Most over rated general of the war?

What general do you reckon was the most overratted?

Personally i think rommel gets way too much hype,he was a good general but there were lots of good generals.
Manstein,Model,konev were good generals but they dont get the same kudos rommel gets.

 

I would never suggest that Montgomery, Patton, or Macarthur were overrated. No way.

Uh-oh, I've put my foot in it now.

 

Rommel overrated? Possible given the media hype surrounding the North African campaigns. It is also a fact that the German Army was quite an efficient military machine. I personally vote for Eisenhower as the best leader of WWII because of his handling of D Day and the unique set of problems that followed.

 

Actually, I think Monty was highly overrated. He had one great success at Alamein. MacArthur is also overrated.

My opinion, some of the best generals in WWII were Bradley, Patton, Doolittle, Arnold, Yamashita, Freyberg, Horrocks, Rommel, and Guderian.

 

lol yep - Montgomery probably most over-rated. In my opinion if he'd been a German General officer he'd have been considered average.

Winston Churchill had a habit of sacking high ranking officers whenever and wherever he felt the man didnt measure up, and this happened very often throughout the war. So often, in fact, that Hitler used Churchill as the example to point out how relatively fair he was in the treatment of his own Generals!

Montgomery was one of the few British Generals to rise to the top, and stay there through most of the war. So in churchill's, and history's eyes, he had what it took to be a succesful British General. But Monty had several bad habits. He tended to act and move deliberately and relatively slowly and was slow to react to changes in the battlefield. If he'd had to fight the Russians with the same methods he used he might have been in alot of trouble - when quick action was called for he often failed to act fast enough.

He used alot of resources to get the job done including the lives of his own men. Even though every General in war must do this sometime, he was a poor judge of what was needed and when in doubt he simply waited until he had way more then enough to get the job done and only then acted (that is how he won at El Alamein, as Churchill was putting alot of pressure on him about the situation there.)
Also how he survived sacking after Market-Garden in fall 1944 must only have been because of reasons of prestige and politics.

To me the German Generals are the most interesting to read about. They had to fight Hitler's war over large parts of the globe from beginning to end, and under increasingly overwhelming and impossible conditions as the war progressed (the most impossible condition being Hitler's own meddling.) Even after Stalingrad, when it must have been clear to most of them that Germany would certainly now lose the war, they still fought on doggedly - if not for Hitler, then for Germany and their own sense of honor.

Even though every one of the high ranking German Generals owed their positions solely to him and were required to sign an oath of loyalty to him personally under penalty of death, Hitler hated the Army General Staff and often told them as much. He thought their ideas were antiquated and their code of morals outdated by National Socialism, and with contempt referred to them collectively as "the last Masonic lodge". He deliberately chose to divide the Army high command (the OKW and the OKH) to play them against each other for political reasons rather than having just one or the other for efficiency.

 

Monty as we all know should have been left in the UK with a torch and ticket machine at the cinerma..Even that would be too much for some of you...So Ill walk away from this one.

 

Me too. The 'Monty over-rated' discussion has been flogged to death on this Forum before with predictable trans-Atlantic mud-slinging.

 

My vote goes for the Desert Fox... Here in the U.S. each time I see an episode on the History channel regarding WW2 battles he is placed on a pedestal as some god like figure.

 

You have to be carefull with Macarthur. Even though he had a big ego and took a lot of personal credit, his island hopping strategy saved a lot of lives. He never was one for going at enemy forces head on if it could be avoided. His biggest mistake was going back to the P.I.. It would have been better to take Formosa like the navy wanted to in my opinion.

 

His campaign in the Philippines is considered by some to have been a waste of resources as it didn't threaten Japan directly, and that the Navy's island hopping campaign was the vital front

 

The island hopping strategy was Nimitz, not MacArthur. MacArthur went right up the Solomons, New Guinea, and to the PI.

Island Hopping was the Central Pacific Strategy devised by Nimitz and King, and disliked by MacArthur.

 

I don't think that either Macarthur or Patton were bad generals. Rather, I think they were "overrated" in the sense that the WWII propaganda machine and subsequent movies painted them as super-generals, larger than life.

Thus, their public reputation was far greater than that of other generals, who were equally worthy but less recognised.

 

What are you talking about? He had his own "island hopping" campaign in NG where he bypassed Japanese garrisons and attacked where they were not.

His advance up to the PI was masterfully planned and executed.

 

JeffinMNusa:I agree with your opinion on eisenhower,not glamerous but if the germans had an eisenhower the would have won in russia.

Gromit801:I also was of the opinion that the island hopping strategy was down to nimitz.

As for montgomery people have got to remember he fought in the first world war and was IMO a WWI general.He was stuck with a set piece battle mindset.
If he wasnt the best british general who was?

Patton?i dont think he was over-rated at all.He was great.
Macarthur?he was a nutbar.

 

1 Bernard Montgomery
2 Ervwin Rommel
3 Georgy Zhukov

 

Hmm........... I CANNOT say Chuikov because he won the war (not really but w/e) with his encirclement of the 6th army at Stalingrad.... Zhukov I don't know much about so I'll stay away. Montgomery has been bit to pieces, apparently.... Rommel was a general but he did have his flaws. So here goes.
1.Rommel
2.Montgomery(How original of me.)
3. Unsure, mostly because I have a brain freeze.

 

The situation tended to weed out the weak in pretty short order-but... well Monty certainly had his faults. Then George Patton was kind of a prickly charactor. In all they were some larger than life people as the times demanded-my favorite is Eisenhower for his steady hand and Midwestern good sense. Rommel? Well he was certainly respected by his enemies.
Jeff

 

Monty and Zhukov in my opinion.

 

Giorgi Zhukov certainly had his share of defeats; Book sources - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Still-who ended up in who's capitol city?
Jeff

 

Very True I guess. thats the same with monty to though. I think that Monty was way overrated