| Hi Ken,
The title in question is "On the Road To Richmond".
I'm just about done with it and I'm sorry it has to end. Sears has done
a great job, just as he did in "Landscape Turned Red". The detail is
all there, but the reading of it is easy and very enjoyable. You don't
get bogged down. I'm one who likes maps, and he's provided one for each
of the major battles and a couple for some of the major troop
movements. I'de like to have seen more though, and in a little more
geographic detail.
Time and again throughout the book it becomes very obvious that General
George McClellan was an incredibly inept and even cowardly commanding
officer. He was not present on any of the fields of battle during the
Seven days, with one exception Malvern Hill. And that was during the
latter half of the days' fighting. What an embaressment! More often than
not he left his generals on thier own to fight the battles, and
retreat.
If, and that was a major problem, Lee had been able to better
coordinate his troops, particularly at Glendale, theres reason to
believe he could've split the Union army in two. He came real close! If he
had, then there was a good possibility of his crushing the pieces!
I'd highly recommend the book. And if you haven't read it, a book of
similar good quality related to Petersburg, "The Last Citadel" by
Trudeau, is well worth the time.
Enjoy!
Jack
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| re: .1
Thanks, Jack. Sounds good!
For some reason I find the Peninsula campaign fascinating - maybe
because it stretched over some much time and terrain; maybe because it
was as you mention one of the South's real 'chances' for a decisive
victory.
There was another book on the campaign I got from my local library
recently but I can't remember the title/author - I'll try to get them
and post them. It was also an excellent book, but also a little short
in the map department. I wonder why it's so difficult for authors of
battle or campaign books to put together good, detailed maps? They seem
to be put together as an afterthought. This strikes me as weird -
how can you *write* a battle history without reference to a good map[s]?
Why then don't you simply include it/them in the book?
Anyway, this other book studies the campaign as Lee's first major
campaign - what did he do wrong? As you say, poor coordination seems
to have been the major flaw. But he learned from his mistakes.
By the way, as an interesting side note on *command* in the civil war,
no commanding generals, whether Lee, McLellan, or whoever, seem to
have *checked* on the progress of their orders. They simply issued them
and waited.
Thanks.
Ken
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