Worst of the Worst in the Second World War

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Alkiviadis:

Adm. Gormley in The Pacific who abandoned the Marines on Guadalcanal.

I can't let this one pass unchallenged. While Ghormley was no ball of fire, especially compared to Halsey who replaced him, he was at pains to provide the Marines as much support as he could. But part of his problem was that during his term as ComSoPac the strategic picture in his area of responsibility was confused, largely due to a temporary absence of Ultra. As a consequence, he felt obliged to protect against a non-existent thrust by the Japanese against his eastern flank, e.g., Fiji. This resulted in a dispersion of effort that Halsey was not subject to.

Michael

[average]

I'll go out there and suggest british bomber command for a gong vis a vis most amount of effort least tangible result.

The Italians have to take the overall prize, followed by the german little mate nations like romania.

The greek army was actually pretty effective.

[Alkiviadis]

Originally posted by average:

...The greek army was actually pretty effective.

Yes it was, tough, aggresive. Kurt Meyer comments ont it in his book "Grenadiers".

Sly, they were able to ambush the Italians at will, on a divisional level.

[CombinedArms]

Originally posted by Martyr:

Goering's uniforms, however, deserve a "best of" award of their own. Say what you will, the man dressed to impress!

Yes, but to impress whom? Give me U. S. Grant any day. The whole German war effort is marked by the interweaving of an enormous cadre of extremely capable professional soldiers on the one hand balanced by a heavy levening of venal and incompetent Hitler cronies on the other hand.

Another worst is that Australian (or NZ) rattletrap tank that's been posted a couple of times...looks like a garden shed on a tractor--maybe somebody can find the link again. That definitely deserves mention on this thread.

[Sergei]

Bob Semple, NZ.

[CombinedArms]

Originally posted by Sergei:

Bob Semple, NZ.

Thanks! And away we go. Find pictures and write up here. You have to see this thing to believe it.

Excerpt from the text:

"In 1940 war hysteria gripped New Zealand and an effort was made to produce a home grown tank. It was decided to armor an International Harvester farm tractor to make use of equipment on hand. The result was an amazing "tank" called a "Bob Semple" after a politician in New Zealand. ... Backing this wonderful idea (probably because Bob was) were the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence (who was Bob). Bob must have been impressed by the U.S. Disston "Tractor Tank" and the idea that a tank would actually be named after himself! Bob probably had visions of Semples storming the beaches and taking Berlin or Tokyo! Rube Goldberg himself could not have designed it better. Apart from being just plain ugly to the bone, the front gunner actually had to lay on a mattress on top of the engine in order to fire his weapon! The Semple had a searing top speed of 24 km/h but had to slow down or even stop in order to shift gears. The "tank" was highly unstable in movement and top heavy. ... The army took them, tested them, and even paraded them around the country in an effort to whip up morale. After the laughter subsided, and in an rare display of military intelligence, the army returned them.... Only 4 units** were built before public ridicule stopped the production. The Bob Semple was armed with 4 machine guns, it was 12 feet tall had had a crew of 8 men. 8 men?"

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Alkiviadis:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Martyr:

Goering's uniforms, however, deserve a "best of" award of their own. Say what you will, the man dressed to impress!

On the other hand Napoleon deliberately took the opposite approach, & thus stood out beside his glittering generals </font>

[CombinedArms]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Alkiviadis:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Martyr:

Goering's uniforms, however, deserve a "best of" award of their own. Say what you will, the man dressed to impress!

On the other hand Napoleon deliberately took the opposite approach, & thus stood out beside his glittering generals </font>

[Guest Mike]

Originally posted by The Hapless General:

German Intelligence Services. Having almost all of their assets in Britain caught right as the war started and then having half of them turned against them... just an example of their ineptitude, especially when highlighted by the brilliant British Intelligence Service.

Dunno if you can count them - Cannaris was anti-Hitler after all (eg he deliberately warned Franco against joining the war!!), and so seeming "ineptitude" on the part of the Abwhere might have been part of his cunning plan!!

Of course his plan wasn't quite so cunning when he was executed in 1944!!

[Holman]

Was it Grant of whom it was said that, even if you put him in a starched and pressed fresh uniform, half an hour later it would like like he had slept in it?

[Shosties]

I remember reading in an older biography of Grant that he was mocked as a young officer fresh out of West Point for appearing, on one occasion, in his new uniform as something of a dandy. It stung too, especially as he wasn't born to high social standing or possessed of impressive stature to begin with.

In the Mexican War he saw Zachary Taylor, the king of slovenly-looking but effective generals, in action and looked to him as something of a role model ever afterward.

[Lord Harmes]

In Heinz Guderian's book he mentions a time when Goering was getting a bollocking from Hitler, and that he appeared to be wearing make up! Now that is just bloody scarey!!!

[Joachim]

Originally posted by Mike:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by The Hapless General:

German Intelligence Services. Having almost all of their assets in Britain caught right as the war started and then having half of them turned against them... just an example of their ineptitude, especially when highlighted by the brilliant British Intelligence Service.

Dunno if you can count them - Cannaris was anti-Hitler after all (eg he deliberately warned Franco against joining the war!!), and so seeming "ineptitude" on the part of the Abwhere might have been part of his cunning plan!!

Of course his plan wasn't quite so cunning when he was executed in 1944!! </font>

[Michael Emrys]

Not only that, they failed to cut the phone line from Gobbel's office—let alone arrest him—and thus he was able to effectively orchestrate the counter-coup.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Michael

[Shosties]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

Not only that, they failed to cut the phone line from Gobbel's office—let alone arrest him—and thus he was able to effectively orchestrate the counter-coup.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Michael

Did they underestimate the club-footed little guy perchance?

What did they try to do about Himmler and Goering (admittedly Goering was rather out of it by that point)?

[Joachim]

Rumors are that Rommel orchestrated a withdrawal of the Western front. This could not happen without the SS divisions. Thus Himmler might have known a few things...

But the other guys... hey, the resistance did not want to kill anybody. They were a bunch of nice guys uneasy with what they were doing. After all the same guy to deliver the deadly bomb in the Wolfsschanze should be the one to lead the coup in Berlin.

Gruß

Joachim

[Michael Dorosh]

Well, another character in the Hitler plot deserves mention.

Otto-Ernst Remer was at the time a Major in the Grossdeutschland Division. On 20 July 1944 he was commanding the Führer Escort Brigade in Berlin, which was drawn from the GD establishment. He personally commanded the Army troops in the Berlin area and rounded up the conspirators - after a phone call from Goebbel's office in which he spoke to Hitler personally.

Remer had been awarded the Knight's Cross as a battalion commander previous to this.

Where he rises to his level of incompetence is afterwards - he ended the war as a general, and was completely out of his depth. He had been a good enough battalion commander but apparently sucked as a general.

He sucked even more at not being a Nazi after the war, and was exiled for being a Holocaust denier. In fairness, he was "only" questioning the numbers of deaths involved, but one combat veteran of the Grossdeutschland, apparently speaking for his comrades, was prompted to say (very elegantly, I think):

We, his former comrades, have deeply regretted that destiny confronted this young officer in July 1944 with a situation with consequences the bearing of which I should assume are beyond the powers of any human being. No judgement will be made here as to whether his decision on July 20 was right or wrong. But the consequences of his decision were so terrible, and have cost so much of the best German blood, that we old soldiers had expected that a man to whom destiny gave such a burden to carry until the end of his life would recognize this, and would thereafter live quietly and in seclusion. We, his former comrades, lack any sympathy for the fact that Herr Remer fails to summon up this attitude of self-effacement.

Remer instead had gone into politics soon after the war, wrote a book about his experiences in the bomb plot, and was sentenced in 1992 (at age 80) to 22 months in prison for his public statements about the scope of the Holocaust. Spain refused to extradite him to Germany on the grounds that "thought crimes" were not illegal in Spain.

Gotta admire a guy for standing up for his principles, but when you've backed not just the wrong regime, but one of the worst regimes in modern history, I don't see where arguing statistics will get you very far....

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Shosties4th:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

Not only that, they failed to cut the phone line from Gobbel's office—let alone arrest him—and thus he was able to effectively orchestrate the counter-coup.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Michael

Did they underestimate the club-footed little guy perchance?</font>

[Darryl60]

Admiral Halsey:

I can understand running your fleet into one typhoon...but two typhoons???

I never did understand where he got his rep from. His early war hit and run raids did little damage. And his leadership at Leyte Gulf could have led to a Japanese Naval Victory.

Luckily for Halsey,the Japanese Admiral commanding the main task force,(That included the Yamato),chickened out right when he was on the verge of breaking through to Leyte Gulf.

Halsey WAS great for newspaper quotes though. But I do think he was very over rated as a commander.

[Michael Emrys]

There is something in what you say. Halsey was clearly not the god that the papers made him out to be at the time, but that's wartime propaganda for you.

It may or may not be true that his early war raids had little effect (although, in provoking a Japanese attack on Midway before they were really ready for it, the raid on Tokyo had strategic consequences far beyond its immediate military effects), but nobody else's did either. That was mostly due to the fact that one or two deckloads of planes have intrinsically less effect than ten or twelve.

I won't argue with you that his performance late in the war left a lot to be desired. Much of the fault lay with his staff, but a commander is responsible for his staff. That's just the way it works. But as near as I have been able to discover thus far, his performance as ComSoPac was excellent and may well have been critical to the success of the Guadalcanal campaign.

Michael

[hurtzDonut]

One of the worst mistakes of WW2 was Gen. Patton's visits to the field hospitals in Sicily. A couple of slaps put him on the shelf for a year.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by hurtzDonut:

One of the worst mistakes of WW2 was Gen. Patton's visits to the field hospitals in Sicily. A couple of slaps put him on the shelf for a year.

What could Patton do between the end of August 1943 and the start of August 1944 that other commanders were incapable of doing?

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

What could Patton do between the end of August 1943 and the start of August 1944 that other commanders were incapable of doing?

For one thing, Anzio might well have developed differently.

Michael

[hurtzDonut]

Anzio might not have been necessary at all.