Monty was loved and respected by his men, and he showed himself to be a cautious, methodical and positively brilliant commander. Historians have found little fault with him, and I certainly have no quarrel with the man.
Many historians have found him to be
too cautious and
too methodical; the long, drawn-out, costly, and eventually ineffectual Operation Market-Garden in 1944 was Monty's brainchild, and it was not much....oddly, to give him his due, it was the exact opposite of his brilliant campaign at El Alamein. By and large, however, his style of strategic management would have caused more casualties and lengthened the war considerably. That is my opinion, and the opinion of various other historians; your mileage may vary.
BTW, just for the record, the man I admire most out of all the WWII commanders, is Rommel. If Hitler had not weakened him by starving him of supplies and equipment, I believe that the Germans would never have lost Africa. In his own theatre, Rommel was arguably the most dangerous man of WWII.
If Rommel had been given free reign, there is no doubt he would have caused some damage. Hitler (who was almost as poor a strategist as Montgomery) insisted on micro-managing things from Berlin, however, and therein lay his mistake. In my own humble opinion, the most brilliant strategist in the entire war was undoubtably Isoruku Yamamoto; the man was a naval genius, a Japanese Nelson.
Nope, I don't recall. I'm not familiar with the finer points of US history, so you have the clear advantage here. Thanks for the correction.
The war, of course, ended in 1945; the United States then consisted of 48 States and ergo 48 stars. The 49th and 50th stars were added in 1960 with the admission of the Territories of Alaska and Hawaii as full-fledged States.
Hiroshima & Nagasaki. (But I accept that you don't see them as war crimes.)
You're correct. I wrote a rather lengthy paper on this when I was in college. Some pertinent points:
1. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of war, which were preceeded by warnings and notifications of impending action by the United States. We warned the Japanese by every medium available that we were going to use a drastic new weapon unless they agreed to surrender.
Pearl Harbor, on the other hand, was done without notification and without a declared state of war.
2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are considered by some to be "war crimes" simply because they involved the use of atomic weapons. The yield of the weapons was relatively small (about 14 to 20 kilotons) and in fact caused fewer casualties than the conventional firebombings of Tokyo, Yokohama, or Dresden.
3. Hiroshima was not without military value; it was the headquarters of the Japanese 2nd Army, which was vaporized in the explosion. Nagasaki was only hit because it was a secondary target; the primary target (Korkura, site of a large army base and weapons-production facility) was clouded over, and another site had to be chosen. The bomb
had to be dropped because at that point, nobody had ever attempted to land with an atomic bomb in the bomb bay before, and in the event of a crash, nobody was
quite sure what would happen. Ditching it was also out of the question---it was way too expensive and way too effective to just throw away; and at that point, it took
months to build the things.
As it turned out, Nagasaki also was clouded over by the time the aircraft got there, but they were low on fuel and didn't have any options left. The run was made by radar and the bomb missed its aiming point by two miles. The destructive effectiveness was primarily due to the plutonium bomb's greater yield (20 kilotons) as opposed to the Hiroshima bomb's uranium yield of 14 kilotons.
But I thank you for the discussion, and I apologise for having roused your ire.
Oh, I'm not ired at all. I may disagree with you, but that doesn't mean I'm angry, or anything close to it.
