Great Military leaders of History? - Page 22

On February 24 2011 06:09 agarangu wrote:


Lautaro, Mapuche strategist. He lead the Mapuches in the war against spanish conquerors, using rocks and clubs against guns and armors. The war lasted 300 years.

edit: he did not live 300 years though.

On February 24 2011 06:09 agarangu wrote:


Lautaro, Mapuche strategist. He lead the Mapuches in the war against spanish conquerors, using rocks and clubs against guns and armors. The war lasted 300 years.

edit: he did not live 300 years though.

On February 23 2011 23:13 Tufas wrote:


Isnt this a little bit misleading ? As I recall there were norwegian voluntary troops there .. maybe not that much, but there were !

And I never understood where those pictures came from, as this is the wikipedia page on the winter war ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War

On February 24 2011 06:23 Bonham wrote:
I vote for Alexander the Great, hands down. Napoleon is second and Julius Caesar comes in third.

On February 23 2011 22:12 Sm3agol wrote:


Let's not get carried away here.
If you'll notice, his most famous "victories" are all sieges/aka, house to house fighting. The German army was not built for that kind of combat AT all, so every time they had to take a large city from the Russians, they pretty much failed. Moscow....Leningrad....Stalingrad. Same thing. Not as much Moscow, but that was clearly ended by winter, not amazing Russian tactics/strategy. If you'll notice, every single one of those "battles" really started in the late fall, and basically came to a complete standstill because of the Russian winter, allowing the Soviets to mass huge numbers of troops due to their superior winter supply capabilities. The battle of Kursk he wasn't even that involved in to begin with, and again, despite having over a million more troops than the Germans, managed to lose 4 times as many. The accepted casualty figures for that battle are mind-blowing, I suggest you look it up just in case you somehow think that the Russians won ANY battle by doing anything not involving throwing massive numbers of troops at their opponents, and relying on winter.

Russian "strategy" basically was this. In summer, throw every man you could at the front lines, trying to slow the Germans down. When winter fell, the German's supply capabilities dropped off drastically, while the Russian's were almost unaffected. So then they could build up their armies, and attack, again relying on their inexhaustable supply of troops to overpower the Germans, who couldn't reinforce fast enough.

I will completely agree he was Russia's best general by far, and towards the end of the war, he finally started to get away from just throwing millions of men at the Germans, but, imo, he was pretty much outclassed by every German general he faced in the pure strategy aspect. As I said earlier, if not for Hitler's complete idiocy, the Germans might have stalemated the Russians deep in Russia until 1944 at the least.
His orders to never give up ground for any reason themselves basically resulted in the annihilation of 3 perfectly good German armies.

On February 23 2011 23:38 Maenander wrote:

The roman empire and china are estimated to have had similar population numbers at that time iirc.

On a sidenote: I wonder why Agrippa, the general behind Augustus' success (not in Phillippi), wasn't mentioned in this thread yet.

On February 24 2011 00:09 c3rberUs wrote:
For me its pretty much everyone everyone else said (Alex the Great, Napoleon, Caesar, Patton, U. Grant, Robert Lee, G. Khan, Tamerlane etc.). However I have a something to say about Marshal Georgy Zhukov.

The reason he is a great general was because he was a major figure in defeating Nazi Germany. He led the soviet forces in a time where the Soviet Union was in the middle of the largest invasion in history (Operation Barbarossa). The red army wasn't prepared for this. The red army back then was still trying to recover from the Great Purge which killed of most of the pioneers of soviet war theory, tactics and strategy. The officer corp was still inexperienced to lead the troops into battle because of the tactics and strategies developed before the Purge is in shambles.

What Zhukov did in Stalingrad was ingenious in that the street fighting took away the biggest advantage the Germans had, open field combat (like Blitzkrieg). The street fighting was designed tactically to bog down the enemy, allowing Op. Uranus encirclement. In the battle of Kursk, there was some luck involved too with the delay in Op. Zitadelle.

In short, Zhukov is a great general because he had to reinvent, pioneer and put into practice those 'long lost' tactics and strategies in the soviet war theory. They counterattacked during the winter because they know that the Nazis are unprepared, they exploited the Germans' weakness and made it their strength. He also used those so-called 'swarm tactics' because he was merely doing what was logical and an advantage at hand: numbers (If you know what iloveOov does, then you will probably understand me easily)

On February 24 2011 04:25 WhiteDog wrote:

Even if most of us are biased, I think this post is still pretty interesting exactly because everybody come with his own point of view, and I learned a bit by reading some comment, mostly about asia's war history and generals, which is something I'm completly blind about.

On February 24 2011 07:15 Monsieur wrote:



General Tao ftw!

On February 24 2011 07:20 StorkHwaiting wrote:


The joke was already made earlier in the thread.