Greatest Military Leader elimination game (game thread)

[Kobal2]

Keeping :
Isoroku Yamamoto - 2 points
**Pyrrhus **- 2 point.

Adding :
Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban - 1 point

While I recognize his incredible vision in engineering, on both sides of a siege, he doesn’t stand out by his achievements in other areas of leadership or warfare. He truly was a remarkable man : he turned France into a damn bunker, was a good statesman, a progressive thinker and unlike many in his era seemed to have the well-being of the people in mind. All note- and praiseworthy achievements.
Yet none really fall under the “leadership” header, I think. At the very least, I wouldn’t rank him in the same ballpark as folks like Genghis Khan or Napoleon.

[Sailboat]

Hrm…I’m getting to the part of the game where some of the gaps in my knowledge of military history are making it tough for me to make the best decisions. I know almost nothing about the ancient Chinese guys for example.

Wikipedia say this about Zhuge Liang, however:

From 228 until his death in 234, Zhuge Liang launched five Northern Expeditions against Cao Wei, but all except one failed.

While defeat is not actually a disqualification IMHO, continuing defeat is enough to prompt me throw some votes against this guy.

Zhuge Liang - 2
Flavius Aetius - 1
Mehmet the Conqueror - 2

[MOIDALIZE]

@Sitnam

@MOIDALIZE

I don’t know…Giap? But what did Vorbeck accomplish, really? I get that he was outnumbered and “never lost,” but so what? He was a successful raider in a non-priority theater of the war, fighting against British officers famed for being incompetent buffoons. Nothing he did would have changed the outcome of the war, and he only seemed to have fought only two major engagements (Tanga, where he repelled a badly executed amphibious landing made mainly by poorly trained Indian troops, and Mahiwa, which was a Pyrrhic victory), which suggests to me that he was either overly cautious with his force, or didn’t have the manpower and supplies to affect the situation any more than he did.

A fine leader, but not particularly exceptional.

The other German colonies were quickly crushed or surrendered, the German East African governor and Berlin itself told him to surrender yet he took 2600 German recruits and 2500 African’s on a world wind four year tour of hassle for the British government. Fed up, in march 1916 the British tried to finish him off with Gen. J.C. Smuts and 45,000 men. Which were men that could have been badly needed in Gallipoli 2 months earlier. At Mahiwa he lost 520 men killed or wounded to the British 2,700 killed or wounded. But the best part of Lettow-Vorbeck’s strategy is that he DIDN’T fight many battles, he just led his pursuers around while the African countryside killed off their support animals. According to here, “More than 300,000 troops were deployed during the course of the war to hem in and defeat Lettow’s army, yet he did not suffer a single defeat. The Allies suffered sixty thousand casualties including twenty thousand British and Indian dead in East Africa during the war.”

That 60,000 casualties figure is rather vague. Does it include the tens of thousands of Africans that portered supplies all over East Africa on a wild goose chase who ended up overworked and diseased?

As for the 300,000 troops figure, I’m betting that figure includes more than just soldiers; that probably includes support and naval personnel. Wikipedia lists about 10,000 Commonwealth soldiers killed in action and by disease, and the bulk of the British forces after 1916 were African recruits, so it’s not like Vorbeck was able to bleed off significant chunks of British manpower over the course of the war.

Also, remember what war this was. The side that maintained the defensive tended to have a significant advantage over the attacker.

[SecretaryofEvil]

@Tamerlane

@SecretaryofEvil

Nobody has yet to complain that Julius Caesar had better armor than the Celts

The Celts invented chainmail, which was later adopted by the Romans ;).

Oft-stated but unproven. In fact as far as I know there is not a shred of archaeological evidence that the Huns used stirrups. The earliest evidence for paired stirrups in Europe is in 7th century Avar grave sites. One argument that the Huns didn’t have them is that we don’t really see their use in Europe until Carolingian times ( after contract with the aforementioned Avars ), despite the facts that Germanic armies that fought for and against them made extensive use of cavalry and would have seemed likely to adopt them. For that matter Flavius Aetius lived with the Huns as a hostage and made heavy use of Hun troops in some of his campaigns and the late Romans certainly didn’t adopt them either.

Of course current thinking is that stirrups weren’t as profound an advance as was once thought.

Cortez won some of his early victories when he was outnumbered 50 to 1, and he did so with no native allies, few horses, and less than 50 firearms.

Well, the first major engagement he fought ( when he had a couple hundred Totonac porters, but apparently few warriors ) was against the Tlaxcalans and according to the eyewitness Castillo, the Spaniards were very nearly wiped out by the younger Xicotencatl. It wasn’t Cortes’ skill that saved the day, but dissension in the Tlaxcalan ranks.

Cortes then advanced into Cholula with an initial force of 1,000 Tlaxcalteca ( more than twice as many native warriors as there were Spaniards ). By the time the several hundred Spanish troops had first arrived in Tenochitlan they were backed by a purported 3,000 native troops ( as opposed to 400-odd Spaniards at that point ).

His night ambush of Narvaez was quite successful and good thinking. But it involved rushing in under cover of night and a rain storm, bulling through a few guards, then grabbing Narvaez and threatening to kill him if he didn’t surrender, which he promptly did - it wasn’t really a battle. Meanwhile the expulsion of the Spanish from Tenochitlan shortly thereafter was a bloody debacle, with very heavy casualties.

What seems to be what really destroyed the Aztecs in the end was smallpox, particularly in densely populated Tenochitlan, where it annihilated almost half the populace. While Cortez seems like a brave, quick-thinking leader, given the huge helping hand of disease in particular in the Aztec conquest, I can’t help feeling he is perhaps a bit overrated as a great conqueror.

True, but orchestrating a successful night ambush in a age before radios, night vision, or even electric light is no simple task. A lot can go wrong, and it takes a large amount of planning and coordination to succeed. Would you argue that Washington’s victory at Trenton was not a piece of tactical excellence just because it was a surprise attack?

That’s very interesting about the stirrups. Do you know of any reason why secondary histories often credit the Huns for introducing stirrups to Europe? Believe it or not, I’m looking at a secondary source which makes said claim about the Huns and stirrups, but you’re right, it doesn’t cite any primary source examples.

[Mr.Excellent]

@Tamerlane

Of course current thinking is that stirrups weren’t as profound an advance as was once thought.

Why is this?

[Tamerlane]

@SecretaryofEvil

Would you argue that Washington’s victory at Trenton was not a piece of tactical excellence just because it was a surprise attack?

No, but there was hard fighting at Trenton. There wasn’t any in the encounter with Narvaez. One can credit Cortes with an audacious plan, but it doesn’t really speak to his ability to a commander on a battlefield much. Again it was essentially a quick rush through a sleeping camp to grab the commander out of bed. Smart, but not a real fight.

Cortes in no ways comes off as incompetent. Just a candidate to go early on such a short list :).

That’s very interesting about the stirrups. Do you know of any reason why secondary histories often credit the Huns for introducing stirrups to Europe?

Not a clue. It is a very pervasive meme, but various experts on the Huns like Maenchen-Helfen have pointed out that there just isn’t any evidence - nothing written in chronicles and no preserved material. There is much contemporary talk of what superb horsemen the Huns are, we have preserved saddle remnants, we know the didn’t use spurs but rather whips ( with plenty of preserved whip handles ). But nothing about stirrups.

They may well have used perishable leather toe loops ( a much older innovation ), but those aren’t considered real stirrups of the “revolutionary” type. And it’s worth noting that this meme often suggests that the Huns both invented stirrups ( zero evidence ) and also introduced them into Europe ( despite them not coming into common use until several centuries later ).

@Mr.Excellent

@Tamerlane

Of course current thinking is that stirrups weren’t as profound an advance as was once thought.

Why is this?

Mostly in that they appear to be a lot less necessary to armored shock cavalry than was once thought. We not quite sure exactly how Alexander’s hetairoi operated, but we have plenty of examples of post-Alexandrian shock cavalry that made no use of them at all ( early Persian cataphracts for instance, that may have used saddle loops for grounding lances instead ).

Stirrups provide a more stable platform for leaning in particular and enhance riding endurance. They surely do give more flexibility to a mounted archer like a Hun ( hence perhaps some of the speculation in that corner ), who can use stirrups to elevate better. They may also offer a bit of an advantage in a hand-to-hand melee. But they probably aren’t the cause of the rise of the feudal knight in Europe as was once widely speculated and accepted.

[Tamerlane]

Marc Mitscher - 2.

Philip Sheridan - 2. I agree another culling from the CW makes sense at this point. Solid general, by Civil War standards anyway, with some notable success and a few notable failures. Not good enough.

Orde Wingate - 1. Very interesting regular-irregular commander, but fucked up more than once in Burma.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

The votes in our eighth round:

Marc Mitscher - 8
Flavius Aetius - 5
Mehmet the Conqueror -5
Pyrrhus - 5

Tsao Tsao (also Cao Cao); Orde Wingate - 4 each
Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, Philip Sheridan - 3
U.S. Grant, Kong Ming/Zhuge Liang, William T. Sherman, Yamamoto Isoroku - 2 each
Hugh Dowding, Vo Nguyen Giap, Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, George Washington - 1 each

The top four are now gone. That leaves:

Akbar the Great: Conquered much of India
Alexander the Great: Conquered the known world
Attila the Hun: Scourge of God, and Rome.
Belisarius: Justinian’s hammer
Napoleon Bonaparte: Conquered most of Europe
Sir Isaac Brock: Saved Canada against overwhelming odds
Arthur Currie: Vimy Ridge; only sane WW1 leader?
Moshe Dayan: Eye-patched Israeli commander
Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter: Dutch admiral, naval star
Hugh Dowding: Won Battle of Britain
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Defeated Nazis in Western Europe
Frederick the Great: Prussian king and battlefield genius
Gaius Marius: Most important military reforms ever?
Genghis Khan: Built the perfect war machine
Vo Nguyen Giap: Won Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam
Ulysses S. Grant: Won final victory for Union
Gustavus Adolphus: Made Sweden a great power
Hannibal: Greatest tactical genius?
Henry V: Warrior-king; won at Agincourt
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson: Embodiment of maneuver and offense
John Paul Jones: Great American, Russian naval commander
Julius Caesar: Rome’s most brilliant commander
Khalid ibn al-Walid: Architect of the Arab conquests.
Kong Ming/Zhuge Liang: Great Chinese tactician
Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck: Evaded the British in Africa
Erich von Manstein: His plan conquered France
Duke of Marlborough: Master of early modern war
Bernard Montgomery: British commander at El Alamein
Lord Nelson: Royal Navy admiral; Trafalgar victor
Oda Nobunaga: First great unifier of Japan
George Patton: Armored warfare advocate
Phillip II of Macedon: Alexander’s father, set the stage
Erwin Rommel: Germany’s Desert Fox
Scipio Africanus: Stopped Carthage and Hannibal
Philip “Little Phil” Sheridan: Grant’s troubleshooter; Indian fighter extraordinaire
William Tecumseh Sherman: Logistics, maneuver as strategic warfare
Subutai: Genghis Khan’s top general
Themistocles: Victor of Marathon, Artemisium, Salamis
Timur-e-Lang: The scourge of Western Asia
Togo Heihachiro: Japanese naval victor against Russians
Tsao Tsao (also Cao Cao): Chinese emperor, general
Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban: Great French military engineer
George Washington: Determined general; won American independence
Duke of Wellington: Successes in India; thrashed Napoleon
Orde Wingate: Unorthodox leader in Africa, Asia
Yamamoto Isoroku: WW2 Japanese naval leader
Yi-Sun Shin: Noteworthy Korean admiral
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

The next round will conclude at noon EST on Mon. Sept. 6. Same rules as before.

[MOIDALIZE]

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck - 2

Orde Wingate - 2

Hugh Dowding - 1

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Orde Wingate - just not on the same level as the real military geniuses on the list - 2
Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck - ditto - 2
Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban - ditto; more an engineer than a battlefield champion - 1

[Quartz]

2 - William Tecumseh Sherman
2 - Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck - not on the same level
1 - Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban - as noted more an engineer than a battlefield champion

[Sternvogel]

All new blood this round for me:

Tsao Tsao (also Cao Cao) – 2 points
Orde Wingate – 2 points
Hugh Dowding – 1 point

[Kobal2]

Sticking with :
Isoroku Yamamoto - 2 points
Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban - 1 point
adding :
Orde Wingate - 2 points. Didn’t even know who he was, but he seems popular so what the hell. Apparently he was also crazier than a shithouse rat - not necessarily a bad thing to be in the military, but…

[Elendil_s_Heir]

The votes in our ninth round:

Orde Wingate - 8
Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck - 6
Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban - 4

Hugh Dowding, William T. Sherman, Tsao Tsao (also Cao Cao), Yamamoto Isoroku - 2 each

The top three are now gone. That leaves:

Akbar the Great: Conquered much of India
Alexander the Great: Conquered the known world
Attila the Hun: Scourge of God, and Rome.
Belisarius: Justinian’s hammer
Napoleon Bonaparte: Conquered most of Europe
Sir Isaac Brock: Saved Canada against overwhelming odds
Arthur Currie: Vimy Ridge; only sane WW1 leader?
Moshe Dayan: Eye-patched Israeli commander
Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter: Dutch admiral, naval star
Hugh Dowding: Won Battle of Britain
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Defeated Nazis in Western Europe
Frederick the Great: Prussian king and battlefield genius
Gaius Marius: Most important military reforms ever?
Genghis Khan: Built the perfect war machine
Vo Nguyen Giap: Won Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam
Ulysses S. Grant: Won final victory for Union
Gustavus Adolphus: Made Sweden a great power
Hannibal: Greatest tactical genius?
Henry V: Warrior-king; won at Agincourt
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson: Embodiment of maneuver and offense
John Paul Jones: Great American, Russian naval commander
Julius Caesar: Rome’s most brilliant commander
Khalid ibn al-Walid: Architect of the Arab conquests.
Kong Ming/Zhuge Liang: Great Chinese tactician
Erich von Manstein: His plan conquered France
Duke of Marlborough: Master of early modern war
Bernard Montgomery: British commander at El Alamein
Lord Nelson: Royal Navy admiral; Trafalgar victor
Oda Nobunaga: First great unifier of Japan
George Patton: Armored warfare advocate
Phillip II of Macedon: Alexander’s father, set the stage
Erwin Rommel: Germany’s Desert Fox
Scipio Africanus: Stopped Carthage and Hannibal
Philip “Little Phil” Sheridan: Grant’s troubleshooter; Indian fighter extraordinaire
William Tecumseh Sherman: Logistics, maneuver as strategic warfare
Subutai: Genghis Khan’s top general
Themistocles: Victor of Marathon, Artemisium, Salamis
Timur-e-Lang: The scourge of Western Asia
Togo Heihachiro: Japanese naval victor against Russians
Tsao Tsao (also Cao Cao): Chinese emperor, general
George Washington: Determined general; won American independence
Duke of Wellington: Successes in India; thrashed Napoleon
Yamamoto Isoroku: WW2 Japanese naval leader
Yi-Sun Shin: Noteworthy Korean admiral
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

The next round will conclude at noon EST on Weds. Sept. 8. Same rules as before.

Proposed rule for the round after that: To move this along, I was thinking of giving each player three “killer” votes, any one of which will kill a leader. Each player would also have a single “save” vote, to keep a leader in the running who would otherwise have died from a vote cast in that round.

Please vote Y/N on this proposed rule, which, with a majority vote, would be used in the round ending on Fri. Sept. 10.

[candide]

I noticed this thread just this morning and had to hurry off to work before I got to cast a vote. And I do want to participate but I shouldn’t vote whether casting “killer” or “saving” votes might be allowed. I haven’t been participating long enough. But I do have thoughts:

I think giving everyone participating 3 “killer” votes per round is extreme. Especially if it only takes one killer vote to eliminate a contestant and a “save” vote can be held until moments before the deadline to remove a “killed” contestant from elimination. Ebay is a wonderful tool, but I don’t think this is the proper application.

It should, in my mind, take more than one “killer” vote of those participating to eliminate a contender in a given round.

Those are the totality of my thoughts on that matter and I think the eliminations so far have been spot on.

But, before I cast my votes, I wonder why Sir Isaac Brock has thus far gotten no votes (at least as far as I can tell)? Can anyone defend his inclusion? I don’t mean to denigrate Canadian military endeavor, but he is the only Western military leader still on the list who I had never heard of. How are his accomplishments at Detroit more important than O.H. Perry’s at Lake Erie which is temporally and geographically similar?

Can anyone make a case for him?

[Sternvogel]

Once more into the breach:

Tsao Tsao (also Cao Cao) – 2 points
Hugh Dowding – 2 points

Joining the fray:

Yamamoto Isaroku – 1 point

I’d prefer to see each player allowed only one “kill” and one “save” to be used at any point during the game. If the only choices are the 3:1 option or no change, I cast a vote for the latter.

[Sailboat]

Kong Ming/Zhuge Liang - 2
Moshe Dayan - 1
Henry V - 2

Dayan’s combat experience seems to have been in the 1948 war for independence and in 1956. But he was also Defense Minster during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. His Wikipedia page, at least, does not seem to cover him with laurels for those incidents:

Although Dayan did not take part in most of the planning before the Six-Day War of June 1967…

He was still in that post when the Yom Kippur War began catastrophically for Israel on 6 October 1973. As the highest-ranking official responsible for military planning, Dayan may bear part of the responsibility for the Israeli leadership having missed the signs for the upcoming war. In the hours preceding the war, Dayan chose not to order a full mobilization or a preemptive strike against the Egyptians and the Syrians. He assumed that Israel would be able to win easily even if the Arabs attacked…

I love Shakespeare’s speeches in Henry V, but the real king seems less a candidate for apotheosis than many of the gods of war we have here. the more one reads about it, the more Agincourt seems almost a phenomenon than a planned battle; panic and poor decisions led the French into a kind of static slaughter all but unique in warfare. Aside from that, his career seems to consist of the chevauchée, a practice of questionable military virtue largely involving picking on the unarmed, and a siege in which the French fell more due to infighting than by storm. And that’s leaving out the moral issues of the ‘slaughter of prisoners’ order at Agincourt and the time he allowed women and children trapped between the besieged city and his own lines to starve to death.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

And as to the proposed rule, Sailboat?

[Sailboat]

@candide

I noticed this thread just this morning and had to hurry off to work before I got to cast a vote. And I do want to participate…

Welcome to the thread! a fun little timewaster for grognards and military history buffs.

@candide

But, before I cast my votes, I wonder why Sir Isaac Brock has thus far gotten no votes (at least as far as I can tell)? Can anyone defend his inclusion?

Not my nomination, and I don’t intend to spend a lot of time typing about him, but it appears from a quick Googling that he:

[ul]
[li]Exercised considerable foresight in preparing the Canadian military for a war with the fledgling US that few foresaw[/li][li]Struck early in that war and pressed on, keeping the offensive going as far as his limited resources permitted[/li][li]Suffered no apparent defeats[/li][li]Held together a difficult, culturally diverse coalition (with Native Americans)[/li][li]And has the unusually rare distinction of having invaded the US successfully – more or less on a shoestring[/li][/ul]

Given all that, I am reluctant to consider him an early pick for elimination.

Lastly, regarding kill/save votes, I have no particular preference for that, BUT, I would advocate a modification to any such rule.

The principal fun for me in this thread is reading and writing about the historical figures and their trials and accomplishments. I would urge that that in order to make any kill or save vote, the voter should e required to at least briefly write a critique or defense explaining the reasoning. Ordinary votes wouldn’t require any such critique or defense, but the special votes would. More chat = more fun!

[candide]

@Sailboat

Not my nomination, and I don’t intend to spend a lot of time typing about him, but it appears from a quick Googling that he:

[ul]
[li]Exercised considerable foresight in preparing the Canadian military for a war with the fledgling US that few foresaw[/li][li]Struck early in that war and pressed on, keeping the offensive going as far as his limited resources permitted[/li][li]Suffered no apparent defeats[/li][li]Held together a difficult, culturally diverse coalition (with Native Americans)[/li][li]And has the unusually rare distinction of having invaded the US successfully – more or less on a shoestring[/li][/ul]

Given all that, I am reluctant to consider him an early pick for elimination.

I googled him, too. And I learned that he won one fort on the outskirts of the United States. During the Napoleonic wars. The War of 1812 was inconsequential in the geopolitical scheme of things in the first half of the 19th Century. And, he died in the next major battle he fought. The United States did not, then, overrun western Canada (of that age).

Brock was a contemporary of Napoleon, Arthur Wellesley and Horatio Nelson, the only three remaining Westerners on the list from the Napoleonic era.

Isaac Brock lived in the age of Ney and von Blucher and of Toussaint Louveture and Andrew Jackson – great soldiers – men who aren’t on the list. You tell me Isaac Brock deserves to be categorized a great leader above those men? In my mind, I don’t think so.

Consequently, I don’t believe he belongs on the list,