The war between the
states, as some prefer to call the U.S. Civil War, is what first
comes to mind when I encounter George Santayana's quip, “Those who
ignore history are condemned to repeat it.” This applies to war in
general, that when each new one comes along we seem to be unaware of
the carnage involved and skip gaily into the glorious fray - well, we
send the professionals along with the young and naïve as cannon
fodder, being too busy (as Dick Cheney said about his failure to
serve in Vietnam), to actually attend ourselves.
Another application of
the phrase is to military strategy. Winston Groom mentions in his
book on the battle of Shiloh
that toward the end of the war the military leadership began to
realize that Napoleonic tactics were no longer appropriate, given
advances in weaponry. Soldiers of both sides were marching smartly
across open fields into the jaws of death, as it were. Unfortunately
the lesson came less from revulsion at the cost in lives and limbs
than from the realization, at least in the south, that they were
running out of warm bodies to fling into the caldron.
When World War I. Raised
its ugly head, it brought us carnage on an even grander scale. The
great military minds had suffered yet another bout of amnesia,
utilizing once again Napoleonic strategies, marching old-fashioned
soft bodies into new fangled hard contraptions such as machine guns,
poison gas and artillery of unprecedented size and capacity. One
wonders what went on in the military colleges. Did they study dusty
tomes from the ancient past, welcoming innovation of weaponry but
punishing as heretical any corresponding innovations in strategy?
Santayana suggests that this is to be expected even though West Point
could not have been ignorant of history. Perhaps it is selective
history that is the problem.
Then there are the
politicians, the statesmen (mostly men, yeah) whose history reading
is selective indeed, filtered through a fine screen of rosy if deadly
patriotism and/or corruption... or sociopathic dysfunction.
So, enough
editorializing. Groom's book covers the battle, enlivening the chess
analogy often employed in Civil War books, to tedious effect, by
selecting characters of all ranks and following them through the
battle, characters who left memoirs, letters, diaries and of course
those who went on to become famous, failed business man Grant to
General Grant to President Grant. Other notables in the battle were
General Sherman of march-to-the-sea fame, Henry Stanley who later
“found Doctor Livingston”, Ambrose Bierce, later a popular writer
who disappeared in Mexico, and infamous calvary officer, Nathan
Bedford Forest, whose name was removed from a street in Atlanta when
finally black politicians came into prominence in the 1970s and
resented his involvement with the Klu Klux Klan.
One anecdote illustrating
Forest's reputation: after the Confederate retreat Sherman proceeded
to engage in a little harassment. He came upon Forest's calvary unit
who immediately attacked. Forest got out beyond his troops and
suddenly was surrounded by Yankees trying to kill him. He reached
down, scooped up a federal officer and using him as a shield, made
his escape. The man was apparently fearless, a definite candidate to
have a southern street named after him. In retrospect some offered
that the war might have had a different outcome had Forest been given
command.
Some ink is spent
rehearsing the climate leading up to the war. There were heartless
slavers and zealous abolitionists, anti-and pro-secessionists, slave
and free states and territories. Gore Vidal, in his usual
iconoclastic mischievousness, has suggested that many lives would
have been saved and suffering averted had the North simply accepted
secession, adding that slavery would have died out naturally. Grant
called the Union the greatest form of government ever achieved and it
was worth war, in his mind, to prevent its dissolution. He believed,
or at least said, that democracy itself was at stake. I have heard
more than one person invested in the “southern heritage”, claim
that slaves enjoyed their position and were well treated. Others see
the conflict as a clash between north and south ruling classes with
the average person having little actual investment to defend. Quite a
range of opinion on the subject.
Vidal was certainly
correct that there was massive death and suffering. Groom depicts
horrific stories, gleaned from his sources, of repeated withering
assaults, obscene decapitations and carnage from the various,
devilish creations of death machinery. Artillery of all kinds,
sometimes balls and shot, sometimes nails and chains, thinned the
ranks of attackers (thinning the ranks, now there's a euphemism)...
the rifles and pistols and bayonets, swords, and, whatever was at
hand in a desperate horror show of close quarters combat. The author
does a little macabre math, utilizing the fact that a soldier could
fire three shots per minute so that the air on the battlefield would
have been abuzz with deadly flying metal, 12,000 per minute per
brigade... and there were 30 brigades.
Artillery batteries
poured devastating fire on troops and attempted to silence each other
so that in addition to the metal just mentioned in the air there were
cannon balls also aloft. A strange phenomenon was noted that
sometimes balls would come bouncing across a field seemingly in slow
motion and you could step out of the way and watch it go by. But
there were those who would see it coming and impulsively put up their
boot to stop it and that miscalculation cost them a foot.
Speaking of limbs, the
primitive nature of battlefield medicine meant that the surgeon's saw
was the most frequently used tool. Before antibiotics, the prospect
of gangrene and death were treated with a liberally applied
procedure called amputation. Outside hospital tents there were piles
of limbs and hospital boats could be seen chugging downstream with
legs and arms regularly being tossed overboard.
Other near unspeakable
happenings were fires started by the constant barrage, trapping the
screaming wounded in an inferno. On top of that, wild hogs would come
foraging, not distinguishing between the dead and the merely wounded.
Not to put too fine a
point on it but the soldier victims of foolish politicians were far
from enjoying the glittering, honorable glories of combat but rather
suffered what Sherman, who surely knew of what he spoke when he said,
“War is Hell.”
So, in a nutshell, or a
shell casing: a major force of Confederate troops, surprised an equal
number of Union troops along the Tennessee River, at first light,
June 6, 1862. In the course of a ferocious day of fighting, the
Federals were pushed back into a precarious position, bounded by
river and swampland. As in most military encounters, inexplicable
flukes arose to now advantage one side, now the other. Acts of
imbecilic stupidity and awesome bravery in turn had their stupendous
effects on both sides. The Federals were certainly advantaged in
equipment, having iron-sided boats from which to lob explosives, and
heavier artillery but the chaos of a battlefield makes for
unpredictable outcomes. The decisive advantage for the Union was
probably a 25,000 soldier army which arrived late on the first of the
two day battle, which provided fresh troops to fight an exhausted
Confederate force.
Groom closes with a
synopsis of the subsequent lives of the characters he selected, those
who survived. Grant of course became President where a tendency to
fall under the spell of charlatans undid him; Bierce disappeared,
caught up in the 1913 Mexican revolution; Wallace became the
bestselling novelist of the 19th century; Stanley found Livingston;
Sherman fled politics for western military operations (another
euphemism) and Nathan B. Forest survived to the ripe old age of 56,
but not before rising to leadership in the KKK and dissolving it in
disgust over its behavior (so claims Groom). It of course arose again
when “needed”, like cancer or nuclear power, ever alert for the
worst of human corruption to which it can embed and resurrect itself.
