The best general of WW2 might be a man most people have never heard of: William Slim. No famous pistols. No riding crop. No glamorous desert duels. Just a stocky, square-jawed Englishman his troops called "Uncle Bill." And he pulled off what might be the greatest turnaround of the entire war. Slim wasn't supposed to be a general at all. He grew up in a family that had fallen on hard times. He worked as a clerk and a schoolteacher. He got into the army through a university officer training corps he wasn't even enrolled at. He was badly wounded at Gallipoli in WW1, then worked his way up the Indian Army with no money and no connections. In 1942, he was handed a disaster. The Japanese were steamrolling through Burma. Slim took command of the British forces there and led them on the longest retreat in British military history. Around 900 miles, through jungle and mountains, all the way back to India. They arrived starving, sick, beaten, and with almost nothing left. Slim later wrote openly about his own mistakes in that campaign. Generals almost never do that. In 1943, he was given command of the new 14th Army. On paper, it was a mess. It was the most diverse army Britain fielded in the war. Indians, Gurkhas, Britons, East and West Africans, Burmese. Dozens of languages. It got the worst equipment and the lowest priority, because Europe came first. Its men called it "the Forgotten Army." And it was being destroyed by disease. At one point, for every man wounded in battle, about 120 were falling sick, mostly from malaria. Slim's fix was simple and ruthless. Anti-malaria pills became an order, not a suggestion. Officers were held personally responsible. If too many men in a unit got sick, the commander got sacked. Sickness rates collapsed. Then he fixed the fear. The Japanese had won in 1942 by slipping around British units in the jungle and cutting them off, which caused panic and retreat. Slim's new rule: if you're surrounded, you don't run. You dig in, form a defensive "box," and the air force will supply you from the sky. In February 1944, it worked. At the "Admin Box" in Arakan, a Japanese attack surrounded a British-Indian force. The force held. Planes dropped supplies. The Japanese ran out of food and broke. It was the first major Japanese defeat on land in Burma. A month later, the Japanese launched their big gamble: an invasion of India itself, aimed at Imphal and Kohima. Slim did something that terrified London. He pulled his forces back onto the Imphal plain and let the Japanese come to him. They had brought only a few weeks of supplies, betting they could capture British stockpiles. They never did. At Kohima, the two sides fought across a tennis court at a few yards' distance. At Imphal, the British held for months while being supplied by air. The Japanese army starved in the hills. Out of roughly 85,000 men, tens of thousands died, many from hunger and disease. It was the worst defeat the Japanese army had ever suffered up to that point. Then Slim went on the offensive. In early 1945, he crossed the Irrawaddy River and made the Japanese believe his main attack was aimed at Mandalay. They rushed their forces there to defend it. Meanwhile, he had quietly sent an entire corps south through jungle trails, under radio silence, using fake signals traffic to hide the move. It burst out and seized Meiktila, the Japanese supply and communications hub, far behind their lines. The Japanese army in Burma was cut in two and collapsed. By May 1945, Rangoon was back in Allied hands. The army that had fled 900 miles in defeat had marched all the way back. And even then, Slim almost got fired. That same month, his superior tried to push him out. When word got around, the backlash was so severe that the superior was the one who ended up being replaced. Slim later became a field marshal, head of the British Army, and Governor-General of Australia. He called his memoir "Defeat into Victory." No title has ever been more honest.

80 years ago today, the top Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were hanged. The man who did it lied his way into the job and botched it. His name was Master Sergeant John C. Woods. Woods told everyone he was a veteran hangman. He claimed he'd executed hundreds of people over a 15-year career in Texas. Reporters loved it. The Army ran with it. None of it was true. There's no record he ever hanged anyone before WW2. He'd been kicked out of the Navy in the 1930s. When he joined the Army during the war, he volunteered to be an executioner, and somehow nobody checked. In Europe he carried out dozens of hangings of American soldiers convicted by courts-martial, and several of those reportedly went badly. Then he was handed the most important execution of the century. Just after 1 a.m. on October 16, 1946, ten condemned Nazi leaders were led one by one into the gymnasium of Nuremberg prison. Three gallows painted black. Hermann Göring was supposed to be first. He'd swallowed a cyanide capsule in his cell about two hours earlier. So Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, went first instead. The problems started immediately. The drops were too short. Instead of dying quickly from a broken neck, several men slowly strangled at the end of the rope. Accounts say Ribbentrop took around 10 minutes to die. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel reportedly took more than 20. The trapdoors also looked too small. Photos of the bodies afterward showed bloody facial injuries, consistent with men hitting the edge of the trap on the way down. Julius Streicher, the vicious antisemitic propagandist, shouted defiance on the scaffold. After he dropped, witnesses heard him groaning beneath the platform until it finally stopped. The executions took about two hours. Woods didn't see a problem. He told the press afterward that it had gone well, that he was proud of the work, and that he'd do it all again. The bodies, Göring's included, were photographed, secretly cremated, and the ashes scattered into a small stream outside Munich, so no grave could ever become a shrine. As for Woods, he never had to answer for any of it. Four years later, in 1950, he was on a remote Pacific atoll working on electrical equipment. He was accidentally electrocuted. The man who claimed to be an expert at killing died from a mistake.

The worst American general of WW2 might be Lloyd Fredendall. And the US Army rewarded him for it. In November 1943... no, let's start at the beginning. George Marshall loved Fredendall. Called him one of the best. Eisenhower trusted him enough to give him the Center Task Force for the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, and the landings at Oran went fine. So in early 1943, Fredendall got II Corps in Tunisia. The first real test for American ground troops against the Germans. His first big decision? Build a bunker. He picked a ravine near Tebessa, roughly 70 miles behind the front, and had a company of engineers spend weeks blasting tunnels into the hillside. The place got nicknamed "Speedy Valley." Meanwhile, the men actually facing the Germans were digging in with whatever they had. Fredendall almost never went forward. He ran the battle off maps from his cave and spread his units all over the place. Infantry got stranded on isolated hilltops miles apart, too far to support each other. He went around his own armored division commander, Orlando Ward, and gave orders directly to Ward's units, splitting the 1st Armored Division into pieces. He also had a habit of talking on the radio in his own homemade code, which nobody could decipher, including his own officers. One real order: "Move your command post to J, which is a place that sounds like what you drink." He despised the British. Didn't care for the French either. His staff was afraid of him. Then in February 1943, Rommel and the Germans hit. At Sidi Bou Zid, the stranded hilltop garrisons were surrounded and hundreds of Americans were captured. German armor shredded the scattered US tanks. Then came Kasserine Pass. Green American troops broke and fell back about 50 miles. By the end, the US had taken roughly 6,000 casualties and lost nearly 200 tanks in a matter of days. The Germans walked away thinking the American Army was a joke. Eisenhower sent people to assess the situation. Ernest Harmon came back and told Ike flatly that Fredendall was no good and had to go. Omar Bradley agreed. In March, Fredendall was out. His replacement was George S. Patton, who showed up with sirens, ordered everyone into helmets and neckties, and started turning II Corps into an actual fighting force. And Fredendall's punishment? He was sent home, promoted to lieutenant general, and put in charge of training troops in the States. Newspapers welcomed him back as a hero of the North Africa campaign. The man who hid in a cave while his army collapsed got a third star. Meanwhile the lessons of Kasserine were burned into the US Army forever: commanders lead from the front, and you don't keep generals who don't.