Posted on 03/14/2014 11:57:27 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Positive article on the General from last August:
Which is actually a testament to Patton.
My late Grandfather on Dad’s side disliked McArthur, they always referred to him as “Dug Out Doug” (He was taken with the provisional Marine battalion on Corrigedor).
Conceptually, that is probably not a truly deserved moniker, but when you’re the dudes ending up as slaves for 3.5 years it kind of colors the past tense tactical outlook...
From what I can tell Patton would send a tank battalion to engage an enemy armored column low on fuel with little ammunition. Not sure if that story is true but I take it as incompetence, in the movie it is made to look heroic.
The Soviets won by brute force and not caring about casualties since there was plenty cannon fodder to go around. They lost 50,000 in the final Battle of Berlin.
The US Government would not survive politically with that level of casualties. Although they were facing that in the invasion of Japan, hence the 2 A-bombs.
Depends when you're talking about. Certainly in 1943, the Russians were fighting 4 million Germans while the US and Britain were facing a few hundred thousand in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. High end estimate for Germans on the Western Front in 1944-45 is about 1.5 million.
So... How’d the German generals do?
Well, as I say, Patton was a GOOD gen’l. I’ve never called him a genius. In my book he was a movement gen’l, as opposed to an attrition gen’l and he always wanted to be on the move and on the attack, and that was a good and needed thing. I think it was in the Liberation Trilogy that I read he was disappointed in finding that grand, tank envelopments were as rare in WWII as in WWI, but he still used movement as best he could when he could. As I say, a good gen’l, not an Alexander or anything.
Patton would also order his subordinates to send junior officers up to exposed forward positions until enough of them were killed to satisfy him. He would explicitly say he wanted more officers killed. As I read more, including his letters to his wife, he comes off as a really insecure, sensitive guy who is wildly overcompensating for it.
Patton was good at a tactical level.
He was never up to par in formulating the logistics war, which was why Bradley superceded him, and why he was not considered in the same league as MacArthur and Eisenhower.
I haven’t studied the British command enough to know who all their big guns were.
Patton was good at a tactical level.
He was never up to par in formulating the logistics war, which was why Bradley superceded him, and why he was not considered in the same league as MacArthur and Eisenhower.
I haven’t studied the British command enough to know who all their big guns were.
Good read by Douglas Porch - “The Path To Victory, The Mediterrenean Theater in World War II”. Makes the case that while the Germans couldn’t win the war in the Med, the Allies most surely could have lost it if they hadn’t vigorously contested them there.
Soviets not fighting competently is an understatement. Something like 88% of the male cohort born in 1922 in Soviet Union and over 50% for several years on either side died in the conflict. It was the direct cause of the emergence of the steriotypical spinster “Babushka” women, unable to find husbands in that age group after the war.
The only good thing I can ascertain about Patton was he was always at the front personally exposing himself to enemy fire, whether that is a good thing who knows. He was not a “Dugout Doug” type.
There were some good ones and a few geniuses (Mannstein, Guderian). Rommel isn't all he's cracked up to be. It's hard to be brilliant on the defensive, though, and after 1943, the Germans were pretty much all defense. Tough buggers, though, and thoroughly professional. They knew what they were doing.
Yeah, the purges took a toll in the opening of Barbarossa, but the Russians learned and good generals emerged. By 1944, Zhukov is as good as anyone anywhere.
They were probably short pants.
My late father served in the Burma campaign and become ill in mid 1945 and was sent to a British Military hospital in India to recover. He apparently did not have enough "points" to be immediately shipped home for muster out. While biding his time, he was attached to a British Army Unit in the Kashmir until he could ship out. He fully understood the term only mad dogs and Englishman go out in the noon day sun.
Sheer manpower was their greatest resource, and at war's end, it was the Russians standing in Berlin.
Incidentally, I just listened to a podcast of a BBC Radio documentary about Russians who go into the forests and locate the skeletons of soldiers who were never buried. After the war, rather than recover the bodies, the Russians would plow the area and then plant trees, frequently directly on top of the remains. And even now they're senstive about it, with Putin torn between recognizing these people and trying to restrict their activities. They told the story of one soldier they were able to identify and how the family was told that he was missing, thought to have deserted, and they were denied survivor benefits, apparently a very common story.
"L'audace, l'audace....toujours L'audace!"
Logistics was Montgomery’s strength. Before El Alamein he worked to get all his equipment and supplies in the right place at the right time until it got to the point that victory was more or less a foregone conclusion once the fighting started. A much under-rated quality in a good general.
The American generals were never really tested in circumstances that required logistical skill, because they were always very well supplied and equipped compared to everybody else in the field (with the exception of MacArthur in the early stages of the war against the Japanese, which didn’t go well for him).
I personally think Patton deserved all the praise he got. HE was an oddball but so what.
As far as McArthur being called “dugout doug” that was true, he was called that but it was also unfair. During WWI he showed uncommon bravery as a young lieutenant. Patton also showed extreme bravery in WWI and also in the Mexican excursion.
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