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Reviewed by:
  • A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War by Williamson Murray, Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh
  • Mark Hertling
A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War. Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0691169408. 616pp., cloth, $35.00.

Students expect several things from a composite history, and A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War delivers for our nation’s most destructive conflict. It provides incisive, accurate, informed, and flowing accounts of each of the major campaigns along the timelines of the Civil War. The authors accurately describe the actions on the ground in the eastern, western, and trans-Mississippi theaters in effective detail, and the ground analysis is complemented with extensive information on the effects of the blue and brown water naval campaigns. Descriptions of the flow of battle are supplemented with keen insights regarding the personalities of key commanders on both sides, and the authors provide substantive information on how various positive or toxic leadership styles influenced results of campaigns and battles. There are requisite strategic, operational/campaign and tactical battlefield maps to supplement the narrative and additional graphics contribute to understanding the uniqueness of this conflict; two of my favorites are an overlay comparing the U.S. continent with Napoleon’s Europe and another showing the proliferation of railroad lines between 1850 and 1860. Additionally, many early reviews correctly proclaim how this book is valuable for two additional key reasons. First, the authors draw on more recent Civil War scholarship, especially regarding the culture and the motivations of the two different field armies. Second, this work posits the Civil War as the first “modern war,” due to size and scale of the two armies, the continuous fighting conducted over a long period of time, and the projection across a continent made possible by the Industrial Revolution. All of these strengths add to the fact that the book is certainly well written and carefully edited as a composite history. [End Page 320]

Two unique things about this book make it a required addition to any Civil War student’s bookshelf. First, authors Murray and Hsieh are not typical historians. Murray has penned insightful works on a range of subjects, and he has written on myriad topics, such as military effectiveness, net assessments, innovation, grand strategy and hybrid warfare. His ability to weave information from those fields into various historical analyses has contributed to the education of a generation of military officers—majors through generals—at different service schoolhouses. His analysis is almost like applying sabermetrics to military history. Hsieh—while younger than Murray—is of a similar ilk. Hsieh’s service as professor and resident scholar for the sea services at the U.S. Naval Academy likely keeps him on his toes, but one must understand he started at Annapolis only after gaining pragmatic understanding of the battlefield by serving an operational stint as a State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team chief during the surge in Iraq. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow in strategy and security studies at Yale, and these experiences likely allow him a measure of understanding of the dynamics of conflict few historical scholars possess. These two authors are not typical historians, so it comes as no surprise that A Savage War is not a typical work of history.

Second, military histories appropriately and properly focus on what occurred, searching for details on the movements, the commands, the effects of resources and actions on reaching a military objective. Works where historians attempt to address why things occurred or how lessons from a conflict might be applied in the future are appropriately subjected to extensive critiques and continuous debate. This is to be expected, as historians usually can’t read the minds of long-dead commanders. But this work cites the philosophy, military theory, and even psychology of the day in interjecting the works of Clausewitz, Thucydides, de Tocqueville, and the training model provided by Thayer and others. All these masters contributed to the teachings of the day, and given the majority of commanders on both sides matriculated from West Point, it’s helpful to explain how this scholarship...

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