Where is Carthage you ask? What will another year of war look like? Who are the famous national heroes or generals in Vietnam? These American commanders have lost the battle for history. Fortunately, along came Reaganif not for that, Westmorelands military reversals could well have signaled the beginning of our end. Click + to receive email alerts when new stories are published on Not only is Sorley a third-generation graduate of West Point a Vietnam veteran and a historian, but he worked for Westmoreland as well. Most younger officers who worked around General Westmoreland, excepting only a very few among his many aides-de-camp or executive officers and the like, had no personal relationship with this difficult and distant man. His poor tactical decisions resulted in his army being routed by a smaller force of Redcoats and Loyalists at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina in 1780. Warfare: Who was the worst General/military commander in history Reviews - Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam Who was the worst US general during the Vietnam War? Rommel is by far the greatest military general of the . This piece originally appeared in The National Interest https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/6-worst-military-leaders-ever-167526. Westmoreland was on a treadmill. Major General Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend The idiot who, seeking self aggrandisement, led his army, Force D, to disaster at Kut in WW1. He continued to view attrition as the most effective strategy for defeating Germany; the British lost some 420,000 men at the Somme. After his performance at Belmonta spectacular success by Pillow standardshe was tasked with the defense of Fort Donelson, a key strongpoint on the Mississippi River. The last king of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, Darius was not quite as qualified to rule a mighty empire as his predecessors were. He was certainly nave, but the Boy Scouts need to be defended here. Sun Wu Sun Zi, or Sun Tzu, was a prominent military general during the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC) who is always regarded as one of the greatest military strategists in China and even the World. But then MacArthur thrived on controversy like bread thrives on yeast. Instead of holding a natural defense line around Pyongyang, which would have given the United Nations control of most of the peninsula, the UN troops retreated all the way back into South Korea in a humiliating reverse for U.S. power after the crushing victory of World War II. He is the dumb ass who gave the order to exfoliate the jungles with agent orange. Military greatness can most easily be defined by comparison. DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY/Contributor/Getty Images, Biden Proposal Puts Climate Agenda Above Americas Defense, Russias New START Breach Means U.S. Nuclear Weapons Modernization Is a Must. Today's list: The top ten reasons Gen. Westmoreland lost the war in Vietnam By the way, here is the first review I have seen of Sorley's new biography of Westmoreland, which I read in galleys. Franz Conrad von Htzendorf of Austria couldnt decide which country he wanted to invade, so the German General Staff eventually took his armies away. It was a humiliating baptism of fire for the U.S. Army in Europe, and more important, caused British commanders to dismiss their Yank allies as amateur soldiers for the rest of the war. Thats an automatic disqualification from Hall membership. A more positive example is George Washington. It doesnt matter if theyve won more often than theyve lost. America, the Middle East and the rest of the world are still reaping the consequences of those omissions. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig: World War I's Worst General - HistoryNet Fortunately, along came Reaganif not for that, Westmorelands military reversals could well have signaled the beginning of our end. But the worst of all was McClellan, the so-called "Young Napoleon" from whom Lincoln. There is now little doubt that Putin failed in his initial goals: Kyiv is still Show morestanding, Ukrainians are determined to keep fighting, and the West has so far stayed resolute in its support of Ukraine. Delivered Wednesday. Delivered Monday-Friday. Defining that is like defining a bad meal. After an initial attack drove back Grants troops, Pillow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by retreating to the fort rather than breaking through Union lines to Nashville. By December 1864 Paraguay was at war with Brazil, and, when Argentina denied a request for the transit of a Paraguayan army across its territory, Lpez declared war on that country as well. Antonio de Padua Mara Severino Lpez de Santa Anna. Judging GOFOs The Decisive Point He was an artilleryman who missed out on the Army's great schools system, never attending the Command & General Staff College or the Army War College. Best Defense: Of course they raised this issue, leading Westmoreland to declare vehemently that establishing MACV Forward had not a damned thing to do with my confidence in General Cushman or the Marines, not a damned thing. That again was not only false but, given the existing paper trail, reckless as well. Simultaneously, he contacted Maximilian to offer the young emperor his services. Westmoreland told him, "We're killing these people at a ratio of 10 to 1.". If there was a saving grace for America, it was that he wasn't commanding an army. With a few relatively minor changes, thats just about where they stayed for the next four years. Santa Anna, a lifetime gambler, was known for his risk taking in battle, but also his brutality. FPsRavi Agrawalsat down with U.S. Trade RepresentativeKatherine Tai, the Biden administrations top official tasked with mapping out and implementing the White Houses trade policy. If Gates had been in command, we might be paying for our groceries with shillings and pence. The 1970s were scary times. Marine Corps Casualties 1775-2016 - Marine Corps University What was the worst battle of Vietnam? What does that mean for trade and globalization? Read More. Pierre de Villeneuve had his first brush with history when he bravely ran away at the Battle of the Nile. Top 10 Most Underrated Military Generals. He was also supremely gifted at overestimating the size of his opponents armies to a degree that beggared belief. Top Ten Reasons Field Marshal Montgomery is Not so Great By the end of May 1862, Confederate commanding Gen. Joseph E. Johnston had withdrawn his forces to Richmond, and McClellan was close enough to the Confederate capital to hear its church bells ringing. Approaching his 60th birthday and exhibiting a timidity that had no place in a general about to lead an invasion, Hull also had the misfortune of facing two of the most gifted commanders ever to operate in North America. Many historians credit Benedict Arnold and others with being the real victors of Saratoga. He decided to conduct of a war of attrition, using search and destroy tactics, in which the measure of merit was body count. While there were a host of bad generals serving on both sides during the American Civil Warmostly on the Union side unfortunatelythe one that usually gets the most credit for dragging out the war as long as he did is Union General George McClellan. 10. Their orientation, indeed the core of Scoutings values, is selflessness and service to others. This is, obviously, a problematic quality when ones title is general-in-chief of the entire Union army. Even now, the easiest way to get into an argument at a V.F.W. Necessarily, more is lost to time than is remembered. He was uninterested in other viewpoints on how the war might be prosecuted, dismissing the PROVN Study sponsored by Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson (which concluded that Westmorelands way of war was not working and could not work) and basic disagreements with Westmorelands organization and approach voiced by his brilliant classmate General Bruce Palmer Jr. 7. The Legion numbers XVII, XVIII and XIX never again appeared in the Roman Armys order of battle due to the shame and ill luck they carried. But he also displayed remarkably bad judgment, as when he was commander in the Philippines in 1941. Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam, Chinas Censors Are Afraid of What Chatbots Might Say, The U.S. Turncoats and Traitors - Seven Americans Who Defected to the Enemy in In a war that saw more than its share of unskilled politically appointed generals, Pillow was arguably the worst on either side. This would be known as the Tet Offensive and would become a major turning point in the war. Watchthe conversation onFP Live, the magazines forum for live journalism, orreada condensed transcript. Is Weiss correct? These are the incompetents, the idiots, the bumblers who have represented armies or nations at war only to lead them to defeat or shame. While Maximus was conducting negotiations with the Cimbri, a Germanic tribe that had invaded the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul, Caepio rashly attacked the Cimbri army on October 6, 105 BCE. Find Paraguay on a map of South America. By signing up, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to occasionally receive special offers from Foreign Policy. HANOI, VIETNAMForty years ago, on April 30, 1975, Nguyen Dang Phat experienced the happiest day of his life . The Worst Military Leaders in History - University Of Chicago Press 2023 TIME USA, LLC. Weekly update on developments in India and its neighbors. This was true in matters both great and small. The Cimbri destroyed Caepios force and, emboldened by their success, marched on Maximuss camp. McClellan was a superb organizer, a West Point-trained engineer who did much to build the Union army almost from . Allied with Brock was the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who was head of the most formidable pan-Indian military force the continent had ever seen. The early days of the 2003 Iraq War were bound to be a graveyard for military and political reputations, given the misperceptions and misjudgments behind America's ill-fated adventure in regime change and nation-building. 15. That may have been true in the east (the worst of the Union generals in that theater rates his own entry on this list), but in the west it was a much different affair. 0. Instead of sweeping around the French defenses in a massive flanking movement, the Germans were checked at the First Battle of the Marne. While there is much to criticize LBJ for in his conduct of the war, one cannot help having some sympathy for the dilemma posed by the often wildly conflicting advice he was getting from his senior aides and advisors, including those in uniform. Hull, convinced that he was hopelessly outnumbered (he wasnt), surrendered Fort Detroit and its 2,000-man garrison without firing a shot. Officially labelled a defector by the Pentagon, many suspected Nolan, an African American, changed sides after suffering a lifetime of racial discrimination. According to a Time magazine reporter who wrote about the Dak Son massacre, Viet Cong guerrillas shouted "Sons of Americans!" as they launched their assault on the village.
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