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The Greatest General in History

The Greatest General in History

  • Napoleon Bonaparta

    Votes: 5 14.3%
  • Genghis Khan

    Votes: 10 28.6%
  • Julius Caesar

    Votes: 4 11.4%
  • Salah ad-Din, Yusuf ibn Ayyub

    Votes: 1 2.9%
  • Georgy Zhukov

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Alexander the Great

    Votes: 10 28.6%
  • Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

    Votes: 2 5.7%
  • Charles Martel

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Sun Tzu

    Votes: 3 8.6%
  • Akbar the Great

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    35
1) You can't factually state what the start date would have been, since it's hypothetical, anyway.

2) Quality of the American troops in the PTO would offset the lack of quanity. Troops who fought in the PTO would bring a whole new bag of tricks that they learned from the Japanese.

3) Soviet troops fought to the death, because commisars were standing behind the lines to shoot them if they didn't; that and they were fighting for Mother Russia. They wouldn't have been quite so eager to defend Germany from an American invasion, the same way battle hardened Iraqi troops didn't want to defend Kuwait.

B-29's based in France and Italy would cut off the Red Army from their base of supply and they would have crumbled.

1. Actually, yes, the start date would have had to be immediate...because the longer we had waited, the greater the repairs and improvements that the Soviets would have made to their lines of communication.

2. The quality, the discipline and training of the German soldier was the best in the world...and look what the Soviets did to them. You're stuck on the assumption that we were, are, and always will be the best at everything...and you're greatly underestimating your opponent.

3. Yes, there were commissars...but you're also assuming that patriotism was somehow foreign to the Soviet soldier. In THEIR eyes, the commissar was for the cowards who ran away. And they would have fought every bit as hard against us as against the Germans. Why? The regular soldier didn't know much about the Germans except that they'd invaded once already...and it would have been simplicity itself to point out to the Soviet soldier that the British and Americans had already invaded Russia before to prevent the success of communism.

4. The B-29's wouldn't have been available until after the surrender of Japan...and after not only the B-29's were transferred, but also all their specialized support equipment. And let's not forget that they needed longer-than-normal runways to use, too. And on top of all that, you're assuming that by September - five months after the commencement of hostilities with the USSR (with their much greater forces and their much shorter supply lines) - that we'd still be holding France.

AND let's not forget that the world was war-weary. It is unlikely in the extreme that the American and British public would have supported a continuation of the war against the USSR...because that's one of the big differences between totalitarianism and democracy. A democracy is more productive per person than a totalitarian state...but a totalitarian state doesn't have to bow to public pressure. Or did you learn nothing from Vietnam?
 
What you obviously don't understand about combat tactics, is that a brilliant tactician will form his tactics to suit all those factors.

And, we didn't lose Vietnam. Any student of military history knows that.

"We didn't lose Vietnam"? Gee...that's funny - last I checked, the Viet Cong won the war. Guy, we left because the American public no longer supported the war - that's life in a democracy. But regardless of the reason we left, we STILL left. We sure as heck didn't win.

And the best tacticians in history can only do so much if the logistics, strategy, and morale are against them - AGAIN, guy, if tactics were the be-all and end-all of battle, the Germans would have defeated the USSR handily. But they didn't.
 
IOW, you know you're wrong, so you're going to change the subject.

um, no, I'm not wrong. You're going only on what you've heard all these years...and because you didn't hear about the successes of the Soviet intel system, you're assuming that they can't have been nearly as good as our own.
 
"We didn't lose Vietnam"? Gee...that's funny - last I checked, the Viet Cong won the war. Guy, we left because the American public no longer supported the war - that's life in a democracy. But regardless of the reason we left, we STILL left. We sure as heck didn't win.

And the best tacticians in history can only do so much if the logistics, strategy, and morale are against them - AGAIN, guy, if tactics were the be-all and end-all of battle, the Germans would have defeated the USSR handily. But they didn't.

Last I checked, the Viet Cong was destroyed in 1968, in the Tet Offensive.

Guy, we left because we forced the North Vietnamese Communists into signing an armistice agreement.

You call yourself a student if history and you think the Viet Cong forced us out of Vietnam through force of arms? Are ALL the historical works you've read written by commies, or what?
 
um, no, I'm not wrong. You're going only on what you've heard all these years...and because you didn't hear about the successes of the Soviet intel system, you're assuming that they can't have been nearly as good as our own.

It's a fact that Britain fed intel from Project Ultra to the Soviets that gave them the upper hand in the Kursk Salient.
 
1. Actually, yes, the start date would have had to be immediate...because the longer we had waited, the greater the repairs and improvements that the Soviets would have made to their lines of communication.

2. The quality, the discipline and training of the German soldier was the best in the world...and look what the Soviets did to them. You're stuck on the assumption that we were, are, and always will be the best at everything...and you're greatly underestimating your opponent.

3. Yes, there were commissars...but you're also assuming that patriotism was somehow foreign to the Soviet soldier. In THEIR eyes, the commissar was for the cowards who ran away. And they would have fought every bit as hard against us as against the Germans. Why? The regular soldier didn't know much about the Germans except that they'd invaded once already...and it would have been simplicity itself to point out to the Soviet soldier that the British and Americans had already invaded Russia before to prevent the success of communism.

4. The B-29's wouldn't have been available until after the surrender of Japan...and after not only the B-29's were transferred, but also all their specialized support equipment. And let's not forget that they needed longer-than-normal runways to use, too. And on top of all that, you're assuming that by September - five months after the commencement of hostilities with the USSR (with their much greater forces and their much shorter supply lines) - that we'd still be holding France.

AND let's not forget that the world was war-weary. It is unlikely in the extreme that the American and British public would have supported a continuation of the war against the USSR...because that's one of the big differences between totalitarianism and democracy. A democracy is more productive per person than a totalitarian state...but a totalitarian state doesn't have to bow to public pressure. Or did you learn nothing from Vietnam?

The Soviets were no less war wearythan anyone else. They lost 20 million people.
 
I would say that as a leader, Julius Caesar would stand beside - but not ahead of - Genghis Khan. But Genghis Khan's accomplishments are many times those of Julius Caesar...

...but if the two had ever met head-to-head, Caesar wouldn't have had a ghost of a chance - there was nothing in the West before the widespread adoption of gunpowder that could have stopped Genghis Khan. The Chinese only held on as long as they did because they already had gunpowder.

I dunno, if Caesar survived the first battle with enough effectives for a regroup, he might have shown the Great Khan some things he never saw before. Especially if he had lots of intelligence about Mongol tactics. Ah, it's just amusing speculation. I've been a Caesar fan since I read an English translation of his Chronicles. When he was governor of Provence he spent seven successive summers fighting against the Celts in Gaul, advancing further each year, and each winter writing about it. Good reading, and sometimes humourous. Someone sold him on a story of an animal called an 'elk' that had no knees. Supposedly it slept leaning against a tree, and the locals would cut trees nearly through- when the elk leaned against it it fell over and the animal was trapped helpless on the ground.
 
Last I checked, the Viet Cong was destroyed in 1968, in the Tet Offensive.

Guy, we left because we forced the North Vietnamese Communists into signing an armistice agreement.

You call yourself a student if history and you think the Viet Cong forced us out of Vietnam through force of arms? Are ALL the historical works you've read written by commies, or what?

Mm-hmm. And everyone who's not blinded by "American exceptionalism" knows that the REASON there was an 'armistice agreement' was that (1) we were war-weary as a nation, and (2) we couldn't bomb North Vietnam into submission. And as I pointed out earlier, while democracies produce more (thanks to better social and economic structures), totalitarian systems are better able to keep their people on a war footing for longer periods of time...

...and democracy being democracy, the American public was tired of war. We were done with it, we wanted no more of it. Sure, there were millions who still supported the war, but there were many more millions who opposed it...and THAT is why we lost the war: it was unwinnable in the traditional meaning of the word, and we as a nation essentially gave up.

We lost that war. Get over it.

And btw, no, the Viet Cong were not destroyed in 1968:

The Viet Cong, or National Liberation Front, was a political organization and army in South Vietnam and Cambodia that fought the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War (1959–1975), and emerged on the winning side.
 
It's a fact that Britain fed intel from Project Ultra to the Soviets that gave them the upper hand in the Kursk Salient.

*sigh*

Guy, you really should take off those "American exceptionalism" blinders.

1. From the Wikipedia:

In 1943, an offensive by the Soviet Central, Bryansk, and Western Fronts against Army Group Centre was abandoned shortly after it began in early March, when the southern flank of the Central Front was threatened by Army Group South. Soviet intelligence received information about German troop concentrations spotted at Orel and Kharkov, as well as details of an intended German offensive in the Kursk sector through the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland. The Soviets verified the intelligence via their spy in Britain, John Cairncross at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, who clandestinely forwarded raw decrypts directly to Moscow.

2. So it was from the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland...and there were indications that this was affiliated with the British. But there's even now some confusion concerning the Lucy spy ring.

3. But the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group - established in the 1990's to compile and make available such records - says something completely different about the Lucy Spy Ring:

Intelligence professionals and historians alike have long regarded the Red Orchestra as one of the most successful spy rings that operated during the Second World War. However, the network that became known as the legendary "Red Orchestra" had humble beginnings. In 1939 Leopold Trepper, an agent for the Soviet military intelligence service, established an intelligence network in Western Europe. At its height, the network carried out intelligence collection operations in Germany, France, Holland and Switzerland. The Red Orchestra spy ring consisted of three main branches: the network in France, Belgium, and Holland; the Berlin network; and a remarkable group of agents, known as the "Lucy Ring," that operated from the relative safety of neutral Switzerland. The Berlin-based Red Orchestra agents included Harro Schulze-Boysen, an intelligence officer assigned to the German Air Ministry, and Arvid von Harnack, an employee of the German Ministry of Economics. These men, as well as several others, reported extraordinarily sensitive information from key areas of the German bureaucracy in the German capital itself.

The Lucy Ring, perhaps the most important branch of the Red Orchestra, possessed some impeccable sources of information. These sources included Lieutenant General Fritz Theile, a senior officer in the Wehrmacht's communications branch, and Colonel Freiherr Rudolf von Gersdorff, who eventually became intelligence officer of Army Group Center on the eastern front. The Lucy Ring provided Soviet leader Josef Stalin with extraordinarily accurate information on Nazi intentions vis-à-vis operations on the German eastern front. The Germans apparently knew of the existence of a Soviet spy ring operating in fairly high levels of the Reich Government administration as early as 1941. However, like many counterespionage cases, it was only after two years of painstaking investigation that the case was finally broken.


Guy, please stop underestimating the other guys - that's the worst mistake a man can make in a conflict.
 
The Soviets were no less war wearythan anyone else. They lost 20 million people.

BUT - as I've pointed out to you twice so far - the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, which meant that the government could force its citizens to keep fighting.

Even more importantly, what you're forgetting is that the patriotism of the regular people of the Soviet Union was by this time at an all-time high. They had just soundly defeated the second major invasion of the Russian homeland...and if there was to be a war against the U.S. and England - both of which had participated in a relatively minor invasion in 1918-1919 - then so be it.

Think about it, guy - if Mexico were very powerful and invaded America, and we'd just finally defeated them at great cost to our own people, if Canada suddenly decided to attack us, do you really think we would give up because we were 'war weary'? I think not.

AGAIN, you're underestimating the other guys. You're assuming that their patriotism is somehow less than our own. But here's a clue: while individual people are wildly different from each other, people as a whole are the same all over the world - and that includes things like patriotism and the desire to defend one's homeland.
 
I dunno, if Caesar survived the first battle with enough effectives for a regroup, he might have shown the Great Khan some things he never saw before. Especially if he had lots of intelligence about Mongol tactics. Ah, it's just amusing speculation. I've been a Caesar fan since I read an English translation of his Chronicles. When he was governor of Provence he spent seven successive summers fighting against the Celts in Gaul, advancing further each year, and each winter writing about it. Good reading, and sometimes humourous. Someone sold him on a story of an animal called an 'elk' that had no knees. Supposedly it slept leaning against a tree, and the locals would cut trees nearly through- when the elk leaned against it it fell over and the animal was trapped helpless on the ground.

It's sorta apples and oranges. Caesar's armies were nowhere near as mobile as Genghis Khan's Mongol cavalry was. The Roman legions required supply and logistics trains, whereas the Mongols lived off the land (and off all those they conquered), and so did not need to maintain that logistics train. If Caesar and Genghis Khan had met in battle, there would have been no contest - the Mongol cavalry was simply too fluid, too quick...and in the case of the Mongols, perhaps even more well-disciplined than the Romans. What's more, the Mongols (like many in Asia) did not have that Western attitude that it's somehow more honorable to meet ones foes face-to-face, man-to-man in the field. Their attitude was that it was much more sensible to kill as many of the foe while at the same time risking as few of one's own as possible.

The Romans - under Crassus, a contemporary of Julius Caesar - got a small taste of what facing massed cavalry archers was like at the Battle of Carrhae, one of the greatest defeats in Roman history. It's this battle that led to the coining of the term "Parthian shot", what we now refer to as a "parting shot".

Don't get me wrong - I've always been a fan of Julius Caesar, too. He was truly a great man. If he and Genghis Khan had met on truly equal terms, Julius Caesar is IMO perhaps the only man in history who could truly have given the Khan a run for his money.

But if you like this kind of stuff that I do, check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Archive. Right now he's got two series on that page pertinent to our discussion - the story of the fall of the Roman Republic (including that Battle of Carrhae), and the story of the rise of the Mongol Empire.

Listen to those, and I promise you'll see why I think that Genghis Khan was the best general in human history.
 
BUT - as I've pointed out to you twice so far - the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, which meant that the government could force its citizens to keep fighting.

Even more importantly, what you're forgetting is that the patriotism of the regular people of the Soviet Union was by this time at an all-time high. They had just soundly defeated the second major invasion of the Russian homeland...and if there was to be a war against the U.S. and England - both of which had participated in a relatively minor invasion in 1918-1919 - then so be it.

Think about it, guy - if Mexico were very powerful and invaded America, and we'd just finally defeated them at great cost to our own people, if Canada suddenly decided to attack us, do you really think we would give up because we were 'war weary'? I think not.

AGAIN, you're underestimating the other guys. You're assuming that their patriotism is somehow less than our own. But here's a clue: while individual people are wildly different from each other, people as a whole are the same all over the world - and that includes things like patriotism and the desire to defend one's homeland.

Czarist Russia was a totalitarian state, too. How well did the Russians do during WW1?

You're assuming that absolutisms existed in Soviet Russia, which isn't true.
 
*sigh*

Guy, you really should take off those "American exceptionalism" blinders.

1. From the Wikipedia:

In 1943, an offensive by the Soviet Central, Bryansk, and Western Fronts against Army Group Centre was abandoned shortly after it began in early March, when the southern flank of the Central Front was threatened by Army Group South. Soviet intelligence received information about German troop concentrations spotted at Orel and Kharkov, as well as details of an intended German offensive in the Kursk sector through the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland. The Soviets verified the intelligence via their spy in Britain, John Cairncross at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, who clandestinely forwarded raw decrypts directly to Moscow.

2. So it was from the Lucy spy ring in Switzerland...and there were indications that this was affiliated with the British. But there's even now some confusion concerning the Lucy spy ring.

3. But the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group - established in the 1990's to compile and make available such records - says something completely different about the Lucy Spy Ring:

Intelligence professionals and historians alike have long regarded the Red Orchestra as one of the most successful spy rings that operated during the Second World War. However, the network that became known as the legendary "Red Orchestra" had humble beginnings. In 1939 Leopold Trepper, an agent for the Soviet military intelligence service, established an intelligence network in Western Europe. At its height, the network carried out intelligence collection operations in Germany, France, Holland and Switzerland. The Red Orchestra spy ring consisted of three main branches: the network in France, Belgium, and Holland; the Berlin network; and a remarkable group of agents, known as the "Lucy Ring," that operated from the relative safety of neutral Switzerland. The Berlin-based Red Orchestra agents included Harro Schulze-Boysen, an intelligence officer assigned to the German Air Ministry, and Arvid von Harnack, an employee of the German Ministry of Economics. These men, as well as several others, reported extraordinarily sensitive information from key areas of the German bureaucracy in the German capital itself.

The Lucy Ring, perhaps the most important branch of the Red Orchestra, possessed some impeccable sources of information. These sources included Lieutenant General Fritz Theile, a senior officer in the Wehrmacht's communications branch, and Colonel Freiherr Rudolf von Gersdorff, who eventually became intelligence officer of Army Group Center on the eastern front. The Lucy Ring provided Soviet leader Josef Stalin with extraordinarily accurate information on Nazi intentions vis-à-vis operations on the German eastern front. The Germans apparently knew of the existence of a Soviet spy ring operating in fairly high levels of the Reich Government administration as early as 1941. However, like many counterespionage cases, it was only after two years of painstaking investigation that the case was finally broken.


Guy, please stop underestimating the other guys - that's the worst mistake a man can make in a conflict.

You need to stop pretending that the Soviets won the war single handedly.

Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers - B. Jack Copeland - Google Books
 
Mm-hmm. And everyone who's not blinded by "American exceptionalism" knows that the REASON there was an 'armistice agreement' was that (1) we were war-weary as a nation, and (2) we couldn't bomb North Vietnam into submission. And as I pointed out earlier, while democracies produce more (thanks to better social and economic structures), totalitarian systems are better able to keep their people on a war footing for longer periods of time...

...and democracy being democracy, the American public was tired of war. We were done with it, we wanted no more of it. Sure, there were millions who still supported the war, but there were many more millions who opposed it...and THAT is why we lost the war: it was unwinnable in the traditional meaning of the word, and we as a nation essentially gave up.

We lost that war. Get over it.

And btw, no, the Viet Cong were not destroyed in 1968:

The Viet Cong, or National Liberation Front, was a political organization and army in South Vietnam and Cambodia that fought the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War (1959–1975), and emerged on the winning side.

You need to stop spinning history to support your blind praise of the Communists.

The Making of Vietnam - Frank Senauth - Google Books
 
Czarist Russia was a totalitarian state, too. How well did the Russians do during WW1?

You're assuming that absolutisms existed in Soviet Russia, which isn't true.

But - and you'd find this out if you read history objectively instead of seeing only what you wanted to see - in 1914, Russia was not only not nearly as industrialized as it was in 1941 (it was not unusual for a soldiers to not have guns - they had to wait until another soldier died in order to get that soldier's gun), but it was also on the verge of revolution. Russia in 1941 was not on the verge of revolution.

Not only that, but Germany was much smarter in 1914 - instead of just coming in full force, the Germans also did their level best to help foment said revolution. If you'll recall, they were the ones who sent a Russian fugitive named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov back on the train to Russia...and this guy later changed his name to V.I. Lenin. You may have heard of him.
 

I'm not pretending that they won the war single-handedly...but I am saying that if we had not invaded Normandy, they WOULD still have won it single-handedly. How do I know this? Before we invaded Normandy, the Red Army had already entered POLAND - as of April 30th, 1944 (five weeks BEFORE the Normandy invasion), the Red Army was about 200 miles from WARSAW.

Our invasion didn't doom Germany - they were already doomed. What our invasion did was save France and much of Western Europe from being trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
 
You need to stop spinning history to support your blind praise of the Communists.

The Making of Vietnam - Frank Senauth - Google Books

"Blind praise"?

Dude, I don't like communism and never did - I've visited China and seen firsthand the fear that the people live under - I should tell you about it sometime. But unlike you, I don't allow my dislike of communism to prevent me from seeing the things they did right in addition to the things they did wrong. Look at all human history, and almost every tyrant did some things that were good and right. That doesn't excuse the things they did that were wrong - it's simply what happened.

For instance, what Hitler did that was right was that he got the German economy back on track and made it (for a time) what was perhaps the best economy in the world...and then there's the Autobahn that he began, which our interstate highway was modeled after. This by no means excuses what he did that was wrong, monstrously wrong.

And so it goes with the communists - the USSR did many things that were right, even heroic and more worthy of admiration than any battle we ourselves fought...but this doesn't excuse the twenty million or so of their own people that Stalin killed along the way. This isn't a matter of who one likes or doesn't like - this is a matter of HISTORY. And the fact that you seem to hate the communists with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns is coloring your perception to the point that you cannot allow yourself to accept that YES, they did many things that were right and good. All you can see is the monstrous evil that they committed along the way.

You gotta see the WHOLE picture, guy - the bad AND the good. That, sir, is the job of the historian.

Now...back to Vietnam. Yes, the Tet Offensive effectively ended the combat viability of the Viet Cong - I'll give you that. But it still existed as a political entity until long after the fall of Saigon. And you seem to be putting too much stock in the Tet Offensive, because while it was a great tactical victory for America and (to a lesser extent) South Vietnam, it was a great strategic victory for North Vietnam...because it proved that no place in South Vietnam (including the American Embassy, remember) was safe from the North Vietnamese. This had a profound psychological effect not only on the South Vietnamese, but on the American public who were reading how even the American Embassy had been attacked and penetrated. The Tet Offensive, perhaps more than any other single event, served to begin turning the American public against the Vietnam War.
 
I'm not pretending that they won the war single-handedly...but I am saying that if we had not invaded Normandy, they WOULD still have won it single-handedly. How do I know this? Before we invaded Normandy, the Red Army had already entered POLAND - as of April 30th, 1944 (five weeks BEFORE the Normandy invasion), the Red Army was about 200 miles from WARSAW.

Our invasion didn't doom Germany - they were already doomed. What our invasion did was save France and much of Western Europe from being trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

You change the subject slicker than greases owl ****...lol!
 
You change the subject slicker than greases owl ****...lol!

Hey - YOU were the one claiming that the Soviets couldn't have won the war single-handedly - I simply proved that they were well on their way to do just that when we invaded. You just don't have the intestinal fortitude to admit that yes, you were wrong about something.
 
Hey - YOU were the one claiming that the Soviets couldn't have won the war single-handedly - I simply proved that they were well on their way to do just that when we invaded. You just don't have the intestinal fortitude to admit that yes, you were wrong about something.

I never said that, either...lol! You went from ignoring the intel the Brits gave Soviets proor to the Battle of Kursk to Operation Overlord.
 
Battlefield tactics are what win the day. You'll never prove otherwise.

general lee lost at Gettysburg because he did not study the terrain.

General Meade of the union was able to hold lees attack's off, and forced lee to launch a frontal aussult on the third day. that led to the tragic massacre known as pickets charge.
 
general lee lost at Gettysburg because he did not study the terrain.

General Meade of the union was able to hold lees attack's off, and forced lee to launch a frontal aussult on the third day. that led to the tragic massacre known as pickets charge.

General Lee lost Gettysburg for a number of reasons, but it wasn't because he didn't study the terrain. The biggest mis-step was when General Ewell misinterpreted General Lee's orders and didn't take Big Round Top.

Ultimately, General Buford was the savior of the Federal army when he held Cemetary Ridge.

General Meade didn't force General Lee into anything. Pickett's Charge was a last ditch effort to break the Federal line. A bad decision on General Lee's part; because of a heart attack just prior too, or during the battle, General Lee wasn't 100%.
 
Here's your quote:

"You need to stop pretending that the Soviets won the war single handedly."

Right! Ignoring the fact that the Soviets recieved intel generated at Bletchly Park and insisting that all their intel came from organic sources, is trying to paint the picture that the Soviets won the war single handedly.

The very specific information that allowed the Soviets to literally know every move the Germans were going to make came Project Ultra, not Lucy. Lucy only confirmed the credibility of the Ultra intel.

You keep insisting that no such intel passed from the Brits and the Soviets and that's completely un-true.
 
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