The Military Thread

x5 — He was a Field Marshal, which outranks a General.

After he lost his intel source in the BEF, the western Allies pretty much ran circles around him, so Zhukov probably could, too.

Besides the later whitewashing, historical soldiers who are noteworthy often get praised in the context of their capability and achievements, which often leads to a mischaracterization. And losing other forms of context completely.

Then there's the desperate search for heroes were there might not have been any.

edited 21st May '17 11:50:46 AM by TerminusEst

Rommel is also to some extent a victim of The Peter Principle. He was (by all accounts of people who served with him in the First World War) a remarkably gifted field officer, it's just that it never really translated well to generalship.

He was far from the only one either. Guderian is an even more glaring case, decent at the division level but he didn't have the skills to command anything larger effectively (though apparently he was alright in bureaucratic positions away from the front).

Rommel and Axis personnel go through a lot of white washing.

Warthunder is full of Werhaboos, who refuse to believe that tankers like Wittmann had most of their success and fame being attributed to Waffen SS propaganda and I've argued with a particular member of the community that outright said that being in the SS-Panzer-Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler didn't make you a Nazi and that Wittmann wasn't a Nazi because there is no recorded incident of him committing war crimes even though his Panzer unit was involved in several war crimes.

As Frank Chadwick points out, Auftragstaktik was the pillar of the German military system. Independence of commanders was something that was supposed to be at the heart of the German military.

In practice this lead to commanders going off on their own. I'm not surprised that Rommel overrode his commanders, as Wehrmacht units above battalion were famous for going off on their own.

Which only shows they weren't very good at auftragstaktik. Ironically.

So, let's cut through the bullshit.

Who's reputation during the war was fully deserved and not revisionists' trying to change history?

Independence is one thing, leaving your own high command completely in the dark as to what you're doing with thousands of trained men and hundreds of armored vehicles is quite another.

I'd say that those honours would probably go to individual soldiers like Audie Murphy.

@Jassaiga: probably not many people. Many competent but less flamboyant generals have an underinflated reputation (eg. Soviet generals not named Zhukov, American generals not named Patton, Eisenhower, or MacArthur, and British generals not named Montgomery), whilst a handful of more colorful figures get much of the credit.

edited 21st May '17 1:09:03 PM by Balmung

William 'Bill' Slim (who belongs in the category of 'British generals not named Bernard Montgomery') definitely deserves the reassessment he's gotten in recent years.

Highly skilled defensive strategists unfortunately tend to get overlooked the most, largely due to the fact that a number of them ultimately lost their campaigns or did not see retreating as a cowardly act to be ashamed of. My two go-to examples of severely underrated World War II commanders would be Gotthard Heinrici, who most famously oversaw the Battle of Seelow Heights and was regarded by his peers to be the best defensive tactician in the OKW, and Tadamichi Kuribayashi who now has been immortalized by Letters From Iwo Jima in 2006 but who was virtually unknown to the global public until then.

I mentioned it here before, but a favorite alternate history scenario of mine would be about a defense of Normandy led by Heinrici, whose iconic tactics revolved around defending in depth, instead of Rommel, who committed to forward defense along the coastline.

edited 21st May '17 3:15:00 PM by FluffyMcChicken

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/angolan-apartheid-troops-battle-survive-africa-031916910.html

Angolans who fought with Battalion 32 face problems in Pomfret.

A lot of WWII US Navy admirals did deserve the kudos they got. However google "the world wonders" and the snafu that caused, the World War Two US Navy was not without flaws. On land Chesty Puller and Omar Bradley are true heroes (even if Bradley told LBJ to never leave Vietnam).

People are people. The problem is that pop culture tends to simplify things. Time marches on.

Before the fall of the wall and the internet, a lot of movies, wargames and tv shows were full of the myths of the war. Now we can see that the people who fought were people - flaws and all.

But a few did shine through.

Eisenhower and Mac Arthur seem to have been pretty consistently represented, from what I have seen. Mac had his fair share of screwups, but I feel like he gave better than he got on most occasions. He dropped off the map after Truman fired him during Korea partly because he had reached retirement age about 20-30 years before. Eisenhower, for the most part, seems to be a kind of dull character in comparison, but was really good at getting lots of pieces to play nice together long enough to get things done, thus his success as a General and later as a President.

And even then, Eisenhower helped set the stage for a lot of the more colorful events of the mid-Cold War.

Going back to WWI, Billy Mitchell seems to be an interesting case. I haven't read much of him, but most of what I have read about him makes him seem to be a bit of a drama queen. There's one account of him actually throwing a fit because he wasn't given command of the First Pursuit Group. And yet, being in the Air Force, all official mentions of him I encounter herald him as the Father of Air Power and the First Prophet of the Coming of the Air Force.

I think a video lecture from a Naval War College explained Eisenhower quite well: His job wasn't to win battles, his job was to make sure the battles the Allies won could translate to strategic gains.

And helping to make sure everyone had the tools they needed to do the job.

Eisenhower was the perfect general to lead a coalition campaign; an excellent administrator, cool headed diplomat, with the strategic sense that his opponents often lacked. And he managed to keep a certain pair of raging egomaniac under nominal control.

It's no surprise he could manage Patton and Montgomery so well. He used to work for Mac Arthur, you know.

Japan and World War 1

In case anyone hasn't heard yet, Montenegro is joining NATO next week.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-montenegro-nato-idUSKBN18I0W3

The US finally stopped blocking it joining? I thought Rand Paul was holding up the US's ratification (which needs unanimous senate approval) and thus the entire thing.

Looks like it, apparently Spain was the last country to ratify their membership.