Letters to the Editor

We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are taking our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that you keep your letters under 500 words.

To the Editor:

There has always been a question about how carefully Civil War historians analyze their source material. Nowhere has the point been made more cogently and forcefully than in J. F. C. Fuller's classic 1929 study The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant. He takes his colleagues to task for failing to assess and weigh historical evidence. He admonishes them as follows: "there is absolutely no excuse why students of war should accept popular opinion as historical truth, for popular opinion is nearly always wrong." (Fuller, Grant [New York, 1958], 37).

Fuller's advice has been largely ignored by scholars in the field ever since. Seven decades after his work on Grant appeared, however, Albert Castel has attempted to demythologize another major Civil War figure utilizing the rigorous methodology Fuller advocated. In two outstanding works Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 and his more recent "Liddell Hart's Sherman: Propaganda as History" (JMH 67 [April 2003]: 405-26), Castel reassesses his subject. The author's objectivity, his critical use of sources, his breadth of knowledge and his willingness to go only where the facts take him make him unusual among his colleagues and unique among Sherman biographers.

Castel proves that Sherman is one of the most overrated generals of all time. He shows that Sherman failed in every difficult wartime assignment and that he was always rescued from his mistakes by either Halleck or Grant. Grant, for example, had good reason to cashier his subordinate for his ineptitude at Shiloh and Missionary Ridge but promoted him instead.

The Atlanta campaign, however, proved that Grant's confidence in his subordinate was misplaced. Sherman's primary objective was to destroy the Confederate army, but after a series of tactical mistakes he occupied Atlanta and permitted the enemy to escape. The new situation was serious and Hood, who now commanded the Rebel force, had the opportunity to elude his pursuers and wreak havoc in the West. Grant, upset by this turn of events rebuked Sherman in writing, something he rarely did to a subordinate: "I believed, and still believe, if you had started south while Hood was in the neighborhood of you he would have been forced to go after you" (Fuller, Grant, 320).

Fortunately for the North and for Sherman's reputation, Hood rashly destroyed his army at Nashville. If Sherman possessed the strategic sense with which he was credited, Hood would not have posed this problem. Sherman's much praised strategic sense was also absent during his raids through Georgia and the Carolinas. With peace obviously only months away he made reconciliation much more difficult by condoling wholesale destruction by his troops rather than confining himself only to military targets.

Castel's work shows us, in short, that Sherman was a great soldier but lacking in the strategic and tactical expertise necessary to be a great general.

Mike Kaplan
Marina Del Rey, California

To the Editor:

D. M. Giangreco's letter in the July 2003 Journal of Military History caught my attention with his comment on the World War II conscription that tapped the talent and valor of some of our most gifted citizens, as exemplified by Elliot Richardson, a future Secretary of Defense. This young patrician from a Boston Brahmin family served with distinction as an officer in the Army's Medical Administrative Corps (MAC), a precursor of today's Medical Service Corps. He was drafted in December 1942, but to his chagrin was denied service in the combat arms due to poor eyesight. Determined to be an officer (his father, a physician, was a major in World War I), he completed MAC Officer Candidate School at Camp Barkeley, Texas, following medical enlisted training at Camp Pickett, Virginia.

I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Richardson when I...