Red Cloud is the only military leader to force the US government to sue for peace.
Perhaps Overrated: Red Army. Brute force with no regards for casualties. Although some of their campaigns late in the war, for example, the invasion of Manchuria, were well planned, executed, and with speed and power.
Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun. Ruthless and destructive without comparison. Joshua’s army was pretty mean too.
The Red Army had very few good generals. Commissars hamstrung the leadership. If the German Army hadn’t surrendered at Stalingrad because of Hitler’s dumb order, the war might have lasted longer in the East.
The Western allies would have crushed the Red Army if they had fought.
They left out the Persian Army of the Achaemenid period.
I am almost finished reading the third volume of the Churchill biography by Manchester/Reid and came across this. As the Red Army savagely raped and pillaged its way to Berlin, one of Tito's associates, Milovan Djilas, expressed his dismay over the behavior of the Soviets. Stalin replied: "You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal, and it is not ideal, nor can it be...we have opened up our penitentiaries and stuck everybody in the army". So, yes, it was an army of thugs led by thugs who didn't care what happened to the enemy or their own soldiers. Heck, the more of his own people that were lost in the war meant that many less for Stalin ro purge or send to the Gulag.
I’m surprised that the Greeks weren’t mentioned since they really wre the first to show that heavy infantry with high moral are capable of toppling any force not armed with firearms. They were the example the Roman Armies imitated. And every European Army until guns made it impossible to sustain such forces.
Also, why the Ottomans?
How about the seventh-century Arab armies that overran Persia, North Africa, Syria and Anatolia?
Obama FSA could pillage any country in no time flat...
If not held back, the Third Army would have rolled through Berlin months ahead of the Russians and then would have turned west and rolled over much of Russia as well, had they been ordered so.
Red Cloud is the only military leader to force the US government to sue for peace.
Honestly, it’s all relative. Imagine what even the most rudimentary modern army could do to the Mongols or even Napoleon’s army of their day.
As the historian Andrew Roberts has observed, “soldier for soldier the German fighting man and his generals outperformed Britons, Americans and Russians both offensively and defensively by a significant factor virtually throughout the Second World War.”
We won, they lost.
These armies are fine, but victory really comes from better ideas. And from hashtags.
Tell it to Crassus, Valerian, and Julian the Apostate.
Also snubbed the Egyptian Army which held on more or less against all comers for several thousand years ...