@LilTheo:
I guess how one treats his soldier is irrelevant?
Patton was nearly court martialed for slapping a crying soldier in the face. I think that puts him front and center for " Worst World War II General " ever.
I think the most overrated leader is definitely Montgomery.
Nobody liked him, not even Churchill. He considered Operation Market Garden, as noted in his after battle reports to be a " moderate success. "
Patton felt that if one soldier did less than his fair share, it meant some other soldier would have to do more than his fair share. To allow soldiers to abandon the front, therefore, represented an injustice to the other soldiers left behind to do the fighting and the dying.
There were two slapping incidents, including the one you mentioned. In both cases, Patton had encountered a soldier who had abandoned the front; and who had refused Patton’s command to return to combat.
Patton’s attitudes about this subject are largely a product of the culture in which he was raised. The U.S. has traditionally had four major cultural groups: the Puritan, the Cavalier, the Quaker, and the Borderer. Of those four, the Borderer is the most warlike. The Borderers are descended from people who lived in the six northernmost English counties, the Scotch Lowlands, and northern Ireland. For many hundreds of years, that region was a constant war zone. As a consequence of all that war, Borderers adopted warrior values; including the kind of contempt for personal cowardice Patton displayed in the slapping incidents.
The Quaker group was by far the most pacifistic, and tended to oppose all wars on principle. Eisenhower was raised in that cultural group, and adopted a milder version of that group’s distaste for war. His initial reaction to the slapping incident–a desire to remove Patton from command–was typical of how a Quaker would see such a situation.
Given the cultural backgrounds of the two men, one would expect that the warrior (Patton) would favor harsher treatment for postwar Germany than the one with qualms about war (Eisenhower). Oddly enough, the opposite proved the case.
Patton was relieved of duty after openly revolting against the punitive occupation directive JCS 1067.[49] His view of the war was that with Hitler gone, the German army could be rebuilt into an ally in a potential war against the Russians, whom Patton notoriously despised and considered a greater menace than the Germans. During this period, he wrote that the Allied victory would be in vain if it led to a tyrant worse than Hitler and an army of “Mongolian savages” controlling half of Europe. Eisenhower had at last had enough, relieving Patton of all duties and ordering his return to the United States.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Patton#Relations_with_Eisenhower
JSC 1067 was specifically intended to starve the German people, as indicated in the below quote:
On March 20, 1945 President Roosevelt was warned that the JCS 1067 was not workable: it would let the Germans “stew in their own juice”. Roosevelt’s response was “Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!” Asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, “Why not?”[45] . . .
In his 1950 book Decision in Germany, Clay wrote, “It seemed obvious to us even then that Germany would starve unless it could produce for export and that immediate steps would have to be taken to revive industrial production”.[48] [Those steps were specifically forbidden under JCS 1067.]
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_plan#JCS_1067
The fact that Eisenhower supported starving the Germans (JSC 1067), and Patton sacrificed his career to oppose the measure, tells me a lot more about the relative degree of kindness and morality the two men had, than does a mere slapping incident.
