re: Ulysses S Grant is the Undisputed GOAT US General

I'll continue to maintain it. Lee sent Longstreet to Chattanooga and Richmond never fell during that time.

The powers that be would have never allowed The Army of the Potomac to leave Washington uncovered. Lee could have sent Longstreet to join Johnston and instead of facing 30 to 35k Grant has 50 to 55k at his back and maybe even more.

Lee digs in at Richmond with the rest or even sends more to Vicksburg, having never gone to Gettysburg and the North. He's dug in holding behind massive fortifications and the South went with a different option. Break the siege at Vicksburg by direct means.

Grant is living off the land himself, having cut himself off. He can't stay there forever and if Pemberton had laid in supplies as he should have Grant might have been in a pickle.

Maybe Bobbie Lee himself comes west to oversee the campaign.

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The powers that be would have never allowed The Army of the Potomac to leave Washington uncovered. Lee could have sent Longstreet to join Johnston and instead of facing 30 to 35k Grant has 50 to 55k at his back and maybe even more.

Lee digs in at Richmond with the rest or even sends more to Vicksburg, having never gone to Gettysburg and the North. He's dug in holding behind massive fortifications and the South went with a different option. Break the siege at Vicksburg by direct means.

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All of this depends on the North sitting still and not reacting to Lee's move westward in the middle of a campaign the Union high command saw at the time as one of the most important of the entire war. This move wouldn't have gone unnoticed and Lincoln would have reacted by ordering Hooker to send reinforcements of his own out west to assist Grant in fending off the increased number of Confederate troops.

The Union also had William Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland (an army of 60,000 men) in Tennessee set to come down to provide additional reinforcements if they were needed. All of this would have happened while the balance of the Army of the Potomac fell back into their defenses around Washington which, at the time, were the most formidable on the entire planet.

The Union could have easily parried this move by the Confederates due to their overall superiority in manpower, communications, and logistics.

So you watched the movie with George C Scott and then became a fanboy. That’s cute. Give them equal forces, and I would take Zhukov every time. Patton could work wonders at quickly exploiting a hole in the enemy defenses, or in general, at moving troops very quickly against limited defenses. He was nothing special when it came to slogging through a strong defensive line.

Zhukov proved himself at all aspects of WWII warfare, and he also functioned as a commander coordinating multiple Russian Armies. By contrast, the Allied high command decided that while Patton was very effective in command of the US 3rd Army, he would never command an Army Group (multiple armies) because this required a level of executive function that was beyond Patton’s powers. And Zhukov was tactically more astute, don’t forget that Zhukov defended Moscow with inferior forces and sagging moral and won at Stalingrad against the best German soldiers while they were at their zenith. Patton was never tested under adverse conditions, he always had air superiority and unlimited resources. Zhukov swept all before him, Stalin was worried that Zhukov’s successes might make him too popular so he had him sidelined. He was demoted because Stalin saw him as a threat.

I wouldn't compare Zhukov and Patton anyway considering the former spent the vast majority of the war in administrative command of multiple armies at a time while Patton was in operational command of a single army for much of the war. Zhukov was the equivalent of a five-star general for the majority of World War II while Patton spent much of it as a three-star. There's just no comparison as they were operating at different levels of command.

Yea I agree it’s not a great comparison but Zhukov has been so overshadowed in the west and even his own country. There have been countless books written in the west glorifying Patton and other US generals but not very much literature on Zhukov. His own country was terrified of glorifying him too much because of how powerful and popular he was. At the end of 1945, he was consider the Alexander the Great of the 20th century and for good reason. The legacy of Zhukov in the Soviet Union was very much evaluated through the lens of the political climate at the given time. Following the end of the war, Zhukov was pretty much at his absolute pinnacle when he rode through Moscow in the victory parade. According to some, this is when Stalin started to become wary of him, seeing how popular he was and this threatened him, although it is perhaps anecdotal. Regardless, Stalin was threatened by him and Zhukov had a very sudden fall from grace in early 1946 and sent to Odessa, a backwater. In typical Soviet style, accusations came from all sides, everything from how involved he was in military operations to that he lived to lavish a lifestyle. Just before Stalin's death, it seemed that Zhukov was going to be rehabilitated, and regardless, after he died, Zhukov very much was and served for a time as Defense Minister under Khrushchev, only to again suffer a fall from grace in the late '50s, forced into retirement because one again he was seen as a threat. He was again rehabilitated somewhat under Brezhnev.

Now, the purpose of this brief biographical sketch is to demonstrate just how much of a roller-coaster Zhukov's life was in the post-war era. Just at the end of the war, he was absolutely lionized as the savior of the Soviet Union, second only to Stalin himself. Zhukov was credited with stalling the attack on Leningrad, repulsing the Germans at Moscow, saving Stalingrad, the victory at Kursk, and of course leading the drive west that ended in Berlin, which is to say, pretty much most of the notable successes of the Red Army in the War. But when he fell from favor, he was practically erased from the history books. Other commanders came out to say that he had been less involved in decisions than previously credited, or else not responsible at all! The official history of the Great Patriotic War was written during one of his "out periods" (following his ouster in '57 I believe), so his barely even gets a mention. Reading it would give the impression he was a relatively minor staff officer.

During that same period though, he began to write his memoirs in a hope to set the record state, although at the time there was little hope of getting them published. It should of course be noted that are probably just as biased in the other direction. It wasn't until the '60s and his second rehabilitation that publication became an option and they were very well received, which I think speaks to the fact that despite his official erasure from the history books, it didn't erase the memory that the people had of him just after the war. His key role in the victory became more and more accepted - again - after that, and he remains a very popular figure in the post-Soviet era for that role. The large statue of him in Moscow was only put there in 1995, which speaks to this, using him as the emblem for victory over Germany.

Of course the underlying question is whether he deserves the praise at all. I think my sympathies might be ever so slightly apparent on that number, but much of the issue there is that, due to the above highs and lows, there is a LOT of contradiction into just what his legacy was. A number of generals, such as Rokossovsky, claimed that Zhukov was credited for things he should have been (in that case, how involved he was at Kursk), and of course even the 'official' records are mixed due to the Soviet habit of trying to rewrite history, so to speak. If you take the picture of Zhukov in 1945, I think it is utterly self-evident as to why he was considered a genius at the time. He was portrayed as one of the few men Stalin trusted with military matters, his right hand, and the one who had a finger in practically every Soviet victory. This was the Zhukov seen by the West. Being a personable fellow when needed didn't hurt, and the other Allied commanders, such as Ike and Monty, were charmed by him and thought very highly. It also is the image that started to return in the USSR in the late 60s on-wards, although maybe slightly toned down.

And of course there is the reputation as a harsh, uncaring commander who didn't care about the lives of his men and just threw them into the grinder that he picked up. To be fair, it isn't totally undeserved to say he was willing to trade men for geographic gains, but it is very simplistic to say the least. The biggest root of this is probably Operation Mars, easily his most notable defeat, and the action that best fits the meat-grinder image, and in the pop-history at least, this kind of became the image of what Soviet operations were in general (thanks Enemy at the Gates), so people think that Zhukov was a one trick pony. Hardly though. He was an adept tactician, which at the least are attested to in the victories which were uncontestedly his (Khalkhin Gol for example), and his writings show a distaste for the callous sacrificing of men. Its hard to pick the true narrative. Even biographies I've seen sometimes split the difference and just offer both (or three +). After the fall of the Soviet Union people were tearing down the visages of the USSR; statues of Stalin, Lenin, other leaders. The one that always remained was the statue of Zhukov.

I must admit I don't know as much about Zhukov as you do. Clearly he was an adept and skillful commander who was most responsible for winning the war for the Soviet Union. He also unfortunately lived and worked in a totalitarian regime whose leaders were always looking over their shoulders for a threat to their power. The people have always had a love and fascination for military leaders. As Zhukov was the most famous and most successful military commander the Soviets had, his popularity was seen as a threat to those who outranked him.

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Burt Reynolds

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Lee was a better strategist and leader, but Grant was woke on a particular issue that you've expressed concern about in other threads.

Robert E. Lee fanboys make me chuckle. They'll go on and on about all the things he did right and shout you down if you bring up his blunders. Then they'll turn right around and tell you how all the great moves Grant made were pure luck or really should have been blunders because "if" the Rebs had made different moves things would have turned out completely different. Well who was running the Confederate army geniuses?

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Lee was a much better tactician, Grant could afford to just wear the south down sending wave after wave into battle because he had the men to replace them whereas Lee did not.

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Again, this isn't shown in the casualty rate nor in overall casualties between Lee and Grant. Grant set the terms of the engagement in three theaters because while he might not have been a better tactician (which is a claim that is hard to prove one way or another), he did have understanding of the strategic and operational scope of what he was undertaking. For some reason, people underrate that vision as though it wasn't a major achievement.

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Lee was a better strategist

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100% disagree. Strategy implies the big picture and if there was one thing Lee sucked at throughout the war (other than logistics) it was looking at the big picture. Lee had tunnel vision and could only see the war as it related to Virginia. He cared little about the goings on in Tennessee or Mississippi - where the South truly lost the war. Because while Lee was holding the line along the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, Union forces were slowly strangling the South to death out west and working their way up behind Lee.

Despite this fact, he was consistently demanding Richmond for more men from those areas so he could conduct offensive operations in the North. And this is also where Lee failed at a strategist - knowing his limitations. Any fool who possessed a copy of the Census of 1860 knew that the Confederacy had a serious manpower disadvantage. Instead of attempting to conserve those men and luring Union armies onto battlefields where the South would be at a tremendous advantage fighting on the defensive, Lee would often assume the aggressive and waste thousands of men he couldn't afford to lose in ill-conceived attacks (often against fortified Union positions). He had the good fortune of facing off against incompetent military commanders for the first year he was in command. Then he met someone who knew how to command an army effectively at Gettysburg and that was all she wrote.

Grant on the other hand saw the war as one giant interconnected behemoth. In order to break into the interior of the Confederacy he would need to control the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. That meant capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. Boom. Done. In order to disrupt Confederate supply lines and communications throughout the western Confederacy he would need to capture the major railroad junction of Corinth, MS. Boom. Done. In order to divide the South and completely isolate the states of Texas, Arkansas, and what was left of Confederate-controlled Louisiana he would need to capture Vicksburg, MS. Boom. Done. In order to begin advancing on Atlanta - the last major railroad hub in the Deep South - he would first need to secure the vital railroad junction of Chattanooga to supply such an advance southward. Boom. Done.

And then as General-in-Chief of all Union armies, he planned and coordinated a series of simultaneous offensives against remaining Confederate strongholds, chokepoints, and bases of supply that would bring about a swift end to the war. The offensive toward Mobile was to take away one of the last major Confederate ports, the offensive toward Atlanta was to take away one of their last remaining railroad junctions from which they could supply their armies, the offensive into the Shenandoah Valley was to deprive the South of one of its last remaining major suppliers of food and livestock, and the advance down the Virginia peninsula toward Petersburg was to cut off and isolate Richmond from the rest of the South as Petersburg was also a vital railroad hub.