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Several years ago, as I mentioned some arcane bit of
Colorado history at dinner, my wife Martha suggested I
broaden my horizons. You're not just a Coloradan,
Ed,
she said. You're also an American, and you ought
to read more general American history.
Since most American historians call the Civil War the
pivotal event in our history, that's where I started, with
Shelby Foote's trilogy, then James McPherson's Battle
Cry of Freedom,
and then whatever I happened
across.
This hasn't made me a hard-core Civil War buff. My brother Tony, for instance, lives in Columbia, S.C., and he's not just a buff; he's a re-enactor. He keeps urging me to visit, but I demure, since one of my heros, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, is still hated in those parts because they blame him for burning the city in early 1865. And I fear I'd get us both into trouble if I couldn't keep my mouth shut about my admiration for Sherman.
One benefit of all this reading is that I can now talk
more coherently with the other member of the Colorado
Association of Red-bearded Pundits (The Red
should
now be Gray,
but CAGP is nowise as satisfying an
acronym as CARP). That other member is Bob Ewegen, much
more of a Civil War scholar than I, and we selected W.T.
Cump
Sherman as our patron saint for three
reasons:
1) He had a red beard.
2) He was a clear and forceful writer.
3) He did something that every editor has wanted to do -- issue an order for a reporter to be taken out and shot. (The order was rescinded, though, before it could be carried out.)
But despite Sherman's celebrity, as well as the honors that accrued to his superior officer, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, they seem to be getting a bad rap these days.
Last week, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the Iraq campaign as a
new American way of war
when he spoke to the Navy
League in Washington, D.C. According to a Washington Post
story, he said that historians tend to describe the U.S.
military's favored method of warfare as an overwhelming
effort of annihilation, as demonstrated by Ulysses S. Grant
and William T. Sherman in the Civil War.
He's right about the historians. Some do describe it that way, even though it doesn't really fit the facts in the Civil War.
Consider Grant's most brilliant campaign, the capture of Vickburg, Miss., in 1863, which gave the Union full control of the Mississippi River. Grant had tried to attack Vicksburg by land and gunboat from the north, and he had tried to cut a new channel for the Mississippi to isolate Vicksburg. Neither worked.
So he marched his army down the west bank, had troop transport boats run the gun batteries at Vicksburg, then used the transports to ferry his army onto the east side. He created diversions so that even though the Confederates had more soldiers in the area, his was always the biggest army at the battle. He didn't go straight to Vicksburg; he captured Jackson first, so that Vicksburg's rail link was cut off, along with the prospects of reinforcements for the Confederate Army.
In other words, it was a campaign of speed and mobility,
not of overwhelming annihilation.
Sherman's famous March to the Sea was similarly a
campaign of mobility, not of overwhelming
annihilation.
Granted, he faced no real military
opposition in Georgia on the way from Atlanta to Savannah
in late 1864, but that was the result of his strategic
brilliance.
He was able to take Atlanta in September, 1864, because the Confederate Army, commanded by Gen. John Bell Hood, had abandoned the city. Sherman tried chasing Hood's army, realized he'd never catch it now that it didn't have a city to defend, and turned his attention elsewhere.
He knew Hood wouldn't be able to catch him, any more than he could have caught Hood. He left Gen. George Thomas in charge, back in Tennessee, where Hood would have to go if his army was going to fight. That December, Thomas destroyed Hood's army.
To be sure, most of Grant's advance to Richmond and then Appomattox with the Army of the Potomac in 1864 was a meat-grinder campaign of attrition, and it is from that, apparently, that Grant gets his unfair characterization by some ignorant historians.
So from the vantage of one Civil War buff, it doesn't appear that the United States a new military doctrine. Since about 1863, the better American generals have known about mobility.
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