Then, in an ill-advised comeback, he met his Waterloo. After early success in the Mexican War for Independence, the rest of his career didnt pan out the way he would have liked. I flew into Vietnam in June 1968 as a young . The Battle of Khe Sanh (21 January - 9 July 1968) was conducted in the Khe Sanh area of northwestern Qung Tr Province, Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), during the Vietnam War. What was your impression of the man when you were working for him? And if they not only fail to deliver, but wind up sinking their own side in the process, and change history, they earn a spot in the Hall of Military Shame. In fact, he did a lot to ensure that Germany would find itself in another war that it couldnt win, but, since he died in 1937, he gets extra credit for being a bad World War II general from beyond the grave. Caepio may have been a terrible general, but he was apparently an exceptional thief. He first demonstrated his ineptitude during the Mexican-American War, where he had received an appointment to the rank of major general from his friend Pres. There appeared to be little serious planning for what would happen the day after Saddam was gone. These records were transferred into the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration in 2008. In a war that saw more than its share of unskilled politically appointed generals, Pillow was arguably the worst on either side. Gamelin was commander of the French forces in World War II and is largely responsible for the fall of France into German control during the Battle of France. Darius quickly lost everything and became nothing but a fugitive. Answer (1 of 4): The former Cham general/leader Che Bong Nga was killed in the battle against the enemy Dai Viet (old Vietnam) but Che Bong Nga was LUCKY to be mentioned by the enemy Dai Viet historians to allow people to remember him. Many historians credit Benedict Arnold and others with being the real victors of Saratoga. Two of the more prominent of these mistakes, both with wide and sweeping results, were the June 22, 1941 invasion of the USSROperation Barbarossaand the December 11, 1941 unprovoked and unwarranted declaration of war on the United Statesagainst the advice of Hitler's Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Necessarily, more is lost to time than is remembered. McClellan was a superb organizer, a West Point-trained engineer who did much to build the Union army almost from scratch. Finally, there was MacArthur's insubordination. Officially labelled a defector by the Pentagon, many suspected Nolan, an African American, changed sides after suffering a lifetime of racial discrimination. The unprecedented violence of battles such as Shiloh, Antietam, Stones River, and Gettysburg shocked citizens and international observers alike. Is the Biden administrations China policy too hawkish? This is one of the more controversial ones, but Douglas MacArthur is incredibly overrated in the annals of the US military, in my . Fort Bragg was named in 1918 during the Jim Crow era. Somalia (1992-1994) 2. After months of inactivity, McClellan was finally spurred to action by Pres. He effectively pledged to become an agent for the U.S. but found that he had been deposed upon his return to Mexico. Dispatched to India, he led campaigns to help subdue the subcontinent, replacing the crown jewel he had lost. He was soon released, however, and, as more capable French admirals either died or somehow incurred Napoleons disfavor, a path to the top echelons of command was opened for Villeneuve. The British gained control of the fort, dozens of cannons, the brig USS Adams (recommissioned the HMS Detroit), and virtually the entire Michigan Territory. But his crowning achievement was bad generalship in Korea. After gaining ground trying to cut an escape path for the Confederates during the February 1862 siege of Fort Donelson by Union forces led Brig. Even a string of bad days does not guarantee entry. The 5 Worst Generals in U.S. History. But in a contemporaneous cable to General Earle Wheeler, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Westmoreland complained that the military professionalism of the Marines falls far short of the standards that should be demanded by our armed forces. Weekly update on developments in India and its neighbors. How well that would have worked can be seen when Gates was sent to command American troops in the South. Santa Anna was found wearing a privates uniform, hiding in a marsh. The last king of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, Darius was not quite as qualified to rule a mighty empire as his predecessors were. The curation of this content is at the discretion of the author, and not necessarily reflective of the views of Encyclopaedia Britannica or its editorial staff. Their orientation, indeed the core of Scoutings values, is selflessness and service to others. Although he outnumbered Magruders Army of the Peninsula 10-to-1, McClellan settled in for a monthlong siege. The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War. Nearly as many men died in captivity during the Civil War as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam War. How does an admiral make a list of the worst generals? FPs Ravi Agrawal spoke with two of the very best Russia experts:Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author ofPutins World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest, and Michael Kofman, the research program director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses. But the inducements encourage U.S. companies to invest only at homenot elsewhere. He bears a lot of responsibility for one the greatest reversals of military fortune ever experienced by a super power. He overestimated the American peoples patience and tolerance of friendly losses. Again fighting outnumbered Texans, this time Santa Anna would lose the battle stunningly. - 4 Worst: 1990 Cleveland Cavaliers. See the vast swaths of land to the north and south that arent Paraguay? A key plank in the Democratic platform that year was, appropriately, not fighting, and McClellan lost in a rout. Historian Lewis Sorley author of 1999s well-regarded A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of Americans Last Years in Vietnam now zeroes in on General William Westmoreland. But he was overly cautious by nature. Of course, that is what they did when Ludendorff pushed for the use of unrestricted submarine warfare against Allied shipping. 15. There is no Carthage. A U.S. ship conveyed him to Mexico, and upon his arrivalto the surprise of virtually no onehe executed a volte-face and took charge of the Mexican troops. Yet Fredendall's solution was to order an Army engineer company to build a giant bunker a hundred miles from the front lines. 1968 takes the cake for me. He worked under Adolf Hitler's Third Reich as a leading general and gained fame from his battles in North Africa. On the other side of the trenches in World War I was Erich Ludendorff, commanding the armies of Germany. The world over, countries are embarking on ambitious projects of industrial policy. Test yourself on the week of Feb. 25: Nigeria votes, Finland builds a border wall, and Israel escalates repression. What will another year of war look like? But all that remains of his would-be empire today is a flaky French pastry. On a visit to Vietnam Senator Hollings from Westmorelands home state of South Carolina was told by Westmoreland: Were killing these people, the enemy, at a ratio of 10 to 1. Said Hollings, Westy, the American people dont care about the ten. For many soldiers, a major tipping point happened when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, news of which reaches the soldiers in Da 5 Bloods during one particularly stirring scene . Starting with the battle of Long Island, he lost way more fights than he wonyet he managed to win the war. General Harold K. Johnson was an authentic battlefield hero, and as noted above was fundamentally at odds with Westmorelands approach, but he was not in the chain of command. T he Civil War was America's bloodiest conflict. Darius was a different sort of game-changer. While there are plenty of books that analyze the keys to success, The Worst Military Leaders in History offers lessons of failure to avoid. The self proclaimed Napoleon of the West didnt quite leave the same legacy as his idol. Westmorelands own book about himself gives some indication of how he would react to this more recent one. His 1812 campaign against Russia ended in complete disaster. 1 Erwin Rommel Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel, popularly known as the Desert Fox, was a German field marshal of World War II. Evening roundup with our editors favorite stories of the day. (The leg did get a state funeral). With the Little Corporal running everything, Europe might have become a very different place. McClellan was a superb organizer, a West Point-trained engineer who did much to build the Union army almost from . Have your boss report to the French gentleman whose name begins with J at a place which begins with D which is five grid squares to the left of M. The Kasserine disaster had repercussions. 5. The Biden administration has passed landmark legislations such as theInflation Reduction Act(IRA) and theCHIPS and Science Act, which provide subsidies in clean energy and semiconductoShow morers worth well over $400 billion. On September 9, 1965, Navy Cmdr. These operations were designed to seek out enemy forces and engage them in decisive battle. Cue the protests from other parts of the globe: A chorus of nations are accusing Washington of fostering unfair competition. Thus the progress Westmoreland claimed in racking up huge body counts did nothing to win the war. FPs Ravi Agrawal spoke with two of the very best Russia experts:Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author ofPutins World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest, and Michael Kofman, the research program director of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses. Hull responded by ordering the evacuation of Fort Dearborn, and the garrison was promptly massacred by a Potawatomi war band upon leaving the fort. While Maximus was conducting negotiations with the Cimbri, a Germanic tribe that had invaded the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul, Caepio rashly attacked the Cimbri army on October 6, 105 BCE. That may have been true in the east (the worst of the Union generals in that theater rates his own entry on this list), but in the west it was a much different affair. James Jay Carafano is a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges. McClellan and Burnside in particular. What does that mean for trade and globalization? Santa Anna, a lifetime gambler, was known for his risk taking in battle, but also his brutality. Military greatness can most easily be defined by comparison. One-stop digest of politics, economics, and culture. James K. Polk. Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. Simultaneously, he contacted Maximilian to offer the young emperor his services. He was an artilleryman who missed out on the Army's great schools system, never attending the Command & General Staff College or the Army War College. The American Civil War was a factory for producing bad generals such as Braxton Bragg and Ambrose Burnside. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail. Vietnam War. The alternative was to split the United States asunder. The Cimbri destroyed Caepios force and, emboldened by their success, marched on Maximuss camp. The man who appealed for Varus help was Arminius, a Romanized Germanic prince. McClellan was removed from command immediately after. Alas, as a historian, he passed on the opportunity to answer Battlelands questions about what Vietnam should teach us about Afghanistan, and who, if anyone, is todays Westmoreland, during our email chat earlier this week: Whats the most important thing you learned writing Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam? Still, he choked in the big game. But the rash advance into North Korea was a blunder of strategic proportions. Washington also suffered his share of defeats. 5. The war soon ended in a Russian defeat, with hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties. Ultimately, he was denied his final showdown with the Allies by German political leaders who realized that the Americans could produce soldiers faster than Germany could produce bullets. There are issues around killing and counting unarmed civilians (non-combatants) as enemy combatants, as well as inflating the number of actual enemy who were killed in action (KIA).For search and destroy operations, as the objective was not to . After only 10 weeks into the Pacific War, Percival became responsible for the largest surrender of British-led forces in history. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Born in 1901 in Quang Binh Province (part of North Vietnam), Diem was the son of a well-educated mandarin (Vietnamese civil servant who took part in running the country) who served as the Minister of Rites and Grand Chamberlain to Emperor Thanh-Thai (1889-1907). Westmorelands first resort in claiming progress in the war was always body count, but in fact this was meaningless. Jessica Chen Weiss, formerly a senior advisor for policy planning at the State Department under the Biden administration, makes the case that the United States is becoming consumed by competition with China, a strategy that could lead to dangerous conflict. Abraham Lincoln. He denied senior civilian officials accurate data on enemy strength and composition, during development of a 1967 Special National Intelligence Estimate imposing a ceiling on the number of enemy forces his intelligence officers could report or agree to and personally removing from the order of battle entire categories that had long been included, thus falsely portraying progress in reducing enemy strength. Join FPs Ravi Agrawal for a frank discussion about the Biden administrations China policy and alternatives that it ought to consider. The heavily forested, swampy terrain made the Legions maneuvers impossible. The latest news, analysis, and data from the country each week. Grachev once said that only an incompetent commander would order tanks into the streets of central Grozny, where they would be vulnerable. Yet near the end of the war he did exactly that. Military. 3. In the end, the Romans leveled Carthage and salted the earth. In 1847, U.S. troops once again surprised Santa Anna and captured his prosthetic leg. In the famous Battle of the Alamo, Santa Anna struggled to defeat about 250 Texans with 2,400 Mexicans and subsequently lost nearly 600 men. Panama (1989) 2. Approaching his 60th birthday and exhibiting a timidity that had no place in a general about to lead an invasion, Hull also had the misfortune of facing two of the most gifted commanders ever to operate in North America. In the autumn of 1804 he was placed in charge of the French fleet at Toulon and tasked with drawing the British fleet under Horatio Nelson to the Caribbean. He deprived the South Vietnamese of modern weaponry, giving U.S. and other allied forces priority for issue of the new M-16 rifle and other advanced military wherewithal. Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced his fateful decision to double the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Hannibal. The premise was that, if he could kill enough of the enemy, they would lose heart and cease their aggression against the South Vietnamese. Mexican general Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna probably wished that everyone really did remember the Alamo, because: (1) he actually did win that battle (he outnumbered his opponents between 10- and 30-to-1); and (2) during the 13-day siege, he somehow resisted the urge to betray all his allegiances and change sides. Hull had served with distinction in the Revolutionary War and was appointed governor of the Michigan Territory in 1805.