World War 2
The Commanders
The war threw many military leaders with markedly different command styles. Their strengths and weaknesses continue to be debated and dissected by military historians and will provide a source of controversy for years to come.
For the Western Allies it was essential that the top positions were occupied by men who were diplomats as well as soldiers. These qualities were combined in the person of the American General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe from December 1943. 'Ike' was no fighting general but his emollient qualities held together a coalition in which temperamental subordinates like Patton and Montgomery sometimes seemed to be more at war with each other than the enemy.
Both Patton and Montgomery were anything but diplomatic, but they inspired enormous confidence in their troops, as did Monty's brilliant opponent Field Marshal Edwin Rommel, the 'Desert Fox', one of the few genuinely romantic figures of the war, and a general who liked to lead from the front. The charismatic Rommel, met a tragic end. Suspected of complicity in the attempt to assassinate Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters on the 20th of July 1944, Rommel who like most of the German high command, knew the war was lost at this point, and to continue fighting would only result in more German casualties and the wrecking of major German cities; Hitler would never be convinced to surrender, so Rommel, tried to assassinate the Fuhrer, to try and finally put an end to the suffering of all German soldiers and civilians alike. The plan failed. Rommel was offered the choice between taking poison or a show-trail. Rommel chose the poison and was buried with full military honours.
Three commanders stand out from the rest; the Japanese Yamamoto, the American MacArthur and the Russian Zhukov. Admiral Yamamoto was the mastermind behind the attack on Pearl Harbor who had the foresight to guarantee the Emperor Hirohito only six months of victory. General Douglas MacArthur's wartime career began with the loss of the Philippines, from which he recovered to display a master-class in operations in the Pacific. The third of the great commaders was Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgi Zhukov, who for much of the war, as Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief, was second only to Stalin in military affairs. Zhukov was Stalin's battle-winner; at Moscow in December 1941; at Stalingrad in 1942; at Kursk in the summer of 1943; and so all the way to the battle for Berlin in April 1945.