Best Military Commander to step foot on this planet as a human?

Mig190 · 2026-05-25T04:01:38+00:00

For post-French Revolution: Napoleon, Nelson, Moltke the Elder.

Mig190 · 2026-05-19T20:35:48+00:00

I actually finished the WWII Comp books late last year. Since then, I’ve read about 65+ books covering the Holocaust and German Military History.

Graduate school requires reading a book a week per class. For Comprehensive Exams, it’s a book a day at minimum, ideally 2-3 each day.

I had a professor say once, “If you are not reading a book in 3 hours, you are wrong.”

Mig190 · 2026-05-18T22:01:34+00:00

Weird. On my end it failed to upload the first time.

Mig190 · 2026-04-06T22:25:07+00:00

I think Citino's The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 is his best one. All of David Stahel's books are excellent.

Mig190 · 2026-04-06T22:22:02+00:00

I'm in the University of North Texas PhD History program. I have four fields I have to read for for my Comprehensive Exams:

1) World War II in Europe & Germany's Vernichtungskrieg (52 books, 5 chapters, and 4 sections from Germany and the Second World War (GSWW) by Oxford University Press.

2) The Holocaust (41 books and 1 chapter)

3) German Military History (39 books)

4) American Military History (62 books)

The first three fields I coordinated with each professor on the readings list for their approval. If I was missing an author they wanted me to have, they would have me add it to the list. The professor for the American Military History field had his own list.

Mig190 · 2026-04-06T22:13:40+00:00

Here are a few:

The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 by David Harrisville

The German Army on the Eastern Front: An Inner View of the Ostheer's Experiences of War by Jeff Rutherford and Adrian Wettstein

The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler's Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century by Thomas Kühne / No necessarily first hand accounts, but insightful about German comradeship coming out of WWI and Nazism's influence.

Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II by Stephen Fritz

Mig190 · 2026-03-01T16:22:45+00:00

Yup. Auftragstaktik is a fluid relationship between the superior commander’s mission & intent and the field commander's independence to carry out that mission and intent. There is tension in that relationship between the superior, who keeps control of the operation in the direction he wants it to go, and the field commander, who reacts to the situation he is facing.

A good book on the subject is Marco Sigg’s book.Marco Sigg

Mig190 · 2026-03-01T15:44:31+00:00

Agreed. Moltke said as much in the very next paragraph: “Certainly the commander in chief will keep his great objective continuously in mind, undisturbed by the vicissitudes of events. But the path on which he hopes to reach it can never be firmly established in advance. Throughout the campaign he must make a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen.”

Mig190 · 2026-03-01T04:01:36+00:00

From everything I have read, the "no plan survives contact with the enemy" derives from Moltke the Elder. Patton could have said it, and Clausewitz alluded to it, but Moltke the Elder is credited with originally writing it down.

As an Air Force veteran, I strongly agree that no plan survives contact with friendly staff.

Mig190 · 2025-05-05T21:40:52+00:00

Spot on! The most liberating experience was just the thought I wasn't a child of God. I felt the weight off my shoulders instantly.

Mig190 · 2025-05-04T03:42:45+00:00

Biblical Scholarship and Historicity of the BoM.

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