Don Wildman

Tactical defeats where American forces had to retreat after inflicting disproportionately high casualties on the British harkens back to the Bunker Hill lessons.

You know, that kind of way that they started to realize, oh, we could beat these guys just by, you know, making them bleed, but still, you know, holding our troops at bay.

This leads to Cornwallis basically forced to retreat to the coast.

Wouldn't have won the revolution without this guy from beginning to end.

It was an incredible thing.

All right, Jonathan, we're going to take a break.

I want your opinion on the first two.

Pick your best general out of these two.

The matter of scale is immense.

It's Eisenhower.

Not even a question in my mind.

Okay, we'll come back after this break and we'll continue with our rankings.

Okay, we're back with Major Jonathan Bratton and our list of four greatest generals of American history.

Jonathan, two generals we're about to discuss are American icons.

But still, we're leaving out so many of the military minds, you know, that we ought to be talking about off this list.

Patton, Bradley, Sherman, to name but a few.

American generals, American military expertise increases over our hundreds of years.

Is this attributable to...

War to war training or did they just get better at figuring out what generals did?

What an impossible question I was just asking.