Sometimes, Facebook is useful. For example, today it showed me this article on Luigi Cadorna, the worst general in World War I. And before you say anything: it is absolutely true that picking any one general for that honor is a surprisingly difficult proposition. But somebody had to be the worst, and Cadorna is a strong contender:
Cadorna is a heady mix of command failings. Authoritarian and cruel, he demotivated rather than motivated his soldiers. His offensives were fought with the wrong tactics, in the wrong place, at the wrong tempo, for the wrong reasons. But more than any of this, what puts Cadorna at the top of my list of worst generals of the war is his failure to learn meaningful lessons from any of this, despite being left in command on the same front, facing the same opponent, from 1915 to 1917. In the end Cadorna’s failure to learn anything from either his own mistakes or from the open-air failure-dissertation that was the Western Front (that Italian positions were not defended in depth in 1917 is shockingly incompetent on its own) really does appear to be uniquely awful.
This was a very interesting post. If you’re interested in the subject, I recommend reading it. It’s worth your time.