Patton, Jackson, and Montgomery have all been suspected of being a bit neurally atypical, shall we say.

Patton was dyslexic and maybe ADDy, (his yacht was used to teach learning-disabled kids for a while) and Jackson and Montgomery are suspected to have been Aspies. People like that can be brilliant, but often need normal persons for, uh, “managers.” Jackson had Lee to manage him, the other two had Ike. Ike was able to manage Patton somewhat. Montgomery, not so much.

(Jackson really does remind me of me entirely too much. he was right weird.)

The American forces in Market-Garden achieved all of their objectives, with great skill and courage. The Brits, at the level of General Browning on up, just failed.

If you look at any accounts of that operation on a Brit-run site, you might see some slight acknowledgement that, “Oh, yeah, we had some Americans who came along with us, who assisted us a little bit.

Funny we got on the Monty-Patton thing. Dad was a CO. Cmdr with the 42nd Rainbow in Patch’s 7th Army, which was situated right between Monty and Patton’s 3rd when they wheeled north after the Battle of the Bulge. Dad had occasion to interface with Monty’s troops as their AO overlapped with the 42nd’s at points. Although he was often frustrated in joint ops with the British approach to doing things , Dad, unlike most US soldiers–officers and enlisted–always thought highly of Montgomery–citing the fact that if he hadn’t turned things around at El Alamain, and the Germans had overrun Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Mid-East oil, things might have been vastly different. He used to point out that if that had happened, the Nazis could have gone on to even India and Southern Russia as well with those oil fields.

As for Patton? There was no love lost there–one time when going to a Commander’s Conference
in the 3rd Army AO as the Regimental Rep, his jeep was stopped by a couple of Patton’s MPs who upbraided him and his men for being “out of uniform” by not having their ties on. LOL.(Ties were IN in Patton’s Army–were definitely OUT in Patch’s, who had come from the jungles of New Guinea and Buna to take command and couldn’t have cared less. Patch in his memoirs is quoted as saying the uniform of the day in New Guinea was often Pith helmet, T-shirt, shorts and tennis shoes. LOL again!)

While I yield to no man in my dislike for Montgomery’s personal pettiness on the march into Northwest Europe, you have to be fair to the fellow. He was fighting with what was essentially England’s last army. He could not sustain casualties. So he sat on his ass and thought a lot. And part of what he thought about was how to take cheap shots at the American generals and how to claim all the credit for himself. Generals sometimes need to do less thinking and more moving.

Now some of you guys will recall campaign statements about how Obama’s uncle or grandfather or some relative “liberated Auschwitz”. I think Obama was making the claim that he understood war and the costs ot it. The division that Obama’s St. Louis native uncle or grandfather went over with was one of the last divisions fed into the European war arriving in mid January 1945.

I make the point because we durn near ran out of riflemen and rifle divisions for the European campaign at the end of 1944. Marshall’s planning for WWII presumed we’d need something like 90 infantry divisions for the European conflict; we finally managed to train and get 88 divisions to Europe–and it wasn’t enough.

Montgomery didn’t dare lose his Army, because it was the last one Britain had–and we darn near chewed up everything we could get together before the end of the European war. Military planning is just that–planning–and sometimes it’s good and sometimes its bad.

Military bragging–or at least Montgomery style military bragging goes on forever.

Exactly, and that’s what I always try to impress on everyone. People talk as if we are going to be turning them out like sausages by the tens of thousands for a couple thou apiece and saturate the skies. (Hell, we don’t even do that with Tomahawks)

The reality is they are damned expensive if used in the numbers that their best utilization tactics would call for–which for that very reason (the cost) they won’t be. And the same tendency to gold-plate every platform that’s come down the pike since WWII and add mission creep to boot (think F-15 from original conception to now) is much in evidence with these things even as we speak. The long-range strike versions only going to get bigger and more expensive. Anyone who doesn’t think so is fooling themselves–like people who enter into second marriages–the triumph of hope over experience.