Thank you, what a great read.
Keep 'em coming, folks!
Offhand, the only person who comes to mind is:
William Hull: surrendered peacefully to inferior forces.
By the by, who was responsible for Gallipoli?
Pyrrhus won.
Carlo di Persano - Loser of Lissa
He moved his command from a ship to another, but failed to tell his ships about it, so they were looking for the masts of the wrong ship for instructions all thru the battle. He spent much of the crucial stages in a boat. He also declared victory - only to be thrown out of the navy for cowardice later.
The cowardice will not suffice for the title - with only that he could have saved his superior forces by refusing to fight. You need genuine stupidity to loose that spectacularly.
Sure, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.
I’d argue he was a de facto battlefield commander due to his micromanagement of some engagements.
He may have spelled the Saint’s name with a single “n,” but that doesn’t mean he spelled his own name with one. The Spanish version of Wiki has it as Santa Anna, and includes a copy of his signature, showing that that was the way he signed his own name.
I’ve just stumbled across this page, and now have two more:
Gaius Terentius Varro – Blamed for defeat at Cannae
Tiberius Sempronius Longus – Lost to Carthage at Trebia
Still looking for my final duo…
No, I don’t think so. He was certainly a dumb, meddling national leader with delusions of tactical acumen, but he was not a battlefield commander. Disqualified from this game.
Oh, Romans…
For my last nomination
Gaius Claudius Glaber: why fortify against slaves?
I’m not sure if a captain of one ship counts but if De Chaumareix’s command of the Meduse isn’t the perfect storm of incompetence and cowardice I don’t know what is.
Napoleon III - Misadventures to many to name, but primarily added for foolishly declaring war on Prussia, getting clobbered in a double envelopment at Sedan, then watching as Parisians lived on rats.
George B. McClellan - A good organizer but willingly dithered in spite of Lincoln’s demands so he could run on an appeasement platform in the next presidential election. I don’t know if that’s treason, but it smells like it.
Does this qualify, though? Per Wikipedia, this was just a shipwreck - albeit of a military vessel, but it doesn’t really reflect battlefield incompetence.
The shipwreck was bad enough but it was the stuff after that nearly brought down the government when the report was released in papers.
I’ve taken my time reviewing my list of villains. Some of them have already been nominated.
I’ll start with two who actually had some successes, but whose search for personal glory or the aggrandizement of their arm of the service led many of their followers or dependents to unnecessary deaths:
Hugh Judson Kilpatrick – Nicknamed “Kill Cavalry” for reason
Admiral Ernest J. King – Disastrously opposed convoy, Anglophobic
Less controversially, I will finish with three figures from high command who each led a series of disastrous defeats almost uninterrupted by successes, were eventually hated by their men, and were either instrumental in losing their wars or, in one case, their country’s military reputation). Their military sins are many, and were hard to boil down to five words:
John Bell Hood – Recklessly stupid, lost Atlanta, West
Hermann Goering – Prancing figurehead misused Luftwaffe
Luigi Cadorna – Lost 12 consecutively, hated, cruel
Thanks, Sailboat. I hoping someone would nominate John Bell Hood. I just didn’t want to nominate too many Civil War generals myself.
The Meduse’s commander’s incompetence wasn’t on the battlefield, as such, so I’ll exclude it.
Did Napoleon III actually exercise battlefield command, or was he just a bungling, meddling national leader a la Hitler?
I specifically looked for that. It appears that Sir Ian Hamilton had overall command of the expedition, and could be blamed for the decision to telegraph the assault by bombarding months before landing troops…but someone else had ground command…or nobody. Wikipedia doesn’t even list an overall ground commander, and only names the ground commander of one unit in the initial landings. The follow-up landings at Suvla Bay were under Sir Frederick Stopford, who was responsible for immediately going to ground on the exposed beaches and leaving the heights in Ottoman hands.
Given Churchill’s insistence and the top-heavy assortment of admirals and generals along for the whole affair, I think perhaps one of the reasons it played out the way it did may have been because it was sort of a committee effort with too many meddlers.
Edit: The difficulty with fingering one man for the Gallipoli disaster deterred me from nominating anyone for it. 
I found that was the case with a number of disasters; I ended up nominating someone for the Russian defeat in the war with Japan, but he was only in for the final act. The Spanish Armada also was a disaster with many authors, as was the Syracuse expedition.