My understanding is that Washington was commissioned as a 3 star general during the revolutionary war, and that Grant was commissioned as a 3 star general during the civil war.
What I find odd is that this was referred to as a “lieutenant general”
To be clear, what I find odd is that the highest rank we had was “lieutenant general.” Perhaps I am getting hung up on the origin of the phrase, which, as I understand it, is that the “lieutenant general” was second in command to the “general” (aka 4 star general). Can any of you 18th and 19th military history buffs help me out?
The Continental Army used the traditional ranks that they were used to. Being a small army, they initially saw no need for more than two ranks of general, so they used the lowest two: major general and brigadier general. Later, they promoted Washington to the next higher rank, which is lieutenant general. It might be said that the rank of general existed, but they saw no need to pin it on anyone.
Just to add: “major general” is short for “sergeant major general”, which explains why it’s beneath “lieutenant general”.
Incidentally, George Washington has been officially promoted posthumously, to ensure that no-one ever outranks him. I think he’s currently a 5-star general.
Not 5 stars, that would be (for the Army) General of the Army. George Washington’s official rank is, according to Wikipedia (the most infallible source of factual citeable useable-on-academic-papers-as-a-source information) as “General of the Armies”, which would probably be a six-star general if they had ever gotten around to designing insignia for it (the only other General of the Armies was John Pershing). The highest-starred insignia worn by either general was 4 gold stars by General Pershing, and his gold stars were never officially recognized as an official Army rank insignia, as opposed to the 4 silver stars worn by other generals.
Actually, he has a special rank that’s higher than 5-star. The title is General of the Armies of the United States. Only Pershing has also held this rank, but when promoted to this rank in 1976, Washington was declared to be senior to all other officers. For more see General of the Armies
Thanks everyone for your responses.
Just to clarify, I understand why a lieutenant general outranks a major general.
I think wikipedia does a good job explaining this.
What I’m still not clear on is why it makes sense to have an army where “lieutenant general” is the highest ranking general. To me that is like saying, well, our company is too small to have a CEO so our highest ranking corporate officer is a Vice President.
Now, probably I am just getting too hung up on the ORIGIN of the name “lieutenant general” which is, roughly, “second in command to a general.” If it did once mean that, it doesn’t mean that any more. What it meant, as of the mid 18th century, was, 3 star general.
I suppose when the highest rank we had was “major general” that could be analyzed the same way. I suppose I could equally say, “well but major general is short for ‘sergeant major general’ which is actually third in command behind a general and a lieutenant general”
OK, stop thinking from the top down, and start thinking from the bottom up. A corporal leads maybe a half dozen guys, a sergeant a dozen, and so on up, a Captain finds himself responsible for something like one or two hundred troops. A Lieutenant Colonel commanding a Battalion of three or four companies will be responsible for something in the neighborhood of seven or eight hundred troops.
This goes on as you get more and more troops, but what if you don’t end up with enough troops to justify the higher ranks? Maybe you just top out at two or three stars because to give the guy four stars would just artificially inflate the rank. In short, they wouldn’t be able to give the rank the proper backing to be taken seriously by foreign powers without coming off as overly self-important and silly.
By the way, I feel compelled to add the entirely tangential point that “stop thinking from the top down and start thinking from the bottom up” is usually good advice in my case. Indeed, one of my friends recently (and somewhat forcefully) used almost exactly these words when talking with me about something.
It’s probably advice that I would be well served to start following more often.
Heh, reminds me of something a friend of mine said in a moment of epiphany: "We think outside of the box because, growing up, nobody would ever let us in the box.
I think the US Army Institute of Heraldry department has designed an insignia for this along with the corresponding rank for navy and air force along with a 51 star flag. IIRC it is a star with stars at each of its points but that is according to Wackypedia.
Well, that insignia was never finalized, due to the rank itself being un-conceived with the end of WWII. Douglas MacArthur actually had a promotion package running the channels for General of the Armies, but it got shot down due to there no longer being a need for the rank itself, and thus no rank to promote him into. I guess he had to settle for the title of “Supreme Commander Allied Powers”, the title that went with his posting in Japan after the war.
Yes and no. When mobilizing the large number of divisions, corps, and armies )in the sense of mutiple-corps units of The Army) we had during WWII, a five-star rank became imperative. In addition, the fact that the U.K., with which we were in close alliance and mounting combined operations, had officers at five-star rank suggested that their opposite-number American top officers should hold equivalent rank.
“Field Marshal” was considered but was rejected early on as too ‘European’ sounding. The preference was for a variant on ‘General’, which sounded more ‘American’ to the ears of the time. Ironically, the answer was found in the Royal Navy, whose highest-ranking Admirals were titled ‘Admiral of the Fleet’. This was borrowed for Leahy, King, and Nimitz, and the parallel construction ‘General of the Army’ suggested itself for Marshall and his top subordinates. The fact that GCM would have been “Field Marshal Marshall” was an extremely minor consideration – the key reasons for the title chosen were avoiding sounding Euro-militaristic and an attempt to evoke American traditions. The issue of GCM’s title was in fact noted but it was far from the deciding factor; at most it weighted the anti-Marshall argument to a tiny degree, but the idea to scrap the whole ‘Marshal’ concept and go with some uber-General sort of term had already gotten, well, general consensus by that point.
Yep. Forgot the adverb seriously considered. I had heard that not only was “Field Marshal” to European - it was too German. We can’t have a new rank that the Germans had. Just like in WWI we ate salisbury steak with liberty cabbage and not hamburgers with saurkraut.