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BOOK REVIEWS McClelhn, Sherman and Grant. By T. Harry Williams. (New Brunswick , N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962. Pp. 110. $3.50.) HOW DOES ONE DISTINGUISH TRUE GENIUS IN A MILITARY COMMANDER? WHAT are "the qualities that mark the great general"? These are questions that dominate T. Harry Williams' short but fascinating volume. The book has a thesis which is simple, perhaps too simple, but nonetheless peculiarly compelling. Professor Williams argues that the crucial determinant of greatness in a general is something that can best be described as "character "—a term which for the author seems to include such diverse but related qualities as high intelligence, complete realism, and the moral courage to act in the face of uncertainty and grave risk. Grant, he insists, had diese qualities in the fullest measure, whereas both McClellan and Sherman lacked at least one of the elements that go into the making of a great commander. This of course is an oversimplification—though not, I think, a distortion—of an argument that Williams develops in three sharply focused essays, each devoted to the career of a single general. George B. McClellan is still the most controversial figure among all the Union commanders. Williams sketches in McClellan's early life, his brilliant years at West Point, his career in the military and in the business world, and then his sudden rise in a matter of months to the command of the Union army. He fully grants McClellan's intelligence and his extraordinaiy talent as an administrator and training officer: it was, after all, McClellan who turned a mob of undisciplined recruits into a first-class fighting force in the period following the rout at Bull Run. Moreover, it was McClellan's plan for taking Richmond that Grant would eventually have to follow after his initial failure in the Wilderness. Nevertheless McClellan is firmly ruled out as a great general , or even as a very good one. His fatal shortcoming was an almost willful lack of realism that seemed to incapacitate him for seeing the world as it actually was, rather than as he would like it to be. He would consistently overestimate the number of enemy troops before him and describe minor tactical gains as major victories. For him the war was a game of maneuver to be played by gentlemen, with the capture of the enemy's capital as the ultimate goal, and he would never understand the vital relationship between the mere continued existence of Lee's army and the success of the Confederate cause. When his dream world was finally shattered, he refused to accept the slightest responsibility for it—everything was the fault of his civilian superiors, the cunning politicians who wanted him to fail. William Tecumseh Sherman fits into the book's argument somewhat less smoothly than does McClellan. His personality is more complex and his short98 comings far less apparent. It is true diat in die opening months of the war he wildly overestimated the number of troops he would need to hold Kentucky, just as McClellan overestimated die force required for taking Richmond, but Sherman quickly regained his balance under Grant, and eventually emerged as a brilliant commander in his own right. As die author himself points out, few men could match Sherman's logistics and engineering; the Atlanta campaign was superbly planned and executed by any standard. Yet Williams argues that in the last analysis Sherman never appreciated the necessity of destroying the Confederate army, that he was much too willing to risk all on a strategic decision such as the one he made at Atlanta (what if Hood had refused to move against his supply line or had managed to defeat Thomas?), and was much too reluctant to risk a finish fight even when die odds were in his favor. It was Grant, not Sherman, die autiior insists, who fully recognized die one task absolutely essential to victory: die destruction of die enemy's army. More tiian anything else, it was his firm grasp of this crucial necessity that enabled Grant to press his attack against Lee in die face of heartbreaking reverses and ever-mounting casualties. Grant could make mistakes; he made some bad...

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