A Friend of mine believes the largest army ever commanded by one man in a war situation was the Adolf Hitler and the German army during the second world war (dont know if it counts romanian, hungarian and italian soldiersfighting on the axis side),
I disagree and think that the Russian army of WW2 was bigger. I've looked on the net quite a bit but cannot get statistics for either armies.
Can anyone help?
Statistics would be brilliant but opinions are very welcome.
Thanks.

I do not exactly understand what u mean commanded by one man. Do u mean at the battlefield? or at a war.

If war, i must say maybe Stalin. The men who died were about 13 million, these are only the ones who died, and all were headed by Stalin.

First thanks for replying.

I meant having command over the most number of troops. Not necessarily on the battlefield, or in one battle. And not the available manpower but the amount of soldiers enlisted in the army during a war setting. My friend quotes a figure of 18million for the german army(ww2).

any time mes ami.

18 million is a record, but u might wanna check Russia too.

You see, there's no confirmation of this number and my friend could be spoofing. I'd love to find a link to a statistic page for it.

It looks like Russia had fielded 20,000,000 soldiers. The German Heer or Army was at about 13,000,000.

http://www.feldgrau.com/main1.php?ID=2

Between 1939 and 1945 close to 13 million served in the Heer. Over 1.6 million were killed and over 4.1 million were wounded. Of the 7361 men awarded the initial grade of the highest German combat honor of WWII, the Knights Cross, 4777 were from the Heer making up 65% of the total awarded.

http://www.eisenhowerinstitute.org/p...erienceww2.htm

The populations of the United States and the USSR were about the same, 130,000,000, when both nations went to war within six months of each other in 1941.
Looking only at Anglo-American forces engaged against German soldiers on our two fronts, northwest Europe and Italy, the United States lost 139,380 soldiers (killed and missing) during the conflict. General Eisenhower had just over 3,000,000 men under his command, with about a third of them safely in England, and faced a German Army of less than 1,500,000 of which our forces killed 834,314. At the same time, Soviet armies in excess of 20,000,000 soldiers were fighting German armies totaling 5,700,000 at their strongest and killed 2,415,690 of them as they fought their way out of Russia and on to Berlin.

swhat I thought....

I agree with the super sonic ring of steel man..

The russian army was never under a unified command.

u kidding? in ww2?

lol, joke right?

do you consider Stalin to be the unified command?

I consider unified command to be a millitary command, not a political one.

I.E. Eisenhower (WW2) or Schwartzkoff (Desert Storm)

Hitler, in a way, transends being a political figure because he went into detail and changed even small details in plans. Hitler did act as a millitary commander as oposed to a political one; a political one being more on the order of "Take back Kuwait" as 1991 George Bush's role was.