He didn’t lack bravery and wasn’t trying to pass the burden to his troops. He was energetic, aggressive-a great American hero. This was something Patton was willing to do in order to keep the momentum moving forward, but also to assure his own fame. After the liberation of Paris, when they were moving on Germany, he attacked Metz in a frontal assault against German troops and tanks entrenched behind a river barrier, and took awful casualties. “But there was a dark side to Patton: He was pitiless about American casualties. Scott, Patton has become an iconic figure very much attached to everything Americans think about the Second World War,” Wawro said. “Because there have been so many books about him, and because of the movie starring George C. Geoffrey Wawro, director of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, chose one of the conflict’s most famous Americans-General George S. As the historian himself demonstrates in his brilliant Bomber Command (1979), Harris became almost obsessed with pursuing the destruction of German cities, when a more strategic approach to target selection might well have more greatly benefitted the Allied cause. Hastings is surely right to name Bomber Harris. “There’s no doubt, for example, that Charles Portal, chief of the British Air Staff, would have loved to sack RAF Bomber Command head Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris in the winter of 1944–1945, but couldn’t because propaganda had told everybody this was Bomber Harris, the master of Britain’s bomber offensive-a great popular figure.” “There is an almost endless roll call of inadequate commanders allowed to become so famous that they couldn’t be fired,” Hastings said. Once he’d been built into a great popular hero he became fantastically difficult to sack. “When you appointed a general or an air marshal or an admiral, the newspapers and the radio for months thereafter built him up into a great popular hero. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill constantly found themselves imprisoned by propaganda,” Hastings explained. “A basic fact about leaders in Western democracies is that Franklin D. Max Hastings found the question difficult-not because the celebrated British historian couldn’t think of a leader who did not deserve his reputation, but because he sees too many candidates to choose from. Nor were commonly revered figures sacrosanct. ![]() I had expected that nationalist pride might influence selection-that a British historian wouldn’t name a fellow Briton that a Russian would avoid embarrassing a countryman, and so on. So to what extent has history treated these revered figures too generously? To answer to that question I asked 16 distinguished historians of World War II to nominate the conflict’s most overrated leader. ![]() As British Prime Minister Winston Churchill admitted, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” But are those reputations justified?ĭo the familiar faces of the Second World War deserve the accolades awarded them? After all, many leaders shamelessly manipulated the media to help gain and maintain their celebrity. Tempered in the furnace of battle, these men, and many others, emerged as titans not merely famous today, but sure to be known to millions for years to come. Eisenhower ’s, from Joseph Stalin ’s to Charles de Gaulle ’ s. ![]() World War II made giant reputations-from Winston Churchill ’s to Dwight D. Who Was the War's Most Overrated Leader? Close
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