Great Military leaders of History? - Page 40

[QUOTE]On August 05 2011 03:31 DeepElemBlues wrote:
[quote]However, in terms of actual accomplishments, the man may not quite live up to his reputation. While an aggressive and capable commander, he tended to be abrasive, intolerant, unteachable and rash to the point of foolhardiness, which might be one of the reasons he was defeated by the British in North Africa not once, but twice (the first time at the hands of British General Auchinleck, the second time by Montgomery) and finally pushed off the continent. Afterwards given the task of securing the French coastline from allied invasion (the Atlantic Wall) he oversaw the construction of a formidable barrier of bunkers and gun emplacements that prevented the allies from taking the beaches at Normandy on June 6, 1944 for about half an hour or so, thereby demonstrating the futility of depending on fixed defenses to stop invasions (a lesson the Germans should have remembered from France’s futile efforts to hold the Maginot Line in 1940). [/quote]

There's a couple things wrong with this:

Auchinleck never beat Rommel. He finally got the point where he'd retreated so far that Rommel's tactical brilliance could no longer compensate for the fact that he had badly stretched his supply lines and he was getting the short end of the logistical stick from Germany anyway. Rommel did make several mistakes being overaggressive, like in the first assault on Tobruk.

Rommel only lost his offensive war in North Africa after Britain sent not one, but two major armies to Egypt, mostly equipped by the Americans, with materiel resources Rommel could not match. The British Empire put almost all of its land military strength into keeping Egypt out of German hands and even then it barely held on.

He also was relieved of command before Africa fell and the Axis defensive strategy was changed to one of major local counterattacks that Rommel disagreed with.

Again in France, Rommel wanted to keep full tank divisions within 20 miles of the beaches so as to be able to counterattack the Allied beachheads within hours. Hitler, with no experience of the power of Allied air attacks and their ability to disrupt ground operations, disagreed. Rommel knew what it was like to try to move an army whose enemy has near-complete air superiority. The argument was still ongoing when Rommel was badly wounded when his command car was shot up by an Allied fighter-bomber. He was already in a bad odor for disagreeing with Hitler so the tanks stayed more than 50 miles away from the coast and they never had a chance to counterattack the beachheads.

Rommel also recommended not defending the lower half of Italy from Allied invasion and instead putting up defensive positions north of Rome along almost the identical terrain that later became the Gustav Line, the one that held the Allies up from fully conquering Italy until the year after the invasion.

Erwin Rommel was a divisional commander on par with Vespasian and an army commander at the level of a Sherman. However, he wasn't so great at controlling multiple armies and was not a man with a head for logistics. But in North Africa the only choice was try to win as quickly as possible or inevitably lose, if Rommel had been properly supported by Berlin he probably would have taken Egypt well before the second army (with 300 brand spanking new Sherman tanks) that beat him at El Alamein arrived.

But I think the greatest modern general is either U.S. Grant or Max Hoffman. Both were geniuses at maneuvering their armies in ways that either fooled the enemy or left him in no position to successfully halt their movements, which is basically auto-win in war.