Worst US General of all time?

Kind of a controversial topic as all of these men flew the flag of the United States into battle, but we have had some (not many, thank heavens) bad generals in our country’s history.

Horacio Gates of the American Revolution was pretty bad.

There’s an entire myriad of generals from the American Civil War that fought for the Union that were incredibly inept. McClellan and Burnside in particular.

This is one of the more controversial ones, but Douglas MacArthur is incredibly overrated in the annals of the US military, in my opinion. I think he’s easily the most vain, insubordinate, pompous, arrogant, dictatorial general we’ve ever had. He throughly bought into his own hype and it cost his fighting men’s lives. He was insubordinate to three US Presidents and this is what Truman had to say about him upon his firing:

quote:

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I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

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A MacArthur sycophant, Ned Almond, is also up there in worst generals in US military history. Commanded the X Corps in Korea and promptly got them surrounded by Chinese forces at Chosin after ignoring the mountains of intelligence saying otherwise. If it wasn’t for O.P. Smith taking matters into his own hands, he’d have probably gotten them thoroughly slaughtered up there.

Lloyd Fredenhall and Mark Clark didn’t do well at all in WWII.

William Westmoreland could’ve done a lot better in Vietnam but I do think he was hamstrung quite a bit by Washington.

Who’s your pick for worst US General?

ETA: forgot about Benedict Arnold. All those names are invalid now.