Hanging around:
Subutai – 2
First time on my list:
Frederick the Great – 2
Returning to the ranks:
Georgy Zhukov - 1
I like Themistocles for pulling out every trick in the arsenal (advance planning in funding the navy, exhortation, bribery, planted rumors, spies, threats, deceit, stealth, frontal attack) to survive an overwhelming Persian assault. But it appears that his battle record is pretty small for this august company.
At Marathon he is reputed to be one of ten generals, but that’s not established, and there’s no indication I’ve seen that he was in charge.
Artemisium was a painful draw – the Greek navy suffered losses it could ill afford, and it retreated when events on land made further fighting moot. I’ll grant that a painful draw was actually better than the outnumbered Greeks had any right to expect.
Salamis was a stunning victory against terrible odds, and is justly famous. But it was only one battle.
Frederick the Great - 2
Gustavus Adolphus - 2
Themistocles - 1
Thermistocles - 2
William Tecumseh Sherman - 2
Lord Nelson - 1
2 votes each for Napoleon and Alexander, for the reasons stated before. I’ll hold my last vote in reserve for a bit - honestly, I’m not sure I care to cast it at all. This is getting tough - which is all to the good!
Just 48 minutes to go 'til today’s deadline, Mr. Excellent, for your final vote.
A vote for Frederick the Great, then. Do I know how to cut it close or what?
ETA: BTW, thank you, Tamerlane for your excellent short essays on these leaders.
A bit of a hijack, but: Does anyone think there’d be an interest in a “Greatest Living Military Leader” elimination game, or have we pretty much flogged this (cavalry) horse to death?
Dunno. Are there enough of them to make it worthwhile?
And yes, thank you, Tamerlane, for the fine profiles.
The votes in our 20th round:
Frederick the Great - 7
Napoleon Bonaparte - 6
William T. Sherman, Themistocles - 5 each
Gustavus Adolphus, Subutai - 4 each
Alexander the Great - 2
Hannibal, Lord Nelson, Georgy Zhukov - 1 each
The boldfaced leaders above are now gone. That leaves:
Alexander the Great: Conquered the known world
Genghis Khan: Built the perfect war machine
Gustavus Adolphus: Made Sweden a great power
Hannibal: Greatest tactical genius?
Julius Caesar: Rome’s most brilliant commander
Khalid ibn al-Walid: Architect of the Arab conquests
Duke of Marlborough: Master of early modern war
Lord Nelson: Royal Navy admiral; Trafalgar victor
Scipio Africanus: Stopped Carthage and Hannibal
William Tecumseh Sherman: Logistics, maneuver as strategic warfare
Subutai: Genghis Khan’s top general
Themistocles: Victor of Marathon, Artemisium, Salamis
Duke of Wellington: Successes in India; thrashed Napoleon
Georgy Zhukov: Led from Moscow to Berlin
Eliminated so far:
George B. McClellan
Charles the Bold
Hernan Cortez
Douglas MacArthur
Pompey Magnus
Carl von Clausewitz
Robert E. Lee
Josip Broz Tito
Zachary Taylor
John S. McCain Sr.
Titokowaru
Albert Kesselring
Curtis Le May
Sun Tzu
Gabriel Dumont
Charles Upham
Richard H. O’Kane
Charles de Gaulle
Paul von Hindenburg
Marc Mitscher
Flavius Aetius
Mehmet the Conqueror
Pyrrhus
Orde Wingate
Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck
Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban
Tsao Tsao (also Cao Cao)
Hugh Dowding
Yamamoto Isoroku
Sir Isaac Brock
Moshe Dayan
Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter
Phil Sheridan
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Kong Ming/Zhuge Liang
Henry V
John Paul Jones
Vo Nguyen Giap
Attila the Hun
Togo Heihachiro
Bernard Montgomery
Erich von Manstein
George S. Patton
Philip II of Macedon
Gaius Marius
Akbar the Great
Arthur Currie
Yi-Sun Shin
George Washington
Oda Nobunaga
Erwin Rommel
Belisarius
U.S. Grant
Timur-e-Lang
Stonewall Jackson
Frederick the Great
Napoleon Bonaparte
The next round will conclude at noon EST on Weds. Oct. 6. Same rules as before.
Well, my vote is easy then
William Tecumseh Sherman 2
Thermistocles 2
Lord Nelson 1
Themistocles - 2
Lord Nelson - 2
Duke of Marlborough - 1
2 - Sherman
1 - Khalid ibn al-Walid - generalship isn’t enough to qualify here.
1 - Subutai
1 - Hannibal
Gustavus Adolphus - 2
Khalid ibn al-Walid - 2
Subutai - 1
In defence of Themistocles, it was specified in the original thread that quantity was not a decisive factor. Further, generalship alone is not sufficient. Themistocles was not only a successful general, but he carried Athens and Greece behind him. And he did beat the Persians more than once.
2 votes for Subutai - nothing against him, but Genghis Khan just plain outclasses him. And one horse archer on this list goes a long, long way.
2 votes for Khalid ibn Al-Walid - the historical record just isn’t clear enough for him to earn a spot at this point.
And a vote for the Duke of Marlborough - good, but not good enough, IMHO.
Why? Horse archers were the dominant military force in the world for roughly a thousand years, from roughly the time of Attila to the creation of industrial/gunpowder armies. Why are two horse archers too many when fivedudes in sandals (Alexander, Hannibal, Julius, Scipio, and Thermistocles) is perfectly fine?
I think Scipio was partial to fluffy bunny slippers, actually…
William Tecumseh Sherman - 2.
Themistocles - 2.
Lord Nelson - 1. Changed my mind on edit - bit of a coin toss.
Was a bit of a joke, perhaps a poor one. I do think, though, that Subutai is sufficiently similar to, and contemporaneous with, Genghi Khan, that we don’t need both of them on the list at this point.
I came on a bit too strong with the riposte. Subutai is on my short list for the near future, since I’m not sure how much of his glory derived from the system the Great Khan put into place. I do also think the ranks of the ancient-mediterranean types need to be thinned a bit.
I’m less sanguine that political skills should be the decisive factor. Some of the guys we’ve eliminated (as well as some remaining on the list) were essentially pure warfighters, but first-rate ones.
Okay, my reading of events boiled down to “he only really beat the Persians once,” but I admit I was skimming. My understanding was that Artemisium was a draw inflicting casualties on the Greeks they could ill afford, and Marathon was not really the result of Themistocles’ generalship. Are you advancing a different interpretation of those events, or something else that I’ve overlooked?
I’d add John Keegan’s qualifier that horse hordes tended to reach the limits of military effectiveness a certain distance beyond the steppe, because the grasslands in “civilized” Europe (especially west of the Hungarian plain) simply cannot support the horseflesh required to mount large nomadic armies. Mongol warriors were supported by strings of up to 18 ponies per man, and they denuded large areas of grass. The filthy horse archers ruled unchallenged within a certain radius of action from their fodder, but they could not go everywhere (at least, not without suffering sufficient loss of horses as to limit their campaigns).
Agree the sandal vandals are a bit dense and some heads will roll.
In general, I am even more stunned to see Napoleon Bonaparte go than I was to see Marse Robert (Lee) knocked out really early and Ol’ Blue Light (Jackson) go last round. I was trying to make a case for him…in fact, I was in the middle of working through Wikipedia’s exhaustive list of Napoleonic-era battles, eliminating all except ones Bonaparte personally commanded, and assigning a won-loss record. But I didn’t finish because it was taking so long! Over and over, “victory…victory…decisive victory…inconclusive…victory…tactical victory…decisive victory…” I don’t think today people remember how complex the period was, and how many times Napoleon completed dazzling concentrations in the face of numerically superior forces and rapid shifts of his center of effort. Sure, he overextended ultimately, but there’s something of a fine line between overextending and not meeting one’s full potential.
Here’s how far I’d gotten:
A
• Battle of Aboukir 2 January – 20 February 1799 Decisive victory
• Battle of Abensberg 20 April 1809 Complete victory
• Siege of Acre 17 March – 20 May 1799 Unsuccessful siege
• Battle of Arcis-sur-Aube 20–21 March 1814 Tactical victory, strategic loss
• Battle of Arcole 15–17 November 1796 Victory
• Battle of Aspern-Essling 22 May 1809 Defeat
• Battle of Auerstadt 14 October 1806 Decisive victory
• Battle of Austerlitz 2 December 1805 Decisive victory
B
• Battle of Bassano 8 September 1796 Victory
• Battle of Bautzen 21 May 1813 Victory
• Battle of Berezina 26–29 November 1812 Tactical defeat, strategic success
• Battle of Borodino 7 September 1812 Pyrrhic victory
C
• Siege of Cádiz 5 February 1810, 24 August 1812 Unsuccessful siege
• Battle of Castiglione 5 August 1796 Victory
• Battle of Champaubert 10 February 1814 Victory
• Battle of Château-Thierry 2 February 1814 Victory
• Battle of Craonne 7 March 1814 Victory
D
• Battle of Dego 14–15 April 1796 Victory
• Battle of Dresden 26–27 August 1813 Victory
E
• Battle of Eckmühl 22 April 1809 Victory
We’re not even through all of “e” yet, the list goes on to “z,” and that’s 15 wins, 2 mixed-results, 2 null contests (abandoned sieges) and one defeat, all personally commanded by Nappy. Bear in mind that even Genghis Khan didn’t face the kind of sustained opposition Napoleon did – he was finally defeated by the sixth coalition formed against him, fighting almost the entire European world at that point plus Russia, and his conduct of the campaign is still admired. The man had his weaknesses but military command was not one of them.
Gustavus Adolphus outlasting him is basically a fluke. I had Bonaparte pegged as a shoo-in for top five at least, and a fighting chance (heh) for the finals. I certainly don’t regard Wellington as his equal; Wellington did defeat him, but just barely, and faced nothing like the sustained worldwide campaigns Nappy had dominated for so long. Logistics in Spain and India are great (although Napoleon also performed logistical miracles), and Wellington belongs somewhere on the list, but he’s just not on the same scale as Napoleon.
Gustavus Adolphus - 2
Themistocles - 2
Lord Nelson - 1
Narrowly escaping my puny wrath this round are Caesar, Scipio, Wellington, and Marlborough, if only because I ran out of votes trying to clean up Gus and pick off a sandal vandal. Anyone amateur barrister of history care to argue Caesar v. Scipio or Wellington v. Marlborough?