version of this board and that the consensus would be that it did draw Luftwaffe aircraft from the Eastern Front.
It's the same with Bomber Command before it became effective. It had to be seen to be going on the offensive, even if the military results weren't worth the effort and it would have been better to strengthen Coastal Command.
And Coastal Command wasn't neglected as much as naval historians would have us believe. That's before and during the war.
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The China Tibet conflict was a mess. Tibet sought to take advantage of China's weakness and expand into Qinghai (a Chinese province), while the Ma Clique (a warlord faction made up of members of the Ma family; later joined the KMT) sought to defend their land and holdings against those they perceived to be invaders.
It just depends on who's perspective you agree with.
However, in the 2nd Sino-Japan war, the Ma Clique produced some of the best cavalry troops and generals the KMT had. Ma Bufang and his brother Ma Buqing, both sons of Ma Qi were among the best commanders and they were both known for defeating superior Japanese forces on several occasions.
And you cannot consider the interwar Chinese generals to be part of any military. They were warlords, men with nominal military training who had fought for one side or the other in the chaos of post Qing China and grew powerful enough to hold their own personal fiefdom. I personally consider the warlords to be a sort of stationary bandit, a group of criminals who live off the land they hold by extorting peasants and merchants.
Shanghai was one of Chiang's worst decisions in the 2nd Sino-Japan war and my great-grandfather nearly paid the ultimate price for it. There was a terrible cost paid for hold Shanghai, which should not have been done. Instead, Chiang should have withdraw to the half finished defensive line which would have cost the Japanese even more.
You mean like Oskar Dirlewanger? The man who recruited fighters convicted of "Rape, murder, arson and rape."?
No, aware of Dirlewanger and his scum but would have regarded them as more typical of the SS. The curious thing is that there are also attested cases of SS men being court martialled and shot or dishonourably discharged for bringing the organisation into disrepute. I suppose that it may have depended upon individual senior commanders plus Reichsfuhrer Himmler's hypocrisy.
I'd agree. Haig doesn't deserve to be in this thread.
That's a classic tactic of exploitation used when you're winning.
While in the context of the BoB he was probably wrong, there is a logic to that belief. If you hit your enemy hard today, even though he has already bombed you, he has fewer aircraft to come at you tomorrow.
Where that falls down in the context of Leigh-Mallory's argument is that the targets the Luftwaffe were hitting were the airfields of 11 Group (and to a lesser extent 10 Group to the west). If those airfields are not protected then the ability of the defence to react is degraded.
Coulsdon Eagle
Monthly Donor
Exactly. Haig knew it would cost more lives in the short-run, but ending the war weeks or months early would halt the casualty lists. Previously the British Army was very wary of leaving a flank open, as the Germans were the masters of the counter-attack, so Haig's orders went against all the ingrained knowledge earned in the war so far. There was no esay & cheap anser.
If said victory was ultimately futile and/or could have been won with far fewer casualties, I'd say yes. A poor general costs his army greatly even when he wins.
Except this would then run into a lot of "what-if" scenarios and tons of speculation, so no real point in arguing those because then we'd be arguing whether Monty did the right thing by his El Alamein defense when a hypothetical counter-attack could have crushed Rommel then and there.
(For the record, I think Monty did a great job at El Alamein. Sure, he's not very creative and tends to be overly cautious at times, but given Rommel thrived on playing his opponent and maneuver warfare it was the right move to force him into a battle of attrition he couldn't win)
So I'd imagine that there are plenty of bad generals who won very poorly, we should stick to those whose clear ineptitude cost them a battle or a war, like Gideon Pillow or Elphy Bey (who were pre-1900 so doesn't count, but I needed some good examples).
Cho really wasn't much of a field commander- he held staff positions right up until the Battle of Okinawa, where he masterminded the defensive tunnels... and then wasted his troops in an "active defence" (not-a-step-back orders and Banzai charges), before committing seppuku when the battle was clearly lost.
He likely wasn't a very good staff officer either- he was always old for his ranks and his positions were low prestige ones. He was known to be a heavy smoker and drinker, a degenerate gambler and often sought the company of prostitutes. He ruthlessly beat his subordinates, to the point that even the IJA regarded him as notorious for that.