Who is the Greatest General of All Time? - And Why

[The Giver]

Hannibal is the correct answer if you are keeping score at home. Took and held Spain for Carthage, marched through hostile Gauls and over the alps to fuck up the Romans. Kicked the Romans in the dick so hard that Fabius and all the other Roman pussies refused to fite him irl. Stayed in Italy for like a decade just doing whatever he felt like to the Roman heartland. Took Rome's bitch Capua making Rome his cuck. Only lost the war cause the Romans were too stupid to know they lost the war at Cannae and all the other Carthaginians were useless fags.

Honorable mention to Napoleon "Blow em Apart" Bonaparte for fucking Europe until that bitch came.

 

[AnOminous]

Alexander the Great, because he conquered what was at the time most of the civilized world.

Genghis Khan would have to be up on the same level, too.

More modern? General Lee and Patton, because murrica.

I'm being chauvinistic there, because guys like General Giap (who kicked France's and then America's ass in Vietnam) would also have to be up there.

Someone will surely name Rommel, too.

But I'd say it would be between Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan for #1.

I'm sure someone can think of some really good argument for some Three Kingdoms motherfucker whose name I don't know, though.

 

[millais]

Rommel was an excellent small unit tactician but he lacked the strategic ability to skillfully command anything bigger than a division. Rather inappropriately for a corps commander, he liked leading dangerously close to the front, and because of this, in more than a few battles, his command staff was surrounded and cut off from the main body of his forces for hours, effectively devolving command of the rest of the army to subordinate officers on the spot. All his greatest successes in the Western Desert occurred during a period when the British were at the end of a long supply line and cycling through a terribly incompetent crop of generals in command of the 8th Army (with the exception of Gott, who was killed too early on to prove himself). During this period, Rommel also had a massive advantage in that the Germans were intercepting and decrypting the daily dispatches and communications of the US Army attache embedded with the British 8th Army, so Rommel basically knew every single move the British were making days or even weeks in advance and could plan accordingly. Once the attache was dismissed and a somewhat competent commander in the form of Montgomery was appointed to the 8th Army, Rommel really struggled to keep it together. In Tunisia, Rommel's last great desert victories were again more due to the inexperience of his American opponents than his own skill, and he admitted as much in his correspondence.

I think for the Germans in the Second World War, Kesselring and Manstein had more redeeming qualities and skilled generalship than Rommel, but they (especially Manstein) had their own faults too.

I think for the First World War, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck has to be one of the most skilled generals and one of the few who emerged from the war with his reputation bright and completely untarnished in any way. In the East African Campaign, he arguably codified the book on modern irregular/guerrilla warfare as we know it today in terms of mobile harassing columns, train-wrecking, local recruitment of forces, and so on. With less than 200 European officers/NCOs and 2000-5000 native Africans levies and porters, he ran circles around hundreds of thousands of regular troops from India, Nigeria, Britain, South Africa, Rhodesia, Belgium, and Portugal from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the very last day of the war in 1918. During that entire four year period, he was resupplied only once, and spent the rest of the war living off the land and the materiel he could capture from the enemy. Not even Jan Smuts, the great Boer general and the premiere guerrilla warfare veteran of the pre-1914 era, could catch von Lettow-Vorbeck when Smuts was appointed to lead the Allied forces in East Africa. By the end of the war, von Lettow-Vorbeck had yet to be defeated and was even about to embark on an invasion of British Rhodesia when news of the armistice reached him. And all this was in theatre of the war so isolated from the rest of Germany that when the Kaiser awarded Lettow-Vorbeck the highest military medal that the imperial government could bestow, the British were the ones who had to deliver him the news of the award. This guy was an excellent strategist, logistician, and tactician all wrapped up into one. He was physically indomitable too; when his leather boots rotted and wore out, he marched barefoot alongside his African troops through the jungle until he had developed enough calluses to outpace them, all while suffering from malaria and all kinds of other tropical diseases.

 

[Flowers For Sonichu]

The General who gives me affordable car insurance

 

[ICametoLurk]

Not this guy.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

Alexander the Great, because he conquered what was at the time most of the civilized world.

Genghis Khan would have to be up on the same level, too.

More modern? General Lee and Patton, because murrica.

I'm being chauvinistic there, because guys like General Giap (who kicked France's and then America's ass in Vietnam) would also have to be up there.

Someone will surely name Rommel, too.

But I'd say it would be between Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan for #1.

I'm sure someone can think of some really good argument for some Three Kingdoms motherfucker whose name I don't know, though.

I would say Alexander even though Genghis built a larger empire.

Alexander carved a swath across basically all of the civilized world at the time and probably would've made it to China if he didn't dead.

Thing you have to remember is much of the Mongol empire was wide, sparsely-populated territories in central Asia. There were few large cities and they were all far as fuck away from each other. Conquering empty territory filled with stupid sheepfuckers is comparatively easy especially when you have such a mobile army. Geographically difficult regions had a habit of stopping his advance in its tracks for extended periods of time. Case in point: Japan. The total conquest of Imperial China was honestly his most impressive achievement and it's no surprise that's where the Yuan Empire's powerbase remained in after his death.

 

[ICametoLurk]

>All this plebbt responses

Alexander is overrated, Tamerlane took India in 1 month, the India that Alexander couldn't be able to take for 7 months.

Rommel made the Italians switch out their 1970's level Cryptography for the Enigma machine. He lasted cause he always lied to his superiors with the Enigma machine.

Lt. General Chesty Puller and Smedley Butler would be my bet. They were the finest the Marine Corp had to offer and the shining example of USA's Military Superiority and how great the Virginia Military Institute and West Point are compared to the rest of the World. Butler's writings are also great about Bankers and crony capitalists being the root of all evil in the United States.
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

 

[millais]

Chile's finest economic reformer

 

[Y2K Baby]

@Field Marshal Crappenberg

 

[Forever Sunrise]

While not really a general, Sir Thomas Cochrane lead a pretty amazing career at sea and spent most of his life beating ten kinds of shit out of enemies from just about every belligerent nation on Earth at the time. He also arguably invented the concept of WMD's, notoriously proposing plans for attacks on the French coast using tactics so insanely destructive that they were rejected on the grounds that they would irreparably damage relations between England and mainland Europe. All this in the early 1800's.

 

[Sock Cucker]

 

[Sock Cucker]

@Morose_Obesity

 

[Jan_Hus]

Oh Jesus that's a tough one... I can scrape together something for a longpost... give me a bit to pull some stuff together

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

 

[PeachyQueen]

While not really a general, Sir Thomas Cochrane lead a pretty amazing career at sea and spent most of his life beating ten kinds of shit out of enemies from just about every belligerent nation on Earth at the time. He also arguably invented the concept of WMD's, notoriously proposing plans for attacks on the French coast using tactics so insanely destructive that they were rejected on the grounds that they would irreparably damage relations between England and mainland Europe. All this in the early 1800's.

What were the WMDs?

 

[Forever Sunrise]

What were the WMDs?

To quoth a web article on the plan;

'First of all he had developed his earlier concept of the 'explosion ship' into a potentially more effective weapon, the 'temporary mortar'. The idea was to take a hulk, that is a ship without masts and rigging, strip out the decks and pack the hull with a layer of clay, into which was interspersed pieces of scrap metal and sundry obsolete ordnance. The whole lot was to be topped off with a layer of gunpowder and rows of shells and animal carcasses. By the arranging the ballast correctly such ships could be made to heel to one side, securely anchored and then pointed towards the enemy. Various experiments had convinced Cochrane that three such temporary mortars, properly handled, could saturate an area of half a square mile with some 6,000 missiles. Thereby of course, sinking or disabling whatever ships of the enemy's fleet that happened to be within that half square mile.

This was to be augmented with a further idea; the 'sulphur ship', or 'stink vessel'. This followed along the same lines as above except that the upper deck of the hulk would be left intact, so that it could be covered with a layer of charcoal with a further layer of sulphur placed on top. Lighting the charcoal would generate what Cochrane referred to as "noxious effluvia", which could be directed against shore installations. Provided the wind was blowing in the right direction, the resulting clouds of choking gas would force the defenders to flee, thus allowing the gallant British Marines to sharply pop on shore and occupy the now deserted fortifications once the gas had dispersed. (This was undoubtedly the "important addition" that Thomas had first suggested back in 1809 that made his plan now "formidable against fortifications".)

However as we have seen, Cochrane was unable to win official backing for his weapons of mass destruction, if only because the notion that war was an honourable profession for gentlemen still prevailed in many quarters.'

Dude had balls.

 

[JustStopDude]

Subutai. A Uriankhai general from an opposing tribe of Ghengis Khan, he rose through the ranks of his army as the Mongols practice a meritocracy based military.

In the course of his career, he commanded more than 20 separate military campaigns, conquered 32 separate nations, and was 65-0 in battles in which he was directly involved in. Statistically, no single general in human history has conquered more land then him.

His greatest military act was destroying the Hungarian and Polish military within 2 days, in battles occurring over 500 km apart.

The Khan was reported to say...

"They are the Four Dogs of Temujin. They have foreheads of brass, their jaws are like scissors, their tongues like piercing awls, their heads are iron, their whipping tails swords . . . In the day of battle, they devour enemy flesh. Behold, they are now unleashed, and they slobber at the mouth with glee. These four dogs are Jebe, and Kublai (different than Kublai Khan), Jelme, and Subotai."

He was a master of all methods of warfare, from siege craft, to intelligence gather. When the military leaders of Europe lead from the front with almost no command and control, Subutai sat on a hill side, sipping tea, directing complex troop movements through the use of flags. He introduced gunpowder large siege weapons to the Middle East, through the use of Chinese siege expects (he had already conquered China for the Khan).

Muhammad II of Khwarezm made the disastrous mistake of killing the Khan's dignitaries. So he unleashed his dog of war. The Khwrezm empire, which was not small at all, consisting of many modern countries today, did not survive. Muhammad II escaped and when Subutai found out, he had his men slaughter the capital city, knock down every building, and a river redirected so that Muhammad could not visit the ruins.

Subutai was working on plans to conquere the Holy Roman empire when word came that Ögedei Khan had died and Subutai had to return to Mongolia to pay his respects.

There is little historical evidence to suggest that Subutai would have had that much difficulty in conquering the rest of Europe (he had already taken Hungary despite the combined efforts of Poland, Hungary, Russia, and the Holy Roman Empire) had the third son of Ghengis not died.

 

[The Lizard Queen]

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus.
A Roman general who was elected to the dictatorship, kicked his enemies' butts, and had the opportunity to seize supreme power... and instead he gave it all up and went back to farming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus

 

[Vex Overmind]

My nigga Ho Chi Minh. Kicked the French and Americans out. A respectable adversary.


http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/ho-chi-minh

 

[escapegoat]

General Tso for his bomb ass chicken recipe.