Top 10 Most Successful Military Commanders

[Joe Shearer]

Better post it before I get another update from the ministry of public security.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Yes japanese,chinese and indian generals of antiquity are heavily ignored due to lack of information.

In japan for example leaving out the nominal 3 nobunaga,hideoyoshi and tokugawa.....yesugi kenshin is often overlooked.Though he is probably the best soldier of the 4 .called during that era as the japanese god of war.He defeated nobunaga and only on his death is nobunaga said to have remarked..'now the empire is mine'.He aso introduced the organized cavalry charge in japan.

This is useful input. I actually knew only of the other three - Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Tokugawa - and will now look around and see how to get educated about Yesugi.

Zhukov is not a shock inclusion at all,this is a false propaganda from the west that the war was won by the soviets due to human wave charges.From 1943 onwards the sovietsdevelpoed their own doctrines that matched the wehr at the strategic level though they still remained inferior at the tactical lvl on which the wehr remianed supreme over all armies till the end.

Zhukov is the most capable and foresighted commander of the post purge era.He crushed the japanese threat at khalkin gol,defended leningrad,moscow.Masterful counterstroke at stalingrad ,berlin was not really significant militarily though.

But his strategic successes over a huge front are truly very high.Yes he did use human wave tactics early on but the soviets had no choice at that point ,with most of their army being conscripted peasnts 3 men in a six men squad had rifles other 3 ammo.his use of massed armour was impressive.He was also the first russian commander to anticipate kursk .

Zhukov is surely in my book number 2 ww2 general after manstein.And neither overrated patton,monty or rommel.

I have a couple of points to make about this. While in general I agree with the trend of your thoughts, there is the question of resource availability. Frankly, other than Kholkhin Gol, he would have been another Soviet wurst-meister, running a sausage machine. For that, I feel Malinovsky and Rokossovsky are as worthy as he; personally, I count Rokossovsky ahead, 2 to his 1 and Malinovsky 3.

You mentioned Vatutin. He does epitomise the Soviet General/Marshal. He was courageous, aggressive, very aggressive, and creative, catching Manstein off balance at his best. But his casualty figures were humongous. He wouldn't have lasted the course if he didn't have millions of men to spend.

About the Soviets, one comment. There is always the question of the butcher's bill. Take Belisarius, one of my personal favourites of all time. He was always doomed to fight his battles with a few thousand trained soldiers, with no proper order of battle, with no money, sometimes, and also sometimes no imperial support as well: Justinian was terrified that his general would convert his well-deserved popularity to political ends.

Now imagine that same Belisarius with 5,000 cataphracts, 50,000 light cavalry lances carrying steppe bows and two well-staffed legions, with good, trained centurions leading them (and don't quibble saying that the bucellarii were in fact nothing but cataphracts with recursive bows - his core regiment only had 1,500 troopers!). If Justinian had supported him, what might he not have achieved, more even than his astounding deeds?

I hope you get my point.

Guderain was one dimensional and didn't fight enough of the war.Slim never fought germans but yes was really brilliant in burma.
mcarthur,i don't really see him much more than a good organizer.

Quite honestly, I have little to add. Guderian deserves a little more credit than you have given him, because he was both doctrinaire and field general, not to forget his organisation role in the background of the rebuilding of the Wehrmacht (why do you keep calling it the Wehr, btw?) Slim is another of my favourites; why shouldn't we be permitted a little weakness for Indian Army officers? As you say, he was rather good in Burma, although the episode with Leese was not edifying.

And - hey! - he mayn't have fought Germans, but he had to face the Japanese with their tails up. Do I detect a faint whiff of the martial races theory in that comment of yours? ;-)

He was the first Indian Army officer ever to be CIGS, forced on Monty by a relentless Attlee!

On the other hand, it was Slim's influence which hovered over both the Indian and Pakistani Armies for years afterwards, not always to good effect. His tactics of letting the Japanese outflank him in the jungle, maintaining a 'Box', and obtaining supplies by airdrop (so reminiscent of the 18th and 19th century forming of squares by the infantry to handle a cavalry charge), led to some accentuation of the essentially infantry nature of both the sub-continental armies.
I agree with you; McArthur, like Monty, was an organiser more than a field general.

Eisenhower was a brilliant manmanager and organizer but strategically hesitant and indecisive.

Malinovsky admitted that zhukov was the best of the russian generals.And manstein the best of germans and most feared.
TUkhachevsky is overlooked but yeah had major contributions to ww2 and post ww2 soviet doctrine.His deep operations with modifications borne from experience became the standard soviet strategic doctrine with the addition of operational manuevre groups and other additions.
Rokkosovsky is surely a good general but not in ww2 top 5 imo.
Vatutin u didn't mention.

True again, O sage. But...

Malinovsky was not only a good general, but also a good minister. In Soviet Russia, that meant extreme political correctness, including the realisation of when to open one's mouth. It was politically very wise in post-war Russia to praise Zhukov, the blue-eyed boy. But I do take your point. I was disappointed at your lack of enthusiasm about Rokossovsky; perhaps if you get to look up his record once again, you might just possibly change your mind. I hope so.

Attila is a bad choice his strategic brilliance is nowhere to be seen.A good conqueror but general...no.
William again is an overrated hyped up chum.Hastings is hardly a great victory although a decisive ones.Brilliance in generalship is largely absent in the medieval age with sieges and cavalry charges deciding wars.No where near the top 25 for me.True. However... I put it to you that the Middle Ages also saw the working through of several themes in weaponry, which had a profound impact later.

But first, regarding Attila, there is nothing, no specific battle that he has to justify, because his successes were to get his enemy to a battle of his timing and choice. Like all steppe-warriors/ conquerors, there were just two parts to his war-craft: bringing the enemy to battle, as soon as possible; the battle. Chenghiz did this later; so did Timur. That was what a nomadic cavalry was good at, and they did their job with pitiless perfection.

Among the english kings sry except richard 1 maybe none would be in my top 50.Their victories are mostly attributed to the immense advantage and superiority of the english longbow.

Robert bruce while overall mediocre actually has a great victory at banockburn with superb use of terrain.

Moore's is simply too small a phase to be really judged. Died before being seriously tested.

Yes marlbrough definitely top 20 materiAL,H e and wellesly are the best british pre industrial age generals.Wolfe, although a step below, is worthy of mention.

Including hitler was a joke....also some guys said tipu and stalin......i think that was amusing in a really funny way.Yeah, right; funny as in bizarre.

@captain-
opinions usually place western generals ahead because the undeniable fact remains that the best strategic masterpieces and tactical masterpieces have emrged in the west.
Can u answer one tactical formation unique to the east rivalling-

The greeko macedonian phalanx.
Roman aces triplex.
Roman testudo.
Spanish tercio.
The infantry square.
Double line.

On the whole it is undeniable that european generals have been more innovative tech savvy and organized.Part of the reason they came to dominate the world despite being hugely outnumbered.It is fact even if we don't like it.

This has been answered beautifully, brilliantly by CardSharp, but my ubiquitous friend forgot to add the massed charges of the cataphracts to this list. I feel they belong there, with the other formations.

Overall, I find myself greatly in sympathy with your comments, and will only invite you to help the process of extracting more and more information as we go along.

I have to mention once again how thoroughly delighted I am at your most appropriate comments.

 

[CardSharp]

^^^^

About Zhukov, something that bothered me about him was the assault on the Seelow Heights. It should argued in that battle he was at his most experienced and the troops under him the finest in the whole of the war. Still, he made a hash of it like a rookie. Making the same mistakes soviet commanders were making in the sad early years of the eastern front.

The guy won the war in a big way, but still you get the feeling he was star pupil on the short bus. That said I do like Rokossovsky (a shame he wasn't allowed to reach his full potential)

 

[Joe Shearer]

To that I'd probably also add Gustavus Adolphus and his pike and shot formations (+ codified arquebus drill)

OH and Eponmendas weighted wing.

This doesn't add value, but just to round off the picture: the importance of Epaminondas was that he discovered that if one heavy hoplite was able to defeat one lightly armed Persian, then 20 heavy hoplites would be able to defeat one heavy hoplite. And that's what he did; build a massively overweight wing that thrashed the Spartans for the second time in history (of course, everybody remembers that sandy beach in Pylos, everyone remembers Sphakteria?).

Philip of Macedon was an interested spectator, but didn't stay on the sidelines. He 'hinged' this phalanx, the Theban phalanx, with the Companion cavalry, producing a composite which fought in close coordination.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Yes, Zhukov was definitely NOT an incompetent general, and he definitely did NOT use human wave charges to win his battles. That is pure Western propaganda, who cannot accept the fact that it was the Soviet Union who truly won WWII.

Zhukov's victory at Khakin Gol showed that he was one of the first people to understand the importance of armor in tactical operations. He envisioned the use of multiple tactical operations to break through the enemy's defense and destroy the enemy's strategic reserves, the classic "deep battle" operation. He recognized that future wars would be fought in an elastic manner with mobile forces (as opposed to the linear-style of warfare seen in WWI), and by conducting operations simultaneously and in the enemy's rear this elastic defence could be destroyed, and a decisive outcome could be achieved. To make such an operation possible Zhukov also stressed combined arms warfare at ALL levels: tactical, operational, and strategic (the "operational" level of warfare, by the way, was a uniquely Soviet concept). His use of mass-produced Sturmoviks - the "flying tanks" - to shatter the enemy's tactical and strategic reserves was probably the single most important factor leading to Soviet military success.

Here is a diagram showing the basic theory:

As you can see, the ultimate objective was to destroy the enemy's strategic reserves in the rear as quickly as possible. While the frontal forces engaged the enemy's tactical zones, the operational forces were used to exploit the gaps. The reserves would already be in disarray from air strikes, and other tactical operations would be simultaneously be conducted to further confuse the enemy while the deep operation was conducted. With their strategic reserves depleted, the enemy would be unable to conduct an elastic defence, and their formations would inevitably be destroyed.

Operation Uranus and Operation Bagration are two good examples of Zhukov's successful deep operations.

I have little to add to this excellent exposition except a bit of pedantry: actually, Napoleon had anticipated Soviet Russian use of the concept of 'operations' as a stage intermediate between the battlefield - 'tactics' - and the field of war in general - 'strategy' - and used it extensively. Some authorities insist that his mastery of this concept was what made him such a terrifying opponent. In Napoleonic terms, what a Soviet Russian called 'operations', Napoleon called 'grand tactics'.

Analysis of his campaigns becomes easier to comprehend if the analyst is aware of how he marched in separate columns, and brought them to converge sharply once he identified the enemy, and formed an idea of how and where to fight the battle.

 

[CardSharp]

(of course, everybody remembers that sandy beach in Pylos, everyone remembers Sphakteria?).

Bad luck that, cook your breakfast and accidently burn down half the island's tree (aka your cover from the hundreds of missiles troops the athenians had)

Philip of Macedon was an interested spectator, but didn't stay on the sidelines. He 'hinged' this phalanx, the Theban phalanx, with the Companion cavalry, producing a composite which fought in close coordination.

I think those lessons didn't go unlearned by Alexander either. In many of his epic battles with Darius III, he weighted a section of the phalanx, waited for tears and dislocations to occur as the two lines met and drove the champions straight into the gap for a victory.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Do you have any specific information? I mean like battle tactics he used and such?

According to some classical historian (I think Appian), Hannibal listed him as the greatest general ever. I'm trying to understand why.

I'll take you through one or two of these, in Italy or in Sicily, but not just now. It's too much fun to stay with the mainstream discussion, and I have to go out for four/five hours now.

Essentially, after he beat his b-i-l Demetrius, he inherited a number of elephants, and the sight and use of these terrified the Romans out of their wits.

More.

 

[aks18]

where is name of Hazrat umar farooq (RA) he captured more land than alexandar

 

[AUSTERLITZ]

where is name of Hazrat umar farooq (RA) he captured more land than alexandar

Khalid ibn al waleed fought most of his battles for him just as sabutai did for chengiz,if this was a thread for great leaders he would certainly be here.
And no his empire was smaller than alexander's as though almost similar in all aspects of territorial possesions lacked greece and asia minor.

 

[Last Hope]

People are getting their list wrong!
You are missing those who have defeated and fought you which isint fair!

Please be neutral.

 

[AUSTERLITZ]

This has been answered beautifully, brilliantly by CardSharp, but my ubiquitous friend forgot to add the massed charges of the cataphracts to this list. I feel they belong there, with the other formations.

Overall, I find myself greatly in sympathy with your comments, and will only invite you to help the process of extracting more and more information as we go along.

I have to mention once again how thoroughly delighted I am at your most appropriate comments.

The reason i have put zhukov ahead because he was the man that stopped the german tide during the most critical hours of the war,rokkosovsky came into prominence later in the war.During the battle of moscow there were hardly massive resource availability to the soviets ,that began to happen from late 1942.Because of this crisis management ability i've put zhukov ahead.

Hmm yes i do admit i'm a little short on rokkosovsky details other than the broad outline of battle she was in.

@cardsharp- seelow heights ,yes zhukov admitted he had underestimated german resistance and caused heavy soviet casualities.This was mostly the work of gotthard heinrici the wehrmacht commander also the wehrmacht premier defensive expert and his deputy husso von monteuffel.Heinrici's elastic defence was very well executed at seelow heights .If he had more resources it would have been a soviet defeat.
Heinrici is probably the best defensive tactician of the war though hardly mentioned.Also balck is another great one,though most of his brilliance was at divisional level.he was uneasy at higher commands.
I admit vatutin was unpredictable but very reckless.Belisarius is the byzantine version of al waleed.He was never appreciated to the extent he deserved.
Guderain ofc is the best armour commander of ww2 and a brilliant theorist and organizer,when i said one dimensional i didn't mean that he was bad just that he wasn't much good at other things but he could do he was the best at.
About the steppe nomadic cavalry horde armies i agree with u.

Taking nothing away from slim the fact remains that the japanese while even more fanatical than the germans and just as tencious were not as organized and techincally perfect as the germans which does come in slim's way of fame to the title of best british general of ww2.

As for formations yeah i forgot adolphus mixed formations,but that was heavily modelled on maurice of nassau's dutch army.Also cromwell's new model army is a good organized force during its era.
U mention cataphracts but it wasn't unique to the east in fact it was perfected and used to itshighest degree of perfection in the west under the knights,and much later the heavy cavalry of napoleon.Heavy cavalry became the great western forte eventually.
The horse archer's cantabrian circle formation is one unique to the east though,it was also used to deadly effect by mongols.Also i left out the swiss pikemen landscnhedt squares though these were eventually evolved into the tercio.
Also if we are talking military organizations and not formations there are the roman manipular system,then cohort legions under marius.Also the german panzer division,the napoleonic corps d' armee,also as a strategic formation napoleon's battali'on square used to devastating effect vs prussia in 1806.The ottoman jannissary/sipahi army was at its height the most professional force in the world.

Overall thanks for ur replies and kind comments.

 

[AUSTERLITZ]

As to what eastern formation would rival it?


I'd say the Mongol decimal system (more an organizational formation but still very important) and Qin crossbow army are good candidates (amongst others).

Um..these are organizations not formations.The mongol battlefield formation was the cantabrian circle with modifications.

As for desiguy....i'll just pretend to forget ur post on porus as top 10 military commanders candidate.

@godless bastard the main problem is we know very little about ancient india and china and though we get some peaks as to their existence such as the terracotta rmy and the arthshastra ,we never can ascertain their practical battlefield success due to lack of data.

Yes i did omit epaminondas's oblique attack which won him leuctra and mantinea.A variation was used by philip and alexander and much later by frederick the great.I think i somehow missed this....

for seige warfare vauban is the greatest,alexander would be my number 2.

Also in the honorable mention list i think i forgot eugene of savoy and germanicus.

 

[500]

Rommel is a highly overrated general. His reputation today is partly a result of his ability to run his own PR and in the end, he and his theatre just didn't matter. It was a side show

Disagree. Rommel made amazing things with little force and and fuel.

If you want to name a German commander who had a real effect on the war, I'd pick Erich Von Manstein.

Manstein, Model and Rommel are best German generals of WW2. If you need most overrated then its Guderian.

hate these kinds of lists because they are basically opinions usually concentrated on the west

muslim/eastern influences missing in list:
saladin (crusades)
ibn saud (saudi arabia)
the mughals
sher shah suri

2 greatest Muslim commanders are Khalid bin Walid and Tamerlane, without any doubt. Saladin is most overrated, largely because he is only Muslim commander that is known in west.

Zhukov is the most capable and foresighted commander of the post purge era.He crushed the japanese threat at khalkin gol,defended leningrad,moscow.Masterful counterstroke at stalingrad ,berlin was not really significant militarily though.

Zhukov had nothing to do with Stalingrad. During the Stalingrad battle Zhukov was unsuccessfully storming Rzhev. This failed assualt was one of the bloodiest WW2 battles, probably the most.

 

[500]

Top 7 military commanders according to Napoleon (in chronological order):

Alexander the Great
Hannibal
Julius Caesar
Gustavus Adolphus
Turenne
Eugene of Savoy
Frederick the Great

 

[Muhammad-Bin-Qasim]

Hamza Bin Abdul Mutlib
Khalid Bin Waleed
Saad Bin Waqas
Muhammad Bin Qasim
Musa Bin Nadeer
Tariq Bin Ziyad
Sultan Muhammad Fateh
Salahuddin Ayubi
Sultan Mahmood Qutuz
Sultan Beybars

May Allah bless their souls Ameen