Favourite WW2 General or Field Marshall

@ABWorsham4

Thanks for letting me know. I was considering watching it, but now I’m scratching that off my list of things to watch. Now I feel bad for Leslie Odom Junior for doing this.

So who would be your top 10 generals and admirals of World War 2? Put them in order if you can (it’s quite tough). If you could also make a top 5, that would be appreciated. This list also includes all naval, army, and air force commanders regardless of rank.

Personally my picks would be (in no particular order, I just can’t decide):

Erwin Rommel

Jisaburo Ozawa

Takeo Kurita

Walther Model

Erich Von Manstein

William “Bull” Halsey

Raymond Spurance

Tamechi Hara

Chester Nimitz

Georgy Zhukov

Writing this out, there is not enough space for all the generals I want to put, such as Bernard Montgomery, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ernest King, and many Soviet generals.

@RJL518:

Do you guys think that Germany DID change their attack plans after the plane had crashed?Â

I haven’t looked at the linked article, but one thing to remember is that the German plans for invading western Europe changed substantially (and many times) between the fall of Poland and the invasion of the Low Countries – so it would be hard to say whether this incident was (if at all) exclusively responsible for any particular changes a plan that was already evolving.

The Italian ones are new to me, only because they were never discussed.  However there are plenty of records of the ones in action during the Phillipines and South Pacific Campaigns (JFK, etc.) which gave them plenty of heroic press.

Escaping Montevideo Harbour – possibly.  Getting all the way back to Germany – extremely doubtful.

In terms of getting out of the harbour, Langsdorff would have had two options: heading across the river Plate to Argentina, or making a break for the open sea.  If he’d headed for Argentina, there was no guarantee that he’d be any better off than in Uruguay.  Argentina had some Axis sympathies, I think, but it was still nominally neutral, and the British and French would have put the same diplomatic pressures on it as they had put on Uruguay to respect the Geneva Convention and either intern the ship or force it to leave.  Making a break for the open sea was problematic too.  The British had made sure that the Graf Spee’s departure from Montevideo was in a carefully defined time window by making use of an article in the Geneva Convention that prohibited a warship from sailing from a neutral harbor less than (I think) 24 hours after an enemy merchantman had left the same harbour.  There were British merchant ships in Montevideo at the time of the Spee incident, and the British arranged for one of them to leave the harbour at the right moment to put Langsdorff in a bind between the Geneva Convention and the expiration of the Uruguayan government’s deadline for the Spee to leave.  Harwood’s cruisers were lying in wait nearby, and it’s doubtful that the Spee could have given them the slip.  Moreover, the shallow waters of the Rio de la Plata area were unsuited for combat from Langsdorff’s perspective because his water intakes might have gotten clogged with mud.  Additionally, having the ship sink in combat in shallow water carried the risk that secret equipment and papers would have fallen into Allied hands (this being less of a concern if, as eventually happened, the ship was scuttled under controlled conditions).

Assuming for the sake of argument, however, that Langsdorff had managed to elude Harwood, getting back to Germany would have been very challenging.  Although the Spee was technically still able to sail and fight, the damage she had suffered in the original battle with Harwood had left her in very poor condition to make a long sea voyage.  Harwood, even if he’d initially been eluded, would still have been close by and would have sent his ships (and his scout plane) to look for the Spee; additionally, some British and French naval groups were already converging on the general area following Harwood’s initial battle a few days earlier, so Langsdorff would have had an awful lot of sea power focused on finding him.

@cernel

And based on your updated question, I would put Rommel with Patton. Too very aggressive generals greatly liked by troops, and masters of armoured warfare.

@CWO:

@Gargantua:

I would have sent assassins or whatever I could have, after the top leadership of the army of my opponent

Considering how incompetent most of the Union generals commanding the Army of the Potomac were before they finally put Grant in charge, it would have been less productive for the Confederacy to assassinate them than to leave them in comand.

McClellan was a poor field general, but an excellent ‘builder’ of an army. The AoP was McClellan’s army, he built it, he trained it, the only thing he couldn’t do was lead it in the field, because McClellan continually managed to convince himself the South had far larger armies than they did. Also, Meade at Gettysburg had Lee pretty well sussed out and predicted the outcome. Only his failure to pursue Lee more vigorously (I believe he still had a whole corps in reserve) which could have been done I think, cost him effectively his job (he was allowed to stay at the AoP, but Grant as the new General in Chief was the effective commander of the AoP). Grant just decided to make it a battle of attrition which he knew he would win. Grant also promoted the idea of coordinated attacks all over the South, attacking with all armies at the same time so reinforcement could not be sent by the Confeds from one to another theatre.

I’m planning on buying a K98 M48 next chance I get, my friend has two K98’s one is a M48 the other was from his grandfather