Who was the most overrated personality of WW2?

My pick for overrated dunderhead is of course Generalissimo MacArthur, for reasons already stated. But I would add that his stature during and after WWII enabled him to stay on far too long and after he was obviously overage, and a relic of America’s interwar past. In short, his disastrous decisions in The Korean War (overall, despite some successes such as Inchon) and what I regard as an overall display of poor leadership make him a massive goat that is still a supplicated deity by some.

MacArthur’s imperial overreach and atomic bombast combined with incompetence at maintaining conventional forces in his “soft occupation army” in Japan resulted in a dangerous setback in Korea and showed weakness to our Cold War adversaries. Mac wasn’t solely responsible for this as I think the U.S. Army suffered from poor leadership amid budget cuts -or rather budget redirections towards a nuclear deterrent that turned out to be more expensive than anticipated - ultimately resulted in an inferiority complex against the “Godless communist hordes” of Chinese (and by extension Soviet) infantry when in fact U.S. infantry often had vastly more firepower and air support available to them. Mac bungled American advantages by failing to prepare his forces for basic conventional infantry warfare. The proof is in the puddin’ as General Matthew Ridgway, often criticized as having no great intellect himself, was able to transform the Army in a few weeks into a vastly more professional and tough fighting force whose battlefield performance was magnified tenfold. I think no other leader displays such overall ineptitude combined with idolatry…

I might say, Zhukov
Everyone can just send masses of armies to death, until the enemy runs out of ammo.

Zhukov was just following standard Stalin inspired Soviet doctrine of the time in applying massive force without much regard to casualties.

I don’t know enough about all commanders in all armies in WWII, but I suspect he was unique in being victorious before, during and after the war in Europe, being the commander at Nomonhan / Khalkhin Gol battles for about five months before WWII began; in Europe; and again against the Japanese in Manchuria in August 1945.

Unlike, say, MacArthur who is much better known in the West, he commanded much larger forces for much longer with much greater success.

He was to an extent, he was also following the decidedly Un-Stalinist doctrine of Deep Battle as well…

I don’t think Zhukov is an overrated personality, he was an able general that had to use his advantages in numbers and resources to overcome a technically superior adversary. But by the end of WWII, the Red Army was a steamroller (if logistically imperfect) capable of massive envelopment that the Germans never could imagine with Schwerpunkt or was was thought of as “Blitzkrieg”…

William Shirer knew him when he was boadcasting out of Berlin. At first he avoided him but eventually inevitably spent some time with I’m during air raids. Shirer said that a he had a fair sense of humor and that his wife was also an ardent Nazi. Shirer said that the scars on his face were gained during street brawls in his pre-war years.

Mac attended the Texas Military Institute (still here) when he was a young man while his father, Arthur, was stationed at Ft Sam Houston in San Antonio. His mother had a powerful influence over him until she died. When he went to West Point, she moved there to keep an eye on him. He was apparently justly honored for his fearlessness during the FirstWorld War, earning a Congressional Medal of Honor as a rule, thus achieving the same rarified honor that his father did. Mac always possessed a high opinion of himself, had a certain charisma, but was seemingly always a distant sort of character. I am unaware of any close friendships that he had during his life, but he did surround himself with worshipful sycophants. He had the impulses of an authoritarian which probably helped him in Japan postwar and in Manila pre-war. He didn’t so much as speak as orate and he expected those nearest to him to pay rapt attention. Interestingly, during the Korean War he spent not a single night on the peninsula, flying home to Tokyo every night. His son, Arthur is not cut from the same cloth and lives quietly in New York City. He sits on he board of an organization related to his father’s exploits but I am given to understand that his main interests were in the theatre. My across the street neighbor where I live was the director of all military hospitals in Japan under Macarthur during the occupation and had frequent contact with the family.

Bernard Law Montgomery, if we had given his supplies to Patton I think the war could have been won sooner!

It is a toss-up between MacArthur and Montgomery.

Totally agree with you. And he even had the nerve to stride ashore again claiming “people i have returned”. Talk about rubbing salt into the wound. “The people” were either dead, starving or in camps. British Commanders in the Pacific have a lot to answer to too. But McArthur was something else! And i thought Monty was bad…

Monty and MacArthur were definitely overrated tactically. But im a little surprised nobody has mentioned Bradley. He was both tactically inept and a weak minded man…

I will give Mac credit for one thing…he was an expert in P.R. :wink:

Welcome to the forum, smokey stover. (I hope you’re not a food stove smoker, because like most things that are fun and pleasurable one of our idiot state governments is going to close that off among one of the few remaining avenues of pleasure left to us in our own homes: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-19/barbecue-smoke-ban-dubbed-un-australian/10012644 )

I’d suggest that one of the major problems with MacArthur from the pre-war Philippines to his end in Korea is that he and his staff of appallingly obsequious ‘yes men’ (notably Willoughby with his farcical and disastrous ‘intelligence’ evaluations in Korea in the face of everything contrary coming to him from those in field but opposite to what Mac wanted, which cost countless unnecessary lives on both sides) weren’t focused on either tactics or, as Mac should have been at his high command level, strategy, but the media managing politics of promoting Mac as the greatest commander ever and pursuing Mac’s own version of changing global politics with, ideally, atomic weapons without regard to much more conservative views from his civilian masters.

I think it was von Clausewitz who said something along the lines that ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’.

The flaw in that observation is that it is commonly assumed that those armed service commanders engaged in running a war are not also engaged in politics, both in pursuit of their nation’s aims and their own ambitions. At high command levels in any nation, it is a mix of civilian politics and military politics in pursuit of national and personal ambitions carried out by civilian and military politicians.

Then there is Hitler’s observation in Mein Kampf along the lines that (although he ascribed it to the Jews who brought Germany to what he and many other delusional Germans saw as an unnecessary armistice in 1918) if you tell a lie that is so extreme that nobody could fail to believe it could not be true, it will work.

As, indeed, did MacArthur at various stages of his career, ably assisted by civilian politicians for their own purposes, leading to such nonsense as him being a stout and skilled defender of the Philippines in the face of overwhelming Japanese forces rather than being hopelessly incompetent in just about every aspect of his preparation for and subsequent resistance to the Japanese invasion.

As for Montgomery, he was undoubtedly successful in North Africa (although perhaps not least because of the foundations laid by his supposedly failed predecessor), but if one looks to his conduct after D-Day there were some very unedifying examples of nakked personal ambition frustrating combined operations with the Americans while pursuing his belief that he, rather than Eisenhower, should have been running the show. That came to an end when he issued a veiled ultimatum to Eisenhower, who called his bluff and Monty retreated.

Bradley subsequently distinguished himself by being part of the combined civilian and military political clusterf**k which, after a rout by North Korea, converted an early US / UN victory in Korea into prolonged misery which saw untold and unnecessary civilian casualties in both Koreas along with unnecessary military casualties on both sides. Anybody who looks at the devastation the UN, i.e. 95% or more the US, imposed on North Korea would understand why the ‘hermit kingdom’ has a longstanding antipathy to and fear of the US.

It is an unfortunate reality that thrusting, self-promoting, arrogant people with often a wholly unwarranted belief in their abilities who in many cases are borderline or full blown sociopaths are the ones who lever themselves into positions of power in civilian and military politics, where they can pursue their own beliefs with little regard to reality. The US is currently run by one of the better examples of an unrestrained narcissistic sociopath in a democratic society, while about at least half of the rest of the world is run by really bad psychopaths without any constraints on their autocratic, murderous and genocidal inclinations.

MacArthur had the Best personality hands down. Had he of been in power longer he would have convinced the president to send atomic bombs over to Korea and save lots of American lives.