The 7 WORST Generals of World War II | They Cost Their Armies Everything

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Over two million soldiers, not lost to unstoppable enemies. Not sacrificed against impossible odds. Lost because the men giving the orders got it catastrophically wrong. Military history spends most of its time celebrating genius. The commanders who saw what others couldn't. The men who turned near defeat into legend. But genius always has a shadow. And in that shadow, you'll find incompetence, ego, blind obedience, and decisions so catastrophically wrong that they didn't just lose battles. They handed the enemy entire campaigns.

[00:00:39]This is the other list. Seven generals, seven nations, seven decisions that changed the Second World War. And not one of them for the better.

[00:00:50]The man at number one didn't just lose an army. He lost the entire war for his side before it had really begun. Number seven, Admiral Husband Kimmel, United States Navy, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, Pearl Harbor, December 1941.

[00:01:09]On the morning of November 27th, 1941, a dispatch landed on Kimmel's desk. It used clear language. This dispatch is to be considered a warning. Japanese forces were expected to make aggressive moves in the Pacific. The window for diplomatic resolution had effectively closed. That warning was real. The intelligence behind it was real. What was not real, what existed nowhere in Pearl Harbor's defensive posture was any serious preparation for what came next.

[00:01:43]Kimmel commanded the most powerful naval concentration in American history, and it sat at anchor in a harbor that was by December 1941 almost entirely undefended against air attack. Torpedo nets had not been deployed along battleship Row.

[00:02:00]Aircraft were parked wing tipto- wing tip on Ford Island and Hickham Field, lined up as though waiting to be destroyed.

[00:02:07]There was no meaningful dispersal, no elevated alert status, no fleetwide defensive readiness. Kimmel operated under one critical assumption. Pearl Harbor's shallow water, roughly 40 ft in most areas, made aerial torpedo attack essentially impossible. Standard aerial torpedoes needed far more depth to arm and stabilize after entry. The Japanese had solved that problem months earlier.

[00:02:34]Modified type 91 torpedoes with wooden stabilizing fins had been tested, refined, and loaded onto carriers that were already at sea. Kimmel did not know the solution existed. He did not know that the obstacle he believed protected him had already been engineered away. On the morning of December 7th, 1941, the answer arrived in waves. In under 2 hours, 19 American ships were sunk or damaged.

[00:03:03]88 aircraft destroyed and 2,43 Americans killed. The Pacific Fleet battleship force was effectively neutralized in a single morning. The full question of who bears responsibility for Pearl Harbor's lack of readiness remains genuinely debated.

[00:03:22]Failures and intelligence sharing reached all the way to Washington. But what is not debated is the physical condition of the base on the morning of the attack. The warnings existed, the defenses didn't. Number six, Luigi Kadora, Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, the Asanzo River, 1915 to 1917.

[00:03:44]There is a particular kind of military failure that does not come from a single bad decision. It comes from making the same bad decision 11 times in a row. The Asanzo River runs along what was in the First World War the border between Italy and the Austrohungarian Empire. On the Italian side, flat exposed ground offering almost no cover. On the Austrian side, commanding heights, fortified positions, and machine gun nests built into the carsted limestone that made the terrain a natural fortress. The river itself was fast and difficult to cross under fire. The only logical conclusion looking at that geography was that a frontal assault across it was close to suicidal. Kadorna launched 11 of them. Between 1915 and 1917, Italian forces crossed that river again and again, assaulting the same Austrian positions that had stopped them the last time along the same narrow front with the same basic tactical approach. No meaningful flanking, no operational deception, no logistical surprise, just attrition. The belief that if you pressed long enough and hard enough, the fortified heights would eventually break. Approximately 300,000 Italian casualties later, the Austrohungarian positions above the Asanszo were still largely intact. When his own soldiers began to crack under the conditions, the exposure, the losses, the repetition of futile assaults, Kadorna's response was to reintroduce decimation, the execution of soldiers selected by lot as punishment for units deemed to have performed inadequately. The policy had last seen serious use in ancient Rome. Kadora applied it in a 20th century industrial war. It did not improve battlefield performance. It confirmed what the Italian army already understood about the man commanding it. If Kadorna represents pure attrition, blindness, the refusal to adapt to a reality the battlefield was demonstrating every single day. The next man on this list represents something more dangerous. He could see the problem clearly. He chose to ignore it anyway. Number five, Semon Badani, commander, Soviet southwest direction, Ukraine, summer and autumn of 1941.

[00:06:12]Operation Barbar Roa had been running for 2 months when the full scale of the strategic disaster in Ukraine became clear. German Army Group Center, having already driven deep into Soviet territory toward Moscow, pivoted south.

[00:06:27]Gderian's armored forces swung down from the north. Simultaneously, Army Group South was pushing north and east through Ukraine. Between these two thrusts, the Soviet southwest front, an enormous concentration of men, equipment, and material centered on Kiev was being encircled. The Dper River ran behind them. The escape routes were closing from both directions. Yorgi Zhukov saw it and said so. He went to Stalin personally and argued that Keefe had to be abandoned, that the forces had to pull back before the pocket sealed.

[00:07:02]Stalin refused. Zukov was removed from his post as chief of staff for saying so. But the military logic was unambiguous. The ring was closing and the window to save those armies was measured in days. Budyani commanded those forces. He had built his reputation during the Russian civil war as a cavalry commander and Stalin trusted him completely. That trust flowed in both directions. Budani wanted to give Stalin exactly what Stalin demanded, which was Kiev held at all costs. Kiev was a political symbol, the capital of Soviet Ukraine and an industrial center the regime could not afford to be seen abandoning. And so Bodani held. By September 19th, 1941, the pocket had fully closed. The German pinsers had met east of Kiev, the Deniper at their backs, the retreat roads cut, the armies trapped. Over 600,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. It remains the largest military encirclement in recorded history. Budyani was relieved of command shortly afterward, but the armies he had refused to save were already gone. Budyani obeyed the wrong man. The next entry on this list obeyed only himself.

[00:08:24]Number four, General Mark Clark, Commander, US Fifth Army, Italy. May and June of 1944.

[00:08:34]Operation Diadem had broken the German winter line. By late May 1944, German forces under General von Vietinghof were falling back northward through the Liry Valley, and the Allied breakout from the Anio beach head had finally succeeded.

[00:08:51]Field Marshall Alexander's orders to Clark were unambiguous. Push northeast toward Valanton, cut Highway 6, and closed the trap on the retreating German 10th Army. If Clark's forces reached Valanton in strength, that army had no road north. The Italian campaign could change overnight. Clark redirected his army northwest toward Rome. His own diary makes the reasoning explicit.

[00:09:17]Clark wanted to be the general who liberated the eternal city. He feared British forces advancing on a parallel axis might get there first. A token force was dispatched toward Valmonton.

[00:09:30]enough to say the objective had been acknowledged, not nearly enough to seal the gap. The German 10th Army read the situation quickly. They streamed north through the Velman corridor, largely intact, and escaped the encirclement that had been within reach. Clark entered Rome on June 4th, 1944.

[00:09:49]2 days later, the Allied landings at Normandy consumed every headline on Earth. His moment lasted approximately 48 hours. The forces he had allowed to escape regrouped north of Rome and continued fighting. The Italian campaign ground on for another year. Some historians argue that Allied supply constraints and terrain difficulties around Valmonton would have made a complete encirclement impossible regardless. That Clark's critics overstate what could realistically have been achieved. That debate is legitimate. What is not disputed is that the German 10th Army escaped, that it fought on, and that the decision to allow it was made in favor of a photograph. He got the picture. His enemy got away. Number three, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Hey, Commander, British Expeditionary Force, the SO July 1st, 1916.

[00:10:47]Hey had reasons to believe the attack would work. 7 days of preliminary bombardment, one of the heaviest artillery preparations the war had yet seen, had been laid down along the Som front. The logic was straightforward.

[00:11:02]The German wire would be cut, the forward positions destroyed, the defenders shattered.

[00:11:09]British infantry could advance across no man's land at a steady pace, occupy the ruined positions, and breach the defensive line before the Germans could respond. What he did did not adequately account for was what was 30 ft underground. German defensive doctrine had evolved over 2 years of war. Their troops sheltered in deep dugouts carved into the chalk, reinforced shelters that could withstand the bombardment above them. The artillery hammered the surface for a week. The German soldiers waited beneath it. When the guns lifted on the morning of July 1st, 1916, those soldiers climbed out, set up their machine guns, and looked out at British infantry walking toward them across open ground. Much of the wire had not been cut. The positions had not been destroyed. The battle went almost exactly the wrong way. 57,470 British casualties in a single day.

[00:12:08]19,240 killed. the bloodiest day in British military history.

[00:12:15]Heg continued the offensive for 141 more days. Total Allied casualties reached approximately 420,000 British and 200,000 French before the s ended in November. Heg's defenders, and they exist among serious historians, argue that the offensive achieved its strategic purpose by relieving the French army at Verdon, which was being bled white. They argue that the army which emerged from the s was a harder, more experienced force, what some call the learning army that would eventually break the German line in 1918.

[00:12:51]That debate is genuine and worth having.

[00:12:55]But whatever the strategic arithmetic ultimately shows, 57,000 men on the first morning cannot be argued away. If Hey represents the devastating cost of a flawed plan, number two represents something different. Number two had the right answer. He knew it. And he chose not to act on it. Number two, Field Marshal Friedrich Powas, commander, German 6th Army, Stalenrad.

[00:13:25]Winter 1942 to 1943.

[00:13:29]Operation Uranus had worked with brutal precision. In November 1942, Soviet forces swept around both flanks of the German salient at Stalingrad from the north and from the south, meeting east of the city and sealing a pocket around the German Sixth Army and portions of the fourth Panzer Army. Roughly 250,000 Axis troops were now encircled. The Soviet ring was new, thinly stretched in places, and not yet fully consolidated.

[00:14:00]Several senior German commanders, including Field Marshal Fon Monstein, argued that a breakout was possible, that the Sixth Army had the fuel and fighting strength to punch through the encirclement and link with relief forces if it moved quickly. Hitler ordered the Sixth Army to hold. Stalenrad was a fortress. Guring promised the Luftvafa could supply the trapped army by air, 300 tons per day, he told Hitler. The actual average delivered fell under 100.

[00:14:31]The army began to starve. Temperatures dropped to minus30. Soldiers broke apart equipment for firewood. Operation Winter Storm, Mannstein's relief attempt, drove to within roughly 35 mi of the pocket southern edge in December 1942.

[00:14:48]Inside the encirclement, there was still enough fuel for a breakout attempt toward that corridor. Powus requested permission to move. Hitler refused. Pace did not move. Mannstein's column stalled and was forced back.

[00:15:03]By January 1943, the fuel was gone. The window had closed permanently. How forcefully Palace pushed back against Hitler's orders remains debated. His communications from inside the pocket show a man who understood the situation with complete clarity. What he did not do was act without permission. And in a situation where acting without permission was the only thing that might have saved a quarter of a million men, that distinction matters enormously.

[00:15:36]On February 2nd, 1943, Palace surrendered. 91,000 German soldiers marched into Soviet captivity.

[00:15:46]Fewer than 6,000 would ever return home.

[00:15:49]Hitler had promoted Palace to field marshal the day before the surrender. A pointed signal since no German field marshal had ever surrendered.

[00:15:59]Palace understood the message. He surrendered anyway. It was in the end the only defiance he managed. Every general on this list made a catastrophic mistake. But only one made a mistake that guaranteed his entire nation would lose the war.

[00:16:17]Number one, General Hideki Tojo, Prime Minister, Army Minister, Chief of Army General Staff. Japan, December 1941.

[00:16:30]No name on this list held more concentrated authority. By late 1941, Tojo simultaneously held the office of prime minister and army minister, later adding chief of army general staff, a consolidation of military and political power with no real parallel in a major wartime nation. When Japan went to war, it went to war because Tojo decided it would. Japan's strategic position in 1941 was stark and well understood by its leadership. The country was almost entirely dependent on American and Western imports for the oil, steel, and raw materials its military required. The embargo imposed by the United States in July 1941 had started a countdown. At current consumption rates, Japan had roughly 18 months of fuel. After that, the military machine stopped. The options narrowed to negotiation, which required significant concessions in China or war. Japan's only viable path in a war scenario was a swift campaign to seize the resource zones of Southeast Asia, followed by the construction of a defensive perimeter broad enough that America would calculate the cost of dismantling it too high. The critical variable in that calculation was keeping American public opinion divided. In 1941, it genuinely was powerful political opposition to Pacific involvement existed. The United States was not mobilized. Full industrial war production had not begun. Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor strike, stated privately that Japan could run wild for 6 months to a year, but expressed serious doubt about what would happen after that. That statement is documented. The men who approved the operation heard it. Tojo approved the attack anyway. On December 7th, 1941, carrierbased Japanese aircraft struck the American Pacific Fleet at its moorings. 2,43 Americans died. 18 ships were damaged or sunk. The battleship force was crippled and every American aircraft carrier, Enterprise, Lexington, Saratoga, was somewhere else that morning. All three were at sea, away from harbor, untouched.

[00:18:52]The ships that would actually win the Pacific War were not in Pearl Harbor when the attack came. The strike had neutralized the oldest component of American naval power and missed the most important one entirely.

[00:19:05]What the attack did achieve with complete and irreversible effect was the elimination of every political argument against American involvement. the division, the debate, the organized opposition, the genuine public hesitation. It ended on December 7th.

[00:19:24]The United States entered the war unified and it brought with it an industrial economy approximately 10 times the size of Japan's. Within months, American factories were producing aircraft, ships, and weapons at a pace Japan could not match, could not approach, and could not survive against.

[00:19:44]Japan's only realistic path to any version of a sustainable outcome was keeping America out. Tojo made that permanently impossible before the war had properly begun. Four years later, the result was absolute unconditional surrender. Atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tojo was arrested, tried before the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, and executed in December 1948.

[00:20:13]Every general on this list lost something. Kimmel lost a fleet for a morning. Kadorna lost 300,000 men on the same river 11 times over. Budani lost the largest army encirclement in history. Clark lost a campaign's worth of time for a single photograph. Hey lost 57,000 men before lunch. Pow! lost a quarter of a million soldiers and with them any serious chance Germany had of winning in the East. Tojo lost the war and he did it on the first morning.