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Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
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Interesting piece. I don't disagree, though I think using Trenton as the example is a bad idea as that was an astounding domination victory for Washington. He lost 2 men to exposure and had like 5 casualties while taking out an entire regiment. It is the same core weakness that Lee had, who I know historians love to attack now, but successfully beat the odds time and time again against a much better armed and numerically superior force for two entire years in one of the best fought series of campaigns in history, until his best subordinates were dead. He continued to use more complex tactical movements that his new commanders could not or would not really execute and it cost him Gettysburg and the northern invasion. His gentility and distaste for confrontation kept too many of his weaker replacement commanders in place for too long.
All have strengths and weaknesses, I give Washington points for having the odds heavily stacked against him. Eisenhower would win inevitably almost no matter how he actually performed. He saved many coalition lives by not messing it up and making mostly the right calls at mostly the right times, but with US industrial power and the Soviets doing most of the actual fighting and draining Hitler's resources, it would have been almost impossible to actually lose it. Pershing is in a similar boat but seems to be mostly forgotten now. Grant's reputation as a General is being rehabilitated to suit our contemporary narratives, though he was never really considered bad, just a user of brute force instead of careful tactics to save his mens lives. Winfield Scott probably deserves more consideration than he gets.
But anyways, here's some of the WWII command in one of my favorite cheap common sets, the Look N See's that the 1952 baseball issue lifted the design from. I like low grade, but even I need to upgrade the Truman...