History has been kinder to the American generals of World War II than to the generals of later wars. Is this merely nostalgia? Thomas E. Ricks answers definitively: No, largely due to a widening gulf between performance and accountability. In The Generals we meet great leaders and suspect ones, from World War II to the present, generals who rose to the occasion and those who failed themselves and their soldiers. Marshall and Eisenhower cast long shadows over this story, but no figure is more inspiring than General O.P. Smith, whose fighting retreat from the Chinese onslaught into Korea in 1950 snatched a kind of victory from the jaws of annihilation.
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