Disgaree. In all three areas, Strategy, Logistics and Tactical ability, Grant was by far Lee’s superior, especially the first two. Should be remembered at the time of the 1864 campaign, Grant was actually not the commander on the ground, that was Meade he was Gereral in Chief.
Grant showed his brilliance as a tatician at Vickburg and at Chantanooga. Far superior to anything Lee ever did.
Sir, that entire analysis is one of the most incredibly inspid things posted here on the dope. It is a giant wreck of historical crap, and could not stand up to the most facile examination. I do not claim to be an expert on the Civil War - but I can tell for a damn fact that you clearly don’t know much more than a particularly shallow high school history textbook.
The single most telling and blatantly obvious issue that Grant most specifically did aim to manuever around Lee. In fact, every single movement he made in the entire Eastern canmpaign was wholly and utter devoted to flanking Lee.
Every. Last. Movement.
Period.
It was Lee who deliberately turned it into a battle of attrition - not because he wanted to, but because it was his only method of delaying defeat. And he knew that by the time Grant and Sherman moved, his only chance lay in delaying the inevitable until a more favorable President McClellan might halt the war. I do not claim to blame his for this, but it is an absolute fact: he presented Grant repeatedly with the choice of (A) Retreat, which Grant was not going to do, or (B) attack through, and force Lee back into siege warfare. retreat would have functionally meant either defeat in the war or its extension for even longer, so Grant opted for victory. But at every turn he worked to flank Lee and force him into open battle or taway from his supplies, despite a horribly incompetent Junior Officer Corp (indeed, it’s very likely that Grant would have quite swiftly broken Lee had the initiative been there).
You also VERY clearly don’t understand the relative timing of events. Even as late as Appamatox, Sherman wasn’t very close to Virginia, being held in place by a skeleton crew under Johnson. He could not have easily come up behind Lee, because it took an incredibly long time to get to Atlanta, march through Georgia and South Carolina, and then up to North Carolina. Without Grant holding Lee’s army in place and preventing reinforcements, he probably wouldn’t have gotten there at all, because Lee would have sent reinforcements to Johnson before Sherman even reached Atlanta! (Just, in fact, as was done repeatedly and to bloody effect numerous times before.)
Zhukov was not a one-plan general who just threw all the soldiers he had into the face of the enemy. He understood it made no sense to fight the Germans where they were strongest. He would commit enough soldiers to hold a defensive line, withdraw when necessary to keep the line from breaking, and hold reserves for a counter-attack when the Germans over-extended themselves.
Nor did he have a free hand. Stalin always kept his Marshals competing with each other. He played Konev and Rokossovsky off against Zhukov so none of them could be sure of their position.
Different wars, but I think Currie and Monash were both excellent commanders of the 20th Century.
And Zhukov- he helped get rid of Beria so he deserves a medal for that.
I appreciate your honesty :D.
I’m not an expert either, my opinion on Grant’s campaign to sizeable extent derives from Bevin Alexander, who wrote ( among other things ):
*Grant envisioned the campaigns to end the war as direct attacks with little subtlety. By 1864, the frontal assaults had become extremely dangerous and costly…Grant ignored this reality because he could think of no other course of action and because Lincoln assured him of full support and unrestricted access to the manpower of the North. Consequently, Grant adopted a brutally simple strategy: to make repeated hammer blows against Confederate field fortifications, beating down the enemy by main strength. The prospects were for casualties on a scale even more enormous than had been suffered previously.
…These campaigns won the Civil War for the North when the strategy of Ulysses S. Grant came close to losing it.*
I said as much in the post you quoted in the very first line. Actually I said he essayed flanking movements, which he did. And he failed every time and it ended with him launching a frontal assault. BA again:
Sherman acted far more wisely than Grant in Virginia. After the Army of the Potomac had clashed headlong with Lee in the Wilderness on May 5-7, 1864, Grant ordered a left flank march to Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lee beat him there and Grant assaulted his entrenchments directly, suffering severe losses but failing to break the Confederate line. Grant then slipped off southeastward, ending at Cold Harbor, only few miles northeast of Richmond, where again he attacked frontally, with horrendous casualties. In a month’s campaign Grant lost 55,000 men, nearly half his original strength, and nearly double Lee’s losses. Grant had ruined the offensive power of his army.
and…
Alexander, I guess it should be said, while praising the tactical ability of Grant ( at Vicksburg ) and Lee, is a far bigger fan of the strategic minds of Jackson and Sherman.
Now where Alexander himself might accuse me of being facile and you may be correct, is in the assumption that unengaged, Lee might not have tried to combine with Johnston, which Sherman feared. Under the circumstance he was unwilling when Johnston suggested it. It’s my guess that with Grant’s ( undamaged ) army threatening but not engaging or only harassing and threatening to engage, the fixation on Richmond would have been his ( and Davis’ ) undoing regardless, but I’ll admit I could really be wrong on that. The thing is that seriously reinforcing Johnston in the face of Grant’s much larger army would have left him open to devastating blow from Grant, that might have actually broken through and ended the war right there. Win-win. Or lose-lose if I’m wrong, I guess.
As for timing, while not irrelevant, it isn’t important. I’m not concerned about what did happen in my scenario, as much as what might have happened. I’ll readily admit the war might have dragged on a bit longer.
So I’m not entirely pulling this out of my ass, maybe just substantially. I’ve read a moderate amount on the period ( the majority of it non-military ), but I’ll readily admit I am nowhere near as informed as some, including many on this board.
But most insipid? Really? Well, alright…but…MOST insipid :p?
A quibble, if you don’t mind. A minor point, perhaps, but that’s the trouble with quibbles…
Grant’s boss could lose an election, and the war might be brought to a negotiated end without any real resolution. Zhukov’s boss had no such worries.
Thanks for the info about General Heinrici-he had a lot of courage (to defy Hitler’s orders).
I wonder why Hitler never seemed to grasp the need for intelligent defense…rather than ordering his troops to stand pat and fight to the death.
According to the Air Command and Staff College research paper: A MILITARY LEADERSHIP ANALYSIS OF ADOLF HITLER by Dr. Richard Muller.
He’s still well-thought-of in three hundred years, apparently: USS Zhukov | Memory Alpha | Fandom
There’s three reasons for this:
Hitler was not as bright as he’s credited for being. He was clever about politics, but there’s a pretty fair amount of contemporary evidence that he had a lot of difficulty understanding warfare above the regimental level. He just didn’t have any training in it. It looks easy to push little flags around a big map table. In fact, it’s a damn career. You can no more just turn yourself into a talented supreme commander by putting on a uniform than you can turn yourself into a skilled heart surgeon by washing your hands and putting on a mask.
You’re simplifying Hitler’s weaknesses as a leader to some degree; it wasn’t just that he didn’t like retreating, but that he did not grasp the implications of logistics, industry, and technology in the German war effort. Hitler was fascinated by gadgetry but didn’t really understand the need to have professionals running the systems for production and delivery of war materiel. I would argue that the Nazis’ inability to create a coherent war economy plan had far more to do with them losing the war than any tactical failures.
Finally,
I find it oddly fitting to the nature of “The Good War” that one of the main causes of the downfalls of the Nazis was that their ideology prevented them from optimizing their economy. Granted, a lot of it was just garden-variety inefficiencies, corruption, and/or their doubled political structures, but a lot of the inefficiencies were directly due to misogyny and racism (with a helping of indirect inefficiencies added on when they invaded Russia, but who knows how much the Russians would have cooperated with them even if they wouldn’t have treated them so poorly.)
I’m currently reading a history of World War II that goes into a great detail about the Eastern Front. Although the author doesn’t dwell on it, I’m continually impressed by the Russian Army’s logistics. Not only continually raising more troops, but getting them quickly to the pressure points along a front that ranged from Leningrad to the Crimea. Assuming Zhukov was the strategist behind the movement of men and material, he was brilliant.
Hitler’s no retreat policy wasn’t irrational. As Hitler himself once pointed out, there were no defensive lines behind the front - if the Germans retreated in the face of a Soviet attack they would just keep falling back until they reached Berlin. And it’s also true that when German forces did try to retreat they were usually caught out in the open and overrun by the Soviets anyway. So the stupid idea was not telling the Germans to hold their positions, it was sending the Germans out to an indefensible position in the first place.
Hitler also screwed up Germany’s military economy. It was due to his paranoia. He was afraid of rivals so he always kept his top follwers divided up and had them competing against each other for influence - this led to a lot of duplicated and wasted effort. And he was remembered the civil unrest due to economic hardships in the later years of World War I and feared a simular public uprising against his regime - so he insisted throughout the war on diverting resources to the civilian economy to placate public opinion.
The “no retreat” policy you describe doesn’t sound irrational - I’m not a military wonk, so that doesn’t mean much, but that policy sounds not-crazy. That being said, the policy that Hitler actually enacted does seem to have been nuts, insofar as it precluded limited, tactical retreats that were meant to be reversed swiftly - retreats that would almost certainly not have fallen back to Berlin.
By the time Hitler issued his no retreat order there was no longer any realistic prospect of reversing tactical retreats and regaining lost ground - the Soviet advantage was growing and the Germans were not going to regain it. So the logic was that if the Red Army attacked and the Wehrmacht pulled back fifty miles, it might save some troops that day. But the only real result would be the Red Army would attack them again at the new front line - and the new front line was no more defensible than the original one (actually less so because some troops would be lost during the withdrawal). So the two choices ultimately were keep pulling back from battle or make a stand and fight.
Ah, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, a wonderful book that every wannabee armchair general should read. 
IIRC Dixon puts the boot even more firmly into Himmler, and for much the same reason.
There’s an interesting story about Stalin & Zhukov: it’s late 1941 and the panzer divisions are menacing Moscow. Zhukov and another senior general have just had a dispiriting meeting with Uncle Joe, who has ranted and raved at them Hitler-style. The two generals repair to the other side of the large conference room and whisper to each other, “What are we going to do?”, “We can’t save Moscow if it goes on like this” etc. Stalin overhears them (big ears), but instead of going ballistic, he quietly asks them what they need. This reaction contrasts rather strongly with Hitler foaming away endlessly in the bunker as the Red Army closes in 4 years later.
Anyway, count me in the Zhukov-was-good camp. He was Stalin’s fire brigade for most of the war, on the front that really mattered.
Some of that sounds a little spurious. Things like sexual hangups, a belief in the occult, and racism might be undesirable personality traits in general but why would they be particularly bad in a military leader? I’m sure there have been some great generals who’ve had those traits.
Bingo, Bingo, Bingo. Having the initiative is extremely important. Grant keeping Lee pinned meant that Lee couldn’t come up with some miracle maneuvering and somehow save the day.
Lee KNEW Grant was coming and would keep coming. This meant he couldn’t pull off some miraculous sneaky shit because if he tried…Grant would be coming. It took all Lee had to keep grant back.
Now, you could argue that Lee couldn’t have done anything…but if you were the Union commander…would you take that chance knowing Lee’s previous exploits?
In addition, one part of war is psychological. The South knew they were in deep shit…would they have thought the same if no fighting was really happening in Virginia?
Well, exactly what was the point of keeping the Wehrmacht bottled up in Stalingrad? Hitler could have pulled his armies back to the western shore of the Volga, where they could have established a defensive line.
But no-“stand and die”-resulted in a huge disaster.
If I had been a top level Nazi, I would have been planning my escape (to Argentina) at about this time…
IIRC the German high command believed that the Russians had no reserves left, so they put Romanians, Italians and Bulgarian troops to protect the flanks on the north and south of Stalingrad. Zhukov amassed six armies (So much for German intelligence) north and south of Stalingrad and hit first running over the Romanians and Italians with tanks and then encircling the city, The German sixth army could still break out but Hitler told Paulus to stay.
After surrounding the sixth army the Russians thought that they had surrounded only 75,000 in fact 250,000 Germans troops were done for. It was a disaster for the Germans.