What German Generals Really Thought of Allied Commanders in WWII — Ranked From Worst to Best скачать в хорошем качестве

What German Generals Really Thought of Allied Commanders in WWII — Ranked From Worst to Best

May 1945. A small room in a British interrogation facility. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt sat across from Captain B.H. Liddell Hart, the renowned British military historian. For years, Rundstedt had commanded the most powerful armies in the German West. Now he was a prisoner, his uniform stripped of insignia, his nation in ruins. Liddell Hart asked the question carefully. Of all the Allied commanders you faced, who was the most dangerous? Rundstedt's answer would shock the world. For decades after the war, we believed we knew the story. Patton was the general the Germans feared most. Montgomery was the methodical master. Eisenhower was the supreme coordinator. The German generals themselves told us these things in their memoirs, in their interviews, in the comfortable narrative they constructed for history. But when historians finally gained access to the actual interrogation transcripts, the daily intelligence reports, the private assessments written when the bullets were still flying, they discovered something remarkable. The German generals had been far more honest, far more brutal, and far more surprising in their real-time evaluations than anyone imagined. What they found was not a simple ranking of good and bad. It was a complex portrait of military leadership, revealing what professional soldiers truly valued when death was the price of error. Some Allied commanders earned genuine respect. Others earned contempt. And a few earned something the Germans rarely gave: fear. This is the real ranking. Not the legend. Not the myth. The truth. There is a particular kind of contempt reserved for vanity in professional military circles. Not the pride of a soldier, but the preening self-regard of a man who values his image more than his mission. When German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring assessed Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army in Italy, the word he used was "predictable." In warfare, this is not a compliment. Clark was tall, photogenic, and obsessed with his own legend. He maintained a personal public relations staff. He positioned photographers to capture his best angles. He believed he was destined for greatness, and he would sacrifice military advantage to achieve it.