No, he couldn’t. BY the time he’d been handed command of anything, Germany was completely screwed. And it’s not as if his presence brought about disaster in any sense of the word. He launched some counter-attacks which were, in fact, briefly effective in holding off the Americans and the Russians. However, there was absolutely no chance of victory, and they simply couldn’t sustain an offensive at that point in time. And once he was out of either command, well, they obviously fell back but hardly collapsed. He was inept, but he was also a complete newb being handed a losing hand. He played it poorly, but no more poorly than one would expect.
The results of our 11th round of voting:
Maximilian von Prittwitz - 8
William Westmoreland - 4
William Calley, Rodolfo Graziani - 3 each
Braxton Bragg, Crassus - 1 each
The boldfaced leader(s) above are eliminated. That leaves:
Abdel Hakim Amer: Panicked, lost Sinai in 1967
Oreste Baratieri: Routed by Ethiopians at Adowa
Braxton Bragg: Bungling, irritating Confederate general
Duke of Buckingham: Useless sycophant, incompetent military leader
Ambrose E. Burnside: Defeat from jaws of victory
Luigi Cadorna: Lost twelve consecutively; hated, cruel
William Calley: Ordered, led My Lai Massacre
Charles Alexander of Lorraine: Sustained career of incompetence
Charles le Temeraire: Rash rather than “Bold”
Crassus: Army pincushioned by Parthians
Carlo di Persano: Loser of Lissa
William George Keith Elphinstone: Lost an army in Afghanistan
Maurice Gamelin: Relied on the Maginot Line
Horatio Gates: Fled headlong from Camden, S.C.
Gaius Claudius Glaber: Why fortify against slaves?
Hermann Goering: Prancing figurehead misused Luftwaffe
Rodolfo Graziani: Trounced in North Africa
Douglas Haig: Incompetent British WWI general
Paul D. Harkins: Ignorant, overoptimistic in Vietnam
Heinrich Himmler: Nazi botched every field command
John Bell Hood: Recklessly stupid, lost Atlanta, West
William Hull: Surrendered peacefully to inferior forces
Thom Karremans: Toasted Mladić, allowed Srebenica massacre
Hugh Judson Kilpatrick: Nicknamed “Kill Cavalry” for reason
James Ledlie: Drunk during Battle of Crater
Tiberius Sempronius Longus: Lost to Carthage at Trebia
Francisco Solano López: Almost unmade Paraguay
George B. McClellan: Timid, bungling, arrogant Union commander
Ratko Mladić: Ordered Srebenica massacre; since indicted
Napoleon III: Clobbered, captured at Sedan
Nicias: Commanded ill-fated Syracuse expedition
Arthur Percival: Surrendered Singapore to Japan
Philip VI of France: Crushed own army at Crécy
Romanus IV of Byzantium: Lost Battle of Manzikert
Zinovy Rozhestvensky: Led Russian Navy to annihilation
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna: “Napoleon of the West”? Ha!
Manuel Fernandez Silvestre: Lost badly in Spanish Morocco
Frederick William Stopford: Blunderer at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli
Publius Quinctilius Varus: Army totally annihilated in Germany
William Westmoreland: Brutal, unimaginative technocrat
William H. Winder: Lost Upper Canada; Washington burned
Zhao Kuo: Became idiom for “bad general”
Eliminated:
Ulysses S. Grant
William T. Sherman
Pyrrhus of Epirus
Benedict Arnold
James II of England
Earl of Cardigan
Cloudesley Shovell
Douglas MacArthur
William Halsey
George A. Custer
Curtis LeMay
Lord Chelmsford
George Tryon
Geoffrey Spicer-Simson
Benjamin F. Butler
Xerxes I of Persia
Ernest J. King
Gaius Terentius Varro
John A. McClernand
Daniel Sickles
Christian de Castries
Maximilian von Prittwitz
Same rules for the next round, which will end at noon EST on Weds. Dec. 15.
Sticking with:
William Westmoreland – 2 votes (finally his time?)
Rodolfo Graziani – 2 votes
Adding:
Crassus – 1 vote
Rudolpho Graziani: 2 Votes
William Westmoreland: -2 Votes. My first votes for this man. While he ran the war in an ineffective manner he didn’t lose any battles or have any disasters that were not PR issues. More ‘uninspired’ than ‘worst’.
My new target:
William H. Winder: 1 Vote - OK, this guy was dealt some 300-400 regulars and 1500 inept militia and told to stop a British invading force of veteran infantry some 2.5 times bigger than his force? Sorry, but you’ll should need to do much worse than losing that battle to get on this list.
Sorry I haven’t been paying as much attention to this thread as I should. It’s mostly a matter of me thinking I need to take the time to do some reading on a few of these characters and just not getting around to it.
But any way re: Varus, allow me to argue both sides of the street for a second.
I think that is slightly harsh. As I said earlier Varus committed errors of judgement, both personal ( trusting Arminius, but he had good reason to do so ) and in terms of overconfidence. But I don’t think I’d call it an idiotic defeat per se. I think even a Julius Caesar ambushed in the manner Varus was would have been in a difficult situation. Archaelogical work on the battle site done since 1987 ( when it was discovered ) seem to indicate that it really was a superbly prepared and timed ambush on ground that would have been very difficult to defend ( narrow track, prepared bog and woods on one side, back to a hillside on the other ). The actual battle itself I think might stand as more of a testament to Arminius’ ability than the lack of such by Varus.
Varus’ failure was more the in the events leading up to the battle.
The above said, I also think this is a little dismissive. No Rome hardly collapsed, but it did retreat. Permanently. Before Teutoburger Wald it was in the process of assimilating the Rhineland much as it had Gaul. The battle took place at Kalkriese in western Saxony. Had Varus been able to leverage a victory ( or at least avoid an annihilating defeat ) that deep into Germany we may well have seen an eventual permanent Roman advance to the Elbe and the pacification of Germania as a whole. It is hard to say just what difference a Roman Germania would have made to history, but it could possibly have been profound, giving the later Western Roman empire that much more space to defend itself from collapse.
I would argue that Varus’ defeat had a very real historical impact.
I think Crassus provides an excellent compare and contrast with Varus.
I agree with Mr. Miskatonic on the significance or lack thereof of Carrhae. IMO it was a considerably less significant battle in historical terms than Teutoburg. While a humiliating and complete defeat, it did not permanently alter the political situation in the area ( it did cause political disruption in Rome, as one leg was cut out from under the Triumvirate - but that was an inherently unstable situation that would have dissolved eventually anyway ). Rome was likely never going to conquer the Persian heartland and if Crassus had won, even won big, it would have had minimal impact. Surena’s field army was actually rather small and hardly represented the full strength of the Parthian state. By contrast Arminius probably had as much of the rebellious Germanic “nation” in arms as existed - a heavy defeat might have at that stage ( i.e. before the huge morale boost of Teutoburg ) broken the back of the Germanic resistance.
On the other hand, I think Crassus made more egregious errors than Varus on the battlefield and just as many on the campaign leading up to it. The entire affair was suffused with incompetence, as he made seemingly every bad decision he could to speed his army along to a crushing defeat. Varus was probably doomed the second he was ambushed. Crassus by contrast had options and failed to exercise them. The fact that he was annihilated by an army maybe one quarter the size of his own makes for an even more devastating indictment of his performance.
So you have an interesting comparison ( if you accept my half-assed analysis 
). On the one hand a mediocre performance that led to a defeat of potentially substantial historical import ( Varus at Teutoburg Wald ). On the other a thoroughly incompetent performance that led to a defeat of only passing historical impact ( Crassus at Carrhae ). Both were battles of annihilation, lost against smaller armies ( that were actually probably of similar size ), in which minimal losses were inflicted on the enemy - Crassus losses were worse only in the sense that he likely had a larger army to lose. So which was worse and who ranks lower?
I think we have to weigh the degree of incompetence far more heavily than historical import. Otherwise, we might find our Worst Military Leaders list swiftly dominated by military leaders of smaller states. Larger states, after all, can shrug off a series of military defeats - smaller ones often cannot.
On these criteria, I’d rank Crassus as the worse military leader. Varus screwed up more before battle was joined - but once battle began, Crassus was the one who made unambiguous and serious errors in tactical leadership.
William Westmoreland - 2
Crassus - 2
William Calley - 1
William Calley - 2
Rodolfo Graziano - 2
Braxton Bragg - 1
Been slacking off here, I see Sickles and McClernand are now off the list, so I have to come up with new losers.
I only know this Graziani guy from his failure to take Egypt. It’s enlightening, in a horrible way, to see that he was TWICE given the classic dishonorific “Butcher of <place name>.” The Libyans called him “the Butcher of Fezzan” for the tens of thousands of Arab civilians who died by bullets, hanging, or starvation in the concentration camps he ran in Libya in the 1920s. Later, being made Viceroy of conquered Ethiopia in 1937, he began a brutal campaign of repression that included massacring the monks in a monastery, and became known as “the Butcher of Ethiopia.” That’s some achievement. He avoided war crimes prosecution only on the technicality that the Allies decided not to try any Italians.
I agree, for slightly different reasons. Historical impact is often – perhaps always – outside the scope of any individual’s direct control. Usually it’s not the general’s fault that X or Y exacerbated what would have otherwise have been a routine defeat. I think it’s something of a blind alley for us to weigh a general’s skill by whether, three hundred years later, his society is still influential. I fall back on my list of criteria instead.
Perhaps where we differ here is that I see all bad arguments for military necessity, and almost all bad arguments for confusion, error, or misjudgment, as rationalizations for pure, gratuitous cruelty. I think most massacres come from the same set of atavistic impulses and most militaries (since the Enlightenment, anyway) hold themselves to be above such things, but all to frequently do them anyway. I agree that My Lai was gratuitous and cruel self-indulgence that cost a national reputation and hurt the war effort – but I conclude that most/all other massacres are the same.
These things always hurt the perpetrators’ causes. In WWII, German generals eventually realized (and wrote down) that the regular German massacres of Soviet prisoners had quickly made the Soviet soldier a much harder fighter, much less willing to surrender and much more committed to killing Germans.
Heinrich Himmler - 1 - Never had a chance; just a placeholder during Germany’s death throes
Rodolfo Graziani - 1 - Personally a monster, but militarily a realist in an impossible situation
William Calley - 1 - Another monster, but a much more minor player
James Ledlie - 1 - Classic weakling unable to perform, but minor player
Publius Quinctilius Varus - 1 - another “Custer error” guy
Rodolfo Graziani - 2
William Calley - 2
Carlo di Persano - 1
The results of our 12th round of voting:
Rodolfo Graziani - 9
William Calley, William Westmoreland - 6 each
Crassus - 3
Braxton Bragg, Carlo di Persano, Heinrich Himmler, James Ledlie, Varus, William H. Winder - 1 each
Hmmm. Not a good game in which to be named William…
The boldfaced leader(s) above are eliminated. That leaves:
Abdel Hakim Amer: Panicked, lost Sinai in 1967
Oreste Baratieri: Routed by Ethiopians at Adowa
Braxton Bragg: Bungling, irritating Confederate general
Duke of Buckingham: Useless sycophant, incompetent military leader
Ambrose E. Burnside: Defeat from jaws of victory
Luigi Cadorna: Lost twelve consecutively; hated, cruel
William Calley: Ordered, led My Lai Massacre
Charles Alexander of Lorraine: Sustained career of incompetence
Charles le Temeraire: Rash rather than “Bold”
Crassus: Army pincushioned by Parthians
Carlo di Persano: Loser of Lissa
William George Keith Elphinstone: Lost an army in Afghanistan
Maurice Gamelin: Relied on the Maginot Line
Horatio Gates: Fled headlong from Camden, S.C.
Gaius Claudius Glaber: Why fortify against slaves?
Hermann Goering: Prancing figurehead misused Luftwaffe
Douglas Haig: Incompetent British WWI general
Paul D. Harkins: Ignorant, overoptimistic in Vietnam
Heinrich Himmler: Nazi botched every field command
John Bell Hood: Recklessly stupid, lost Atlanta, West
William Hull: Surrendered peacefully to inferior forces
Thom Karremans: Toasted Mladić, allowed Srebenica massacre
Hugh Judson Kilpatrick: Nicknamed “Kill Cavalry” for reason
James Ledlie: Drunk during Battle of Crater
Tiberius Sempronius Longus: Lost to Carthage at Trebia
Francisco Solano López: Almost unmade Paraguay
George B. McClellan: Timid, bungling, arrogant Union commander
Ratko Mladić: Ordered Srebenica massacre; since indicted
Napoleon III: Clobbered, captured at Sedan
Nicias: Commanded ill-fated Syracuse expedition
Arthur Percival: Surrendered Singapore to Japan
Philip VI of France: Crushed own army at Crécy
Romanus IV of Byzantium: Lost Battle of Manzikert
Zinovy Rozhestvensky: Led Russian Navy to annihilation
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna: “Napoleon of the West”? Ha!
Manuel Fernandez Silvestre: Lost badly in Spanish Morocco
Frederick William Stopford: Blunderer at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli
Publius Quinctilius Varus: Army totally annihilated in Germany
William Westmoreland: Brutal, unimaginative technocrat
William H. Winder: Lost Upper Canada; Washington burned
Zhao Kuo: Became idiom for “bad general”
Eliminated:
Ulysses S. Grant
William T. Sherman
Pyrrhus of Epirus
Benedict Arnold
James II of England
Earl of Cardigan
Cloudesley Shovell
Douglas MacArthur
William Halsey
George A. Custer
Curtis LeMay
Lord Chelmsford
George Tryon
Geoffrey Spicer-Simson
Benjamin F. Butler
Xerxes I of Persia
Ernest J. King
Gaius Terentius Varro
John A. McClernand
Daniel Sickles
Christian de Castries
Maximilian von Prittwitz
Rodolfo Graziani
Same rules for the next round, which will end at noon EST on Fri. Dec. 17.
I’d never heard that this was a conscious decision by the Allies. What was the rationale?
I skimmed the thread but can’t seem to find out: why are there sometimes 1, sometimes 2 and sometimes 3 individuals eliminated?
Uh…I was going by Wikipedia, which in the Graziani article says
But it’s not footnoted.
A BBC site says this:
The Straight Dope itself says this in a 2004 post from the archives (bolding mine):
[QUOTE=APB]
No, the surrender was indeed unconditional. (Photographs of the Instrument of Surrender can be found here (Online Exhibits | National Archives), although it is more readable in the text printed here (http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/war.term/093_00.html) along with other related documents.)
But it was not quite that simple. The surrender was an unconditional surrender by the Japanese government of their armed forces; the Japanese government itself remained in being, although with the crucial proviso that, ‘The authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the supreme commander for the Allied Powers, who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate these terms of surrender’. This was broadly similar to what had been agreed with the Italians in 1943, as that also involved the government agreeing the surrender.
[/QUOTE]
…which suggests the possibility, at least, of a tacit agreement between Allies and Italy not to prosecute, as an incentive to capitulate.
But the same site that poster used presents what are supposedly the terms of capitulation and they seem to be pretty clear that war crimes suspects will be turned over to the UN although what might follow isn’t spelled out:
To sum up: answer unclear so far.
On Varus:
I think the posters arguing against him being here are minimizing or not understanding the depth of his utter failure. If it was merely a “Custer Error”, I’d agree. But it was not.
First, he created the problem by gross corruption and bad behavior. This might be excusable as irrelevant to his military ability except that it directly created the later problem. Why Augustus put an emarassment like Varus into that position I do not know. AFAIK nothing in his family or person made him particularly useful; it was a matter of perosnal friendship.
He was warned about Hermann (Arminius) and left him completely uncontrolled, a mistake other Romans usually avoided.
He took his troops into a thick area with no intelligence, no scouting, and no clear purpose or goal. He got savaged and should have realized he was going to have to change his plans, which would start by moving back to a stronger position. He completely failed in this, despite later battles showing that the Romans had no trouble crushing the Germans.
Sticking with:
William Westmoreland – 2
Crassus – 2
Adding:
William Calley – 1
I’ve generally been eliminating those WMLs who are at least one or two persons’ combined votes away from the next-highest vote-getter. At least one WML is eliminated in each round, but I don’t want to throw out too many at once.
You mean we occasionally get a Bonus Loser? 
OK, not much change here:
William Westmorland: - 2 votes
Crassus - 2 votes
William H. Winder - 1 vote
I don’t think you have yet, but I suppose it’s possible. 