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One unmistakable sign of ignorance is to take the word of those who were licked, when discussing the SOB who licked them. True amateurish gullibility.

One of Patton's major accomplishments with his so-called authoritarian leadership style, was that his Third Army suffered the lowest rate of casualties of any unit of similar size and combat engagement.

His "authoritarian" training, expectations and discipline saved lives and as one survivor of Bastogne told me personally they were all really glad to see Patton when they were relieved.. He never knew or mentioned anybody else. And he didn't get Patton's name from the Sunday papers or the movies, like this joker.

Basically true ~ the losers made some poor judgments ~ both in terms of strategy as well as in tactics, at all levels from the theatre as a whole to individual fire teams.

Why anyone should imagine their judgments regarding the quality of one of our generals or another should be respected is a good question.

A German Error of major consequence ~ how to build tanks. The Germans built large tanks and effective tanks ~ but yet they built them slowly since they'd decided to hand the work over to folks who usually built locomotives.

The Allies made use of automotive manufacturing capability ~ people who built trucks ~ and they could produce tanks, or chassis for use in Russia, quite rapidly.

In the end the best of the big German tanks proved totally inadequate. The Allied tanks were a stupendous success.

My dad and General Christmas regularly flew to various cities throughout the American heartland as the General saw to the production and deployment of tanks and other American rolling stock for the war ~ you almost never hear of General Christmas ~ BTW, there were two of them ~ the guy meeting with company engineers and executives in Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, etc. was actually far more relevant to what went on in Europe ~ and Russia ~ than Patton or any other field general.

That's why he got to hop around in the most luxuriously appointed and capable aircraft owned by the US government ~

One unmistakable sign of ignorance is to take the word of those who were licked, when discussing the SOB who licked them. Very true. For example, much of the writing by German officers on the Eastern Front following the end of the Second World War fell prey to this, and the extent to which their writings were misleading only started to come to light after Russian archives began to be opened up to the West in the 1990s. But contemporary battle-reports, letters, and personnel writings are a different beast from post-war memoirs and the like.