Clark's memoir is only surpassed in deceit and dullness by Bradley's 'A Soldiers Story'. The historian Martin Gilbert does a masterful job in deconstructing Bradley's career and the man himself. Eons ago my dad told me a good way to judge a man’s character was to judge him by his enemies. For instance Joe Kennedy’s enemies list began with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and that says a lot. At the top of Clarks enemies list was George Marshall who detested and distrusted Clark. When Clark returned to Washington after the fall of Rome (against Marshall’s wishes) Marshall treated him as if he had smallpox. There were a growing list of reasons for this attitude on the part of Marshall who considered Clark an insubordinate marginal-performer who was not only out for himself. He resented Clark’s willingness to undermine the allied cause and sacrificed lives to serve his personal vanity.

"was not only out for himself."

This should read: 'was only out for himself.'

I understand Gen. Franks came out with a memoir some time ago. Haven't read it (actually, the financial crisis has shoved a lot of my reading away from military memoirs and histories lately), but I wonder how it was.

I wonder at the unequivocal nature of the judgement on Gen. Clark presented here. That he was personally vain and deeply interested in public recognition for himself and his army is amply documented by the record. His preoccupation with seizing Rome seems clearly to have distracted him from a maneuver that would have flanked the city and very probably done more damage to the enemy at less cost to Clark's own army, and there were other decisions of his earlier in the Italian campaign that his peers, and historians, had difficulty understanding.

On the other hand, Atkinson presents Clark as having been sinned against as much as sinning, in part because of the nature of the Italian campaign itself. A number of assumptions about critical facts like the the Italian population's reaction to an Allied invasion and the Germans' ability to move reinforcements south and establish effective fortifications were made for Clark prior to and shortly after the Sicily landings,not by him. The crucial decisions to proceed slowly across Sicily and then to the Italian mainland after Sicily fell were not Clark's either, nor is the case that he was primarily to blame for the failure to break out quickly from the Anzio beachhead particularly clear.

Though I hold no particular brief for Clark, it occurs to me that historians should beware of getting caught up in the passions of memoirists and their critics. In this case, the judgement on Clark as simply "mediocre" requires a harsh judgement as well on those who placed him in important commands after Italy, especially the one in Korea. He'd have had to be not only very dedicated to public relations but much better at it than seems to have been the case to have prospered so after the events in Italy that caused so much controversy.

Tommy Franks wrote what I consider to be one of the worst...not quite as boring as Clark's, but it comes off as very self-serving, how he did everything right as everyone else (JCS, etc...) was holding him back.

"Tommy Franks wrote what I consider to be one of the worst...not quite as boring as Clark's, but it comes off as very self-serving, how he did everything right as everyone else (JCS, etc...) was holding him back."

Franks agreed to lead the invasion of Iraq with a plan he had to know would lead to disaster, or even a Fiasco. His reward was a big cash advance on a book deal. Books, as Robert Heinlein said, are guaranteed to have enough pages to keep the covers apart.

- My opinion, Walt

Wes Clark whose Waging Modern War is as lame as it is self-serving. To think that man ran for President and some were willing to vote for him.

I think it quite telling that CGSC had this book as part of their curriculum. CGSC was lame too.

Clark may have had a reason to be so polite. He might have wanted to avoid politics or insulting a much beloved general and president.

Franks has my vote. Wish I could get my $25 back.

I enjoyed reading this, mostly because my dad was under Clark's command -- a very little guy in a very big command, but nonetheless it heightened my interest. He told me several times that Clark was absolutely loathed by the G.I. Joes that served under him -- for the very reasons that have been pointed out here.

Lone Survivor, by Marcus Luttrell and Patrick Robinson, is easily the worst war memoir I've ever read, and I'm currently doing a project to read as many war memoirs as I possibly can.

(Not to promote my own stuff, but my brother and I literally spent a week tearing this book apart, from bad character description to getting the title wrong. Read about it here: http://onviolence.com/?e=230. This is the first post that week, we've since written posts on ROE and such.)

Lone Survivor reads like bad fiction, gets the title of the mission wrong and endorses an anti-COIN, anti-liberal, anti-ROE political positions that boggle the mind. How it remains the most popular post-9/11 war memoir blows my mind.

I'm really surprised this book hasn't received more criticism. It feels like what happened with the Hurt Locker. People in the know dismissed it, but the general public (and Fox News) has picked it up and ran with it.

i might actually vote for that MacArthur one for the worst, but then i have intentionally avoided reading anything by some of the names that have been listed here (Clark, Franks, additional Clark), so maybe i've just been lucky when it comes to bad memoirs.

Mark Clark had a number of admirers. Few of them, however wore U.S. uniform. Churchill called Gen. Clark "my American eagle" (that nose?). The British liked Clark for the same reason they liked Gen. J. Lawton "Lightin' Joe" Collins. Both were aggressive commanders who pushed their men hard. This was appreciated by an ally who often felt the Americans were not doing their part.

It was hardly Clark's fault that only on the little island of Pantelleria did the Italian soldiers resist when the Germans disarmed them. Clark showed a commendable loyalty to subordinate general John Lucas, much blamed for the long and costly stalemate at the Anzio bridgehead. Remember also that the breakout from Anzio, when finally it came, inflicted more casualties on a single U.S. Army division in a single day than any other battle of World War II..

And those of just about any other German general from World War II? Mellenthin? The Rommel Diaries (well, maybe blame Liddell Hart for the way that reads)?

They all read as apologia..."it wasn't my/our fault, we were just good Germans seduced by bad Germans, we would have won if they just listened to me, I never killed any Jews/Partisans and never ordered my soldiers to, I had no clue what was going on behind the lines...and anyway they were all Bolsheviks anyway so who cares?"...pretty well sums up the genre.

And yet legions of the gullible have sucked up to such pap as the be all and end all historiography of the Third Reich.

Cheers!

Rich

Montgomery was a petty little fart.

Panzer Leader by Hans Guderian was also pretty poor. It has a lot of info but Hans is a little full of himself. Much of the book details how great he was in creating panzer troops but paid little attention to how he was helped. Like Mainstein, he abdicates responsiblitiy for the horrors of the third reich. The battle narratives are also pretty poor - ' this division and that division attacked. that division broke through and had x casualties.' Interesting piece but jaded in outlook and not an easy read.

Hard to believe that LTG Sanchez's 2008 apologia, "Wiser In Battle," doesn't qualify for at least a bronze medal in this contest.

A probable reason for Patton's hatred of Clark was touched on last week in Tom's publication of Patton's anti-Semitic diary passage,

Clark was the son of a Gentile career army officer, but his mother was Jewish and Clark appears to have followed tradition by at least nominally adopting her religion, which is matrilineal. Undoubtedly, even the slightest taint of Judaism would have caused Cadet Clark to face open hostility at West Point and an army in general that was openly and at the time actively anti-Semitic. At any rate, while at West Point, he was baptized an Episcopalian.

It would stand to reason that, in a small Regular Army, Patton would know of Clark's perfected but nonetheless tainted heritage.

Panzer Leader reads more like an annotated guide to his campaigns rather than a standalone "memoir"

There are two ways to judge the worst memoir: lack of content, and failure to acknowledge shortcomings. On both grounds, the memoirs of Major General Charles Lee must rank near the top. Here's a man who 1) jumps ship to whatever nation will most rapidly advance him, 2) tries to broker a peace deal while in enemy captivity, only to later deny the effort, and 3) subsequently flees the field of battle (Monmouth) despite orders (from his commander) and pleas (from his subordinates) to the contrary. His memoirs gloss over all these, painting him instead as a victim of circumstance, conspiracy, and cavil comrades.

With all due respect to the others on the list, I think we need to cull some older memoirs to round out an all-time list.