History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

[Traitorfish]

Oh, that was child abuse.

Or his parents knew a vainglorious wingnut when they saw one, and named him in the finest Scottish tradition.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

No "or" but perhaps "and"...

 

[r16]

so , ı see this book advert or something that says Southern parts of the 13 Colonies saw London's plans to eventually ban slavery and thus either started or joined the Rebellion and America was thus born , a state of slavers for slavers . No time to read it in full , but might love to use the argument . From a scale of 0-100 , how true that can be ?

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

Clark was often competent but rarely better than that, and sometimes worse; he fully deserved the opprobrium that came down on him for diverting an entire field army to occupy Rome for prestige purposes rather than attack retreating Wehrmacht units.

The whole Rapido River debacle and subsequent Congressional inquiry doesn't give him any credit either.

Ideally, President Quezon could have declared the Philippines neutral and convinced the Americans to withdraw to forestall a Japanese invasion entirely, but it's hard to see the Americans agreeing to such a course of action and even harder to see the Japanese giving up on an invasion in such a case; they'd probably have just occupied the islands anyway.

I don't think Quezon would have even had the time to do so if he wanted to. The Philippine Government and USAFFE learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor while it was occurring in the early hours of Dec 8. Clark Field was being bombed by 12:40 that same day with landings on the northern most Philippine islands (those north of Luzon) also occurring on the 8th.Sure the main langings took place on the 12th, but for all intents and purposes the shooting war in the Philippines had already begun.

MacArthur may have been dealt a bad hand, but for many rounds MacArthur had been acting as the dealer. Despite being granted the ego stroking rank of "Field Marshall" by the Philippine government, and receiving not one but two ridiculous salaries for being both a Field Marshall and the Military Advisor to the Philippine government, the preparations made for the Philippine Army were ...lacking... to say the least.

Even though the Philippine Army and MacArthur’s promotion were authorized in 1935, troops didn’t begin to be called up for training until 1937. The first Philippine Air squadron wasn’t organized until 1939, despite being given priority in funding & U.S. based training. Infantry training was carried out in tent camps spread throughout the islands, meaning that even though the Philippine had over 100,000 troops in the field when hostilities broke out in 1941, there was almost zero coordination or cohesion between the units. While it must be mentioned that the budget for the Philippine Army usually hovered in the $6 million range and the U.S. Army was less than enthusiastic in providing equipment, it should also be noted that MacArthur’s salary also came out of that figure. Further, though MacArthur made complaints about the lacking amounts of equipment, he never brought his “considerable influence” to bear to rectify the situation, despite that being a major factor in his hiring by Quezon.


Thus, when war broke out in 1941 the Philippine Army had 2 active and 10 reserve divisions, who were all hovering just about combat irrelevant. Its telling that when MacArthur was activated by FDR in July 1941 to form the USAFFE, he did not include the Philippine Army units into his new theater wide Army unit. The US Philippine Division, an understrength Square Division made up of mostly Philippine Scouts units, was expected to shoulder most of the burden of the defense of Luzon, despite only being around 10,000 in strength. The quality of the Philippine Army units was apparent during the invasion. A single USPS cavalry regiment (the 26th cav PS) defended the Damortis area for 6 hours against the landings of the equivalent of 2 Japanese infantry divisions, despite the presence of 4 Philippine Army divisions in the same area.

While its fair to say that the Philippine Army had limited resources and a comparatively small amount of time to form, its also true that MacArthur spectacularly failed to prepare anything close to a competent fighting force during his 6 years of pre-war leadership.

And then there the $640,000 from the Philippine treasury that Quezon ordered be paid to the personal bank accounts of MacArthur and three members of his staff "in recognition of outstanding service to the Commonwealth of the Philippines" on Jan 3rd, 1942...

 

[Dachs]

The whole Rapido River debacle and subsequent Congressional inquiry doesn't give him any credit either.

Yep.

The most astonishing and humiliating part of the whole disaster on the Rapido was that the American military mounted a main effort in its assault area and the Wehrmacht literally did not notice. Internal Wehrmacht communications after the first day of battle show that the Germans thought they had defeated a minor battalion-size probe, rather than an entire American division. Clark probably should've figured out it was a bad idea after Keyes told him it was.

I don't think Quezon would have even had the time to do so if he wanted to. The Philippine Government and USAFFE learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor while it was occurring in the early hours of Dec 8. Clark Field was being bombed by 12:40 that same day with landings on the northern most Philippine islands (those north of Luzon) also occurring on the 8th.Sure the main langings took place on the 12th, but for all intents and purposes the shooting was in the Philippines had already begun.

MacArthur may have been dealt a bad hand, but for many rounds MacArthur had been acting as the dealer. Despite being granted the ego stroking rank of "Field Marshall" by the Philippine government, and receiving not one but two ridiculous salaries for being both a Field Marshall and the Military Advisor to the Philippine government, the preparations made for the Philippine Army were ...lacking... to say the least.

[...]

While its fair to say that the Philippine Army had limited resources and a comparatively small amount of time to form, its also true that MacArthur spectacularly failed to prepare anything close to a competent fighting force during his 6 years of pre-war leadership.

And then there the $640,000 from the Philippine treasury that Quezon ordered be paid to the personal bank accounts of MacArthur and three members of his staff "in recognition of outstanding service to the Commonwealth of the Philippines" on Jan 3rd, 1942...

Yeah, I had a segment on MacArthur's training and disciplinary failures before the war, but deleted it to avoid stretching out an already overlong post. I agree on basically all counts. The state of the Philippine military was horrendous and much of it was his fault - low training amounts, low manpower levels, extremely poor relations between American officers and liaisons and Filipino subordinates, racist disciplinary measures...it runs the gamut.

That said, I still suspect that even if MacArthur had done his job properly from 1935 onward, the Philippine military probably wouldn't have been enough to defeat the Japanese. Low preparedness was not just his fault (although it was partially his fault and the fact that he profited from it is a heinous crime worthy of court-martial), but rather an institutional and political difficulty faced by all the Western democracies.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Back on Ike - I was looking for a good quote I faintly recall about Ike's greatness/glory really being in keeping Patton, Montgomery and De Gaulle all on the same side and shooting at the enemy, not each other - and found this instead:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...0winter/Ambrose.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
-Strikes me as excellent. Should it?

 

[JohannaK]

Are you knowledgeable about commanders from other Allied nations?

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

keeping Patton, Montgomery and De Gaulle all on the same side

That's a bit of a stretch. Truth be told, de Gaulle couldn't even be said to be on France's side.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, de Gaulle had to be de Gaulle, and great quotes about --- being a difficult human being -leaving ally and in moral debt to his hosts aside- are in plenty and easy to find... Really clever burns.

Are you knowledgeable about commanders from other Allied nations?

If you're asking about Monty - I can hang in there for a minute without humiliating myself, though that's tough for me to do in this room. Not knowledgeable by local standards, no, and I'm sincerely flattered you had to ask. The Honorable Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, like de Gaulle above, was what he was, which wasn't exactly everybody's favorite chum.

If that's a rhetorical opening, or I need to tell what I know about, for instance, Chaing-Kia Shek, I'm not even sure I spelled it right, and I know more about his wife, MRS. Chaing-Kia Shek, and her brother, Tse-Ven Soong - who was a great man at the center of great events and who deserves to be recalled better by Americans, but was no general; just the man who hired many.

I know a little this and that -who Zhukov was, for example- but while I love history, I never specialized in it. -Just a widely-read minor enthusiast able to fathom/follow the high-level talk in here.

-Franco got away with murder, BTW.

 

[Dachs]

Back on Ike - I was looking for a good quote I faintly recall about Ike's greatness/glory really being in keeping Patton, Montgomery and De Gaulle all on the same side and shooting at the enemy, not each other - and found this instead:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...0winter/Ambrose.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
-Strikes me as excellent. Should it?

I think Ambrose was a bit harder on Ike than he should have been over the failures in the fall of 1944. (He also misconstrued a dual-phase, dual-thrust strategy as "broad front", which is something Montgomery did in 1944 to make Eisenhower's ultimate course of action look less intelligent than it was. Monty's words set the terms of the discussion for the rest of time.) Eisenhower's orders were communicated clearly. He allowed the army group commanders some leeway in objective selection, but on crucial issues, like opening Antwerp, he was fairly firm. Bradley (not Patton) and Montgomery committed insubordination in pursuing their independent courses of action. In some cases (definitely Montgomery over Antwerp) this took the form of ignoring direct orders. In others, it took the form of ignoring the commander's intent.

It's unclear what Eisenhower could have done differently there. As Ambrose pointed out, he both had to try to exercise overall operational direction as well as act as a supreme commander keeping the forces of several countries moving in the same direction. One was a military job, and the other political, and they were almost impossible to reconcile. Ike did better than arguably any other supreme commander in history at the political side of his job. Necessarily, that involved suboptimal choices on the military level. Not all of his political choices were good. He was probably too friendly with Bradley to ever seriously reprimand him for his errors (let alone relieve him) and he was unquestionably too hard on Devers, whom he unreasonably saw as a rival. But it is difficult to argue with the final result.

Some observers then and since credited those choices to his lack of battlefield experience. Unlike many of his fellow Western commanders, Ike spent the Great War out of the trenches, stateside and in staff positions. But he had a strong theoretical background in Clausewitz, which was clearly reflected in his directives, in SHAEF planning, and even in communications by his subordinates. And while he had no battlefield experience, he had experience as a supreme commander in the Mediterranean that he brought to the table in Western Europe.

Ambrose also correctly pointed out that Ike got better at the job over time. His experience in North Africa and Sicily informed his decisions in Western Europe. He was perhaps a bit too light on the hand of his army group commanders in the fall of 1944 but eventually cracked down on them (at least, on Monty). He responded better to the crisis created by the German offensive in the Ardennes than either Bradley or Hodges, and helped lay the groundwork for defeating that offensive and successfully counterattacking.

As you can probably tell, then, I think Ambrose's overall assessment of Ike is fine, although I'd quibble with a lot of the details.

Are you knowledgeable about commanders from other Allied nations?

Somewhat. Bear in mind that, while my opinions about military leaders are based in fact, they are still my opinions. There are plenty of people - some of whom are very, very smart - who would disagree with me about them.

I'm also going to spoil the comments because they're so extensive.

Spoiler :

The British and Commonwealth armies produced some excellent officers.

Guy Simonds, who spent most of the campaign in northwestern Europe as the commander of II Canadian Corps, was probably the best general officer Canada produced during the war. He was an innovative thinker, as demonstrated by the plans he came up to clear Walcheren Island in Operation INFATUATE. Simonds made some missteps, and like most Commonwealth military leaders he was too wedded to the step-by-step phase-line British style of campaigning that focused too much on consolidation and not enough on initiative. But overall, his press has been very good. The other Canadian corps commander, Charles Foulkes, was generally regarded as a competent but limited professional.

Harry Crerar, the chief of First Canadian Army during most of the campaign in northwest Europe, was flawed but suffered from an unreasonably bad postwar press. His military ability was at best limited, and he was better known as a "political" general. However, as the commander of Canada's forces in Europe, he had to be a political general. Monty ensured that First Canadian Army was invariably under-resourced, but had incredibly unrealistic expectations of it all the same. The situation culminated in early September 1944, when Crerar was assigned to clear all of the Channel ports and the Scheldt estuary, despite Second British Army being assigned almost all of the Canadians' motor transport. Monty attempted to blame the Canadians, and Crerar's alleged bungling, for his own inability to prioritize and the errors that his monstrous ego generated. He further criticized Crerar for attending a ceremony at Dieppe to memorialize the Canadian fallen there, despite the fact that it was basically his job and not appearing would have been ridiculous. Monty seemed to believe that generals should not have national responsibilities, if those generals were Americans or Canadians. Anyway, Crerar was not great at higher-level military operations but he wasn't that bad.

The UK also had some good general officers. However, it is often difficult to evaluate their skills. The first problem is that they generally looked very bad when placed next to German professionals with a solid grasp of a war of movement, especially since they were trapped in a deeply flawed doctrine from which few of them really broke free. North Africa and Dunkirk were the graveyards of a generation of reputations. The second problem is that Bernard Law Montgomery established an iron grip over the British military in the field in the second half of the war, whereby an officer's effectiveness was generally based on his ability to carry out Monty's orders. The field marshal was a notorious micromanager and usually left little room for the individual initiative that is at the heart of warfare. Red Army officers arguably had more leeway than British ones did, due to Monty's ever-present network of liaisons and his "Phantom Regiment".

Given those caveats, the best of the British wartime officers were probably in the armor. Pip Roberts was one of the outstanding division commanders of the war. Brian Horrocks was also excellent at corps level, although he was much more prone to make dubious decisions after his 1944 illness. Richard McCreery, who rose to command Eighth Army in 1944, was a highly intelligent officer who made few mistakes. Richard O'Connor was not an armor or cavalry officer, but he won one of Britain's most decisive mobile victories of the war, Operation COMPASS, the destruction of the Italian army in Libya; his later career, however, was less spectacular, and uncharitable analyses often devalue his victory in 1941 due to his often plodding and hesitant command in northwestern Europe in 1944 (while failing to mention the two years he spent in an Italian prisoner of war camp as a somewhat mitigating factor).

Oliver Leese, who was one of Monty's cabal, showed himself to be a limited, if not flawed, commander in Italy. He also inherited his boss's inability to work well with others, and Anglo-American cooperation in Italy was at a low ebb when Clark and Leese were in command. John Crocker, I Corps commander in 1944, was more professionally competent but equally incapable of dealing effectively with allied forces (in his case, his Canadian superior officers in First Canadian Army).

Miles Dempsey was also Monty's man, but possessed significantly more competence than Leese. Unfortunately, it's difficult to tell what decisions were his and not his boss's. His actions commanding Second British Army in Normandy showed little flair or drive, and he and Monty share blame (with Bradley) for the failure of the Falaise encirclement and the subsequent attempt to encircle German armies on the Seine. Dempsey's troops moved spectacularly quickly during the subsequent pursuit, to the point where even Patton expressed his admiration. He was also critical of Montgomery's deeply flawed MARKET-GARDEN plan and, following excellent military instincts, proposed an alternative that Monty simply ignored. After MARKET-GARDEN failed, Monty eventually adopted Dempsey's alternative, a crossing of the Rhine at Wesel, in the spring of 1945.

Some British officers died early, before promising starts to their careers could come to fruition. Jock Campbell and William Gott showed some ability in the Western Desert fighting, but both died in 1942. Admittedly, their actions look somewhat better by comparison to their peers, and it's hard to tell how either would have done in roles of greater authority.

William Slim, the commander of the so-called "forgotten" Fourteenth Army in India and Burma, did a decent job with limited resources. Some of his ideas were inventive, but their actual battlefield utility turned out to be quite small. He was certainly a competent and conscientious officer who fought a difficult war well, but the postwar British Army lionized him to a degree that is faintly silly nowadays. (One might say the same of the Americans and Patton for different reasons.) Of course, it's good not to go too far in correcting Churchill's overblown opinion of him. Slim was a great officer with good ideas, and one of the best generals in the British Army during the war.

One of the reasons the Western Desert was littered with so many fired British generals was Claude Auchinleck, their ostensible commander in the Middle East. The "Auk" was demonized after the war, mostly by comparison to Monty, as a man who simply couldn't get the job done against the Germans, and who was both personally incompetent and incompetent at choosing subordinates. There was some push-back against the idea after Monty died, with people gleefully willing to point out his missteps and giving the Auk credit for the victory at El Alamein. That, too, was a bit of an overcorrection. Auchinleck oversaw some real military disasters, some of which were his own making. He often benefited from Rommel's obstinate refusal to consider his very bad supply situation at multiple points. He was not fit for the job and his relief was probably the right decision.

Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff for most of the war, was a drama queen who always thought he knew best. Monty was his protege, and of course the two shared many characteristics. Brooke found diplomacy with the Americans difficult at best. He was frequently insubordinate, and in fact openly lied to his superiors in order to evacuate the "Second BEF", which he commanded in early June 1940, from France. However, while he shared many of Monty's failings, he was not as egregious about them as his subordinate. He focused on Antwerp and the supply situation better than Monty did and was instrumental in helping Ike finally force him into line in November and December. Like many Ulster officers, he had a great deal of difficulty in dealing with civilian leadership, but although his relationship with Churchill was, uh, difficult to say the least, he toed the line and supported the Prime Minister, recognizing political objectives that superseded operational ones. Max Hastings, a journalist who currently serves as the premier flag-waver among English writers of history, undoubtedly overstates his case (as usual) when he describes Brooke and Churchill as the greatest combination of civilian and military leadership in the history of the world. (Marshall and FDR? Moltke and Bismarck? Foch and Clemenceau? Grant and Lincoln? Vasilevskii and Stalin?) But while the partnership did not always work well, it worked well enough.

Which leaves Monty. He was an undoubtedly gifted commander who understood the importance of mass (and even speed, when he wanted to). He operated under severe constraints that his American allies rarely recognized, such as a desperate manpower shortage that pushed him into conservative decision-making. In acting as the overall ground commander for OVERLORD, he planned and managed one of the most complex undertakings in the history of warfare, and did so successfully to a degree that few if any other Western commanders could have matched at the time. He was self-confident in a way that the British Army lacked before 1942, and imprinted himself and his personality successfully on the entire force, for better and worse.

With all that said, Monty was also a disaster in many ways. His relations with allies - both American and Canadian - were abysmal, mostly of his own doing through insensitivity toward the other nations' concerns and flat-out hypocrisy. He was massively egotistical and deeply enamored of his own abilities to the degree that he, like MacArthur, made bad decisions because of it. He possessed drive, but rarely employed it at the appropriate time; many opportunities were lost because of Monty's want of speed and decisiveness, and the one time he threw caution to the wind and moved out smartly was in the run-up to MARKET-GARDEN, which led to underestimating his opponent and the disaster that befell Allied forces at Arnhem. If any one officer was responsible for the frustrating autumn that the Allies had in the west in 1944 (and goodness knows Bradley did his worst too), it was Montgomery through his failure to focus on Antwerp and the Scheldt estuary, the armies' critical supply line. He was one of the worst subordinates ever to reach so high a command. And while he undoubtedly kept a tighter grip on his troops and subordinates than did the likes of Eisenhower, it came at the price of stifling almost all initiative. Armies cannot fight that way, at least not well. British arms were rather less successful during the war than they might have been, in large part because of him.

The British Army in the Second World War and its successful regeneration is impossible to imagine without Montgomery. But for many of the same reasons, the man was atrocious at higher command. He was an impossible boss and an impossible subordinate. He was a total paradox - couldn't fight alongside him, couldn't fight without him - and I, for one, am very glad to never have had to deal with him and his frequently infuriating style of leadership.

I have many thoughts about Soviet generals and marshals. Unfortunately, I probably won't get to them until tomorrow.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Spoiler :

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

Guy Simonds, who spent most of the campaign in northwestern Europe as the commander of II Canadian Corps, was probably the best general officer Canada produced during the war. He was an innovative thinker, as demonstrated by the plans he came up to clear Walcheren Island in Operation INFATUATE

 

[JohannaK]

Eagerly awaiting Volume II.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Guy Simonds, who spent most of the campaign in northwestern Europe as the commander of II Canadian Corps, was probably the best general officer Canada produced during the war. He was an innovative thinker, as demonstrated by the plans he came up to clear Walcheren Island in Operation INFATUATE. Simonds made some missteps, and like most Commonwealth military leaders he was too wedded to the step-by-step phase-line British style of campaigning that focused too much on consolidation and not enough on initiative. But overall, his press has been very good. The other Canadian corps commander, Charles Foulkes, was generally regarded as a competent but limited professional.

Harry Crerar, the chief of First Canadian Army during most of the campaign in northwest Europe, was flawed but suffered from an unreasonably bad postwar press. His military ability was at best limited, and he was better known as a "political" general. However, as the commander of Canada's forces in Europe, he had to be a political general. Monty ensured that First Canadian Army was invariably under-resourced, but had incredibly unrealistic expectations of it all the same. The situation culminated in early September 1944, when Crerar was assigned to clear all of the Channel ports and the Scheldt estuary, despite Second British Army being assigned almost all of the Canadians' motor transport. Monty attempted to blame the Canadians, and Crerar's alleged bungling, for his own inability to prioritize and the errors that his monstrous ego generated. He further criticized Crerar for attending a ceremony at Dieppe to memorialize the Canadian fallen there, despite the fact that it was basically his job and not appearing would have been ridiculous. Monty seemed to believe that generals should not have national responsibilities, if those generals were Americans or Canadians. Anyway, Crerar was not great at higher-level military operations but he wasn't that bad.

I no longer recall who nine years later, but I think this early SMACX custom faction leaderhead was one of these gentlemen - Foulkes sounds most familiar:

-That's a modified 1944 Time Magazine cover, a Canadian general I futured a little and altered to be Afghan-Canadian and moved the background from Belgium to Planet...

 

[Cutlass]

That's a bit of a stretch. Truth be told, de Gaulle couldn't even be said to be on France's side.

I once tried to start a topic to get people to educate me on deGaulle. Care to take a stab at it?

 

[Ajidica]

@Dachs: As long as we are on the subject of WWII generals and deGaulle, were the Free French generals -such as Gentilhomme- half decent or was the Free French military in such a poor state that "can read a map" was about as good as can be expected for them.

 

[Dachs]

So, Soviet leaders of the war.

Spoiler :

The Red Army of 1941 was, to put it bluntly, a catastrophe waiting to happen, and this was in large part due to its leadership. It has been fashionable for many people to argue that the effect of the Stalin-era purges has been vastly exaggerated. In civilian life, that may well be true. In the Soviet military, however, there is still virtual academic unanimity that the purges left leadership a hollowed-out husk. Many of the best officers were dead or imprisoned. Those that were left were usually terrified into submissiveness. Few outstanding officers remained in positions of high command. Many of those who were, were cronies of Stalin.

K. E. Voroshilov is probably the most egregious example of the latter. Voroshilov was not a complete idiot. He understood that the purges had gotten rid of better leaders than he was. He also understood when his own forces were not up to par. In his report on the 1936 maneuvers, he initially described the exercise (which British observer Giffard Martel characterized as two forces that "appeared just to bump into each other") in glowing term, probably to avoid appearing incompetent, but admitted to serious command and control problems later in the same document. Candor aside, however, his military ability can be charitably described as "limited". He was a member of Stalin's cavalry mafia, however, so he kept high leadership: member of the GKO, chief of a Strategic Direction, Defense Commissar, and so on. He was not up to the demands of modern warfare. He understood when subordinates lacked drive but possessed none of his own. His mismanagement of the Winter War was one of the epic military catastrophes of the twentieth century. He exhibited personal bravery on at least one occasion early in the Great Patriotic War during the defense of Leningrad, but at the same time was totally failing to organize his troops effectively. He was quickly replaced in that post by G. K. Zhukov, a much better choice.

S. K. Timoshenko, one of the other notable early Soviet commanders, was on balance more competent than Voroshilov. Timoshenko's generalship can be reasonably described as unsophisticated. The stereotype of Soviet soldiery repeatedly flailing away on the same axis of attack for little gain is an unfortunate one, but in Timoshenko's case it was reality. He was a general who could at least motivate his soldiers to fight, and fight hard. It was Timoshenko who kept the entire Western Strategic Direction from collapsing entirely during the ferocious battles for Smolensk and El'nia in the summer of 1941. In doing this, he expended a tremendous amount of manpower and materiel. He also probably saved the Soviet Union, by making it impossible for the Wehrmacht to continue east toward Moscow. He also led the counterattacks in the south in the winter and spring of 1941-42 that put so much pressure on the Germans...and which also led to the last great German encirclement of the war, Operation FREDERICUS, which annihilated several armies numbering a quarter million soldiers. Timoshenko undoubtedly lacked flexibility, and Stalin was probably correct in replacing him in 1942.

Another hard fighter of the early war was M. P. Kirponos, chief of the Southwestern Front, who defended Ukraine from Rundstedt and the German Army Group South. Much is often made of Kirponos' leadership in Ukraine, where the Nazi spearheads were badly stalled until help came from the north in the form of Guderian and Panzer Group 2. Had the rest of the Red Army held on like Kirponos and his troops, so the argument goes, the fascists might have been stopped long before Moscow. Of course, this ignores the fact that the Germans had little room to maneuver in the opening stages of the fighting in Ukraine, that Kleist's Panzer Group 1 was eventually able to slash through Soviet defenses too, and that Soviet forces suffered disaster in the Uman Pocket long before Guderian's panzers went south. Kirponos was unquestionably a fighter and was better at handling his armor in a counterattack than were many of his fellow Soviet officers early in the war, but both he and his instrument were not up to the task of fighting the Wehrmacht in 1941.

You'll notice a trend here. The most effective Soviet leaders early in the war were mostly the ones who were willing to spend their men's lives to kill more Germans. This was probably unavoidable, at least to some degree. The Red Army was not nearly as mobile as the Wehrmacht. The VVS could hurt the Germans but was totally incapable of protecting ground forces from the Luftwaffe. Soviet leaders were under supply pressure nearly as immense as that which faced the Germans, and transportation problems led to road marches that crippled many units before they even got to the front. Under such circumstances, generalship could not consist of formulating complex, balletic maneuvers to stupefy the opponent, to say the least. However, staff failures, and command failures, contributed to all of those problems.

The early war is littered with the careers of Soviet generals who simply lacked the ability to command effectively. D. G. Pavlov, commander of the Western Front, was generally incompetent, although he was simultaneously placed in an impossible position; his failures in the opening days of the war got him accused of sabotage and executed. He was later exonerated of the sabotage but will probably never be exonerated of the incompetence. Other officers managed to survive despite incompetence, like Voroshilov (moved upstairs) and Timoshenko (shifted to an advisory role). D. T. Kozlov's incompetent command of the amphibious assault on Kerch during the Crimean campaign in 1941-42 led to the destruction of virtually his entire force of two armies during the German TRAPPENJAGD counteroffensive; he continued in various posts in the Transcaucasus and Voronezh Fronts before being shuffled off to the Transbaikal where he couldn't do any more harm. I. E. Petrov also had a poor showing in the Crimea as the chief of the Coastal Army; he was more of a fighter than a manager, and his defense of Sevastopol was haphazard. Somehow he was given the responsibility for liberating the peninsula in 1944, which he also bungled; most of the Germans and Romanians got away.

Eventually, the Red Army developed to the point where it no longer had to expend soldiers' lives as an alternative to maneuver and materiel. Some generals were better at recognizing that fact than others. K. K. Rokossovskii was probably the finest Soviet operational commander of the war. He proved his mettle in virtually every situation imaginable: the swirling armored melees of Ukraine, the grim slaughter of Smolensk and Moscow and Stalingrad, the high-technology apocalyptic showdown at Kursk, the battles of annihilation in Belorussia, and the final march through Poland to Berlin. He rarely made a misstep (Belorussia in 1943 being possibly the only example) and demonstrated real genius at the operational level on both attack and defense.

Many of the other late-war Soviet marshals were true competent professionals. R. Ia. Malinovskii was a gifted armor commander who made his way up to Front command and masterminded the liberation of Hungary and Romania. (Interestingly, Malinovskii was one of the few Soviet commanders who had to interact with an allied force, namely the Romanian army after that country ended its association with the Axis in 1944. While the Romanians didn't exactly slot into the Soviet order of battle seamlessly, the two forces cooperated with each other reasonably well considering the circumstances.) I. K. Bagramian and F. I. Tolbukhin also demonstrated real skill in their assignments. Both of them were prone to commit missteps early in the war (Bagramian in his first field command at Sixteenth Army, Tolbukhin as a staff officer in the Crimea campaign in 1941-42), but both clearly improved as time went on.

Other Soviet officers of the late war lacked flair, but were broadly capable of doing their jobs. V. I. Chuikov gained historical immortality for his leadership of the stubborn defenders of Stalingrad in the dark days of 1942. As a commander in most situations, he was unspectacular, but frankly, leading the defenders of Stalingrad ought to be more than enough for anybody. G. F. Zakharov showed good aggressive spirit as an Army commander, but when elevated to Front command in 1944 the powers that be were displeased with his performance and he was demoted again. I. D. Cherniakhovskii showed general competence and some flashes of brilliance, especially during the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation, but the bloody operations to capture East Prussia in 1945 did not reflect particularly well on him (although they reflected even more poorly on Stalin and the GKO, who could easily have masked the province to maintain the drive on Berlin).

In sharp contrast to the Germans, the Soviet military leadership was also more willing, as a group, to take risks as time went on, a generally positive development. This did not mean that fear of Stalin and the NKVD was a thing of the past - far from it.

For example, during the Battle of Kursk, the commander of the Voronezh Front, N. F. Vatutin, became acutely aware that the German offensive was proceeding much more rapidly than he'd planned. While the Red Army's forces could contain the Germans at virtually any cost due to the vast reserve force assembled in the Steppe Front under I. S. Konev, Stalin and the GKO wanted that reserve deployed for counteroffensive operations only. Voronezh Front's objective was to defeat the German attack on its own resources. Within a few days of the beginning of the attack, Vatutin understood that this was no longer very likely.

One of the key German advantages was in their armored formations. The heavy tanks - Tiger, Panther, and the Panzerjäger Ferdinand - got the publicity, but many of the German formations relied on long-barreled Panzer IVs with high-quality optics. Whether the Nazis had Tigers or Panzer IVs, though, they outranged the Soviets with their increasingly obsolescent T-34/76s. Using the T-34s doctrinally, in a counterattack role, was suicidal. The T-34 was too large of a target and was too ineffective against German frontal armor for too long. German panzers picked them off at range like the armored equivalent of a sniper. (Later on, during the armored clash at Prokhorovka, P. A. Rotmistrov sardonically told the crews of Fifth Guards Tank Army to engage the Germans in close combat "and board them", as the only possible means of effectively coming to grips with the SS Tigers. Rotmistrov's plan did not work and his tank army was thoroughly wrecked.) One of Vatutin's high cards before the fight started was First Tank Army, under the outstanding armor officer M. E. Katukov, but with the German tanks so badly outranging the Soviet T-34s, First Tanks was increasingly looking like more of a joker than a face card. In response, Vatutin decided to deploy First Tanks in hull-down positions, dug in to the turrets. It would make them almost impossible for the German gunners to acquire and kill. It meant that the T-34s could not be used in a counterattack role, and this violation of doctrine meant dire things if it failed. Vatutin, however, was willing to risk it, even though it made him vulnerable to Stalin's wrath, because he knew that it only made him vulnerable to Stalin's wrath if it failed.

Vatutin was probably the Red Army's premiere risk-taker. Sometimes the risks didn't pay off. Vatutin was known for getting overaggressive, overextending, and biting off more than he could chew. His advance forces, including Group Popov, got annihilated during Manstein's "Rochade" counterattack in 1943. He again lost his spearheads to a German counteroffensive during the struggle for Kiev in the fall of the same year, when Hermann Balck's XLVIII Panzer Corps wrecked a Soviet tank corps and halted Vatutin's drive on Zhitomir. Risk-takers, however, were what the Red Army really needed, and contrasted very favorably with the unimaginative and destructive command style of many early war commanders. Vatutin had a real gift. which he demonstrated in the successful battles to reach the Dnepr River and in the Korsun-Shevchenkovskii Offensive Operation, and his death at the hands of Ukrainian partisans in 1944 robbed the Red Army of a general of genuine talent.

Some Soviet officers, however, did not grow beyond the disciplined but unimaginative stereotype of the early war years. G. K. Zhukov and I. S. Konev are probably the most famous Soviet marshals of the war in the rest of the world. They certainly had talent. Zhukov in particular was persistent to the point of stubbornness, possessed boldness and initiative and discipline, and, most of all, was aggressive. All of these are positive military traits, to a degree. That stubbornness, however, often led him down unfortunate roads. It took a total disaster for him to finally admit defeat and change his approach. Konev was in many ways broadly similar. Both men participated in the endless Rzhev campaign, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers over the course of an entire year with virtually nothing to show for it. It's fair to say that Zhukov, at least, was obsessed with the place. He attacked an incredibly tough target unimaginatively and his men paid the price again, and again, and again. Zhukov and Konev both repeatedly showed that even in successful attacks, they were usually less efficient (i.e. they got more of their own men killed) than other Soviet operational commanders. The casualty rate Konev's men suffered in the offensive against Army Group North Ukraine in late summer 1944 was simply embarrassingly, only matched by Zhukov's horrifying mismanagement of the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation in 1945.

Frankly, both Zhukov and Konev were butchers. They were the Red Army at its worst in the later years of the war. While many Soviet commanders fully understood operational art, and had developed effective tactics to counter the simultaneously-evolving German defensive tactics, others, with Zhukov and Konev chief among them, continued to bull ahead with relatively little concern for means to achieve the same result with fewer casualties. One of the most horrifying facts about the Great Patriotic War is that in almost every battle of the war, save perhaps the last few months of it, the Red Army suffered more casualties than the Wehrmacht - more men killed, more men wounded, more equipment lost or damaged, and so on, and so forth. The stereotype is that the Red Army could easily sustain those casualties. It could not. More than once during the war, the Soviet Union started to scrape the bottom of its manpower barrel, and conscripts from newly-liberated territory made the difference. By the end of the war, the Red Army was a truly powerful force of high quality and great quantity, led in the main by competent, seasoned professionals every bit the equal of their German rivals. But its great flaw remained that it took horrendous losses. Many of these were unavoidable, the result of a grim defensive campaign waged by a still-formidable foe. Many of them were absolutely avoidable. Officers like Rokossovskii did their best to avoid them; officers like Zhukov did not.

The best of the Soviet marshalate was not Zhukov. Instead, in my opinion, it was A. M. Vasilevskii, who spent much of the war as Chief of the General Staff. Vasilevskii was B. M. Shaposhnikov's protege, and showed his boss's attention to detail and planning in most of what he did. Stalin recognized his ability and from 1942 onward made him one of the "troubleshooters", Stavka's representatives sent to the front who could do anything from kibitzing and dispensing advice to actually assuming control of the battle. When the USSR launched its two grand offensives in the winter of 1942, Zhukov was sent to command one and Vasilevskii the other. Zhukov's attack, which was better-resourced, was Operation MARS, the climax of his obsession with the Rzhev salient, and it ended in bloody disaster due to command mismanagement. While Zhukov poured out his men's blood in the snow, Vasilevskii orchestrated the first great Soviet victory of the war by encircling and annihilating the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. One could not imagine a better way to contrast the two. Vasilevskii was a more thoughtful soldier. He rarely shied away from difficult (bloody) fighting, but did what he could to mitigate it and do it more cheaply. Furthermore, his staff work inaugurated a new era of remarkable effectiveness in Soviet organization; one can say that without Vasilevskii, Soviet operational art probably wouldn't even have existed. He was an excellent officer and one of the finest generals in Russian history.

@Dachs: As long as we are on the subject of WWII generals and deGaulle, were the Free French generals -such as Gentilhomme- half decent or was the Free French military in such a poor state that "can read a map" was about as good as can be expected for them.

They did a very much better job than "can read a map". In Italy, the French Expeditionary Force was regarded as an elite formation by both Allies and Germans, and usually participated in high-value operations. Field Marshal Kesselring relied on knowledge of the Free French troops' position to predict the next location for major offensives. (The fact that he could not do this for SHINGLE - because the French didn't participate - or DIADEM - because German intelligence failed to locate the French - materially aided the early success of both operations.)

Leclerc in particular showed himself to be an aggressive armor commander with all the qualities that one would want from such a leader. While he was undoubtedly a difficult subordinate, especially for Wade Haislip (his American corps commander) and Patton, he worked well with Devers once the 2e DB and XV Corps were transferred to Sixth Army Group in late fall. Patton had much more difficulty with the notion of an ally's forces having alternative national interests than did Devers, a weakness that Patton himself freely admitted. Anyway, Leclerc's exploitation to Strasbourg in November was one of the few bright spots for the Allies that fall and demonstrated that he and his 2e DB were on a par with the best of the Axis and Allied tankers. (It was also, y'know, an iconic moment in French national history.) It created remarkable prospects for subsequent operations, and the fact that those prospects were not exploited was not his fault.

Most of the other Free French leaders were a mixed bag. There's a reason that the Gaullists were okay with accepting the likes of de Lattre into the army after ANTON and the German occupation of the metropole: they needed the leaders and they needed the men. Legentilhomme, for example, rarely led troops in combat, and when he did (in Syria and East Africa) he did so unspectacularly, albeit successfully. To be fair to the French, they were attempting to fight with very little trained manpower, very few arms, very little industrial support, and on-again off-again support from the rest of the Western Allies. The Free French forces were generally reliable, if small in number, and they rarely broke or caused disasters. Later, after the liberation of France, the so-called "whitening" process, by which the French replaced African and Maghrebi soldiers with metropolitan Frenchmen (partially at the Anglo-Americans' behest, because racism), limited French manpower reserves and made military operations more difficult.

 

[Ajidica]

Later, after the liberation of France, the so-called "whitening" process, by which the French replaced African and Maghrebi soldiers with metropolitan Frenchmen (partially at the Anglo-Americans' behest, because racism), limited French manpower reserves and made military operations more difficult.

Thanks Dachs!

On the subject of "whitening", do you know how the French justified it? Like, were they fine with going along with Anglo-American racism or was it understood as, say, allowing the African and Maghrebi troops to go home after several years of hard fighting?

 

[Dachs]

Thanks Dachs!

On the subject of "whitening", do you know how the French justified it? Like, were they fine with going along with Anglo-American racism or was it understood as, say, allowing the African and Maghrebi troops to go home after several years of hard fighting?

Honestly, I'm not as familiar with the process as I'd like. I know that the Western Allies requested that it happen, but I don't know if it was solely motivated by that concern, and I don't know how the liberation government justified it.

 

[Ajidica]

You know of any articles or books I might want to try and track down?

Also, on the subject of the Soviet commanders, can you offer any insight as to why, say, Rokossovsky and Zhukov had different styles with regards to "meatgrinder" battles? You noted that Rokossovsky was quite skilled at operational decisions and avoiding unnecessary casualties by but Zhukov not so much despite Zhukov being a largely competent commander. Did Zhukov just lack imagination to have better plans or were other considerations at play?

EDIT: Was it you who has said Blaskowitz was the most underrated German commander of the war, or was that someone else?