Don Wildman

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.

Yeah, the phrase is, the times make the man.

I mean, to paraphrase, in a way, the wars make the generals, don't they?

I mean, the challenges they must meet create these guys.

Okay, we're in the pantheon here, the last two generals.

So obviously, we're going to talk about George Washington.

But his effectiveness as a military leader has been called into question over the years, very surprisingly to me.

He certainly had some ignominious episodes early in his career before he was a general working for the British.