5 Generals Who Got In Trouble With Their Chief
4. Musa bin Nusair
5. George McClellan
As an organizer and logistician, Union General George Brinton McClellan was a godsend to the Army of the Potomac, early in the American Civil War. The scholarly, well-traveled veteran of the Mexican War and former instructor at West Point was just what the Union, stunned by unexpected defeats by the Confederacy, needed to whip its forces into trim. Even though McClellan himself had been mauled by Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in the Seven Days Battle, his assumption of command from the defeated General Pope was met with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, he was unused to supreme command. He was as overcautious in the field as he was meticulous behind the lines, time and again allowing Lee to slip away. He complained of lack of support, and consistently overestimated the enemy’s strength. President Abraham Lincoln began to lose patience with him, sending increasingly tart orders for him to get moving: “Are you not overcautious when you assume that you cannot do what the enemy is constantly doing?” “I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.” Finally, he was relieved and replaced by General Burnside. He ran and lost against Lincoln for President in 1864, later served as governor of New Jersey, and died of heart failure in 1885
Musa bin Nusair was an Arab from what is now southwestern Saudi Arabia. He was one of the greatest commanders of the Arabian age of conquest, most famously capturing Morocco and invading Spain, conquering it for Islam. He landed on the Iberian peninsula in tandem with an army led by his subordinate–and rival–Tariq bin Ziyad in the early 8th century AD. For the next several years he campaigned successfully, amassing a fantastic amount of treasure and captives. He and Tariq were called back to Damascus by the caliph, al Walid I. They were celebrated as conquering heroes by the people. But al-Walid died soon after, and was succeeded by his brother Sulayman ibd al-Malik. Sulayman demanded that Musa turn over his treasure, and, when he objected, Musa was stripped of his rank and turned out into the streets. His son was beheaded on Sulayman’s orders. He was reported to have spent time as a beggar outside a mosque, and he died, old and broken, while performing the pilgrimage to Mecca.
3. Erwin Rommel
“We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general,” said Winston Churchill, in acknowledgment of the formidable gifts of Nazi Germany’s greatest general, Erwin Rommel. His skillful implementation of Heinz Guderian’s blitzkrieg enabled the Wehrmacht to swiftly overrun France, and nearly drive the British from North Africa. It was in the latter theater, far from the meddling interference of Hitler, that Rommel earned his nickname “The Desert Fox”, for his daring and innovative tactics. But by the time of the Allied invasion of France in 1944, Rommel was disillusioned with the war, and with Hitler. He was implicated in the July plot on Hitler’s life, but was too popular with the public to move against openly. When he was injured in an Allied strafing attack on his car, the Gestapo gave him an ultimatum: to commit suicide or he would be tried publicly along with his family. He chose suicide, and his death was attributed to the airplane attack. He was given a fallen hero’s sendoff, that made excellent grist for the Nazi propaganda mill.
2. John K. Singlaub
General Singlaub was a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He was one of the Operation Jedburgh parachute commandos who worked behind the lines with the French Resistance in August 1944. In early 1977, when he was chief of staff of U.S. forces in South Korea, he publicly criticized President Carter’s plan to draw down troop levels in Sthat country. Carter fired him for the breach of discipline on March 21, 1977. Singlaub went on to participate in a number of anti-communist organizations in the Eighties.
1. Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Marshal Of The Soviet Union, and a gifted military theorist. He was decorated for bravery while serving in tsarist Russia’s army during World War One. He rose to command during the Russian Civil War, carrying out the final Red offensives, and suppressed the sailors’ revolt at Kronstadt in March, 1921. He also quite ruthlessly quashed a number of peasant revolts in the 1920s. He ran afoul of Joseph Stalin during the 1920 war between Russia and Poland, each blaming the other for Russia’s defeat. Never one to give up a grudge, Stalin framed Tukhachevsky as a Trotskyite conspirator, and had him tried, convicted and executed in 1937. His advanced military ideas came back into favor after the initial disasters of the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, and Tukhachevsky himself was posthumously rehabilitated in 1963.
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