We’re about out of living WWI veterans. The last British one, Harry Patch, died at the age of 111. There is apparently one remaining U.S. Veteran, Frank Buckles, 108, of West Virginia. I was a history major in undergrad. Miami didn’t really do specialties, but my senior seminar or whatever they called it, was British Society in World War I. That gave me an appreciation for a time period I had largely ignored.
I’m not a student of military history, so I’m sure I’m leaving myself open to major objection; but, for me, it was the first really modern, industrial war where our capacity for wholesale destruction really got swinging. A lot of the crap about the nobility and honor of warfare really got left by the wayside after World War I. After that war, soldiers were less noble heroes fighting gallantly for God & Country and more a form of human sausage to be ground up by the machinery of war. Some of that had, also, to do with the nature of the conflict. Where World War II had a Good versus Evil vibe to it; World War I had all the righteousness of a bar fight.
In any case, time moves on, and 100% of the survivors die anyway.
I’m almost 68 years old — I recall stories about the passing of the last Civil War veterans.
A strong case can be made for our U.S. Civil War as being the first “modern, technological” conflict. However, it was sorta one-sided. Us winning Unionists had the better machines! World War One pitted advanced, civilized, industrialized nations against each other…
Im also almost 68 years old also, and I remember my grandfather back in the 60s lamenting that all the ww1 vets,like himself, were passing on.Also that only a couple Spanish-american war vets remained at that time.There was a war for each generation,and the Vietnam war continued that pattern.
He spent a hellish year or more in the trenches fighting in a long stalemate of human attrition,but always said how lucky he was not to have been wounded or gassed. But oddly enough,he never understood the logistics of that war until after he got home and read about it.The battle line moved very little over a very long time.
Ive been to Verdun a couple time and the trenches are still there for living history.My adivice for a moving experience is read about ww1 and then go to Verdun and look around the countryside.Take your family.. I imagined all those men there on both sides,slowly being killed, fighting in place with no place to go.
It’s a special gift when you can remember someone talking about something they did so significant that is now only in history books.
Well, WWI had the ‘righteousness of a bar fight’ until the sinking of the Lusitania.
I recall WWI vets marching in local parades as a kid. Seems hard to believe that WWII vets are in their 80s & 90s.
The Civil War was one-sided? It wouldn’t have taken four years to prosecute if it were all about machines and numbers. The South had a decided advantage in leadership. McLellan was a lousy leader, and two years were lost to his foundering. The Civil War to me illustrates just how significant competent management is in the prosecution of war. Men and materiel are important, but the best tools mean nothing if there isn’t competency at the top.
I don’t really see how the sinking of a british ship by submarine changed the moral equation of WWI. I think it really was a bar fight.
It was in the interest of the US to back the side that we did, of course…but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t involved in a bar fight.
The Civil War was where trench warfare was started – not to mention the technological advances.
Doug, I agree completely with your assessment of WWI being the first modern, industrial war. The war isn’t my period of interest, but for anyone who would like to know more about the US experience, I would recommend Edward Lengel’s book,To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918. The book has a softcover version, and I believe is available on Kindle as well.
In my own experience, one grandfather was just too young and always regretted it. The other grandfather was present during the entire US involvement, including the Army of Occupation, and almost never talked about it.
varangianguard says:
‘In my own experience, one grandfather was just too young and always regretted it. The other grandfather was present during the entire US involvement, including the Army of Occupation, and almost never talked about it”
This is interesting because my grandfather, mentioned above, was billeted in a German home after the war in a town called Kaiserslautern.It was actually interesting for him and the family because my grandfather spoke German.The German family was amazed, as I remember the story,
I mentioned that my grandfather had been assigned to a German family after ww1 when I was doing a house exchange with people in Berlin.These were very eduated Germans and they didn’t believe me at first and then found out that indeed American soldiers were assigned to German homes for a period of time after ww1.And Germans usually are very well-versed in German history.
I think Verdun is most often the place name used before American involvement and Meuse- Argonne was where the Americans fought.Eastern French soil has been bloodied for centuries because that’s where the culture -national sovereignty-language line has meandered.
Topigraphically it’s a very beautiful area of rolling hills and controlled small forests.There are many traces of ww1 but a French guide from the region was very helpful.
One of my family ties to WWI has to do with how people get scared and stupid every time during war, not just today.
My great-great grandfather was a German-born Lutheran pastor. During WWI, he offered a prayer of protection to those young men fighting for the “Fatherland”. He claimed that as an American citizen, he meant the USA, not Germany. He was jailed for sedition.
Not too surprising that your grandfather spoke German, Lou. Lots of midwestern Americans whose roots were German did so at the time. My grandfather did not speak German though, as his roots were Scots-Irish. The billeting period was uncomfortable for both parties. My grandfather had seen things that had engendered strong anti-German feelings in him, and the family where he was billeted seemed resentful about being occupied by the enemy when they hadn’t felt that had lost the war.
The fall of German-American culture during the war is a very interesting topic. Indianapolis had a thriving Germanic cultural community before the war, but by the end of the war the public faces were almost completely subsumed by Anglo-American culture.
During the 1960s, the Military History Institute sent out some survey to all known WWI veterans. My grandmother made my grandfather write some stuff down about his service in WWI and for this survey. I’m sure he still redacted his memories, but his brief writings represent almost all he ever mentioned to his family concerning what he saw and felt while away at war. The 6700+ returned surveys are kept at the MHI facility at Carlisle Barracks, PA.
Like a lot of others, I never over/heard my grandfathers or father talk of their combat experiences in either WWI or WWII. Not until I got hooked on genealogy research did I discover my paternal grandfather’s lifelong limp was a result of being wounded at Meuse-Argonne (37th Buckeye Division); or, that my own father served aboard the flagship USS Ancon (AGC-4) throughout invasions at Algiers, Salerno, and finally Normandy. True to that paradigm, my brother served 2 years in Viet Nam and never talked about the details of how he was awarded a Bronze Star – nor for that matter, did my own (then) husband talk about his experience serving in the Marines during Nam.
The BBC reports Harry Patch was the last surviving “Tommy” of WW I, i.e. a soldier who fought in the trenches, but was not the last surviving British “veteran”. According to the BBC, “The sole British survivor of the war now is former seaman Claude Choules, who is aged 108 and lives in Perth, Australia.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/8171526.stm
The Thirty Years War ushers in the modern, professional standing army, and its North American component, known hereabouts, collectively, as the French and Indian War, at least suggests the concept of Total War Sherman would later develop. The American Civil War adds the first use of mass transportation, aerial observation, large-scale modern engineering, and the idea of winning by continually propagandizing the thing for a century-and-a-half after you lose. WWI elevated the killing efficiency to the point where (in the West, at least) troops could not survive above ground without protection, if then. It also saw the invention–by the Germans, in the Spring Offensive of 1918–of the modern, small-unit, fast-movement-and-encirclement tactics which are still in use almost a century later.
A word about the superiority of Southern generalship: saying so depends at least in part on ignoring the half of the war that took place west of the Appalachians. The difference in the East was maneuver, which Grant realized, and which is why he stuck himself to Lee like a pit bull once he got there. With, whatever else was wrong with McClellan, an exceptionally well-trained army he’d created out of raw farmboys and stock clerks.
And however great the leadership of Lee, and Jackson, if (Hoosier) Burnside wades his men across the fookin’ creek instead of slaughtering them trying to take a bridge, the war is effectively over in 1862. Which shows, I think, the vital importance of not having total incompetents in charge.
“The difference in the East was maneuver, which Grant realized, and which is why he stuck himself to Lee like a pit bull once he got there.” Almost, but not quite. The pit bull part weakened Lee’s army, but Grant didn’t seal victory win until he disengaged from Lee after the Union defeat at Cold Harbor. Grant quit the field, totally broke contact with Lee and screened his movement in an effort to move southeast of Richmond to cut the city’s supply line through Petersburg. He wasn’t quite fast enough, his army was almost as exhausted as Lee’s, but it did have the effect of pinning Lee in a siege Lee couldn’t possibly win.
I too think McClellan’s contributions have been overlooked and his strategic insights not given their due. McClellan has been castigated as seeming to want to win the war while spilling as little blood on either side as possible. But it seems to me he came darn close to pulling it off. The peninsula campaign might well have worked with half way reasonable appraisals of Confederate strength, i.e. improved military intelligence.
McClellan “retreated” from the horrors of total war, which might make him appear a throwback to some, but which to me cast a favorable moral light on him. The logic of total war doesn’t retreat from concentration camps (the Boer War), poison gas (WW I), fire bombing cities (Dresden, Tokyo) and all manner of atrocities carried out by the Red Army, the Japanese Army in China, the SS in World War II, the actions of a Sherman in Georgia, or even worse the conduct of Sheridan in Virginia and on the CSA side, Early in Pennsylvania. “Total War” in service to the state seems to me nothing more than fanaticism in the service of ideology. I can understand it when your survival is at stake, but the “modern” incidents of the American Civil War, its ideological character and what that meant for the future, make me cringe.
Backing off on the rant, and speaking of military intelligence, I’ve wondered whether Lee’s success in Virginia, and his lack of success outside his home state, stemmed as much from just plain good scouting to his seeming ability to read opposing generals’ minds. If nothing else Lee learned the value of good scouting during the Mexican War. Accounts of life in the Army of Northern Virginia mentioned how scouts were seemingly coming and going from Lee’s tent in a steady stream throughout the night. And Lee knew the eastern half of the state like the back of his hand which would have allowed him to make good use of the intelligence. Was Lee really as great as the Lost Cause partisans would have us believe, or just a very competent, experienced officer who knew the hand held by Union officer who ever entered Lee’s state?
I haven’t thought it through very deeply, but I’ve generally held the feeling that if it’s not worth total war, it’s not worth war at all. Freeing the slaves or preserving the Union might justify it. I’ve never thought Sherman was out of line, in any case.
I’m afraid I still believe McClellan to be a poor excuse for a general commanding troops in wartime.
He did have some very good skills, notwithstanding my criticism. He was adept at organizing large scale efforts, was an able administrator and trainer, and quite the politician in his own mind (not sure if that counts as a “plus”, though). After he was sacked, he was placed in a command where his skills were put to good use. If he just could have stayed out of the 1964 Presidential campaign, he would have retired with more credit than he ended up with.
Can’t agree with your assessment of the Pennisular Campaign. In my view, he threw away any chance for strategic maneuver by throwing the Army into a channelized area. Aggressiveness and sheer numbers might have carried the day anyway, but too much caution and dawdling threw that chance down the drain.
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean that Grant didn’t tactically disengage from Lee after May of ’64, only that he understood the strategic situation required engaging Lee across his entire front and did so continually. The point being that the largely unfettered maneuverability in the East in 1861-62–partly explained by the fact that the opposing capitals were 100 miles apart, with D.C. of far greater importance than Richmond–has been used to bolster the Lost Cause mythologizing of Lee. And in turn the early successes in the East engender the whole “the Southerner, raised in the saddle, suckled on a rifle, was the superior soldier” business, all of which is disputed by a glance at the other theatre.
As for Sherman, the Georgia campaign is not just the greatest act of genius of the war, but of the 19th century and an era named for Moltke. And it’s beyond disturbing to see the History Channel, and some sui generis Confederate historian, hold the man up as a terrorist. No one describes the siege of Vicksburg that way (possibly because all the Noble Rebs had to do was surrender a lost position and the civilian population would have spared?). Even ignoring that Southern irregulars actively spread terror, as we knew in Indiana, Confederate regulars executed citizens–including women and children–suspected of Unionist sympathies in more than a dozen locations, throughout the war, including the largest single mass hanging in US history (in Gainesville, TX). We’re always ill-served when the truth is hidden, but, I think, in this country, nowhere as seriously as the wholesale misrepresentation of the Southern Cause and Southern arms.
On the Southern Lost Cause business, I highly recommend Tony Horwitz’s “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.“
As for Grant and Lee in the Spring of 1864, I’d say Grant understood that the strategic situation required not that he engage Lee, but that Lee would try to keep his army interposed between Grant and Richmond. It wasn’t Grant “sticking on to Lee like a pit bull” (if this were the case why give up on Spotsylvania?), rather it was Lee hanging on to Grant like a crazed Terrier.
I think the small-unit “encirclement”, or more accurately “infiltration”, tactics, whose first use was attributed to the German 1918 Spring offensive were actually first used by German forces on the Austro-Italian front in the fall of 1917 in the Isonzo Valley. Admittedly a quibble.
I obviously think far less of Sherman or the “Total War” concept than others commenting here. Wars are fought for political ends, and that should be particularly true in a civil war. As I understand “Total War”, no distinction is made between combatants and non-combatants if destruction of non-combatant life and property advances “total” victory. But wars are fought in the real world where “total” victory may be unachievable, or even undesirable. The Union side’s legal theory of the war postulated that the Union was perpetual and indivisible. Thus Civil War was not justified as a war of conquest, but as the “suppression of rebellion” and, after 1862, a war to free the slaves. To convert it into total war implies a lack of discrimination in the application of force against people who were the Union’s own citizens. The destruction of property (I exclude the release of slaves) in territory that was not being effectively defended by the Confederacy is more than a little problematic under those circumstances.
Sherman’s actions occurred after it was obvious that the Confederacy had no means of transporting Georgia’s economic output to the last effective field army left to it. In pursuing the course he did Sherman risked cohesion within his force. I’d agree that he was right not to keep after Hood after the fall of Atlanta and that he showed insight in his move to the sea to reestablish his lines of communication. Foraging under the circumstances was tolerable, but he went beyond military necessity, and in doing so lost sight of the political objectives of the war and unnecessarily poisoned political reconciliation.
As for the greatest act of (military) genius of the war, I would award that accolade to Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign. As for the 19th century as a whole though, I think Bismarck exhibited by far the clearest thinking of anyone of the era in the application of controlled violence to achieve political ends in his creation of the German Empire.
Why should we care about Southern partisans cant about the “the Southerner, raised in the saddle, suckled on a rifle, was the superior soldier”? The Southerners seem to think it cloaks their soldiers, particularly their elite, in some sort of cloak of nobility, but even if true that they were “superior” as soldiers what does it really mean?
I say “elites” because of the frequent reference in this line of “reasoning” to horseback riding. Given the expense of horses typically only the elite could afford to keep superior horses available for frequent riding. This gives away that the Lost Cause partisans are talking more about their plantation elites than the common foot soldier. Consistent with this point is that the Southerners usually want to talk about cavalry, the one discipline of arms which Southerners can make the best argument for their “superiority” at (it certainly wasn’t in artillary) and the discipline which their elites gravitated toward as the most “glamorous”. It also fits with their claims for the purported superiority in leadership of their officer corps.
But aren’t the Lost Cause partisans just back on their “Gone with the Wind” theme, trying to turn to paint plantation life, which afforded time to the elite to ride about on horses and play soldier, as possessing some sort special virtue? Why buy into this posturing by playing on their turf at all?
I’ll happily grant that the Southern male elites had all day to engage in feckless horseback riding while hacking at low hanging branches with their toy sabers. All the while their Northern counterparts were being “drudges”, they were “ignoble” fellows busy applying themselves to money grubbing activities like making steel, laying track for railroads, building bridges, etc. I don’t think that Northerners (here speaking of the respective elites) lacked for nobility as a byproduct of having applied themselves to the useful arts before the war rather than playing soldier, even if at the start of the war they weren’t quite as proficient at it as our Southern cousins. If anything one could argue giving up a life of real work to take up arms as an adult enhanced Northern soldiers’ nobility.
Lastly, regarding someone’s point about the Peninsular Campaign confining McClellan to a “channelized front”. The direct overland routes from Washington to Richmond were worse in terms of channelizing movement because they forced the Northern armies to cross the Rappahannock. This river could be forded at only a couple of places or crossed using pontoon bridges. That is why so many Eastern theater battles ended up being fought in and to the west of Fredericksburg. Burnside fought there, Hooker fought there and finally Grant fought there, and each time it was a really bloody affair.
There was the Shenandoah Valley. The Union just had always used it as a sideshow until 1864.
Plus, I would have used the RR path crossing the Rappahanock near Brandy Station instead of hugging the coast to Fredericksburg. I understand about the logistics that the Union wanted, but using blocking forces to shut off the Shenandoah and coastal Confederate forces would have allowed the Army of the Potomac to approach Richmond from the west and southwest.
If the Confederates blocked them south of Culpepper C.H., the Army of the Potomac could have turned upon either the Fredericksburg forces (while already having crossed the Rappanhannock, or turned west and cut off the Confederate forces in the Shenandoah. Any one of the three options could have given one Confederate Army a bloody nose.
The Pennisular Campaign was waving a flag at a single target, which made it much easier to counter.
if this were the case why give up on Spotsylvania?
Because he thought that Lee would assume he, like all the other Union commanders before him, would rest and lick his wounds? Because he realized that he would never dislodge an opponent from a series of prepared breastworks on his own turf? Because he knew that Lee was eager to catch a portion of the Union army in the open and cripple it? Those are things he said, and that is what he did next, at the North Anna River.
Again, Paul, and maybe it’s my poor choice of words, but let’s not lose sight of my original point. Lee was committed to defending Richmond. Grant was committed to defending the entire Union line, west to the Mississippi, as any Southern invasion would have been disastrous politically. And in consideration of the situation he ordered an advance all along the line, making a virtue of necessity. And it’s true that Lee did not command the same army in 1864 that he had in ’62, and his tactical situation was tougher. Still, I think it would have been a mistake to give the man room to maneuver, just as doing so–and the contemporary and subsequent recasting of the campaign as Southern miracles–added much to his reputation, just as it allowed Jackson–a man possessed by genius and several other things–to demonstrate his.
Now, then. The Vicksburg Campaign’s an excellent choice, though not all the brilliance was Grant’s. I’d just reply that the strategic importance of Vicksburg was obvious–even if it gets the short-shift in later accounts–whereas Sherman’s March was breathtakingly bold and original. Not sure about the claim that Georgia had no transportation structure left–it’s been a long time since I’ve been an active reader of this stuff–and yes, the South had been effectively defeated on July 4, 1863, in the field, but Sherman solved the political equation. All things being equal it’s the flashy entry takes the Brilliance prize. The argument always seems to revolve around what boundaries were crossed, since both foraging and destruction of an enemy’s production base are legitimate military actions. It’s fine as an intellectual argument, objectionable when it tries to paint Sherman as a war criminal, coming as it generally does from people who have no problem with the Tokyo fire raids and a world which knows what real war criminals are capable of.
As for Bismark, he didn’t have any opponents nearly as tenacious as Grant’s; and as for lingering political resentment, it’s been a cottage industry for 150 years now, suggesting that if Sherman weren’t the focus it would be something else. Anything, in fact, except the real reason, the one that no longer dares speak its name.
Sherman gets the rap for all the Bummers following along behind him (deserters from both sides) who committed most of the more wanton acts of violence.