"The Bloody Fifth": The 5th Texas Regiment, Hood's Texas Brigade, Army of Northern Virginia, Vol. 2 by John F. Schmutz (review)

The highly anticipated second installment in John Schmutz's two-volume work chronicling the exploits of the fabled 5th Texas Infantry Regiment does not disappoint in the slightest. Far from a gloomy account of increasingly desperate and dispirited soldiers fighting for a doomed cause, Schmutz presents a drama-infused portrait of battle-hardened troops fighting tenaciously until the bitter end for the country and fellow soldiers they love.

Opening in the weeks leading up to the climactic battle of Gettysburg, Schmutz gives an almost hour-by-hour, blow-by-blow account of the 5th Texas as it marched through Devil's Den and nearly gained the summit of Little Round Top before finally being repulsed with terrible losses. The losses for the 5th Texas alone on the first day of fighting—211 out of 409 officers and men, or nearly 51 percent casualties—serve to set a grim tone for the remainder of the book. Indeed, as Schmutz himself states, quoting 5th Texas veterans Joe Joskins and Mark Smither, the losses were so great "the Brigade never really recovered from the slaughter at Gettysburg" (64–65).

After the blood-letting at Gettysburg, the reader follows the 5th Texas through the pyrrhic victory at Chickamauga, on to the varied and numerous privations associated with the ill-fated sieges of Chattanooga and Knoxville, and experiences the losses—through disease as well as combat—resulting from skirmishes and rear-guard actions along the way through Tennessee. Through his adroit use of primary source material from soldier's diaries and memoirs, as well as the vivid detail with which each scene is depicted, readers will feel as though they are marching with the barefoot soldiers, comparing the size of lice in Tennessee versus Virginia. Though speckled with such light-hearted accounts of winter camp life, Schmutz effectively demonstrates the Texans' ability to persevere through every hardship and fight gallantly, though their deepest desire was to be back in Virginia with the much-loved Lee. Schmutz also puts the 5th Texas's time in Tennessee in perspective by totaling their numbers at only 196 officers and men by the time they returned to Virginia in 1864.

In the chapters following the operations in Tennessee, Schmutz sets a steadily quickening pace to the end of the war. He follows the 5th Texas after Grant took command of the Union Army at the Battle of the Wilderness and then through the cat-and-mouse game between Grant and Lee that resulted in the battles of Spotsylvania, North Anna, and Cold Harbor. Even in the grim and increasingly desperate circumstances surrounding the siege of Petersburg and the defense of Richmond, the reader sees again the tenacity and resilience of the 5th Texas through Schmutz's vivid descriptions and eye for detail.

As in his first volume, Schmutz relies heavily on accounts from the participants themselves, and utilizes letters written home as well as other sources, such as diaries and personal memoirs written after the war, to enrich the reader's experience. This approach helps Schmutz accomplish his main goal in pursuing this work: that of producing an engaging and compelling unit-level history of one of the most heavily engaged and affected regiments of the fabled Hood's Texas Brigade. The reader experiences the joys of victory as well as the heartache of the loss of comrades and the difficulties of the journey home. As engaging and informative as many larger multi-volume works on the Civil War, John Schumtz's two-volume history provides a rare glimpse of Texas's involvement in that destructive conflict outside of its borders. This book is truly a must-have for the serious Texas historian.