How do wars start?

So who would be your top 10 generals and admirals of World War 2? Put them in order if you can (it’s quite tough). If you could also make a top 5, that would be appreciated. This list also includes all naval, army, and air force commanders regardless of rank.

Personally my picks would be (in no particular order, I just can’t decide):

Erwin Rommel

Jisaburo Ozawa

Takeo Kurita

Walther Model

Erich Von Manstein

William “Bull” Halsey

Raymond Spurance

Tamechi Hara

Chester Nimitz

Georgy Zhukov

Writing this out, there is not enough space for all the generals I want to put, such as Bernard Montgomery, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ernest King, and many Soviet generals.

@axis_roll I have not watched the History Channel in years. It became to heavily involved in reality TV.

We cut the cord.

I saw this yesterday and was impressed by it. I wasn’t able to see some of the charts as well as I’d have liked, but it looked as if Ghengis was the #1 slayer on a per captia basis. I wonder how they determined the deaths in the early conflicts? Anyway I thought it was well done.

Guilt or innocence is a hard thing to quantify, so im not even going to touch that part of it, but on the waging a war of aggression, I can comment.

I dont think it is a crime to wage a war of aggresion, atleast not one they should hang you for. It is said that when a country wages it is only justified in doing so in defense of itself. How do you quantify something like that though? Japan felt that the US was threating it, threating to cut it off from needed raw materials and strangle their country.
Japan felt that they were acting in defense of themselves by attacking the US and the allies, were they wrong?

Jodl was a career solider, raising in the ranks and working his way to the top. He was no different from the 1,000s of other men who did the same thing, spent their life in the military, and did what they were ordered to do. In a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany one man and his cloest cronied have total control on everything the state does. Jodl wasnt one of them, and he had very limited control over what the German armies did or where they went, that rested with Hitler and his thugs. Hitler told Jodl what he wanted done, and Jodl was left to figure out how to go about it. To have expected him to disobey Hitlers would have been expecting him to commit suicide.

@ABWorsham:

You guys have high regards for the Italian Armies.

The Italian war effort can be described as a failure. Italy had only one main front to fight taking on enemies that have many fronts to contend with. The battles of 1915-17 showsed little progress, 1917 the rout of Caporetto.

Only when Austria-Hungary was at the point of revolution could the Italian Armies have large sucess.

I agree.  But the Italians had more divisions and ships engaged with the enemy at any one time than the USA had during the entire conflict.

You also have to consider that the “Alpine Front” was one of the most difficult and geographically challenging of the entire war.

@Fishmoto37:

All of the above made important contributions to the war effort. Which one do you think contibuted the most. Do you think that there is one fighter that the U.S. could not have done without?

The voting is now closed and the P51 is the winner by 3 votes. Although there was very little commentary as to why.

Here is the series discussed above

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TU1dQK-j-4

A more realistic distance is over 800 statute miles.

Zero had a range of 1,600 miles, so yes thats consistent with Sakai’s account over Java.

Also, they had over 400 Zeros in active service by July 1940.