The fortunes of war can tarnish the finest brass, just as misfortunes, extenuating circumstances, and politics can negate diligent and able service. RAF air chief Marshal Hugh Dowding saved Fighter Command, and possibly England, by using his pilots sparingly in the BATTLE OF BRITAIN, but his shrewd methods won few fans, and he was removed from his post. Lt. Gen. Walter Short and Adm. Husband Kimmel, both competent and professional soldiers assigned to command in Hawaii, were made to take the blame for the damage leveled on PEARL HARBOR.
But there were chieftains who had no excuse, who repeatedly wasted, endangered, and failed their countrymen despite being given liberal amounts of public support, military hardware, skilled subordinates, ample INTELLIGENCE, time, and virtual autonomy of command. Following are ten prime examples of habitual underachievers among the high-ranking, selected for the degree to which they squandered chances, created problems, and generally contributed to their nation’s demise.
1. ADOLF HITLER (GERMANY, 1889–1945)
In a decade he took a minuscule army in a bankrupt country and developed it into the strongest and most feared military power in the world. Had he only stopped after the defeat of France, he might have been heralded as the brightest military mind of the twentieth century. But the halcyon days after the armistice of Compiègne soon faded into darkness as Hitler began to exercise an unnatural degree of control over a system fraught with limitations, and few components of Hitler’s war machine were more limited than himself.
Though a gifted orator, Hitler was a phenomenally poor communicator. He preferred to lecture rather than listen. He gave vague orders, refused to delegate tasks, and invalidated opinions divergent of his own.
On military concerns, he was almost completely ignorant of air and naval operations. Logistics confused him. He assumed any shortage of fuel or ammunition was a matter of supply rather than transportation. Strategically he had a strange habit of halting offensives just before they reached their objectives, demonstrated outside of Dunkirk in 1940 and within miles of Leningrad in 1941.
If Hitler did not know when to move forward, he also refused the option of pulling back. He first issued a “no retreat” order in November 1941 to tank commanders in the Caucasus. He would repeat the directive for the rest of the war, dismissing or executing any general who moved anywhere but forward.54
When men failed him, Hitler placed an increasing faith in machines. By 1943 he assumed the next V-weapon or supertank was all that was required to reverse his losses. As with logistics and people, he did not understand the limitations of technology. He once demanded the construction of a missile with a ten-ton warhead. A rocket engine capable of such thrust would not exist for another twenty years.55
Examples abound of his miscalculations, baseless reprisals, and ever-widening separation from reality. Arguably his weakest characteristic as a military commander was his vacillation, notably pertaining to war aims, indicating that this leader of the “master race” had no master plan.56
For his tombstone, Hitler stated he wanted the epitaph: “He was a victim of his generals.”
2. HERMANN GÖRING (GERMANY, 1893–1946)
On top of his corpulent ego, his unceasing repression of political opponents and Jews, and his art pilfering, narcotics bingeing, palace squatting, jewelry hoarding, and other related acts of Nero-esque debauchery, Hermann Göring was also a bungling air force officer.
A World War I flying ace and last commander of the Richthofen Squadron, the starved-for-action Göring joined the fledgling Nazi Party in 1922 and quickly climbed its ranks. In 1935 Hitler named him Luftwaffe commander in chief. Heading the most technical branch of the German armed forces, Göring had little understanding of engineering and production. He once said half-jokingly that he did not know how to operate his radio.57
Göring summarily appointed yes-men and incompetents, failed to develop an operational long-range bomber, and led his Führer and country to believe the Luftwaffe could achieve anything. Initially it could. The Luftwaffe was exceptionally effective in bombing the undefended city of Warsaw in 1939. After the action, Göring received the fabricated übertitle of Reichsmarshal.58
The high-flying dirigible garnished his Polish success with baseless proclamations—his Luftwaffe could crush the evacuation of Dunkirk, destroy Britain’s air defenses, supply besieged Stalingrad completely by air, etc. In only one prediction was he technically correct. Before the war he proclaimed, “The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb.” The Allies eventually dropped far more than a single bomb on the industrial mecca.59
As if the air force wasn’t enough, Göring also meddled in army affairs. By 1941 his Luftwaffe ran half of Germany’s antiaircraft batteries, competing with army batteries for ammunition, guns, and spare parts. After 1942 the largest and best-equipped tank unit belonged to the Reichsmarshal, the “Panzerdivision Hermann Göring.” All of Germany’s eight paratroop divisions were under the jurisdiction of the Luftwaffe. Of Germany’s 150 infantry divisions on the eastern front, twenty-two of them wore Luftwaffe uniforms.60
By 1943, Göring’s bloated sun had finally set, his Luftwaffe all but shot out of the sky or beaten into the ground. As Allied bombers flew deeper and deeper into German territory, he accused his fighter pilots of cowardice, a strange recrimination. The top U.S. fighter scored forty kills in the war, while fourteen German pilots notched more than two hundred confirmed kills each.61
Göring lived to be indicted in the Nuremberg trials, a slimmed-down, detoxed rebirth of his young pre-Nazi self. Defiant and bombastic throughout the proceedings, he was convicted on all counts. He swallowed poison just hours before he was to be hanged.
Only three Germans ever received the Grand Cross, the eighth and highest grade of the Iron Cross: Gebhard von Blücher for routing Napoleon at Waterloo, Paul von Hindenburg for defeating Russia in the First World War, and Hermann Göring.
3. KLIMENT VOROSHILOV (USSR, 1881–1969)
A Bolshevik long before the 1917 revolution, Kliment Voroshilov was a Red Army commander in the RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR when he met and befriended Stalin. Though lacking in intellect and military aptitude, Voroshilov impressed the Georgian with his dogmatic zeal. As years progressed, he displayed an ever-growing loyalty to Stalin, for which he eventually had a military academy, a tank (the heavy KV-1), and a city named after him (Voroshilovgrad, currently Lugansk). He also served as defense commissar from 1934 to 1940, during which the vapid sycophant developed a gift for inflicting terrible damage.
Through Stalin’s bloody purges, Voroshilov assisted in liquidating 80 percent of the Soviet Union’s senior officers, later bragging, “During the course of the cleansing of the Red Army in 1937–1938, we purged more than 40,000 men.” He further destroyed military readiness by improperly supplying and training Russia’s western armies. Few war games transpired while he was in office. Deployment plans were almost never issued. Many divisional headquarters lacked basic maps. Between extolling the leverage of heroism and dismissing the importance of tanks, he predicted that the next war would only take place in enemy territory and any battles therein would be brief and relatively bloodless.62
When war broke out, Voroshilov “coordinated” the invasion of largely defeated Poland in 1939 and an attack against Finland in the “WINTER WAR” of 1939–40, netting marginal victories and horrendous losses. During the latter affair the Soviets had six times as many soldiers as the Finns. But poorly motivated and without winter clothing, the Red Army suffered eight times the casualties. Nikita Khrushchev, then a political commissar, dubbed Voroshilov, “the biggest bag of [expletive] in the army.”63
In 1941, Stalin incredibly placed Voroshilov in charge of defending besieged Leningrad. Though the inhabitants courageously held out month after month, Voroshilov became convinced that defeat was near, so he wandered up to the front in the hopes of getting killed. He failed in that venture as well, and Gen. GEORGI ZHUKOV arrived the following day to secure the city’s defenses. Voroshilov was summarily removed and promoted to the Soviet Defense Committee.64
The inept Kliment Voroshilov was to have one more distinguished post before retirement. From 1953 to 1960, he was president of the Soviet Union.
4. CHIANG KAI-SHEK (CHINA, 1887–1975)
It says something about a man if Germans, the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and Mao Zedong fight on his side and he still can’t win.
By 1936, a narcissistic, petty, oppressive but charismatic Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek had established a military academy with the help of German advisers. He also purchased German weapons and began to modernize a massive army of at least two million. At the same time, the Chinese Communists negotiated a “united front” with Chiang to oppose the looming power of Japan. When the Japanese invaded China proper in 1937, first to assist were the Soviets, who provided weapons, ammunition, even pilots and fighters. By 1942 the Allies designated Chiang supreme commander of the China theater and sent billions of dollars in LEND-LEASE.
With all this, Chiang was able to amass an army of three million and more, but he failed to score a single major victory in eight years. Only twice did Chiang direct serious opposition, both times in 1937. In July he initiated a fight over SHANGHAI, primarily to gain international attention by placing the multinational port—and China’s richest city—in harm’s way. The event sparked a three-month battle, during which his forces were eventually routed. He immediately followed the devastating loss by jamming two hundred thousand troops in his indefensible capital of Nanking to the west. Both the cream of his army and his capital were demolished in weeks.65
For the rest of the war, he regressed into China’s primitive back-country, establishing a new capital in Chungking (Chongqing), six hundred miles from the Pacific coast. He forced millions of peasants into an undisciplined rabble of an army and presided over a ring of corrupt officials and regional warlords while hoarding money, weapons, and ammunition for an anti-Communist campaign he was aching to resume.
The popular stance in the pro-Chiang camp is that he traded space for time, letting Japan overextend itself into China and subsequently wither on the vine. Such a view overlooks a few basics. The space Chiang surrendered contained 80 percent of his industrial base, including nearly every major city and port in the country. The time he gained he did not use, even when his enemy was locked in a Pacific struggle against the United States.
As for the Communists, their armies never numbered more than a tenth of his force. However, they maintained a much greater level of discipline, conducted far more guerrilla operations, and were more willing to implement tax, rent, and land reforms than the rigid and remorseless Chiang. When two able and progressive Nationalist generals, Pai Chunghsi and Li Tsung-jen, begged the generalissimo to adopt similar methods, Chiang rejected them outright.
In the end, Chiang sacrificed more than a million Chinese soldiers and well over ten million Chinese civilians in his bid to stay in power. In 1949, the West was somehow surprised when the warlord also lost China as well.
Repulsed by Chiang’s limited intellect, his Allied chief of staff, Gen. Joseph Stilwell, referred to the generalissimo as “Peanut.”
5. RODOLFO GRAZIANI (ITALY, 1882–1955)
He was the youngest Italian colonel in the First World War and showed great promise, but Rodolfo Graziani’s long tenure in Mussolini’s fascist regime provided little beyond pointless cruelty and military failure. A general by the early 1930s, stationed in the Italian colony of Libya, he attempted to crush an independence movement by closing religious shrines, executing thousands, destroying villages, and throwing almost the entire population of east Libya into concentration camps. In the 1935–36 war with ABYSSINIA, he granted military contracts to personal friends, endorsed ruthless behavior among his troops, and used poison gas on essentially defenseless Ethiopians.66
Graziani’s Second World War career varied little from his preceding record. Just as Germany was about to secure an armistice with defeated France, Mussolini wanted to rush into the Alps and claim up to a quarter of France for himself. Several advisers rejected the scheme. Army chief of staff Graziani cheered the idea and assured Mussolini his troops were ready. They were not. Invading the mountains without adequate ammunition, air support, or winter clothing, the Italians managed to advance just a few miles. They soon lost more men to frostbite than to bullets.67
Graziani’s crowning achievement transpired in autumn 1941. At the head of Mussolini’s forces in Libya, he reluctantly led 150,000 soldiers into Egypt against 30,000 British subjects, mostly Indians. Gains were modest until the Commonwealth counterattacked, which sent the Italians reeling. Heading the retreat was Graziani himself, at times more than 300 miles behind the front lines. He lost all but 20,000 of his troops. Upon hearing the news, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden said, “Never had so much been surrendered by so many to so few.”68
Yet Graziani’s pitiful career was not yet complete. When Nazi Germany rescued the deposed Mussolini in 1943, il Duce set up the Italian Social Republic in the northern half of the country and selected the ever-loyal Graziani as chief of staff and minister of defense.
In 1940, Graziani “earned” the position of overall commander in North Africa when his predecessor, Air Marshal Italo Balbo, was accidentally shot out of the sky and killed by Italian antiaircraft guns.
6. TOYODA SOEMU (JAPAN, 1885–1957)
In the Samurai code of bushido, a warrior must be willing to sacrifice his life if needed. When Toyoda Soemu inherited the Imperial Combined Fleet in May 1944, he believed the time had come to demand such a sacrifice. In the year that followed he pressed the Japanese navy into a number of poorly planned engagements in search of a “final and decisive battle.” None of the battles were final or decisive, but all reduced a once-daunting force into a ghost of its former self.
A desk officer until appointed naval headmaster, the intelligent but insular Toyoda directed the Imperial Fleet into an all-or-nothing interception of the American attack on SAIPAN. Before his pilots left their carriers, he radioed: “The rise and fall of Imperial Japan depends on this one battle. Every man shall do his utmost.” Outgunned, undertrained, and outnumbered two to one, his air arm flew into what Americans later called “the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” Eighty percent of Toyoda’s planes were shot down, more than three hundred aircraft. The U.S. lost fewer than thirty planes. The admiral also lost seventeen of twenty-five submarines and three of nine carriers.69
In October 1944, he pushed again for a “final battle” at LEYTE GULF in the Philippines. Plucked of his planes and submarines, Toyoda soon forfeited the bulk of his surface ships. His strike forces totaled an astounding six carriers, nine battleships, twenty cruisers, and thirty-five destroyers. A few days later only six battleships and a handful of cruisers remained above water. Afterward Toyoda fully endorsed the use of kamikaze in a desperate attempt to hold on to the Philippines. To ensure the best results, he ordered the use of Japan’s best pilots.70
And still there was one more try in him. To the battle of OKINAWA Toyoda sent the Yamato, the largest battleship ever constructed. Legend states that the warship and its small complement of support vessels were given enough fuel for a one-way trip. Regardless, they had no air cover. Dismembered by direct hits from twenty torpedoes and bombs, the Yamato sank to the bottom of the ocean.71
Removed from his post, Toyoda was promoted to navy chief of staff. Serving in Tokyo up to the end, he passionately argued for a continuation of the war, even after the second atom bomb fell on Nagasaki.72
Brought to trial for war crimes, Toyoda Soemu was one of the few senior officers of the Japanese Empire to be acquitted on all counts.
7. IRWIN ROMMEL (GERMANY, 1891–1944)
Yes, the Irwin Rommel. Chivalrous, charming, aggressive, and perceptive, Rommel was a phenomenon in the First World War. A mere low-grade officer, he personally led raids in France, Romania, and Italy, capturing thousands with a fraction of the troops. As a high-ranking leader in the Second World War, his maverick, reckless exploits were lethally out of place. He routinely disobeyed orders, displayed a contempt if not ignorance of logistics, and all but refused to cooperate with fellow officers.
Assigned to Libya in February 1941 to head the newly formed Afrika Korps, Rommel was ordered to stay on the defensive. Instead he launched an attack on the British protectorate of Egypt. Though he won ground and frightened the Commonwealth, he captured no major ports or key cities. He managed, however, to waste fuel and equipment earmarked for the impending invasion of Russia. Upon hearing of Rommel’s escapade, chief of staff Franz Halder fumed that Rommel had gone “stark mad.”73
Eventually beaten back to Libya, Rommel at least captured its vital port of Tobruk (after four bloody attempts), which strengthened his supply line from Italy and Germany. Instructed to remain there, he headed eastward again. In the summer and fall of 1942, he lost three successive battles, including SECOND EL ALAMEIN, which began while he was on sick leave. His withdrawal of one thousand miles west to Tunisia, though often described as “brilliant,” saved only a fraction of his command. It was also the longest continuous retreat in German military history up to that time.
Later scoring a modest victory against inexperienced U.S. and French troops at Kasserine Pass along the Algeria-Tunisia border, he failed to coordinate with fellow commander Gen. Hans Jürgen von Arnim and lost the initiative. He returned to Germany, but his troops could not follow. Rommel’s desert adventures compromised Axis strength in the Mediterranean, leaving no viable route for evacuation. The Axis subsequently surrendered more men in Tunisia (two hundred thousand) than at STALINGRAD (ninety-one thousand).74
Later in 1943, while his cohorts fought for their lives on the eastern front, Rommel transferred to quiet northern France, where he wasted time and resources on the tactically futile ATLANTIC WALL. In 1944, when INTELLIGENCE and climactic conditions indicated a May–June window for an Allied invasion, he left for Germany to visit his wife on her birthday—June 6, 1944.
Overall, German historians think little of Rommel. His reputation stands high in the West partially because he was stationed in the West. Except for a brief staff job in the invasion of Poland, he served in France and Africa, where he initially faced green troops and commanders who vaunted his “brilliance” rather than admit to their own shortcomings. Rommel vaingloriously augmented his inflated status by courting journalists and photographers throughout his tenure.75
Time and again Rommel’s reputation remained intact because, in truly critical moments, he was usually absent. He also took leave of another important event. Conspirators asked him many times to support the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. But contrary to legend, Rommel strongly opposed murdering his Führer.76
Constantly paired with U.S. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., the two never met in battle. Rommel left Tunisia, Italy, and France before his armies engaged Patton’s.
8. JEAN FRANCOIS DARLAN (FRANCE, 1881–1942)
An American officer described J. Francois Darlan as “a short, bald-headed, pink-faced, needle-nosed, sharp-chinned little weasel.” Still, the French admiral could be reduced to a single word: indecisive.77
Chief of the navy at the time of France’s surrender, Darlan initially hinted that he would enjoin his fleet, the fourth largest in the world, to the Allies. He instead sent his European-based vessels to French colonial North Africa. Britain retaliated by bombarding the warships on the Algerian coast, sinking the battleship Dunkerque and killing more than a thousand sailors.
Infuriated, Darlan forged closer French relations with the Third Reich. For a time he favored German victory, which he believed would enable France to control the oceans and overtake the British Empire. For his work, Darlan was promoted to commander in chief of Vichy’s armed forces.
Darlan was in Algiers in November 1942 when the Allies invaded, and he ordered French troops to fight back. When American envoys arrested him two days later, Darlan denied having any military authority. After further negotiations, he relented and ordered his men to cease fire. But when he heard that the Vichy government was angered by his capitulation, Darlan announced a resumption of the fighting. Twenty-four hours later, when Germany invaded southern France, Darlan hinted he would help the Allies.78
Weathering these bizarre U-turns from his headquarters in Gibraltar, the normally patient DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER finally cracked. “What I need around here,” seethed Ike, “is a damned good assassin.” Eisenhower’s offhanded wish came true. For unknown reasons, an obscure young Frenchman visited Darlan at his palatial Algiers office on Christmas Eve, 1942, and shot him dead.79
Darlan’s family had a legacy of contesting Britain. His great-grandfather was killed by the British in the battle of Trafalgar.
9. WILHELM KEITEL (GERMANY, 1882–1946)
A competent staff officer with no particularly outstanding qualities or achievements, Wilhelm Keitel was as surprised as anyone when he was promoted in 1938 to chief of staff of the high command of Germany’s armed forces, in charge of all military strategy. In an instant, he had become the second-highest-ranking member of the German general staff, right below der Führer.
Whatever latent talents Keitel possessed remained in hibernation, as he quickly became Hitler’s most blindly loyal servant. So repugnant were his kowtowing antics, other officers began to call him “Laikeitel”—a German play on the word “lackey.”
But this lackey simultaneously protected Hitler from voices of dissension and crushed morale and communication among Germany’s high command. Between stroking his leader’s confidence, he occasionally informed Hitler of “defeatist” voices among general officers.
On one instance he demurred. When Hitler expressed a desire to invade the Soviet Union in 1940, the normally spineless Keitel criticized the idea. Troops were too entrenched in France. Necessary tanks, planes, and winter gear were not available. The attack would have to happen early in the spring to avoid the Russian winter. Yet when the same conditions applied the following summer, Keitel succumbed to Hitler’s bidding and enthusiastically supported the invasion.80
Though the field marshal often neglected to stand up for his military, he found time to initiate atrocities in the name of his boss. He endorsed the shooting of captured Soviet political commissars, authorized SS extermination programs, and ordered civilians to murder downed Allied airmen. “Any act of mercy,” he insisted, “is a crime against the German people.”81
Found guilty in Nuremberg of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes of international conspiracy, and crimes against humanity, Keitel was executed in 1946.
At Nuremberg, Wilhelm Keitel requested to be shot, as it was the proper method of execution for officers. They hanged him.
10. MUTAGUCHI RENYA (JAPAN, 1888–1966)
“I started off the Marco Polo Incident, which broadened out into the China Incident, and then expanded until it turned into the Great East Asian War.” Humility was not a strongpoint of Japan’s Lt. Gen. Mutaguchi Renya. Neither were patience, foresight, troops, morale, matters of supply, etc. And it is entirely possible his regiment did initiate the CHINA INCIDENT in 1937. Mutaguchi was one of the more rabid officers of Japan’s rogue Kwantung Army in Manchuria.82
Later, at the head of a division, he performed admirably in the February 1942 conquest of SINGAPORE. But at the time he was under the guidance of the cunning and reliable general Yamashita Tomoyuki.
When he was later promoted to lead the Fifteenth Army in Burma, Mutaguchi did not fare so well. Tokyo directed him to hold the country, the only viable land avenue between India and China as well as a producer of rice and petroleum. At first he complied, but then he began to harbor dreams of great conquest. Eying India, he believed a thrust into the subcontinent would inspire a domestic uprising against British rule. If India fell, perhaps Britain itself would be shaken to its core and sue for peace.
Given approval to mount a modest advance across the border, Mutaguchi aimed for the British base at Imphal, a heavily defended city reachable only through fast rivers, dense jungle, and rugged mountains. With 155,000 troops and 20,000 draft animals, he headed west with a minimal amount of food, medicine, and ammunition. The whole operation, thought Mutaguchi, would take about two weeks.83
Four months later, his troops wandered back, defeated by privation and dissension as much as by the Indians and British. All of the pack animals were lost or eaten, and a third of his force was dead. Then the monsoons came. Beaten men, too exhausted to march on, fell in the mud and drowned. Maggots swarmed in the wounds of the living and the dead. Some men ate grass to stay alive; others begged for grenades to end their torment. In all, 65,000 died.
In losing his troops in India, the routed Mutaguchi also lost his ability to hold onto Burma, which in turn lost his empire’s hold on southern Asia. For the ignominious failure, the general placed all the blame on his subordinates.84
His India adventure was arguably the worst defeat in the history of the Japanese army. Yet instead of being tried or demoted for his actions, Mutaguchi Renya was transferred to Tokyo and promoted to the army general staff.