Most incompetent generals and military commanders in military history

Post histories most incompetent commanders.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Cadorna
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cottage
amazon.com/Chief-Douglas-Haig-British-Army/dp/1845137698/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493907897&sr=8-1&keywords=the chief douglas haig
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

He outperformed most of his contemporaries, his predecessor Sir John French cracked under the pressure of the same position, the French went through something like 5 commanders during the war.

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t. David Lloyd George

Elphingstone has to have my vote.

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer

>when you can plan your offensives on a 1:1 scale map

>Rommel I want you to defend Libya
>Alright I'll charge into Egypt
>Wait what
>Send more supplies man
>wtf are you doing Rommel
>EASTERN FRONT IS FOR NERDS, SEND MORE SUPPLIES
>Rommel pls
>Thank you for losing me North Africa assholes

/thread

Really can't beat this level of incompetence

Don't finish the thread so fast, faggot.

WWI had a lot of incompetence to go around, England was before and since cautious about taking major causalties. Not Haig though...

> Not Haig though
You say this as if it was Haig's own buffoonery that caused the static conditions of the Western Front, as if another man could have simply walked into his shoes and waved away the technological and geographical limitations that made it a war of attrition.

Simply pointing at the appalling conditions of the Western Front and the seemingly futile offensives that characterized trench warfare and saying "what an inept fool, wasting thousands of lives for nothing!" without taking into consideration the circumstances that caused those conditions to be that way and without taking note of the limitations in what any man could have been capable in the same situation doesn't really do justice to history.

Don't forget how he had to abandon most of his supplies for lack of ability to transport them.

If you think Haig was a bad commander, you don't know your history, what is your genius alternative to huge casualties using the technology at the time. I can guarantee anything you think of was either tried or was impractical.

le lions led by donkeyy

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What so bad about him?

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taking weeks to win a siege against a force almost a tenth the size of your own, AND THEN loosing more than a quarter of your army is pretty fucking incompetent

Im a noob, tell me why this is bad

what did he do?

Cadorna started 12 battles at the Isonzo river and lost to the Austrians en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Cadorna

>what is your genius alternative to huge casualties using the technology at the time
Playing defense and mowing down thousands of Germans while taking practically no losses. Worst case the Germans stop coming and then you don't need to go begging for help from anyone that will listen.

haha dank

Balisiscus may have legitimately been retarded

Crassus

Don't know if that was politically viable though.

Fucking was all his life jelly at Pompey. He did eventually get rid of the Spartacus uprising, right?

Your solution is to hand all tactical and strategic initiative to an enemy generally considered to be superior on a tactical level to yourself?

So basically you want to play to your enemies strengths while nullifying your own

Yeah beat spartacus, honestly crassus was a decent commander nothing special but not a meme. Pompey is overrated as well imo, great logistician and morale raiser but tactically he wasn't amazing, got his ass kicked by sertorius as well.

1:1 is full size.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cottage

/reddit/

>make a plan for the offensive
>plan fails
>repeat the same plan 11 times
>fails every time
>blame your generals

but also, after all that
>austrians make one offensive
>they absolutely destroy your armies and almost force your country out of the war

hans, where we are going we don't need supplies

le epik blackadder goes forth amirite m'gentlesirs wwi commanders were so dum xD

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One of the shites generals ever

doesnt the clusterfuck that was his parthian invasion elevate him to meme status?

if you read about it he made the right decisions but didn't have the right forces (enough cavelry) and the enemy was well prepared. For example he waited for the enemy to run out of arrows but they had like 3000 camels resupplying the archers.

Honestly even Caesar couldn't have won that battle with the same forces.

evner was actually pretty chill during the italian-ottoman war

Douglas "nuke the chinks" MacArthur

Phillip the autistic

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Supposedly the average Mexican soldier didn't even know how to aim a gun. I have no source for that, just an anecdote.

In contrast, the average Texan was a stereotypical American and was super familiar with guns.

>Leave Austria to me!

What if your strengths are more harmful to your own side than the enemy? Surely anything is better than sending your forces out to slaughter - and you know it will be a slaughter since it was a slaughter the previous dozen times or so.

t. Murrican

>What if your strengths are more harmful to your own side than the enemy
Well then it isn't a strength obviously

Precisely my point. He just kept throwing people at machineguns. Surely it couldn't be worse to let the Germans have that sort of tactical initiative.

>He just kept throwing people at machineguns.

Will you people cut it out with the meme history already? Crossing no-man's land and taking the opposing trench wasn't as big a deal as it's made out in pop culture, the difficult part was resisting the enemy's counterattack once their supply lines had shortened and yours had lengthened. Trench lines would be taken and then retaken due to the attacker's inability to hold on to them.

>dude what the fuck am I doing haha
>wait where is my weed
>maybe it's behind those very strechted out phalanxes

What was the most common cause of casualties? Machine gun fire or close combat in the trenches? I'm suspecting it wasn't artillery here. I'm asking seriously, not contradicting you.

90% sure it was artillery or disease.

Well I am 90% sure it was machine-guns and suicidal attacks, right after shitty medical treatments.

john bell hood
in the battle of franklin he chose to launch a suicidal frontal assault because he felt his army had to regain their fighting spirit or something like that
attacking when he really shouldn't have was par for the course for him (his "defense" of atlanta, his choice to invade tennessee instead of trying to prevent sherman from burning everything)

artillery created over 75% of casualties. remember artillery was often firing whereas machine guns were only used in the event of an attack, and for rattling off a few rounds every now and again.

I don't believe you, it seems like you're just propagating your opinion and it seems that is even less grounded on actual knowledge of the history than mine is.

about 58.3 percent of German deaths were caused by artillery, 41.7 percent by small arms. Whalen, Bitter Wounds 1984, pp. 41-2.

See. Nowhere near 75%.

Still the majority brainlet and that was only for german troops. Machine guns plus all small arms ins't even 50%

>Well I am 90% sure it was machine-guns and suicidal attacks, right after shitty medical treatments.
t. clueless memester

Why the abuse? I'm not the one here posting meme images. *About* 58.3% is less than "over 75%". Doesn't change the fact that I was wrong too, I would have to admit.

75% total, 58 for german troops. anyway it's not like they kept super precise records about how people died but if you do a very basic look at ww1 history you will see that artillery was king, soldiers died on defense in their trenches, they died when they left their trenches to attack and they died sitting in their trenches for weeks from artillery while never seeing an enemy soldier.

>a very basic look at ww1 history you will see that artillery was king,

Depends on the front. In Belgium certainly, not so sure about the others.

At least they won in the end.
This retard is primarily responsible for the German defeat.

WW1 was a war that was decided before it began, how many doods, factories you got, how strong is ur national will but mostly the doods, if we can trade one of our dudes for one of urs and we have more we win.

the realities of technology meant things like encirclements which could eliminate hundreds of thousands of men in a stroke were just not realistic on any significant scale.

>says retarded shit
>gets called out on it
>haha but I see you didn't get a percentage figure exactly right tough luck pal

>technology develops to a point where a defensive, slow approach is optimal
>your battle plan consists of rushing through everything as quick as possible

Germany would have had the neccisary resources to win the war (hell, they capitulated Russia) had they not wasted them on the Schliffen plan.

Maybe but time was against them, especially in retrospect. as soon as US got involved the war was over.

Saddam Hussein.
When he declared war with Iran he used a presidential decree to appoint himself the highest military rank and personally took control of the war strategy, I'm sure most know how that turned out.

>technology develops to a point where a defensive, slow approach is optimal
>your battle plan consists of rushing through everything as quick a second possible

1. WWI battles usually stretched out over the course of months, define quick
2. Casualties were fairly even between the attacker and the defender (sometimes the attacker suffered less casualties than the defender, as in Verdun) so attacking could make sense even from a manpower perspective to "bleed your opponent white"

What would you have me do, admit defeat?

>not knowing about the counterattack
legitimately retarded

>Be German Army Chief of Staff
>Schlieffen Plan going bretty well
>Crown Prince Rupprecht asks to go on the offensive and charge into French fortresses even though the plan you're supposed to be following requires him to withdraw to lure the French further into Germany
>Like a little beta cucklet, you give in and let your subordinates fuck up the master plan
>Russians send insignificant meme force into East Prussia
>Sperg out and divert 150,000 men from the Schlieffen plan to deal with the Russians
>Based von Hindenburg defeats them without their help, rendering the reinforcements completely useless
>French exploit gap at the Marne and cuck you out of taking Paris
>Panic and order your men to give up a retarded amount of ground, dig in and start a wasteful, unwinnable war of attrition that leads to the complete and total destruction of your empire

They would've had an unlimited amount of time if that fucking nitwit von Tirpitz didn't ram through "muh unrestricted submarine warfare." If they had just listened to Bethmann-Hollweg and not sank ships without warning the US would've stayed out and the Germans would've broken through to Paris.

DELET THIS

You make a good point, but hindsight is always 20/20.

World War 1 occupies a moment in history when commanders who were still stuck in the classical mindset were given command of armies in an industrial age.

The classical mindset was that when the warring season arrived, you mustered your army, trained them, marched them around for several months, spent weeks doing field maneuvers around the enemy army trying to secure the best possible position, and then line up your men in block formations and order the frontal assault, with cavalry/support protecting the flanks. Few casualties occurred during the melee (most happened during the rout) and were more akin to shoving matches, trying to disrupt your enemy's ranks long enough to break their morale. You didn't use irregulars because blocks of infantry were simply better at projecting force

What they mostly didn't realize is all that goes out the window in an age of rifles and railroads. Populations are huge enough that if the government has the willpower and the line of credit, it can make more soldiers show up. Marching around in formations and having a snazzy, brightly colored panoply becomes less important than land-nav, marksmanship, and cardio training wearing simple, functional fatigues. Armies could get from one place to another with extreme rapidity, traveling in a single day what would have taken many weeks of marching on foot. Digging in becomes more important than maneuvering around, but fixed static positions like forts are worse than useless. Rifles and machine guns are simply too efficient killing devices to justify full frontal assaults. Winning battles in an industrial age means replacing battlefield losses faster than your enemy can.

Needless to say, massing armies for pitched field battles seems pointless and stupid to us, but that's because we know better. It would have taken a man of true vision to see through the fog of history and make these kind of connections

>Needless to say, massing armies for pitched field battles seems pointless and stupid to us
This is where I disagree with you entirely. It doesn't 'seem stupid' because literally how the war was won, and the only way it could have been won given the present circumstances. If you didn't mass those armies then you would have been overwhelmed by the other guy who did.

The solutions to trench warfare were more technological than doctrinal. In fact, breakthroughs were common even in WW1, but consolidating them was the real problem because primitive communication and motorization made it difficult to reinforce the breakthrough before they could be dislodged with a counterattack.

It wasn't that the commanders were 'stuck in the past' quite the opposite, they were constantly updating and evolving their stratagems & incorporating new technology to meet the new problems they encountered, it's that they were bereft of the tools necessary to overcome the challenges presented by the western front in a quick and decisive fashion.

You know all those stereotypes about Soviet generals? Just throw men at the enemy, machine-gun your retreating troops, all that? Cadorna was that BUT FOR REAL. IIRC he even decimated units that failed at one point.

good points, I confess that my WWI history isn't as sharp as it could be, which is why I'm painting with broad strokes and don't mind being corrected. But you do see the same basic mistakes being made by both sides in almost every war after Napoleon and before Adolf.

>If you didn't mass those armies then you would have been overwhelmed by the other guy who did.
Wouldn't it make more sense to just keep massing soldiers into defensive positions and forcing your enemy to match your ability to raise and maintain troops and outlast his economy? Especially if they were that keen to funnel themselves into your grinders and therefore had to replace much more soldiers every time they gambled successfully on a victory, only to see it snatched from them because they overextended themselves?

>breakthroughs were common even in WW1
But it seems like the most common result were inconclusive slaughters like Somme.

>quite the opposite,
Clever tactics is something different from strategic vision, though you need both in order to succeed. They were looking for new ways to beat the enemy soldiers in the field, to maximize inflicted casualties. What they weren't looking for was new ways to destroy their ability to make those soldiers appear in the first place.

Horatio Gates

Germans just head out East and knock out the Russians and then the Italians and then come back for you then.

The issues at the Somme were the use of the wrong artillery rounds by the British and the the fact that the British never had the need to engage in an offensive other than to help the French. Who were the defenders against a German offensive at verdun. And we're getting plastered. Verdun was almost an effective offensive until higher command fucked it up.

Localized breakthroughs were super common in throughout the war, it was the act of exploiting those into meaningful gain that was hard as shit.

And commanders were motivated to commit to offensives because everyone wanted to win the war without the massive cost of attrition, their underestimation of defensive capability is glaring, but could anyone really just sit back and be okay with a far longer bloody artillery duel that went on for years and years?

>The issues
but isn't that the point? That there will always be "issues" that seem totally obvious in hindsight?

Seems to me like they would have been better off investing in their navies and bulking up their investments in emerging technologies which would have made a difference: good dependable personal vehicles, earth moving vehicles, aircraft which were more than glorified kites with a machine strapped to it and could carry cargo or drop soldiers, etc.

Like you said, the problem was primarily logistics related, if they couldn't capitalize on their victories, then why gamble on them at all? Why waste your time inventing new machine guns when you should be inventing new back end technologies which boost your military's logistic capacity to capitalize on victory?

>could anyone really just sit back and be okay with a far longer bloody artillery duel that went on for years and years?
Well, the soldiers themselves. Often times they'd get to know the soldiers on the other side and time their artillery fire so that they would land harmlessly and not hurt anyone. At one point on Christmas night there was the famous story of the two sides hearing each other singing the same Christmas carols, met in no mans land, played football, traded rations, and refused to fight each other the next day.The generals called it the "disease of peace" and stamped it out by rotating soldiers so that they could never properly humanize the soldiers on the other side of the trench. It made it easier to funnel them into the grind.

DUDE IM NAPOLEON LMFAO

>Douglas "Eat Bok Choy Get The Little Boy" MacArthur
>Douglas "Invaded by Japan, Get The Fat Man" MacArthur
>Douglas "Commies From Beijing Get The Sting" MacArthur
>Douglas "Mao Ze-bomb" MacArthur
>Douglas "Glass The Gooks" MacArthur

Yes you utter wretch, you are wrong.

Being wrong didn't stop Haig from his one-trick-pony offensives, why should I be any better, especially since I'm not putting anyone's life at stake?

Read a book.

amazon.com/Chief-Douglas-Haig-British-Army/dp/1845137698/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493907897&sr=8-1&keywords=the chief douglas haig

Boggles my mind some of the shit he pulled. A shame, since he was excellent at actually organizing the army.

McClellan was an excellent bureaucrat.

He was a foppish and indecisive military commander and the worst kind of compromise weasel as a presidential candidate.

mcarthur was actually an okay general, his only major flaw being his personality.

Fuck off lloyd george you lying cunt.

this tbqh

This guy finished the thread too soon

>oh no we're encircled in Korea
>wants to have the force try to break out to the north
FLAWLESS PLAN

this is the best thing in this thread
thank you

Literally who?

>Nice army you have there King George. It'd be a shame if somebody lost it.

>Verdun was almost an effective offensiv
Verdun ate 10% of german yearly ammo production in just two weeks, a good chunk of that in the first couple of days.
It also required like half a year of preparation and infrastructure build up.
And it still ended up a failure.

Verdun was not an example of offense being viable.