Underrated Generals

>>2748930
So, wait. You watched something on the history channel, and then went to the hotel bar and the random patrons around there were wall familiar with the claims made in some TV documentary, and willing to argue with a stranger over it?

Look dude, I know people make up stories on a Jamaican turtle herding forum, but can't you at least TRY to make a plausible one? And this is coming from a burger who thinks that Monty was a pretty good general, all things considered.

>>2748969
I didn't say they were familiar with the documentary.
I said they were familiar with the claims made by the documentary.

>>2748930
Most commanders are done injustice in the popular conception for various reasons. Very few people know that Gallipoli was largely a French plan, for instance. The British had wanted to attack Alexandretta and cleave Turkey in two, France refused because they didn't want to expose Syria to the British.

>>2748930
Sertorius.

>>2748930
Bait.

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I think Haig gets a bad rep. Granted, I certainly do not want to accuse him of strategic brilliance, but the criticism levelled against him by armchair generals is flat out unfair.

With the benefit of hindsight it can be difficult to appreciate just how unprepared the generals of Europe were for WW1. War had changed so much that all the strategy, all the tactics they had been raised on was simply not working. They had to throw out the manuals and invent a completely new way of fighting from scratch. In battlefield conditions, with the Germans 100km from Paris. One fuck up, and that's it. The front folds, the Germans roll through, and the war is over. This is the situation in which Haig had to figure out how this war could be fought.

And he found a way. With creeping artillery barrages and sustained offensives he could make the Germans bleed as much as he did. Half a million allies fell in the Somme, but so did half a million Krauts. It was not elegant, and it was not pretty, but at these odds Haig would win and the Germans would lose. So he stuck to it. He did not risk abandoning a method that worked poorly for a method that might not work at all and lose him the war.

>>2750682
This is common knowledge now, only retards hate on Haig.

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>>2750688

>only retards

Well, I am talking to /his/.

>>2750598
He's more unknown than underrated. Everyone who's heard of him knows he was a good commander.

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>>2748930
>Good evening, fellow patrons of this fine board. As you can no doubt tell from my manner, I am a proud Briton of good standing. I have to confess I have just this minute returned from The Pub and am deeply shaken, allow me to convey why...

>>2748930
Monty is highly overrated in the UK as the man who beat the desert fox. People tend to ignore the huge disparity in men, equipment and supply lines. Monty was incredibly cautious and simply waited until losing was almost impossible at El Alamein. He wasn't bad, but wasn't the genius some people like to make him out to have been.

you need to be a special kind of retard thinking the germans will watch you taking all the bridges (with parachute divisions) and ignoring the fact 2 SS panzer divisions were off the radar for some time knowing one of the refitting and staging areas for them was the netherlands

he diddled kids but it's on the downlow

>>2750730
Except if you look at El Alamein in depth, you find that Monty badly outmaneuvered Rommel at it in addition to "outweighing" him. He pulls some of Rommel's classic tricks like lining up his anti tank guns to the other guy's expected armored break right back at the Desert Fox.

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>>2748930
You're laboring under a number of misconceptions (some less obvious than the use of historical revisionism as a categorical indication of worthlessness...)
The one you need to rectify is this: the assumption that there are "good" commanders of land based troops. A 2D domanion is the realm of children and idiots, the greatest geniueses of war have always been able to think on a 3-dimensional level, therefore ensuring their gravitation towards the navy and airforce during the 20th century. The old geniuses of war were either polymaths, i.e. Caesar, Hannibal, Alexander, Marlborough or aware of the 3-dimensional nature of reality- Napoleon's greatest victories relied on his understanding of this fact, see Toulouse, Coune, Austerlitz.

>>2748930
Good commander or not the guy was pretty fucking autistic

>>2748987
I'm frankly surprised you managed to run into another American who knew who Bernard was. I suspect I'd have to visit at least fifty bars before I found one that did, and I live here.

Not that it wouldn't be the attitude I would expect to get from said, were I to find such an elusive creature.

Ironically, this story severely underestimates American ignorance.

>>2748930
He was pretty good. But he was quite a bit up his own arse too.

>>2750682
This
WWI was a victim of unfortunate technological and political circumstance similar to the ACW.
Trench warfare was a perfectly logical and even necessary conclusion at the time, one screw-up in mass warfare spelled total disaster.

>>2750730
You do realise that war is fought, not on one-man upmanship and "gun skill", but on seizing opportunities. He waited, when his predecessors would have run in and lost -- and in fact did, hence Monty being given command at all.

>>2750800
Could you explain a bit more about what you mean by 2D and 3D?

i think joseph e. johnston was actually the best general the confederacy had