1/14/2005

Help us, Rowena Reed

How I miss the late queen historian of Combined Operations in the Civil War.
Of the men in the Federal high command, professional and civilian, during the first two years of the war only General McClellan envisioned the use of combined operations as the foundation of a comprehensive plan to paralyze the south from within.
[...]
Under his [Halleck's] disingenuous leadership, operations in the west were misdirected and fragmentary, and his refusal to cooperate with the Navy prolonged the war for at least a year.
[...]
Although Halleck's replacement [by Grant] in March 1864 seemed to promise a revival of combined operations in the final campaigns, Grant's preferred plan, which had the same object as McClellan's, was never carried out. Government interference with military movements - a pernicious and intractable feature of Civil War operations - and Halleck's still-pervasive influence as Army chief of staff - dictated a continuation of costly, unnecessary, and unproductive land-based offensives.
[...]
Because the Confederacy was defeated not by a highly mobile and flexible water-based strategy, but instead by a massive plodding territorial invasion, the experience and techniques developed by Union forces during the Civil War were quickly discarded and virutally forgotten.
She died almost 20 years ago. We need her badly.