--- Kevin Tarr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At 09:20 AM 7/29/2003 -0400, you wrote: > >On Monday, July 28, 2003, at 09:16 PM, Gautam > Mukunda wrote: > >>--- Bryon Daly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >My List of Great American Generals (in order): > >Washington > >Grant > >Sherman > >Marshall > >Vandergrift > >Gray > >
> >john > > > Didn't we (the list) have the discussion before? > > I'd put Pershing above Grant, remove Sherman, add > Winfield Scott. I > seriously don't know Vandergrift and Gray. > > Kevin T. - VRWC Have to admit I don't know Vandergrift or Gray either, at least not at first thought. I think my list would look something like: Washington Grant Sherman Eisenhower Green Patton Franks Marshall Bradley Pershing Heavily weighting battlefield performance over overall impact (in which case you'd put Marshall and Pershing higher). The case for Washington is obvious and I've already made mine for Grant. Sherman, I think, might actually be the most impressive military figure of the war. His tactical abilities were astonishing - his campaigns in the South were consistently successful and consistently inflicted very high casualties on his opponents while his own armies took very low ones. Even more impressive (to me) is his strategic vision - he understood that breaking the will of the South was the only way to win the war. Finally, he was able to do it all without bitterness - after the war he offered surrender terms so generous that Congress repudiated them. Eisenhower again is obvious. Green was Washington's commander in the South during the American Revolution - the one who outmanuevered Cornwallis and had as much as anyone not named Washington to the eventual triumph. He's been somewhat forgotten, but a really remarkable figure. Patton needs no defense from me. Likewise Marshall and Bradley. Pershing I'll admit I really don't know enough about, so his low placement might be my own ignorance. If anyone has a good biography to recommend, I'd be very interested. Franks is, I think, a choice that might surprise people a little bit. I'm quite serious, though. Tommy Franks, as leader of CENTCOM, led the liberation of two countries at a cost of less than 500 allied lives. Where the Soviet Union and Iran were unable to make progress with years of effort, he won in weeks. In Afghanistan he smashed the Taliban using unconventional special forces tactics where the USSR failed completely. In Iraq he used a battle plan so daring that Patton himself would have quailed at it - and won a victory that _Dissent_, a leftist magazine, said can be compared only to Agincourt, and probably not even there. If that sort of performance, not once but _twice_, doesn't get you on the roster of America's greatest generals, what does? ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
