Category: Strategy & Tactics
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Sharpshooters in Action
While looking through Francis A. Walker’s Second Army Corps in the Army of the Potomac I came across this passage, which describes the fighting between Heth’s division and Hancock’s Second Corps at the Battle of Boydton Plank Road: It may be interesting to pass to the Confederate side and see how the operations of the […]
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1st New York Sharpshooters
Ran across a privately published book about the shadowy 1st New York Sharpshooters. I’ve come across references to this unit but was unable to come with much information about it. Now John Bennett has done it for me, tracking down the sometimes tangled history of this unit in the first book about it. Originally intended […]
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Rifles and Ranges
Drew Wagenhoffer has a short review up of Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth. Although he calls it “the best single volume treatment of the subject so far,” he does raise some significant questions, including one I hadn’t thought of (showing, again, the value of distributed intelligence). There is […]
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Clausewitz, his influence…and that of other pundits.
Dmitri Rotov is into a discussion of the influence of Clausewitz’s work On War on our Civil War. I’m not really a student of strategy, but thought I’d add that although Dmitri has found some earlier magazine excerpts, the first full publication of an English translation seems to have been that of Col. J. J. […]
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“Loose files and the American scramble”
I’m going to take a step backwards here into the Revolutionary War, both to get a perspective on infantry tactics and to get a feel for how the landscape affected them. I’ll also address another issue, that of weapon effectiveness, particularly the rifle, during the war. There are those who, with good reason, maintain that […]
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Mine Run Campaign Addendum
Since I posted last week, History Channel forum poster “sfcdan” has written parts 6-9 of his Mine Run Campaign series. Here are the links to the individual posts. Go check them out! Mine Run Part 6 – Payne’s Farm Mine Run Part 7 – New Hope Church Mine Run Part 8 – Parker’s Store Mine […]
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The Artillery Charge
I have finished Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in the Civil War and will posting a review by and by, but before I do that I’d like to address one of his points, that of the role of the artillery. Hess and several other historians (e.g. Mark Grimsley, Gregg Biggs, etc.) have adopted the thesis […]