Chapter 23

The Ten Worst Generals in U.S. Military History

In This Chapter

Promoting poor combat leaders

Making foolish mistakes

Putting up with narrow-minded egotists

Bad generals are dangerous. They make poor decisions, give in to their egos, harass subordinates, waste resources, and worst of all, get people killed. A commanding general literally has the power of life and death in his hands. That means if he’s unfit to command, the consequences of his failure can be pretty dramatic. Every general on this list of failed in some significant way that hurt the country and the troops under his command. My selections are based on each general’s persistently poor leadership qualities, the negative views of his subordinates, and the overall damage he did to his soldiers and his cause. Not all of these guys were bad people. Some were solid military professionals who made poor choices or simply got promoted too high up the chain of command into jobs they couldn’t handle. I list the generals alphabetically instead of ranking them.

Braxton Bragg (1817–1876)

Bragg just could not work and play well with others. He was a competent enough professional soldier, but his personality was a disaster. He was rude, abrupt, and humorless. He was such a tyrannical disciplinarian that, early in his career, his men tried to kill him. During the Civil War, Bragg was one of only eight full generals in the Confederacy, so he had a lot of responsibility. As commander of the Army of the Mississippi and the Army of the Tennessee, he controlled large numbers of Rebel soldiers in the key battles of Shiloh, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. He didn’t perform well in any of these fights.

To a man, his subordinate commanders hated him with a passion. After the Battle of Chickamauga, they revolted in an effort to get him relieved. Nathan Bedford Forrest, perhaps the South’s greatest tactician, refused to serve under him again, and even threatened to kill him. But Bragg had one powerful friend in President Jefferson Davis. The president rebuked Bragg’s commanders and left his buddy in charge, with predictably poor results. In November 1863, Bragg came up short again in the Battle of Chattanooga, opening the way for Union forces to advance on Atlanta. Davis finally removed Bragg from command, but the southern cause never recovered from the damage he did.

Ambrose Burnside (1824–1881)

This Rhode Islander is the classic example of a good man who got promoted way beyond his capabilities. In the early days of the Civil War, he started well, commanding a brigade at First Bull Run, and presiding over a successful amphibious invasion that bottled up North Carolina’s Tidewater region.

These successes earned Burnside promotion to major general and command of a corps (roughly 15,000 Union soldiers). Here’s where the trouble began. At the Battle of Antietam in 1862, he was in charge of the whole right wing of the Union Army. Instead of fording the shallow Antietam Creek and attacking the Rebel defenders in several places, he funneled all of his troops into a costly attack across a well-defended stone bridge. This cost him thousands of casualties and precious hours when time was of the essence. Instead of achieving an overwhelming victory, the North had to settle for a favorable stalemate.

Two months later, President Abraham Lincoln inexplicably promoted Burnside to command of the Army of the Potomac, a large military force that consisted of more than 100,000 men. To his credit, Burnside knew he wasn’t fit for this assignment and tried to turn it down, but to no avail. He then proceeded to lead his army into disaster at Fredericksburg, where he sent his whole army into an uphill attack, straight into Robert E. Lee’s strongest fortifications. The result was one of the worst slaughters of the Civil War. Lincoln sacked him a month later.

Burnside sported a unique mutton-chop look with strips of facial hair extending from his mustache to the sides of his head, giving us the term sideburns.

Mark Clark (1896–1984)

First, you need to understand something. Clark was a courageous man and an excellent soldier. In World War I, he was wounded in combat. In the years leading up to World War II, he masterminded an important U.S. Army modernization and reorganization plan. In 1942, he risked his life in North Africa on a clandestine spy mission.

So, why is he on this list? Because, when he became a commander, he made disastrous, glory-seeking decisions that cost many American lives. The publicity-hungry Clark never saw a camera he didn’t like. From 1943 to 1945, Clark was in charge of the U.S. Fifth Army in Italy. In January 1944, he ordered the 36th Infantry Division to launch a series of ill-conceived attacks across the well-defended Rapido River. The result was a bloody disaster.

At almost the same time, another part of his army landed at Anzio, behind enemy lines. Instead of pushing forward to seize the high ground that overlooked the beachhead, he stayed put, allowing the Germans to take the initiative, pen the Allies into a perilous perimeter, and stalemate them for five months. Later, in May and June 1944, when his forces finally broke out of the perimeter, he had a chance to trap the retreating German army and annihilate it, thus winning the campaign in Italy. But, giving in to his glory-seeking vanity, Clark chose instead to advance on Rome and enter the great city as a conquering hero. On June 4, 1944, while Clark basked in his Roman parade, most of the Germans escaped to set up a new defensive line, stalemate the war in Italy, and kill many more Allied soldiers. In spite of this inexcusable decision, Clark’s subsequent military career prospered, mainly because of his close friendship with Dwight Eisenhower.

Lloyd Fredendall (1883–1963)

Pound for pound, Fredendall was the worst high-level American field general in World War II. In 1943, he commanded the II Corps, about 50,000 soldiers, in North Africa. He was incompetent, aloof, rash, and cowardly. He used his engineers to build an enormous, bomb-proof headquarters for himself in a cave 70 miles behind the lines. Eisenhower once visited the place and was shocked, saying he had never seen a headquarters so obsessed with its own safety. Fredendall rarely visited his subordinate commanders or went anywhere near the front.

At Kasserine Pass, in February 1943, the Germans nearly overwhelmed Fredendall’s II Corps. The Allies staved off disaster, but not because of anything Fredendall did. By all accounts, he was a complete nonentity during the battle. In the wake of this close call, Eisenhower relieved Fredendall and replaced him with George Patton (see Chapter 22).

John Lucas (1890–1949)

As commander of VI Corps at Anzio, Lucas served under Mark Clark. After invading Anzio behind German lines in Italy, Lucas’s mission was to thrust inland, cut the main road to Rome, capture the crossroads town of Cisterna, outflank the Germans, and take a patch of high ground known as the Alban Hills. This was a difficult task for even the best commander. But Lucas was weak-willed and passive. His invasion was a complete success, catching the Germans by surprise.

However, Lucas was frightened of what reinforcements the Germans might have near Rome, so instead of advancing inland, he consolidated his forces into a small perimeter around Anzio and lost the initiative. When the Germans counterattacked him, they had the advantage of controlling the Alban Hills and other key terrain. Anzio turned into a pointless, arduous five-month stalemate with great loss of life on both sides. On February 22, 1944, Clark relieved Lucas, partly to find a scapegoat for his own failures. Lucas went home and never commanded troops in combat again.

George McClellan (1826–1885)

Some officers are good at preparing troops for battle. Others excel at leading them into combat. McClellan was definitely in the first category. When Lincoln appointed the 34-year-old general to command of the Union’s Army of the Potomac in 1861, the “Young Napoleon” turned it into a first-class fighting army. McClellan excelled at training, organizing, and instilling good morale. For the most part, his soldiers loved him. McClellan had an enormous ego, though. He thought of the president as nothing more than “a well-meaning baboon,” and spoke of himself as the savior of the country. He also had ill-concealed presidential ambitions.

McClellan’s worst problem was that he was a complete washout as a battlefield commander. He could train the army and devise good plans. But he simply could not lead his army into battle. He was cautious and timid. To justify his inaction, he chronically overestimated enemy numbers, even though the Union Army had twice as many soldiers as the Confederate Army. In the bloody battles that were so common to the Civil War, he couldn’t stand to see his soldiers suffering and dying. His tentativeness dearly cost the Union and extended the war he so hated.

He blamed everyone but himself for his failures. In voluminous letters, telegrams, and reports, he raged against everyone from the president to his fellow generals. Blinded by ego, he never understood that he failed because of his own shortcomings. In the wake of the Battle of Antietam, when McClellan failed to annihilate Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Lincoln fired him.

William Rupertus (1889–1945)

Rupertus commanded the 1st Marine Division, one of the finest American fighting units, during the Battle of Peleliu in World War II. He quickly proved himself to be unworthy. He was a poor communicator who seldom conversed meaningfully with his staff, much less the riflemen who did the real fighting. He rarely visited the front lines. He was prickly, unapproachable, and narrow-minded. On the eve of the invasion of Peleliu, he declared publicly that the battle would only take three days. When Japanese resistance turned out to be much more difficult than he or anyone else expected, he stuck to his unrealistic timetable, pushing his Marines into hurry-up attacks, straight into fortified Japanese ridges and caves.

The fighting raged on for weeks. His casualties were disastrous. For instance, the 1st Marine Regiment, one of his main attacking units, suffered 54 percent losses. Still, he kept attacking with the few survivors he had on hand while the Army’s entire 81st Infantry Division was in reserve, at his disposal, waiting to help. But Rupertus was a prisoner to interservice rivalry. He hated the Army and looked down upon the fighting qualities of soldiers. So he refused the Army’s help, preferring to let his men suffer and die, when they clearly needed reinforcements. Finally, Rupertus’s superior, another Marine general named Roy Geiger, ordered him to accept reinforcements from the Army. After Peleliu, Rupertus was quietly “promoted” to a desk job at home where he died of a heart attack in 1945.

Stephen Van Rensselaer III (1764–1839)

During the War of 1812, Van Rensselaer received an appointment as a militia general because he was from one of New York’s wealthiest, most politically connected landowning families. He had no training, no experience, and basically, no clue what he was doing. No matter. In the fall of 1812, he devised a plan to invade British-controlled Canada. Unfortunately, his invasion was poorly planned, with little appreciation for how to cross the Niagara River, how to control high ground, and how to outflank British defenders in Queenstown. The result was the Battle of Queenstown Heights on October 13, an unmitigated American defeat that kept Canada under British control. After the battle, Van Rensselaer resigned his commission and returned to politics.

William Westmoreland (1914–2005)

Westmoreland was a fine man and a good soldier. He’s on this list only because of the catastrophic consequences of choosing the wrong strategy in Vietnam. In 1964, upon taking command of Allied forces, Westmoreland decided to escalate the American troop presence, fight a big-unit, conventional war against the Communists, and wear them down through attrition. He planned to inflict so many casualties on them that they would have to give up the war.

On the surface, Westmoreland’s strategy made sense because the U.S. had distinct advantages in mobility and firepower. The problem was that the Communists chose to fight a guerrilla war at the grassroots level. This meant that large American units had great difficulty finding enemy fighters. Enemy commanders could often control the rate of their losses, thus undercutting Westmoreland’s attrition strategy. Moreover, his lavish use of firepower killed thousands of innocent Vietnamese, alienating some of the population. Equally as bad, the strategy failed to protect South Vietnam from the Communists and led to large numbers of U.S. casualties, undercutting support for the war at home.

Westmoreland never quite understood that in a guerrilla war like Vietnam, success came from providing security for the average villager, not from defeating large enemy units in an attempt to refight World War II.

James Wilkinson (1757–1825)

Wilkinson never met a corrupt scheme or traitorous plan he did not like. As a young general, he fought in the Revolution but spent much of his time trying to sabotage George Washington. After the war, he continued his military service.

While in uniform, he was involved in a dizzying array of corrupt deals and under-the-table conspiracies usually designed to enhance his own power or wealth. He was especially beholden to the king of Spain, who paid him to betray American state secrets. In exchange for a promise of 60,000 acres of land from Spain, Wilkinson offered to give the Spanish control of the Mississippi River, along with huge swaths of western land that Americans hoped to settle. Another time he conspired with the notorious Aaron Burr to lop off a major tract of western land to create their own country. Wilkinson even handed over the secret battle plans of a fellow American officer to the Spanish. Yet somehow, he remained in the Army as a major general until the War of 1812, when he suffered several defeats at the hands of the British and was finally dismissed from the service.