Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.
Lädt ... Chickamauga and Chattanooga: The Battles That Doomed the Confederacy (1994)von John Bowers
Keine Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
The battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, only two months and a few miles apart in the fall of 1863, were not only brutal and dramatic, but also pivotal to the outcome of the Civil War. If the South had won both battles decisively, the war might have dragged on, Lincoln might have been forced out of the presidency in 1864, and the Union might have had to settle for a negotiated peace. What did happen is that in late September Confederate forces under General Braxton Bragg took a stand against invading Yankees near Chickamauga Creek in northwest Georgia, and in a fierce and bloody two-day battle stopped Major General William S. Rosecrans's Union Army of the Cumberland and drove it back to Chattanooga. There on the Tennessee River, under the towering heights of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, dominated by Confederate artillery and seemingly impenetrable Rebel defensive lines, the Yankees were trapped. Or were they? Bragg, in typical fashion, refused to press his advantage, Rosecrans was replaced by Major General Ulysses S. Grant, who brought Major General William T. Sherman with him. Desperately needed supplies and reinforcements arrived in the city and suddenly, in late November, without Grant's or, it seems, anyone else's order, Union soldiers stormed up the almost-sheer sides of Lookout Mountain and routed the startled Rebels. Bragg fell back, and the Union drive led by Sherman to Atlanta and, ultimately, Savannah and the sea - the drive that tore the Confederacy in half and doomed it - had broken through. John Bowers, whose Tennessee ancestors fought on the Confederate side at Chickamauga, tells this dramatic and powerful story with great narrative skill and insight, and he enriches it with his in-depth profiles of the marvelous cast of personalities on both sides: Rosecrans; George H. Thomas, the loyal Union man from Virginia, disowned by his family, who earned the nickname "the Rock of Chickamauga" for his steadfastness; Grant; Sherman; Bragg, the general only Jefferson Davis could admire; James Longstreet, who almost turned Chickamauga into a rout; the fiery Nathan Bedford Forrest; the much-wounded John Bell Hood; and many more. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.735History and Geography North America United States Administration of Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865 Civil War Operations Campaign of 1863 concludedKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
Bist das du?Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor. |
This book is a very good read, but it achieves that by making everything far too simple. Yes, Braxton Bragg was quarrelsome in the extreme, and most of his officers disliked him -- but can he really be reduced to a case of a man with extreme saddle sores (which Bowers calls by a rather earthier name)? Was William S. Rosecrans really the sort of moral coward we see here? I doubt it.
And there are other problems -- officers given the wrong ranks, for instance. And there is one big, big discrepancy. Other source I've read say that, on the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, Rosecrans tried to address a defect in his lines by ordering a certain division to improve its positioning -- and a staff officer misunderstood the order, and told the division commander to make a move that opened a big hole in the line, and into that hole James Longstreet poured almost half the Confederate army. But the whole botched order is downplayed in this account. If it happened, it needs to be described; if it didn't happen, the discrepancy needs to be explained, and it just doesn't happen.
The result almost seems like fiction. It really is a good read. But I'm left searching for another account of Chickamauga; I just don't know what to trust here. ( )