I really want to believe him. However I can't find anything about Obama had fired 9 generals in the mainstream media.

I know that there are generals or other officers that gets fired now and then, but 9 generals at once? That should have made some kind of headlines, or??

Markus

Yep, got to give him credit for most active threads...:yeah:

Anyway might as well talk about Patton.

Well Patton did get into some very hot water over that slapping incident and later explained that he believed in the old Nordic Valhalla and that he was trying to save the troops souls from missing out because they had left the battle.Which was his way of saying that he was wrong to have done it and that it was a lapse in judgment.

I am not sure if dying in a hospital bed after being injured in a car accident is what I call dying gracefully.Patton did however demand that the man who was driving the truck that hit his vehicle not be punished in any way (even though the guy had been intoxicated) his reasoning was he did not want to ruin the mans life for one mistake.

The mystery with Patton is what he would have done after the war.He had no interest in politics though he did know much about other officers who did have ambitions .The thing I often wonder is would he have reveled to the public what he knew.I think he would have said nothing.I do wonder though the Soviets surely feared him and what effect would he have had on the immediate post war years 46~50.

Patton lead from the front which is why most men who served under him respected him not necessarily liked mind you but respected him.Rommel was the same way of course all though certainly less eccentric.Thing is this kind of officer usually dies long before reaching flag officer ranks.Charles XII had the same style even went right into the fray sometimes that was back when Sweden was an aggressive nation.He took a Russian musket ball to the foot once and the crazy fool stayed on his horse and kept riding for three hours.

Just for your information

Patton is one of my favorite generals under WWII.

Markus

Show-off....

I did.

One interesting thing is that every great general makes at least one very bad error in judgment.Patton his big foul up was the attempted rescue of his son in law who was a POW in a German camp not to far behind German lines.Well the mission failed and the rescue unit was all killed or captured and son in law was not liberated until the war ended.

The thing with all of this was that it was a rash reaction on Patton's part and based on the known disposition of the enemy in that sector the Germans where very strong there.

Look at Zhukov his blunder was Operation Mars around Rzhev it failed and cost many lives but he did learn from it.

Patton made his blunder after he had already proven himself of course and his was also a much smaller unit of manpower involved.

All praise, even though you didn't vote for me...

Wait, I did not mean nine at once, I meant over time, recently he has fired 5 or 6 from what can tell in a short time span.Fired the Admiral and General Ham who refused to stand down during the Benghazi attack, two Marine Generals in Afghanistan for "failing to protect" the forces, which sounds like DC garbage to me. Then the Admiral over the "poker chips" thing .McCrystal and Petraeus were gone for nothing more than politics.

I'd say Pattons biggest blunder was ordering POWs to be killed rather than taken into captivity. That and his subsequent statements about the order led directly to his being stood down as commander of the 3rd Army.

To be fair, he wouldn't have been the only one. When South Korea was liberated from the Japanese, the Japanese got most of the admin work because they knew the area better than the Americans did, so for most of the Japanese it was just a case of changing employers. Naturally this did not go down well with the Koreans...

Steve, where art thou? The thread has been hijacked...:arrgh!:

Look at the situation. All levels of government both local and national were run by the party, same with everyday services, everything from garbage and post to rail, telephones, police and hospitals were run by the party faithful.
It was a one party dictatorship, the only available local staff in the jobs were linked to the party.
Now look at a similar situation with Iraq, everything was run by the one party dictatorship, once all those were instantly removed on "liberation" because they were Ba'ath everything rapidly went to pieces.
The two situations have major differences though. WW2 wasn't done on the "cheap", when they entered Germany they had plenty of their own staff ready for the jobs which they knew would need doing, they actually had a plan for how to run the occupation

As already pointed out McChrystals case was a simple case of his breaking regulations.

Saying Patreus was sacked is not correct. Whether the investigation was political is moot. It may not have thrown up anything. What's still missing is the evidence of a Stalinist style purge. All you can say for sure is that during BOs presidency there have been 9 flag rank officers that have either screwed up or been moved on due to some cause. How does that compare to other presidencies?

Re Patton his comments that the USA UK and Germany should clobber Russia probably didn't help either.