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Post by timothylane on Nov 18, 2019 13:12:52 GMT -8
Grant said in his memoirs that Meade's willingness to accept being cashiered gave him more respect for the man than his victory at Gettysburg. Grant was always a rather modest sort, which he picked up from his mentor (Zachary Taylor) and appreciated in others.
The bit in which some Union officer worried about Lee was about to do and Grant mocked that attitude is famous, and in fact Sherman independently alluded to that quality once. He thought he knew far more than Grant did about military science -- but where Grant beat everybody was that he didn't care what the enemy was doing over there, and it "scared hell out of me". On the other hand, that attitude can lead sometimes to unpleasant surprises.
Spotsylvania County was named after a former Royal governor named Spotswood. The tangled terrain was known as the Wilderness of Spotsylvania. The key crossroad that Richard H. Anderson (Confederate I Corps temporarily replacing the badly wounded Longstreet) barely beat Gouverneur K. Warren (Union V Corps, promoted for taking the lead in getting defenders to Little Round Top just in time) to was Spotsylvania Court House.
There were many interesting events in the battle. I assume Shaara will cover the death of John Segwick, which I think was the day before Emory Upton's attack on the Mule Shoe that failed but showed that it was vulnerable (thus leading to the Bloody Angle fighting 2 days later) and Sheridan's victory at Yellow Tavern (in which Stuart was mortally wounded). It should be noted that Sheridan took all of his cavalry, which was a bigger strategic mistake than Stuart's raid to Gettysburg. (Stuart left 4 of his 7 cavalry brigades behind or already operating with Lee, though their quality wasn't necessarily high. On the other hand, one was Imboden's brigade, which despite its low reputation played a crucial role covering the retreat.)
I've seen Glory, but that was over 20 years ago and I don't remember too many details. I was disappointed but not surprised that they didn't include the comment a Confederate made about Shaw after the bloody failure against Battery Wagner: "We buried him with his niggers." Shaw probably would have appreciated that action, if not the sentiment (though it wouldn't have surprised him).
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 18, 2019 14:19:41 GMT -8
Yes, I think it helped that Grant didn’t require servility. At one point, on the way to the Wilderness campaign, Meade finds a convenient hill and sets up headquarters. Grant is appreciative that Meade had Grant’s tent set up a little higher on the hill than Meade’s. That at least shows you that Meade was not Bragg.
Who knows what Meade thought of Grant. I don’t know. But so far Grant is certainly not going out of his way to play the part of “savior of the army” like everyone thought he would. He’s just getting down to business and issuing orders according to his own strategy. He is rubbing no one’s nose in their previous failures.
Speaking of failures, it’s interesting that a particular Congressman (you know the name…I forget…but he goes way back with Grant) is the person Grant feels he can let down his guard in front of. He sometimes visits the camp. This fellow knows Grant’s failures but they are not things Grant would want to be widely known.
Grant laments that Meade doesn’t know the first thing about how to use cavalry. But Grant, like Lee, had to more-or-less make do with the parts he was given. General Ewell had become an ineffective mess. Lee (at least in the novel) thought he was getting close to needing to take personal command of his corps. The man simply would not use his initiative. He expected Lee to give direct and explicit orders for any aggressive move. And even then.
A.P. Hill is another interesting character. The man — in the midst of battle — could get so sick he was debilitated. He was another man that Lee recognized was a more effective subordinate of Jackson than as a corps commander. And in the battle of the Wilderness, Lee said he was, in the midst of the chaos, moving men around into position as if he was a regimental commander. The troops were so intermixed at one point (with the officers being the brunt of the casualties), that this hands-on positioning of men was needed and vital.
After nearly being overrun by the Union, Longstreet just comes on the scene (like a bad movie plot, I guess) and supplies reinforcements. Oddly, the advance of the Union troops (with the Confederates retreating for a moment in panic) was so effective that they got so ahead of themselves and out of line that they suddenly lost steam and became vulnerable. The Confederate commanders on the scene wanted to immediately form battle lines. Longstreet overruled and said what they needed were strong skirmish lines, moving from tree to tree, advancing and giving the Yankees hell, which they did. It would appear that Longstreet had that rare ability to innovate and think on his feet under pressure.
Burnside is another general that Grant just had to suffer. There was another general (I forget who….not Meade, not Sheridan) who he would have liked to replace but the man was so politically connected, it would have brought far more trouble than it solved.
If you could send one bit of alien (or anachronistic) technology via a time machine and it had to fit inside a shoebox, you could have changed the war dramatically if you could go back and arm Grant with a single battery-powered drone. (We’d throw in a solar recharging unit as well.) There’s no doubt that Lee used the cavalry effectively. There seems little doubt that even in mid 1864, the Union still didn’t know how to use cavalry nearly as well. But from my reading, the best analogy would be that the cavalry was their best equivalent to flying a drone over the battlefield to see who was what and where.
Thus Lee’s problems with Stuart at Gettysburg. His eyes and ears went missing. There’s a good description by Lee in the book about what this cost him. Had he known where the Federal troops were, he could have moved further north to even better foraging ground….even putting the scare into the residents of Philadelphia. But, instead, he sort of got pulled into Gettysburg before he was ready.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 18, 2019 15:09:46 GMT -8
I assume Grant's friend was Rep. Elihu Washburne, who certainly sponsored him in the Army during the war. As for the general Grant would have liked to remove, I'm not sure who that was. The Army of the Potomac corps commanders were Hancock (II), Warren (V), and Sedgwick (VI); Burnside (IX) was actually a separate command until later. Hancock was an excellent commander, but never quite the same after being severely wounded at Gettysburg. Sedgwick was shot and killed early at Spotsylvania while encouraging his men (who loved him) with his favorite catchphrase for that purpose, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." Warren was cashiered by Sheridan (who had been given pre-emptive permission to do so if necessary, which in fact it wasn't) at Five Forks.
Hancock later ran against Grant in 1868, but lost the nomination to Horatio G. Seymour, sometime Governor of New York. Hancock was eventually nominated to face Garfield in 1880 in an extremely close election.
Burnside was sent home after the Crater, which he mishandled after Grant and Meade not to use the black division (Ferrero's) that he had been training specially for the battle because if the mine failed to go off (which the professional engineers, such as Meade, wrongly expected) the black troops would be slaughtered and there would be a lot of political outcry. (The baleful expects of race-based political correctness go back a long way.) Burnside had handled things well up to that point, but he decided which division should take Ferrero's place by lot, and Murphy's Law dictated that it should be the worst possible choice, Ledlie's division. It was a bad division poorly led (Ledlie spent the battle drunk in a bombproof, not commanding his men), and that's when everything went downhill.
The arrival of Longstreet with Mahone's III Corps division and Field's and Kershaw's I Corps divisions did indeed turn impending defeat into success. I don't know about the skirmish vs. line approach at that time, but no doubt forming proper lines in the Wilderness wasn't easy.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 18, 2019 15:40:59 GMT -8
Yes. Washburne. That’s the guy. I found the section about that other guy: My town (being a heavily a military town) has nearly every other street named after a military leader. I lived for years on a road named “Sheridan” but confess I’d never heard of the man. There’s also a Sedgwick Rd. in a nearby town. Of course there’s a Nimitz Lane right next to Halsey Lane. Both are off of MacArthur Court…which feeds off of Reagan Avenue. There is a Spraque Street in the area. Decatur Avenue, of course. Farragut Avenue. I’m not sure who Wycoff is. Peary Road. There are other street names that could just be “normal” names but that might have a naval background. Is there an Admiral Yantic out there? I used to play tennis frequently at a little public cement court on Nipsic Ave. I had been unaware that it was named after the USS Nipsic. She was an Adams/Enterprise-class gunboat. And it even fits the current theme: Well done Nipsic.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 18, 2019 16:03:05 GMT -8
Here’s a passage that I think many will appreciate from “The Last Full Measure.” I quite agree. And I think Mr. Lincoln was a victim of this passion. I believe him 100% when he said he’d accept slavery if it meant saving the union. He was by no means elected with a mandate to end slavery. One wonders what Mr. Lincoln’s agenda would have been had the South not rebelled. His previous attempts in government were often lackluster, his political program (in Illinois, I think) amounted to little more than building expensive infrastructure. It wasn’t windmills he was planning. But he was proposing all kinds of spending at a time when times were tight. The people back then were sensible enough to dump him. There is little doubt he would have been a moderating influence if the South hadn’t rebelled. Here’s the 1860 Republican Platform. Item 3 is rather interesting: And… Well, if the Republicans planned on sticking to that platform, the rebel leaders did an enormous disservice to the men and women they were supposedly protecting. Their zealousness led to ruin. I don’t think the South wanted the Slave Trade anymore either. But they certainly did want to keep their slaves. So what did the Democrat platform of 1860 look like. Well, slavery is definitely on their mind and I suppose you have to read between the lines and understand the history of the moment to understand what parts of their platform mean. I would assume, for instance, that the Supreme Court of the day was well stacked with slavery supporters: Both parties has a specific platform item approving of the Federal government aiding in building a railroad to the Pacific. Okie doke. That certainly shines a nice light on your party. Anyone know what the hell this means? I’m guessing “domestic relations” mean if that state wants slavery. Again, I do suppose that the Supreme Court at the time is very much pro-slavery.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 18, 2019 16:06:29 GMT -8
No one placed much value on Butler's abilities, at least as an army commander. He commanded the Army of the James, which is why I didn't think of him. Another political general (though one who actually had military training and experience) was Franz Sigel, who commanded in the Shenandoah. After he was routed at New Market by John C. Breckinridge (who then brought his small infantry division to Hanover Junction), he was replaced by another political general, David Hunter. Hunter got all the way to Lynchburg, where he was driven off by a capable if caustic local, Jubal Early.
Butler had 2 corps at the time, the X (Quincy Gillmore) and XVI (W. F. Smith), They were supposed to provide Butler with good military advice. That didn't end up working too well. Catton's discussion of Butler's campaign (in Never Call Retreat) is most amusing. ("How long will it take to get to Richmond if you go out 2 miles every day and return to your trenches at night?")
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Post by timothylane on Nov 18, 2019 16:10:53 GMT -8
A lot of Southerners simply didn't believe the Republicans. Lincoln offered a cabinet post to an Upper South politician who refused because of Lincoln's abolitionism, which left Lincoln in despair. After all, if even a moderate Southerner could be that paranoid, who there wasn't?
One thing to remember is that there were 2 Democratic tickets in 1860, the (mostly) Northern Democrats (who nominated Stephen Douglas and Herschel Johnson) and the (mostly) Southern Democrats (who nominated John C. Breckinridge and Joseph Lane). The remnants of the Whigs, running as the Constitutional Union Party, nominated John Bell (who joined the Confederacy after his home state of Tennessee seceded) and Edward Everett (the main speaker at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg). The Cincinnati platform referred back to 1856.
Remember, this was the same SCOTUS that issued the Dred Scott decision. Yes, the slaveholders counted on their support. In that decision, they had ruled that no territory (or state) could free slaves who accompanied a visiting slaveholder. This was extensively discussed in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Breckinridge did have some northern support, even winning a few thousand votes in Illinois and Indiana (Douglas's home base). But if all 3 non-Republican candidates had combined their votes against Lincoln, he would only have lost 11 electoral votes (California with 4, Oregon with 3, and 4 in New Jersey -- Douglas got the other 3 anyway). He still would have won the electoral vote 169 to 134. Lincoln also had some support in the upper South, especially Missouri (the only state where all 4 candidates did well). But the race in most of the North was mostly Lincoln vs. Douglas, and in most of the South it was Breckinridge vs. Bell.
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Post by kungfuzu on Nov 18, 2019 22:04:18 GMT -8
Where I am writing it has just become November 19th. I think it only appropriate to note that Lincoln gave his "Gettysburg Address" on that day in 1863.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 19, 2019 8:41:55 GMT -8
Thank you, Mr. Kung, for the most appropriate reminder. Lincoln's speech was also a lesson in brevity.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 19, 2019 10:16:11 GMT -8
Edward Everett, the main speaker, spoke for a few hours -- and afterward said that Lincoln got to the heart of the occasion better in a few hundred words than he had. There were others who didn't care for it (some of that was probably politics), but as an orator he was a good judge.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 19, 2019 20:20:41 GMT -8
At least Everett was an intellectually honest man.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 20, 2019 8:27:02 GMT -8
Today’s Democrats are little different from yesteryear’s. They don’t like an election so they resort to extra-Constitutional means.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 23, 2019 11:39:47 GMT -8
Last night I finished my third Shaara historical novel about the Civil War, The Last Full Measure. The novel is split between three point-of-views: Lee, Grant, and Chamberlain. It’s set after the war in the West had more or less been won and Grant is put in charge of the entire army with his three stars. He’s now after Robert E. Lee’s army. He tags along with Meade’s camp as the campaign advances. The narrative style, in which Shaara gets inside the heads of the participants, becomes a bit tedious and one-dimensional. It occurred to me that he likely had some sources (diaries, biographies, letters) to bolster the thoughts and words he put into the participants’ heads. But it often occurred to me that the volumes of introspection (especially from Lee) might be true-to-life after-the-fact, in moments of reminiscing. But much of it seemed out of place and made-up when presented as the clock ticks on the actual battlefields. Chamberlain seems less like a real person of the three. Grant seems like Grant. I think the writing is solid in this regard and not too speculative. Lee’s story is certainly the most personal and effusive. If most of this is accurate, you learn a lot about the man. But in the back of my mind I was a bit skeptical of it all. Still, you should be thinking “Brad is such a picky reader, there must be something to these novels if he’s read three of them. After all, he hates overly fact-laden muddlesome stories and he hates an intellectual masterbatory handling of history.” And you’d be right to think that. The main problem with this book isn’t Shaara’s technique but that it is too long and he doesn’t present an overriding analysis. We get the three points of view. Fine. But he’s yet another author who seems unwilling to come to any firm conclusions. It’s as if our immersion into the subject matter is meant for us to do that for ourselves. Fair enough. So what do I conclude about the Civil War? First, it was a bad project from the start, fed by a relatively few hot-headed (perhaps even slightly crazy) rabble-rousers that led to the doom of tens of thousands and the destruction of much property. Second, even if you accept the premise that the war was worth fighting, the overriding theme of these books is how badly it was fought. The North was particularly inept. But Southern generals were often just as bad, failing to advance at critical points. Both wasted men with such rapidity and abandon that “horror” doesn’t begin to describe this situation. All the while they talked of “honor.” That dichotomy is difficult to resolve. Grant, in particular, is hard to figure out. He seems to have learned some of the lessons of Gettysburg (as they all did on both sides) but then leads his men to the slaughter at Cold Harbor. And getting a degree at West Point at the time was about worth the paper it was printed on. They all learned a Napoleonic view of battle tactics. But modern guns (both muskets and the larger cannons) had made such tactics stupid and suicidal. But still they were applied. All generals seemed resistant to adapting lest “honor” somehow be damaged. It didn’t matter that thousands of common soldiers had to pay the price for their ego and ignorance. Lee, to his credit (and with Longstreet’s prompting), learned that the shovel was the greatest weapon of the war. I would say at one point — when Lee had Jackson and perhaps a less morose Longstreet — the South had an effective army as a whole. The results seem to speak to this. The North, on the other hand, didn’t have an army as much as it had the individual egos of the generals all battling between themselves. The coordination was poor. And even with Grant as actual head of the army, he often seemed more like a titular head. Any kind of tactical strategy agreed upon by the commanders in his tent was quickly shot to hell when it came to applying it in the real world. This go-it-alone aspect meant that coordination in the Union army was difficult. And the result of this atomized command structure was poor use of the overall intelligence needed to guide the entire army, particularly poor use of the cavalry which was the main means for intelligence. Grant often didn’t know where Lee was, not to mention his own people. Grant’s genius (as portrayed in this novel) was in holding his temper and not firing these generals on the spot. He endured them. It’s certainly possible that there was no one better to replace them. And with the men under their command highly motivated by loyalty to their own general, firing them would bring chaos and demoralization. That, at least, is my reading of the situation. Again, Shaara does not use his expertise to try to answer many of these questions. Why read a book such as this? It’s an interesting question because there’s nothing to be learned from this book, at least for the foreseeable future in that time and place. The Civil War was yet another “war to end all wars” and yet (like most of the others) was rushed into with the thought that it would last a month, at most. Madness drives the process from start to end. One thing that came across in this novel was that barbarity became a habit. The widespread horrible death and destruction became so common amongst the participants that they got used to it. Lee can be forgiven for believing that he was just one more battle from bringing public pressure on Grant because of the slaughter. The amount of carnage definitely did cause shock outside the confines of the battlefield. Even reading this, it’s hard to imagine what drove the Union soldiers — another failure of this novel, if you ask me. And the particulars of Chamberlains’ life add little understanding. Chamberlain is, after all, remarkable, not typical. Whatever sympathy one has for either side, Lee in particular comes off badly as he leads soldiers who have no shoes, no uniform to speak of, and nothing to eat for days at a time. He carried “honor” way too far, even considering the understandable strategy that all he had to do (like General Washington) was to string out the war and stay alive. In this novel, he glamorized General Washington and supposed he was fighting the same kind of good fight. At the end of this, the fight is unconscionably bad. Perhaps without the hot-headed (almost lunatic) General Sheridan getting in front of him, Lee would have indeed slipped away to Lynchburg or elsewhere. But, I mean, if you can’t feed your own soldiers and they are dropping their muskets along the way because of the weight, the problem is not time as much as it is not having an effective fighting force. The book does seem to give a fairly good description (assuming it is accurate) of the entire sequence from Lee dealing with the siege of Petersburg/Richmond to his attempt to break away to the west. Most histories condense that to “and he was cornered near the Appomattox Courthouse.” Well, yeah, but there was much that happened between those two points. In fact, that is another overall impression of this book. There were a lot of battles. It’s almost impossible to comprehend how veteran soldiers on either side could keep this up. No doubt part of it was the excitement and adventure. But it still boggles the mind. Imagine your worst camping experience and then have it go on for four years with people trying to kill you every few days or so.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 23, 2019 12:34:09 GMT -8
West Point really was first and foremost an engineering school. It also taught combat tactics, and probably to some extent actual leadership. Both sides had a lot of important commanders who never studied there. (A few of the washouts at West Point would become noted elsewhere, such as Edgar Allan Poe and James Fannin, even though they both died young.) Nathan Bedford Forrest was probably the best of the lot. One might note that Lincoln (with no higher education at all) was probably a better war president than Jefferson Davis (a West Point graduate).
Even good performance at the Point didn't always matter much. W. H. C. Whiting not only led his class but had a record high rating -- but as a commander he was inferior to many who ranked far worse. He came into his own commanding at Wilmington, where his engineering brilliance came to the fore. G. W. Smith was also a very good engineer, and very senior (he ranked Longstreet and Jackson, for example) as a commander -- but his performance never lived up to his reputation. Lee was probably unusual in that his reputation held up well in the war, although it took a while. (His record in northwestern Virginia was nothing to boast about, and his service watching the south Atlantic coast came at a time when the early attacks had been finished and before they later resumed.)
I would assume Shaara relied heavily on biographical accounts in his research. Grant's memoirs and the various accounts of Lee would be very useful in that respect. Freeman followed a 4-volume biography of Lee with his 3-volume Lee's Lieutenants (which I grew up reading; it was considered an excellent study of leadership, good and bad, so no surprise my father had a copy) before getting to his multi-volume biography of Washington.
One brief study of command in the war argued that Lee, Grant, and Sherman were the only generals on either side who were really qualified to command armies. As for Army of Northern Virginia command, Freeman noted that Grant was lucky to face the attenuated command of 1864 rather than in 1863, though it should be noted that Hooker also had a stronger army available than Meade did a year later. Lee had fewer at Chancellorsville, but that was because Longstreet was in southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina on a massive foraging expedition. (He was also haplessly besieging Suffolk. Longstreet wasn't at his best on his own -- unlike Jackson.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 23, 2019 12:50:08 GMT -8
That makes sense. Lee (and cousins and sons) were apparently very good engineers. A couple other generals (North or South) were mentioned in this regard.
Tacticians? Well. “Cover you flank and bash them into submission with an overpowering frontal assault” was about all there seemed to be on display. Even Lee fell for it at Gettysburg.
I have little doubt that tactics is the tip of the iceberg. I would imagine it’s a full-time job feeding, equipping, and moving up to 100,000 men. Logistics are boring but I’m going to assume that was the meat of the training.
It was mentioned in this novel through either Chamberlain or Grant (I think the former) that he was truly surprised by the Gettysburg address. Before then, he saw Lincoln has just the purveyor of somewhat yokelish homespun material. I think Lincoln didn’t at all mind being underestimated.
And we fall for “experts” with certificates to this day, little understanding how little those pieces of paper can mean.
It did take him at least a few months to get past the visage of “Granny Lee.” But by the end of the war it was “Jefferson who?” Lee was the Confederacy. And I agree with those who thought it might be a good idea to dispense with Davis and give Lee dictatorial powers.
I’m not saying that Lee didn’t believe in The Cause. But clearly Davis was a lunatic. Lee would have been less likely to put “The Cause” before achieving victory. I think Lee would have been more amenable to using black soldiers, for instance. He might have (or Walter Taylor) had the political savvy to court European powers.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 23, 2019 13:12:46 GMT -8
I don't recall reading about logistics being taught at West Point. (Freeman gave a detailed account of Lee as a cadet there, and for that matter his later stint as commandant there.) That's what staff officers were for, and these including quartermaster, commissary, and ordnance officers.
The US ordnance chief (Ripley) for much of the war was a skeptic about breech-loading and repeating rifles because of the ammunition they used up. The quartermaster (Meigs) had a better reputation. Interestingly, the Confederate ordnance chief, Josiah Gorgas, was a Yankee. He also did an excellent job. For most of the war their commissary chief was L. B. Northrop, who had a difficult task (but then so did Gorgas) but was a Davis crony. He was finally replaced near the end by I. M. St. John, who had run the Niter and Mining Bureau under Gorgas and did a better job.
Of course there were commissary, ordnance, and quartermaster officers at least down to division level, as well as signals officers. E. P. Alexander, one of the best Confederate artillerists (it would be interesting to know what Henry J. Hunt, the great Army of the Potomac artillery commander, thought of him), started out in signals (he was doing that when he noticed McDowell's flanking force at First Bull Run), then became the ordnance officer (making sure the Army of Northern Virginia never ran out of ammunition on the battlefield) before taking over S. D. Lee's large artillery battalion after the Maryland campaign.
Bragg's ordnance officer, Hypolite Oladowski, had a pretty good reputation. Jackson had famous officers in all 3 positions (Hawkes, Allan, and Harman).
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 23, 2019 17:04:57 GMT -8
Maybe so. But they certainly do teach classes in how to be an arrogant prima donna because so many of them are good at it. This is likely one reason Grant (and Washington) were so effective. Patton was effective...when he could give his military skills preeminence over this prima donna propensities.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 23, 2019 17:15:23 GMT -8
Being an arrogant prima donna was common among many high-ranking US generals in World War II, notably Patton, MacArthur, and Clark. But it was hardly unusual among other nationalities as well. A lot of Germans had it, not surprisingly, and so did some Brits (notably Montgomery) and French (especially De Gaulle).
MAD Magazine, in its parody of the movie Patton, had a lovely parody of this attitude in a confrontation between "Field Marshal Monkmemory" and "General Puton". When Puton is looking for a bigger role in Sicily, Monkmemory responds that "This is my war. I get top billing. It says so right here, in my contract. 'World War II, starring Field Marshal Monkmemory . . . with General George Puton . . . and a cast of millions." Puton's enraged response is, "'With'? All I get is a 'with'?"
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Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 24, 2019 9:54:17 GMT -8
You must have the entire contents of Mad Magazine imprinted on your brain. I suppose the one cartoon of that magazine that really sticks out in my memory (hopefully it wasn’t from Cracked) was Superman flying in to rescue an ocean liner that was either sinking or grounded. He picks it up in the middle and the vessel promptly cracks in half. Back to the still simmering Civil War: One of the themes of the book (at least from Lee’s point of view) was that his smaller forces (and they were almost always smaller) were more mobile. He could move faster than the lumbering behemoth of the Union army. And at the end, probably only the maniacal pursuit of Sheridan’s calvary (which Grant had let become a separate command answerable to him) led to Lee being cornered. Sheridan was also apparently given special power to commandeer other units of infantry as needed. He did so with whatever division or regiment that Chamberlain was leading which was part of the infantry forces that blocked Lee from the front. His calvary alone apparently had no chance of doing that. Wars are always more fun to fight after-the-fact. In this case, the only real criticism I have of the South is Jefferson Davis’ propensity for choosing his generals because they were friends (Bragg) rather than whether or not they were competent. They should also be faulted for horrible political instincts. They needed trade with Europe (if not also their military help) and were not going to get it as long as it was seen that they were fighting to preserve slavery (which they were). So even if they never meant it, even if it was just for show, they should have arranged photo-ops for European dignitaries to see Southern black troops marching about. To get the South’s cotton, many might has seen that as sufficient. For the North, I don’t have any criticism for the initial policy of trying to take the Southern capital of Richmond. That makes perfect sense. Grant, when given authority over that front, understood it was Lee’s army he had to defeat, not take cities. But I can’t blame the early strategy. That said, it seems to me they should have had two more mobile Armies of the Potomac instead of one behemoth. The one behemoth made it much easier for Lee to manage. But if you had two independent armies whose job was to wear Lee down, Lee just couldn’t have covered them both. The doctrine of having overwhelming forces didn’t play out much until Grant had command of the Army of the Potomac and used those forces, however much of a blunt instrument it was at times. One the flip side, those large forces of the North allowed them to survive some slipshod generalship. Sherman alone saved Shiloh, but only saved it to the extent that he bought necessary time for reinforcements. The Union could always count on have more men and supplies. Lee had his Jackson and one wonders if the war would have lasted another year without Grant having his Sherman. And a lot of stray bullets performed the action of destiny. Plenty of great generals (Jackson, Reynolds) were killed by random bullets. Apparently Lee had more than one buzz close to his head. The Fates were hard on both sides. But a lucky (unlucky) bullet here or there might have changed things even more. What’s the most decisive point of the war? I don’t think it was the failure of Ewell or Early to take Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg although that would have given them better position at the one battle. But would Federal troops have charged up the hill to displace them or instead try to move between Lee’s army and his escape to the south? Granted, the conventional wisdom is that Meade would keep his troops between Lee and Washington, but who knows? Washington was heavily defended and I don’t think Lee was in much of a position for an extended siege. The keystone of the war (slavery) was the South’s key problem. They lost enormous amounts of potential manpower, not to mention the potential help of European powers, by clinging to an institution whose time had to pass at some point anyway. According to this info, there were 2,312,352 (47% of the total population) slaves in the Lower South; 1,208,758 (29% of the total population) in the Upper South; and 432,586 (13% of the total population) in the Border States. In essence, the South was way too late — a day late and a dollar short — to transition to total war. The same perverted ideology which led to the war also led to their defeat. Maybe only 750,000 of those slaves were men of military age. That’s just a guess. But that would have been quite a force. And backed by the income (if not also the military resources) of one or more European powers, it’s not likely that Lincoln would have even won a second term. If ifs and buts were candies and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas. But it’s interesting to consider the what-ifs.
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Post by timothylane on Nov 24, 2019 10:33:55 GMT -8
There were two occasions on which the North tried your suggested approach in Virginia. One came in the summer of 1862, when the various Union forces in northern Virginia were combined into the Army of Virginia under the detested John Pope even as McClellan at Harrison's Landing still (at least theoretically) threatened Richmond. But Lincoln and Stanton decided to pull McClellan back and send his army to join Pope's (under the latter's command). Two corps made it and fought at Second Bull Run (with McClellan favorite Fitz John Porter being courtmartialed for not making an attack that Pope had ordered unaware of the actual situation, especially Longstreet's presence on the field). McClellan with the other 2 (Sumner's II and Franklin's VI) was at Alexandria, a day's march away, but didn't exactly march to the sound of the guns.
Whether this was McClellan being his usual cautious self (no one knew exactly what was going on around Manassas Junction) or McClellan disloyally letting Pope get clobbered is a question no one can answer for sure today. To be sure, Franklin had sent a single brigade to check things out after communication was broken with the supply base, probably thinking it was another cavalry raid. A. P. Hill sent it reeling back to Alexandria, and that was the last attempt to intervene there.
The second attempt came in May 1864, when Grant wanted Butler's Army of the James to hit Richmond from the southeast and Sigel's force to take out Lee's breadbasket in the Shenandoah. Both failed. There were further efforts in the Shenandoah, first by David Hunter, and later by Sheridan after Early had trashed every other Union commander in the area and come within an inch of attacking Fort Stevens in the Washington defenses. (It was the closest they ever came to attacking and perhaps taking the capital, and might have worked if Grant hadn't sent a corps newly arrived from the Gulf to strengthen the defenses.)
The luck of the bullet could indeed be fickle. At Shiloh, Albert Sidney Johnson (the general Davis most respected) made only one personal intervention, during the struggle for the Hornet's Nest, and was fatally hit. (The scene of his death was one used almost identically by Foote in his novel about Shiloh and in his actual historical narrative.) Grant and Sherman were leading troops all day long, and neither was ever hit. So they had the chance to atone for their errors (both were certain that there was no threat all the way up to the point when Johnston attacked).
I suspect your estimate of the young male population of the slaves of the Confederacy (as opposed to those in the northern border states) is a good one. Among the white population, military-age males seem to have been about a fifth of the population, at least at the start of the war. It declined a good bit after that, though not as badly as in Paraguay in 1870 after their war against the Triple Alliance (80% or more female, most likely losing about half their total population). Cleburne noted that the North had 3 sources of troops -- native whites, immigrants, and (mostly Southern) blacks, whereas the South only had native whites. His proposal would (theoretically) have turned blacks mainly into a Southern rather than Northern asset, greatly shortening the odds against them.
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