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.
