The Commanders: The Best of the Rest

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. This was it history.com/subscribed. Hey folks, welcome to Dansano's history here. The great commanders of World War II series has come to an end, but tell lots of you got in touch to how will that be, and tomorrow and the explanation, and why this saw that

person was not on the list, why they're not included, where is Yamashita, where's slim good air in Manstein, where are so many others? So, by popular demand really, here is a podcast in which we'll shout out a few other commanders. Sadly, this still won't be comprehensive, but at least to get us a chance to get a few others out.

The ones that we feel really do deserve a mention.

“Now, there's only one man I could think of to help me with this.”

That is Jonathan Bracken, a long time, contributed to this podcast. Y'all have heard him on here before, we talked about the great commanders of history a couple years ago. He's also, he's accompanied me around Battlefills, the French Indian War, the 70s War

of North America, and the American Revolutionary Wars, who are recently a Lexington Concord

together. He has written books, excellent books, he's taught the next generation of U.S. Army leaders. He thinks about this stuff while the rest of us are fast asleep. So here's our list of alternative great commanders. You might not have heard of, some you certainly will have done it, it's actually got rather

a surprising conclusion that it's probably both less than enjoy. Jonathan Bracken, get to have you back on the pod buddy. Oh, and this is one of my favorite places to be. Hey, man, thanks, dude. Let's jump in.

So we've focused in this big series, in this season on history here on some of the great commanders.

Of course, as we're doing so, you just think there's so many other guys who should

get a mention in World War II, in the Eastern Front, as Rokosovsky, and Chouakov, and we talked about Yamamoto in the Pacific, who we decided to not be a great commander, but I mean, the American city that have a surface of very high-performing senior commanders in the Pacific Theatre in World War II, which one draws your attention. I mean, I'm biased, you know, I love an underdog story, and that story is a Walter Kruger,

who's just this absolutely unknown individual in the American military experience. Two reasons. One, he's not American born in Prussia in 1881, and two he's serving under MacArthur.

“So if you want to have any type of career, you have to not be under MacArthur's thumb,”

and Kruger is just this great experience of one of those guys who does really basic stuff really well. And that's, you know, I think if you look at what makes a good commander, can you get stuff and people to the right point at the right time? That's really sort of what it takes, and I hate to boil it down and simplify it like that.

But that's really what it is. It's very, very difficult now to do all those things. So when you see it done really well, you're like, oh, wow. And Kruger is one of these guys who's just consistently getting it done. It's just a point about, well, we're through modern industrial, but perhaps it was true

of the Catholic Indians and the Romans well, but in some ways, not super glamorous. I mean, this is not the podium riding up and down his lines, night for Astal. It's leading the final challenge, the Imperial Guard. This is just crushing logistics, right? He's just, as you say, just getting a lot of stuff into the right place, and then just

changing the facts on the ground. You go a lot more gear than the other guy. Yeah, and Kruger's got this sort of, he comes up in this American army that's rapidly changing, you know, getting for some pretty experienced in the Spanish American war, which is just a logistical catastrophe.

And then he serves on the divisional chief of staff level in World War I. So he's cutting his teeth doing those things a little bit like Marshall does in World War I as well, just getting very, very good at the administrative athletics. And so by the time of the Louisiana maneuvers in 1941 when the U.S. Army is really just going, all right, things looked very dire in the world.

We should really, I don't know, test our theory, text our doctrine, test our equipment and soldiers. Kruger sort of comes to the fore as one of these guys who is like, wow, yeah, he's very dependable. And he sort of becomes this workhorse and a specific under MacArthur, eventually rising

to command of the sixth army in the Southwest Pacific Campaigns.

mainly because, well, Marines, Nimitz has most of the Marines and they are a phenomenal publicity campaign. So this is like the campaign to New Guinea, this is the campaign to eventually into the Philippines. Yeah. Yeah.

And through the Solomon Islands as well, which is just really, really bloody combat, but also tiny little islands, just little island chains and where you're having to constantly make the decision, do you bypass, do you try to surround cutoff, one thing I love about the Pacific is you don't have a choice whether you want to be a joint commander or not.

“But the virtue of the terrain and the geography, you have to be thinking air, land, and”

sea. And if you're not doing it, you're not successful.

And Kruger, ultimately, he's seen sort of by some historians, a sort of too plotting

or too deliberate, but being deliberate is how you are successful in the Pacific, is because you have to sort of build up capacity at an island chain to then move to the next one. And then the next one. Yeah. And if you lose a bunch of landing craft, they all super hard to replace.

And everyone's screaming for landing craft, both theaters, you can't do anything without them. I think that's one of the great lessons of World War II, what's the one thing you can't do without? And it's landing craft.

And you can do without heavy bombers, of course, the Air Force would object. But well, I also, as a person, as a boat guy, operating in shallow water with the right kind of facilities, you can't make any other boats squeeze into that role either. Right? A landing craft has to be a landing craft has to be a land craft, other types of vessels don't

work. So yeah, it's a tricky one. Okay. So that's really interesting. And I love the fact that he was prussian born, there's something beautifully appropriate

about that. He's not glamorous, isn't he from the front, he didn't have pithy one liners, is that one of them reasons? Oh, he's not remembered by the public, or is it just like, you know, it's a crowded field.

It's tough out there. How do you get remembered in World War II, the greats, but War of all time, there's so many commanders, there's so many theatres, you know, inevitably people are squeezed out. Yeah, there's that, there's not being a native born American, he doesn't have the sort

of star power that a MacArthur is going to have, that an Eisenhower or a Marshal or a Bradley is going to have, or a patent, he doesn't have the pithy one liners, he just does his job, he keeps his mouth shut, he's very reliable.

“And he is under MacArthur's thumb, and I think we really need to emphasize this, you have”

a bunch of incredibly competent core and army commander serving under MacArthur who are not getting any press whatsoever, who are getting just sort of road hard constantly by their boss. And who half of them want to go fighting Europe, they see Europe as the main theatre. And they keep putting in requests to transfer to Europe.

And of course, MacArthur washes them, doesn't allow a single one up towards Marshal. So you've got really, really competent guys fighting in almost what it's seen is a backwater of the war by 1944, you know, the real conflict, as many people see it is happening in Europe, that's where all the attention grabbing headlines are. So yeah, you've got guys like Eichelberger and Kruger who are just hanging out in the Pacific

doing a great job, but never getting the recognition that they truly deserve.

OK, we got Kruger there. It's such an interesting example of a great well-being to come under. OK, before we lead the Pacific, there's someone who I've long admired because I made it one of the first TV shows I've ever made was about the battle of Midway and the events leading up to it. Admiral Holtzie, Bill Holtzie, maybe different kind of commander dealing

with the difference in the problems, but deserves an mention. Absolutely. I mean, he's another person who's critical to the Southwest Pacific campaign, who also is often overshadowed by MacArthur as he's sort of the naval component in that joint command through the Southwest Pacific.

But unlike everybody else, Holtzie has no problem capturing a spotlight.

“He has brush key as profane, he's got the one liners, he's got the cigar chopping, he looks”

the pop, he looks the part, right?

And that's absolutely critical.

He is very aggressive, you know, where I've mentioned Kruger is sort of a little bit more conservative wanting to take more time to be deliberate. Holtzie is not he is of the Stephen Decatur School of Naval Leadership, which is just sort of not quite never mind maneuverers and go straight out of them, but it's pretty close. And he's there at the beginning, right?

He comes back into Pearl Harbor within hours of the raid of the Japanese assault and he promises right there, and then there's going to be revenge to Japanese language will only be spoken and hell. Yeah. And indeed, he kind of, he's the first guy to go on the offensive, I suppose you could say,

you know, he's he's looking for opportunities straight from the off the hit back. Yeah, taking the carriers out of Pearl and then coming back in with them, realizing he's also one of these individuals who sees that the future of Naval Warfare isn't just the

And now we go yet, obviously carriers are very important, but we have to remember the still an era of innovation with a lot of people wondering, all right, well, how central really, you know, 1941, 1941, you have central, really will carry your warfare B. And when you put together something like a carrier task force combining sort of your surface warfare and your air warfare, then all of a sudden, it's a sort of a whole new ballgame. There are

many leaders who just can't grapple with that, can't bring their minds around it. Hullsy's excellent at that coordination of air and see a little bit almost one could say too good, you know, he has this faith in his own capabilities and leadership that puts himself off and in difficult tactical situations and weather considerations as well as he's often puts his task forces into various typhoons throughout the war.

Yeah, I always think it's already sales since not one, but two like ship destroying typhoons

in during the war. It always seems like a slightly, an industry listen to his met people of it more, maybe. Yeah, but he is one of these individuals who being aggressive allows him to always keep the Japanese imperial navy on the back foot. This is huge, because as we know, most of the imperial Japanese army was busy on the Asian continent, busy mostly with China, and it's the navy that's holding those Pacific island chains and fighting what

rapidly becomes a deteriorating delaying action as they're losing island chains and also losing the ability to combat what is becoming increasingly aggressive and increasingly capable US naval presence. That's both under the water on the surface of the water and in the air.

“I think we often forget about how critical the submarine warfare element in the Pacific was”

for destroying Japanese merchant marine. I just find the Warren Pacific's amazing. I mean, you're part of anything else. Hulsi commands the fleet at the Battle of Laita Gulf, which is pretty much by slip and criterion by my criteria. The largest naval battle in the history of the world. The superlatives just keep coming and well, too, don't they? It's just on the just a monumental scale. Just almost too large of a scale. I think for a lot of us to really take in.

Laita Gulf is a great example of what happens if you're a little bit too aggressive. You're following a decoy or a faint of the Japanese carrier force. As you're trying to find your enemy's weakest point or your most the decisive point for yourself to destroy your enemy's

most important asset. It would be the carriers. And you put you up on almost disadvantage

and luckily he wins at Laita, but it is at the cost of very high casualties. Yeah, so he's a kind of a little bit rash. Overly aggressive. I mean, it sounds crazy, but

“possibly are very aggressive. Yes, but you also need that. Yeah, you need that, right?”

You absolutely need that. Especially from a naval commander, and especially in that theater, where if you let your guard down at one moment, I mean, the Japanese Imperial Navy is absolutely a potent force. And if you don't have the destruction of that, especially that carrier capability, nothing's moving. There's no army action coming to reinforce you. You're not able to seize any island change to turn into airfield for strategic bombing. You know, everything hinges

on on that. I mean, as an army person, it's very difficult for me to say, but looking at the

Pacific theater, we have a very small role there. It is always going to be the sea power that

guarantees everything else. Land power will become very important as you look at seizing and holding areas from logistics, bases, and then eventually for looking at something like an invasion of the Japanese home islands. But nothing happens without the Navy. And that is very difficult thing for me to say. Well, listen here. I mean, we've been saying it Britain for a long time afterwards. You know, don't forget Edward Grave once wrote, "The British Army should be a projectile to be

fired by the Royal Navy." So we're all ready for that. Okay, so Hulsie, a different kind of commander,

“I think, but such a striking one. So I've definitely used to have some mention.”

Let's get over to North African European theater. Who do you think, um, we should be looking at beyond perhaps the obvious household names? Well, gosh, there's so many. I like the commanders who just do their job, who are dependable, but who never really get the praise, right? You know, you've got the Jim Gavans, the jumping Jim Gavans of the world, but they get plenty of press and publicity. It's love about the Airborne

nonsense. Um, Lucian Trasket is really the one who I look at, um, especially. Wow, this is niche. This is a lot for me. No, I don't see it. He's fascinating. One, he's not a West pointer. He's, uh, he comes out of the cavalry, such as for Brits. So he doesn't go to the military academy in the US. Which is why you'll see nearly just tend to emerge from? Almost always. We pride ourselves on not being a class-based system and being very egalitarian, and yet for the majority of our military

history, all of our senior commanders have been coming out of the military academy at West Point. Well, given you the teach there, I celebrate that. But, uh, yeah, it's tough to break through there.

start out in the division commander level, commander of the third infantry division, the modern division,

“given that's what we're one nickname, and eventually rise through core command through fighting”

in Sicily and Italy, which is also, this is not maneuver territory, just like the Pacific. It's not until the Pacific forces reach the Philippines that Amon could even think about maneuver, and then with Sicily, you've got a little room from maneuver, but it's such a small island of then Italy. It's just a slogging slugfest when you're serving under someone like Mark Clark, a brace of constantly self-seeking, a little bit like Patton in that regard. But with some

half less self-awareness or more self-awareness really depends on the day with Mark Clark, whether you're going to get someone who really understands what's going on. A really, really difficult situation. So Trusket works under Patton. It works under Clark. I mean, this is a guy who's just

has a succession of very difficult bosses. And then, uh, when they finally take Rome in 1944,

“I think it's a day or two before D-Day. Mark Clark gets the headlines for about five minutes,”

and then all of a sudden it's D-Day. After Mark Clark leaves, it's just Trusket left holding the bag to fight through the rest of Italy. And as you know, there's a lot more Italy after you hit Rome. So Trusket eventually fighting the Fifth Army through Italy in some very, very, very brutal campaigns. Yeah, and people also forget just the geography of Italy is savage. It's narrow. You can't outflank. It's the landscape. It's brutal, the climate's tough. And doing all that whilst knowing that

you're probably not in the decisive theatre must bring its own particular psychological challenges and come on challenges. Yeah. Yeah. That's to say the least. There's a real humility with Trusket. That's really interesting. I think it's a memorial-day dedication at one of the cemeteries outside Rome is the main speaker and he's sort of giving remarks to the crowd. He turns his back on the crowd and turns to look at the cemetery, which are all his soldiers. And in this really moving moment,

he apologizes to his soldiers and he says, "If there's something that I did that put you here, I am sorry for it." And it's this really human moment that is kind of rare when you look, you know, as you said earlier, it's a crowded field and a lot of these people are Primadanas. I mean, you have the Montgomerys, the Pattons. Even the Bradley's to a certain extent. You know, he's got his own ego to deal with. But this sort of humility and understanding that

it is the average soldier that fights and suffers and bleeds and dies in all these moving little pieces around on a map in order to capture things like Rome in order to do things like seize Sicily and sort of erase the axis control off the Italian boot, which is a secondary theater that many historians have argued about whether the US or the ally should have

“expended that many resources against North Africa Sicily and Italy. And so I think that makes”

my very sympathetic person Patton rates him as a very proficient division commander, which

almost comes as a dig. Oh, that's interesting. I've always read that Patton quote. He says,

like, he's the most efficient divisional commander of a meeting. He wouldn't have done well beyond that. That's in trouble. I never read it that way. Interesting. I don't know. I always look at Patton's quotes with a grain of salt, where I'm going all right. What else is he saying? But, you know, rising to army command, he does a phenomenal job. And I think if you put him in another location, we would hear a lot more about Lucian Trasket. Instead, we just know of him for his brief scenes

of the movie Patton. And that I think was his son who did go to West Point. His son or his grandson wrote a romantic thriller based at West Point where you're just like, "Man, your dad was famous for not going here and you've become so bought in that you're just imbibing the West Point, uh, cool aid." But it's funny that the adjectives you're using, some of the words you're using to decide

Trasket is a little bit like Kruger. We're getting at something here around Hikamanda in the middle of the 20th century. You know, he's, it's no longer Alexander Great, the Battle of Gargamella, just leading a kind of frantic cavalry charge that takes out the enemy Hikamanda during the battle. You know, this is, but talking about things like coordination, you know, his ability to make sure

that any human military planners ever had to conceive of before this century. Just messing them together, making sure stuff arrives at the right time, the start line, the things the coordination takes by the orchestras all playing to the right music. There's something really coming through and everything you're saying about these guys. It leads us almost to an interesting point where as we talk about great commanders of World War II, I think some of the most brilliant minds

in World War II never commanded a single person. And the first person who jumps to mind is George

Marshall. I mean, he's the one who's orchestrating, getting all these forces to every single point on the globe. I mean, we are talking Army Navy Air Corps in just some of the most remote faraway conditions from the Arctic to the Antarctic. I mean, it's extraordinary. Yeah. But because he's not a commander and never commanded in combat beyond a platoon in the Philippines in 1901 or so, he usually gets overlooked as oh, it's just some staff person. Yeah, it's very striking. I

wonder thinking about this as technology has changed, whether are we entering a new era and perhaps that will be around sort of almost media and communications. But or are we still locked in this war is still the story of vast amounts of people objects supplies, not only in terms of volume of those objects, but in terms of their the difference in sophistication and range of them. And that

is therefore always at the moment, still means that we put a very high premium on people's ability

to kind of organize and coordinate those things. Definitely, you can't achieve your sort of nation's political policy objectives against another nation or set of nations unless you're massing all the right effects at the right place, at the right time. That's incredibly difficult. You know,

“what are the right effects you use? What is the best way to bring about, I mean, you know, the”

allies make this decision to call for the unconditional surrender of the access, which is highly controversial because there's this idea of, well, if we say, unconditional surrender, then they're just going to fight to the death. And so how do you get your military commanders to then

bring about that effect? How do you get them to bring your enemy to their knees? I mean,

you can't just go in with sort of pinpricks. It's this utterly enormous movement from the home front from production to labor to merchant marine shipping aircraft all the way over to these vast theaters of war to then deploy those in a responsible way where you're not sort of wasting equipment, wasting lives. It's so daunting when you start thinking about the scope of it, you just sort of stop and get a headache and just want to go outside and look at some grass. Yeah, totally.

Let's come to the British name that people have been messaging me about the fact that I missed out,

“who it's, in Britain, if you want to sound knowledgeable about WW2, you always say Britain's best”

commander, WW2 was built slim, was the Vy-Count slim and you deliberately don't say Mongon. He also was not born into the sort of military elite and he's a little bit of an outsider from from a definitely a sort of a different socioeconomic background, what you might expect to British commander this period to be and yet he rises up to command, become a field marshal, and he commands the Fagot army, the 14th army in North East India and then into Burma and Sanatha East Asia.

And I mean, what do you make of our bill slim? Do you see why we'll get very excited about him? Well, I mean, one, he's a character to say the least and he's also doing something that is very, very difficult, commanding multinational forces and especially in the Far East. I mean, on the American side, we've got our own sort of controversial, either you love him or hate him. You've got, you know, vinegar just still well and in China, sort of attempted to do something

rather similar. Slim is dealing with a situation where you've got multiple sort of European forces, sort of colonial forces, you've got British colonial forces that you're trying to fight with. And you're doing this all in really horrific terrain. I mean, the China India Burma theater, it's one where logistics is everything because there are no roads, everything sucks. The weather's

“awful. You have to fly almost fly everything in and this idea of how you are successful in elements”

like that the way slim is. I mean, of course, you're going to come out of that looking somewhat legendary especially considering the number of people around him who were not being led into or collapsing. He's got that thing that holes he needed and Montgomery needed and he certainly didn't. The East

but if you're there, I imagine fields pretty dominant, which is a sense that you've retreated. You've been driven out of Southeast Asia by the Japanese, the mighty British Empire, dominant that part of the world for so many generations is just reeling back and fame to come in and just say we're going to win. And this is how we're going to do it. And he does that. He's communicating that. He famously speaks the language of many of his men. He language is like Napoleon. He's

“able to speak to the gun, because no language. That's what I guess what you call charismatic leadership.”

That's pretty effective. Yeah. Yeah. To be able to sort of influence the morale of the unit to allow soldiers to understand what it is that they're actually fighting for. I think there's something with that with the trust it as well that you have individuals who are able to go, we'll just speak to soldiers on a sort of one to one basis. You're not talking down. You're talking with that's huge, whether you're talking about training or keeping up morale in very,

very difficult circumstances. It is also interesting to look at how he's using resources.

There's always a temptation to throw resources at specialized units. And we could look at

Robert Rogers through the 1760s and 1770s and this idea of, oh, just give me more resources, give me more people and we'll train these Ranger units. And they're going to have amazing effects when really what every commander from gauge to Washington needs in the 18th century is just more good line in portraying. Maybe some good artillery batteries. And you really see this across World War II. Is this some commanders have this obsession with sort of specialized units, whether it's

marils morauders and the chindits in the Pacific theater or the Army Rangers in the European

“theater, what you're doing, I think a lot of people don't realize is you're pulling some of the”

best, most intellectual, best trained, most physically fit soldiers from regular formations, where they could be training those around them and making those around them better, grouping them into one very specialized unit, which can be used for good operational or strategic success if used correctly. But if used incorrectly, you're killing off your best in your brightest and you're really not delivering what is needed for winning that conflict. And so slim takes some

flock for his disdain of the chindits. But I'm of his camp of saying, no, we need to make the whole force better. Not everyone can be a special forces soldier and if you're using them incorrectly, as case and point the rangers in Europe, I mean, where they pull up to four battalions and then you lose most of those in one single operation and Italy, you're just wasting so much of your talent in one single source. But that is a personal opinion and many other military thinkers would

would end due to disagree with me. I just think the challenge is that he faced the geography, the coalition, the Chinese nationalist troops, troops from across Northern India, West Africa troops, European British troops. I mean, it's just an astonishing collection of images to

“well together and push through some of the toughest country on earth. So I think he does deserve”

his honorable mention in this context. But let me go back to Europe, because I don't know nearly enough about the sort of the elephant in the room of the Americans in northwest Europe.

We always talk about Eisenhower, we always talk about Patton. And then there's Bradley just sitting

there. How should we evaluate him? General Omar Bradley went to West Point as we discussed the military academy in the same year as Eisenhower, the class, the stars, fell on, I love that expression. And I see him as being more unassuming, I suppose, in some of the people around him. He's definitely cultivated that air. He was noted in the press as the GI general. And so while yes, he is sort of, he's more humble than Patton, but that doesn't take a lot.

I mean, the bars very low there. But he does cultivate definitely an image that is more of one of the troops. He dresses like an average soldier. He's not spitting polish. He's not wearing a fancy uniform. He's very focused on doing the work. And he's one of these guys. He's in the European theater, the Atlantic theater, however you want to describe it is it really comes up through the North African campaign, from North Africa all the way to the end, sort of brought in to

rehabilitate what is often referred to as a really series of catastrophic first battles for the

US Army in North Africa. I think a little unfairly, everyone's got to have their first bloody nose and their first fight. Yeah, there's the casserine pause as we're entering Tunisia. This is casserine pass and other skirmishes battles around it. And he's coming into an environment where there are so many commanders are getting relieved for minor stuff that I even Patton says, hey, maybe we're, maybe we're kicking people out too fast. Maybe people should have

a second chance. Everyone had their first combat. Maybe they should be allowed to have another chance. So he's coming into a very, very difficult situation there to try to rebuild the forces

he's a guy who can move a lot of people and stuff to the decisive point and do the simple

“things that also build up morale. Make sure the food is good and on time. Making sure that soldiers”

have the right equipment. Making sure that they have the right uniforms for the type of terrain and whether they're fighting in. He's going to come to the fore, you know, Eisenhower picks him not because he doesn't like Patton, but because Bradley has shown the ability to do the things that sort of Eisenhower is doing, which is, don't stir the pot, be a good ally, work well with others, which is vital in coalition warfare and be a sort of master of logistics, which is going to

mean that he's going to command an army group in the European theater, which is unfathomable, maneuvering armies around. I mean, it's unfathomable for us, the Soviets, of course, have been doing it for for several years in World War II. But that's the level of command that he's entrusted with.

“And he does a very good job with it. Yeah, I mean, the U.S. Army in what 1935 was what just over 100,000,”

the whole of the U.S. Army, I mean, it's probably about 180,000, 160,000 regulars. That's the entire

fighting strength of the Republic. And 10 years later, his Bradley commanding over a million men

in an army group. I mean, it's just wild, isn't it? And composed of multiple different nationalities and dealing with field commander is like a pattern and dealing with partners like a Montgomery. And as an army group, I mean, you're responsible almost for half of Europe. It's absolutely unreal. And then adding to this, of course, he is the one responsible for the the operational command of overlord and D-Day. And then the Cobra breakout, once they're in Normandy, in that drive across

France, where he's running into all sorts of problems like, Charles de Gaulle comes to mind

“and what are the free French going to do around decisions like giving up Straussburg after”

you've taken it. And how do you be that good coalition commander? And that's by rule by consensus

for lack of a better term, being able to work across the barriers rather than exacerbate the barriers and make them worse. So he plays a major role in how the U.S. Army actually comes out of World War II as well, because it's going to go on to be Chief of Staff and oversee the army and some real phases of transition that are very familiar to the army that we see today. So one could almost say that Bradley helps build the modern U.S. Army in addition to his wartime exploits.

Well, the great command as well, we'll too. We're going to be talking about find out after this. You know, you mentioned the Gaulle. I wonder if we should mention the Gaulle in this context, because actually, the Gaulle of all these guys has the most astonishing World War II and that he is a nobody at the start of World War II. He emerges having that exactly what he's set up to do, which is established himself as leader of a movement that apparently that he can suggest

has helped to liberate France from its eternal enemy, the German army, restore France's pride and pre-war borders, and we'll go on to have an extremely long political career at the Apex of French politics. Like you tell me, as you get a battle of commander, but in terms of his, he gets his strategic outcomes, almost more than anybody else. Oh, God, yes, and then coming from, as you say, almost no, but I don't know that there's anyone who sort of rises out from

obscurity to become this household name, and what we're trying to call to us, simply by virtue of the fact that he gets out after the fall of France. You can see, okay, establish themselves as the spokesperson for France. I'm really remarkable thing considering that there is, you know, another whole other French government, granted Petom's Vichy regime. Yeah, no, he's just, it's just him going, I'm the government now. He's just a guy with a radio set. I am France. It's

extraordinary. Yeah, and he does it, and he does it because one, that's exactly what Roosevelt and Churchill want to hear. They need someone who's going to be the anti Vichy voice to be this figurehead, and he's very happy to be the figurehead. Probably a little bit too happy, but as loud mouth as bragadocious, as self-seeking as he is, you could almost forgive so much of it because he goes, well, I'm doing this for France, and he's not wrong. France needed that. They needed that

voice. They needed that ability to have someone to be fighting for French interests as a member of the

to be a thorn in the side of everybody. Like I mentioned, Strasbourg, you know, allies capture Strasbourg, Germans, counter-attack, Americans say, hey, we've got a free French, we've got to give this back, and the free French, they absolutely not. And now you've got to sort of stand off amongst allies, but we're in a Galcize, this says, we've lost our nation, our sense of self, our pride, as who we are as French. There are some things we can't do. As a Franco-File, I find him fascinating.

Estonishing, never really got exposed, got a chance to show off his skills. In terms of being

genuinely charge of low-skill, independent operations, like some of these other guys we're talking about. But, so, really, astonishing political military leader. And then, you know, you've said on the previous podcast that we talked about, the great commander history, and you said controversy at the end, you actually wanted to talk about martial, because he's the man who is just quietly in Washington overseeing the greatest warmaking enterprise in the history of the world, and does

so extraordinarily effectively. That is my controversial take. I stick to those guns.

“And I think the efforts of the combined chiefs from the U.S. and the U.K.,”

absolutely nothing short of astonishing. Samuel Elliott Morrison put it best, he said. The second greatest accomplishment of the U.S. and the U.K. in World War II was not breaking faith with each other and just turning on each other and clawing at each other, like some petty children, because it could have gone that way. There's so many personalities. There's so many different interests between the two camps. And so, being able to have these combined chiefs who

can sit there together and work out all those differences and work out everything from who gets land in craft this year to what's the next avenue of advance that we're taking to how do we get Roosevelt and Churchill to, you know, chill a little bit. And then how do we look past victory to what the post war looks like? That's what the combined chiefs are doing. It's amazing. No one had ever done that before. No one had ever managed that level of cooperation

through some very rough and stormy times with so great success. All those two good, one might say, making it look like ending wars are easy. Well, that's right. They made it look easy and they also have disguised, really successfully, so most of us that Brickman America had very diverse and strategic priorities in the second world war. Wildly. Yeah, and it's been convenient to

“forget about those, or that they have disguised those, I think. So what are we going to go with?”

Who do you appoint now to lead a detached command? So like an independent command, so say Italy, or Burma, you just need someone in there that can just get the job done. Are you going with a Krueger, Holsey, Slim, Trusket? I mean, look, they're all good. They're all good. Are you going

to give that job to? You're Marshall. Oh boy. So here's the thing. If you're talking about a command

that requires, you know, especially something like a Chinese Indian, if you look at also just even modern warfare, coalition warfare, the US likes to fight coalition warfare usually. You have to go with slim hands down, I think. He's someone who is able to sort of do whatever one else does. Do the logistics, do the administration, do the building morale, but do it across multinational levels. That is a skill. Very, very, very few people have, and it's so vital right now, especially if

you talk anything with NATO. The most successful commanders have to be the ones who can look past their own, what they want to call it, biases, judgments, national lenses to look beyond that and see that sort of the greater scope. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm a betray, my American nationalist

“identity, and I'm going to have to go with slim. And I think there's something in Slim about the”

muscle memory of empire, which is that he's the last of these, he's a life her up there. He knows South Asia, he knows South East Asia, and there's this, when you run a giant disconnected global empire in the era before modern communications, you're used to figures like Slim emerging, like pro consoles almost, who take charge in a theater and make coalition, military, political economic decisions on that scale. It feels like it comes reasonably naturally. I think that he's

a sort of product of that stable, the last product of that stable. Yeah, I would definitely, definitely agree. But I like our little Dark Horse at the end of here, who's a guy that I'm most from World World Two with every single one of his strategic priorities met from the least promising for getting. I think it's the goal. I think it's the hot take. I'm going to say, Charles the gold, great commodity. That's nuts, but I love it. But yeah, that is going to be

controversial. I mean, what is it you live long enough to see yourself become the villain and

the goal, just his post-war antics. But again, always from this perspective of France first.

advantage of the moment in ways that are, you know, if you talk about most aggressive and risk

taking, um, to gall might be up there for that person step aside, holes, maybe it's the goal. Simply for the ability to just say, I am France. But saying the thing that was needed in the moment

“and I think that's a great capstone to this whole series is that Dark Horse of Charles the”

goal. Wow, that's weird. Okay, that's not where it was possible. Okay Jonathan Bratton has ever met and thank you so much for coming to podcast. See you soon. Thanks.

So this is the finale to our season of Commander. Thank you so much for listening. As always,

thank you for subscribing and following all that kind of stuff. I owe you. See you next time, folks.

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