"Good generals with bad armies?" Topic

Not a poll because boo.

We talk a lot about great generals but the question of course always arises:
How much is the general and how much is the army.

An okay general leading an excellent army might look quite good himself in aggregate.

So what generals led armies that were pretty bad but still did good for themselves?

Any period counts.

The Carthaginian army was not exactly known for their stellar troops but Hannibal did pretty well with them

While the air superiority helped Yamashita's ground troops in Malaysia were not exactly stellar but managed to capture nearly 130,000 British and Commonwealth troops

Joachin (?) Blake with Napoleonic Spanish. When I fought the Peninsular War a lot, I paid serious attention to Blake.

Claire Chennault with his P-40 equipped AVG.

Daniel Morgan and Nathaniel Greene in the AWI. (See Gates with an almost identical army. For that matter, US forces at Bladensburg are similar.)

And people will beat me up for listing them as a bad army, but Montgomery and arguably O'Connor do very well with Western desert British by using them as they were trained and organized, and not making them imitation Germans.

Point being a good general plays to his army's strengths, sometimes to the point that you don't appreciate how weak the general's hand was.

The pre-Wellington Napoleonic British don't look like world-beaters, either--and often aren't when he's not there.

Wilhelm, Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, appointed CiC of the Portuguese army by the king of Portugal to defeat the Spanish-French invasion in 1762. The Portuguese army was in deplorable shape after the earthquake of 1755 but Wilhelm was able to defeat and turn back the invaders through outmaneuvering only.

Surely Napoleon being appointed to command the Army of Italy in 1796 should be on this list.

He was just a promising young general at the time. The Army of Italy was small, hadn't been paid for ages, dressed in rags, and felt generally forgotten and ignored by the French government. Having been sat around doing not very much on a small strip of coast, morale was at rock bottom.

Within weeks of Napoleon arriving, they had marched halfway across Northern Italy and won several battles. Quite a turnaround….

Benedict Arnold.

Arguably the best American general of the AWI but never really given his chance thanks to politics. He took the usually poorly trained & motivated American troops to several victories at the Battle of Lake Champlain in 1776 and Battle of Saratoga in October 1777.

Wallenstein. Was able to force Adolphus to attack on ground W. had chosen on more than one occasion. A master of the indirect approach.

Memnon of Rhodes – Persia's best chance against Alexander. The Persians didn't take his advice and lost…

Archduke Charles and the Austrian army. He knew what needed to be done to beat Napoleon but the system and the general staff he had to work with undid a lot of his plans. Actually, you could say the same about the Austrian army in general because Conrad in WW1 experienced similar problems of getting a ponderous, faction ridden army to carry out sophisticated strategy.

Slim, turned the fortunes of the Empire troops in the Far East around and showed the 14th army that they could defeat the Japanese in the jungle

Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, when commanding Saxons he lost and lost. Later did very well.

Granted when commanding saxons he was fighting Swedes who might have been the best army on Europe/world at the time.

Any medieval "general" had a bad army. Some did amazing things consistently with their bad armies. My favorite is count Bohemond of Taranto………….