Steely Glint
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Mike Scholl
Baloney! Just what "usual collection of clowns" were fighting in the West?
Baloney yourself. The collection of clowns running the Union Western Theater before the rise of Grant and Sherman were led by such notable losers as Henry Halleck, Don Carlos Buell, David Hunter, John Fremont, and Ben "Spoons" Butler. After Grant and Sherman rose to prominence, yes, things changed. But prior to that rise the CSA leadership in the West was dramtically superior to the Union leadership (with Braxton Bragg, a classic example of what goes wrong when you appoint generals for political/personal reasons, being the significant exception). Given the tremendous disparity of forces and resources you only have to look at how little that the Union was able to accomplish with such vastly superior numbers, weapons, equipment, logistics, support, money, not to mention a far superior railway system and control of the rivers and the sea before the rise of Grant and Sherman and their proteges (and outside of them afterwards) compared to what they should have been able to accomplish and you get a picture of just how totally, awfully, woefully bad the Union leadership in the West really was.
And if you want a clear picture of just how bad Union leadership in the West was outside of the Grant-Sherman clique and their proteges, take a hard look at the Red River campaign. Militarily, a five to one advantage in troops and a vast superiority in armaments, equipment and logistics should guarantee a victory even given just marginally competent leadership. Even just plain bad leadership should be able to accomplish at least something with that kind of force disparity. Yet the Union leadership in the West was so incredibly bad that the Union forces failed to accomplish even a single one of their objectives in this campaign. Yes, not even one.
There are numerous - far, far too many - other examples.
Even very late in the war, the Union leadership in the West was simply abominable. Look up the operations of CSA Colonel John "Rip" Ford and his legendary Cavalry of the West in South Texas, in which his ad hoc militia collection of mounted Texan "children and old men" - local underage and overage volunteers judged unfit for CSA service even in 1865 who were mounted on whatever they could scrounge and who lived off whatever they could find - crushed and routed vastly larger Union regular forces at such places as Brownsville and Palmito Hill through nothing more than superior leadership. Or look up the repulse of the superior Union forces at Laredo in 1864 by the 33rd Texas Cavalry (the Benavides Regiment), where Colonel Santos Benavides routed Union forces despite being visibly outnumbered on the field of battle by the Union forces by - you guessed it - five to one. Do I even have to mention such well-known figures as Forrest, or any of his battles such as Bryce's Crossroads, where he beat a far larger, far better supplied, far better armed Union force like a dog through nothing at all but vastly superior leadership? It's easy to win when you have not only overwhelming numbers on your side but also far better weapons, equipment, logistics, support, far more money, a much better railway system and control of the rivers and the sea. It takes bad leadership at an epic level to overcome such huge advantages and get whipped repeatedly by dramatically inferior forces, short of weapons, horses, supplies, you name it, but the Union managed this feat over and over again.
Let me say this again: with the exception of the Grant/Sherman crowd, the Union leadership in the West, even in 1864 and 1865, still looked like nothing so much as a clown show.
Leadership, leadership, leadership. The CSA had it in spades; the USA with a very few notable exceptions (Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, Hancock and a few others) simply never had it and the Union political hierarchy had trouble identifying what scarce talent it actually did have. It took Lincoln until 1863 to recognize that the members of the Grant/Sherman crowd (including Sheridan and Thomas) were at least, unlike other Union generals, willing to fight and that - even better - they were willing to engage not only in a style of war that involved not only planned and ordered atrocities against civilians (see Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and Shermans's March to the Sea) but also in a bloodbath war of attrition that canceled out the South's advanatge in leadership the only way that it could be canceled out - through a blood-based attritional combat style based on brute force and massive ignorance (see the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, etc.)
Take away the Grant/Sherman crowd , the atrocity campaigns and the final bloody war of attrition and the Union was so badly outgeneraled that it could never have won the war anywhere but in its dreams.
_____________________________
“It was a war of snap judgments and binary results—shoot or don’t, live or die.“
Wargamer since 1967. Matrix customer since 2003.
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