LAURENCE REES: And from your study who is the single best military leader of them all?

ROBERT CITINO: Well, pardon me for saying this sitting here in the hallowed halls of West Point, you may know what I’m going to say, but I have to give my vote to Dwight David Eisenhower. Certainly not as a great operational commander or a configurer of elegant flanking maneuvers or vast battles of encirclement, but as a kind of corporate manager for one of the greatest corporations and most successful corporations of all time, the Anglo-American coalition army in Western Europe. Any manager who can keep a Patten on board with a Montgomery, somehow balance their interests, and prevent them from killing one another and not turning to drink deserves my vote as the greatest commander of the Second World War, and that would be Eisenhower.