Lee: Lee is an American military icon. Until his defeat at Gettysburg , his operational brilliance gave the Confederacy its greatest chance for Civil War victory. William T. It has often been cited as a precursor to the blitzkrieg warfare of a generation later. Ferdinand Foch: Although Foch earned his pre-World War I reputation as a tactician, his greatest contribution to Allied victory was as supreme commander of French, British and American forces His influential books on irregular warfare are still read today by those seeking insight on insurgencies.
Henri Petain: Petain was a master of defensive tactics. John J. Pershing: As American Expeditionary Force commander 19 , Pershing insisted that his 3 million-man army fight under U. Later, the Soviet commander was instrumental in the tactical fight that captured Berlin Dwight D.
He rolled over France but was stopped at Moscow He achieved remarkable success in the Pacific Theater despite his inadequate supplies and limited numbers of troops and ships. Carl Gustav Emil Mannerheim: Mannerheim commanded the vastly outnumbered Finnish defense forces that defeated the initial Soviet invasion during the Winter War , and he fought the Continuation War against the U.
He was mortally wounded at age 59 during the civil war at the Battle of Shiloh. Read more about Albert Sidney Johnston. Barnard Elliot Bee Jr. Read more about Barnard Bee. General Joseph Johnston was the highest ranking officer to leave the U. Read more about Joseph Johnston. Jubal Anderson Early was known for his aggressive and sometimes reckless style. Read more about Jubal Early.
Read more about Lewis Armistead. Edward Porter Alexander was a Brigadier General known for being the first man to use signal flags to send messages using signal flags. Read more about Porter Alexander. Richard Stoddert Ewell led numerous battles during the Civil War, but his failure to capture Cemetery Hill on day one at Gettysburg led to his men and himself to be captured and imprisoned at Richmond. Read more about Richard Ewell. General Ulysses S. Grant led the Union Army during the later years of the civil war, and with his victory at Appomattox Courthouse, effectively ended the civil war.
Learn more about Ulysses S. Learn more about George McClellan. Learn more about Robert Anderson. General Nathaniel Banks was a hapless leader of the Union Army, suffering one defeat after another. Learn more about Nathaniel Banks. Read more about George Custer.
He served in the army for a total of four decades and is considered a war hero for his Gettysburg service. Read more about Winfield Scott Hancock. Though there is a myth saying that Abner Doubleday was the inventor of baseball, he never said that he did.
Doubleday was a big supporter of Abraham Lincoln. He died of a heart condition and was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. Read more about Abner Doubleday. General Ambrose Burnside Ambrose, besides being a soldier, was an industrialist, railroad executive and an inventor, eventually becoming the governor of Rhode Island as well as US Senator.
Read more about Ambrose Burnside. General Arthur Macarthur was one of five men to ever be promoted to a five star rank of the general army. Do generals matter? Well, of course they do, on some level. But do they matter as much as military history suggests they do, or as much as most people believe?
In thinking about generalship and outcomes while writing Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost , I was surprised to come to the conclusion that generals matter far less in the history of war than is usually represented in traditional military history. This is especially true of those generals praised by military historians as geniuses of maneuver warfare.
Superior generals may win a tactical or operational victory by overmatching an opponent in a day of battle or a campaign, but in the protracted fighting that marks major wars among modern nations and coalitions, they do not deliver strategic victory.
I was impressed by histories of spectacular battles and brilliant campaigns said to be obvious fulcrum moments in war — the ones where a genius on horseback found a way to maneuver past stone borders, to isolate a plodding enemy army and defeat it in battle on a red day or in a summer campaign. We are all familiar with nationalist military histories in which armies are led to mass slaughter, yet scholars declare Marlborough the finest of English generals.
Or in which Prussia is wrecked and Frederick contemplates suicide, saved only by a stroke of fortuna , yet he is the greatest of Germans. We have all perused bookshelves stacked with adulation wherein France fights for a generation only to lose and be left in ruins, twice, yet an age is named by historians for Louis XIV and another for Napoleon.
What I found more interesting, more telling about real-world outcomes, is the far greater number of generals and armies that never tried for, or outright avoided, the modern ideal of Clausewitzian climactic battle.
These generals knew they could not achieve it, or were not allowed to try — either by nations and empires afraid of losing their capability to a superior enemy, or just to vanity in the saddle of the man in command of their own army. More often, the winning side in modern wars understood that the operational doctrine of the modern aggressor, offensive maneuver warfare heading to the decisive battle, was not suited to the policy or interests of a status quo power.
Nor was battle-seeking actually decisive in prolonged strategic contests between great powers or empires, or opposing coalitions provoked into existence by the opening rounds of fighting. Tactical and operational dexterity almost never brought the promised strategic victory as quickly as proponents promised, or at all. Instead, it descended into coalition war destined to be decided by attrition, or to be fought over and again under different names, resuming after generational pauses to recover and rearm.
Wiser leaders, less aggressive ones, the ones more likely to win, told their armies to sit behind stone walls or a riverine defense, behind 18th-century fortified frontiers, inside 19th- or 20th-century trenches, accepting acceleration of attrition that intermittent battles delivered instead of decision. Let the aggressor recklessly smash his legions and expend his national treasure against my strong, defensive positions.
They did not always win: War is too contingent and complex to predict or perfect. But they won far more often than highly offensive-minded aggressors, deluded that in decisive opening campaigns and battles of annihilation, in their own operational or national genius, lay a short-war solution to decades of unresolved geostrategic issues and ambitions.
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