**Luigi Cadorna ** (this is not a vote!)
Beginning in 1915, he conducted a series of offensives along the Isonzo river, against firmly entrenched Austro-Hungarians. The terrain was mountainous and broken, and the frontier was not large enough for major maneuver – terrible ground for offensive battle.
The first four such battles gained him nothing at all, and cost his country 250,000 casualties. Over the next two years, he would mount eleven such battles, all ending in thorough defeat, at great cost in money and lives.
A WWI-era offensive was a huge affair – these were not little skirmishes. Artillery ammunition would be painstakingly stockpiled, elaborate fire plans worked out, infantry drilled in the all-important timing of the attacks, reserves brought up, wire cut, and then the whole fiasco would go forward – in Cadorna’s case, invariably to death and defeat. Over and over. Talk about inability to learn or adjust.
On the other front he commanded, the Trentino, he launched other unsuccessful attacks. More notably, he failed to anticipate the Austro-Hungarian counterattack, declaring it impossible, and his defenses were inadequate. In particular, the trench lines were not sufficiently duplicated (reserve and emergency trench lines behind the first were SOP in the war, by that point).
Eventually, the Austro-Hungarians and their German allies attacked at Caporetto on the Isonzo front. Cadorna’s forces were in a brittle position; his line had little depth and his troops were too exposed, with little reserve. This despite the lessons of the Trentino front years earlier.
Cadorna’s men were also suffering massive morale issues. Not only had they learned that Cadorna was a military idiot who would throw away their lives if they obeyed him, they’d also learned he was a cruel martinet who would kill them outright if they refused. Cadorna has the distinction of executing more of his own men than any other army did in that brutal war. He also dismissed huge numbers of subordinate officers; they were the lucky ones, as he resorted to executing officers of units that retreated. Cadorna even reintroduced the hideously inhumane Roman practice of decimation, killing every tenth man of units that failed to perform up to his expectations. He also expressed contempt for the country’s civilian political leadership. He was widely (and justly) hated throughout the country when people realized he was killing their children, losing their territory, and mocking their leaders.
When the Caporetto attack opened against them, the exhausted and demoralized survivors of Cadorna’s 11 Isonzo attacks, poorly positioned and badly entrenched, collapsed immediately. Hundreds of thousands of them surrendered, and many were killed and wounded. Italian military reputation has still not recovered from this shellacking, which was mostly Cadorna’s doing. He was finally sacked, and the Italians were able to stabilize their front at last, after losing considerable territory by WWI standards.
I’ve never seen him credited with winning any battles, or even getting in a good move on the enemy (even Burnsides, Hooker, and McClellan managed to steal a march on old Bobby Lee, and two of them were on this list).
After the war, Cadorna wrote an “everyone else was wrong, not me” memoir, and came back into the public spotlight to accept a promotion to Field Marshal – from none other than Benito Mussolini, who shared Cadorna’s opinion of legitimate civilian political leadership.
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(and you could rhyme “martinet” and “part in it”, but I refuse to follow this particular train of thought any further).