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BOOKREVIEWS91 the full measure of his enthusiasm: "I am real sorry that he is going." Sickles was lauded for splendid work at Chancellorsville: "He is a good officer, no mistake about it." On other scores he could be critical of General Dan: "New York corrispondents have cracked him up where the credit for fighting was jusdy due to other brigades and regiments." As for Little Mac: "McClellan has done well. . . . but as usual his enemies will cry him down." Grant was excused for not returning salutes of some of the officers when the fighting Second Corps passed in review before the Wilderness campaign—an indifferent attitude for a new commander just taking charge. "Grant is not a very fine-looking General," but he showed determination and "seemed to be thinking of something else than reviews." The letters could have been used as the foundation of a worthwhile biography. As they are, they will have some interest for research workers. Stripped of their many superfluities, they would have been more approachable as enjoyable reading; en masse they are formidable. Glenn Tucker Fairview, North Carolina The Gatling Gun. By Paul Wahl and Donald R. Toppel. (New York: Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1965. Pp. viii, 168. $12.50.) When American forces in Vietnam needed a rapid-firing, lightweight gun with which light aircraft could place heavy, sustained fire on enemy troops and positions, the weapon they employed was a direct descendant of the famous Gatling Gun that first saw military service just a century earlier . The modern power-operated 7.62-mm. Minigun is, of course, a far cry from the original hand-operated .58-cal. Gatling, but the principle of several barrek rotating around a common axis to provide an extremely high rate of fire still applies. It applies also in the larger 20-mm. Vulcan Gun with which jet fighters and bombers can saturate enemy targets with heavy fire in the split second of time-on-target allowed gunners in today's high-speed air actions. As the authors of this attractive little volume put it, "the old Gatling has come full circle . . . from a mule-drawn carriage to a bulge on the hip of a supersonic jet. . . ." Richard Jordan Gatling, the nonpracticing physician who developed the gun that bore his name, was a North Carolina inventor whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century. In 1861, when he was living in Indiana, it occurred to him that "if I could invent a machine—a gun— which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequendy, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished." A year later he received a patent on the first Gatling Gun. This weapon saw little use in the Civil War—partially because of its unreliability and partially because it made a poor artillery piece and no one thought to use it as a close-support infantry weapon. Subsequent 92CIVIL WARHISTORY modek did, however, win adoption by military, naval, and police forces on both sides of the Adantic. Some saw considerable action. At San Juan Hill, in 1898, the United States Army made its first use of Gatlings in close support of an infantry attack. But this was the last important employment of the weapon. The development of effective automatic machineguns rendered the Gatling obsolete and little more was heard of it for half a century. It survived only as the source of the slang word "gat," meaning a pistol or revolver. Only in 1945, as a result of the growing need for a reliable, extremely high-rate-of-fire machinegun, unlikely to overheat or burn out, was the Gatling principle revived. Today it is the basis of major airborne weapon systems. Firearms experts Paul Wahl and Donald R. Toppel have compiled a useful and interesting semi-technical history of the development and employment of the Gatling Gun and of the life and career of its colorful inventor. Profusely illustrated, although lacking color plates, the book includes a fascinating array of sketches, photographs, model drawings, document reproductions, and other pictures guaranteed to...

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