Sherman's Ghosts
Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War
Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War
Matthew Carr
The New Press, 2015, 352 pp., $26.95
Review by Gordon Berg
Popular
military historian Victor Davis Hanson opines that "the entire notion of
American strategic doctrine," right up to the present, shows the distinct
influence of a mercurial, fiery-tempered Union general who cut a devastating
swath of destruction through the South during the Civil War. Ever since, William Tecumseh Sherman has
remained one of the most revered, despised, controversial, and influential
military figures in American history.
Matthew Carr declares that his intention is to decipher "What
exactly did that strategy consist of and to what extent have America's subsequent
wars followed the template that Sherman created."
In
pursuit of his quest, Carr has written a unique, albeit oddly
frustrating, book. He clearly is not
interested in writing a conventional military biography or a "myth and
memory" exegesis. Indeed, much of
the book deals with military events occurring long after Sherman's death. Carr find's Sherman's ghosts haunting
American military policy and actions from the Spanish American War to Iraq and
Afghanistan as part of what historian Russell Weigley has called "the
American way of war." Throughout
the book, the reader is challenged to consider whether Sherman is the
"Great Destroyer" and maker of war on innocent women and children as portrayed
in Southern Lost Cause mythology or "the first modern general" on a
moral crusade using methods that sought to avoid needless slaughter of his
soldiers while adumbrating modernity's propensity to wage war on civilians in
an attempt to break their morale behind the lines, thus weakening military operations
at the front.
Or perhaps Sherman was that rare
personage who defies categories because, in fact, he is greater than the sum of
his parts. Carr posits a bold conclusion
and uses a broad landscape in his attempt to establish the roots of America's
modern war machine in Sherman's invasion of the old Confederacy. For Carr, "Sherman embodies a very
specific use of military force as an instrument of coercion and intimidation
that has often replayed by the U.S. military and also by other
armies." Understanding the
evolution of this doctrine, Carr maintains, can "tell us a great deal, not
only about the Civil War and American war making, but also about the evolution
of modern war into attacks of unprecedented violence against civilians."
The first third of Sherman's Ghosts summarizes
his modus operandi. In a
September 1863 letter to Union Chief-of-Staff Henry W. Halleck, Sherman
declared his intention to wage war not only against opposing armies but also
against Southerners who "stand by, mere lookers-on in this domestic
tragedy, they have no right to immunity, protection, or share in the final
results." Clearly, warfare
inflicted upon civilians was nothing new; it had been practiced at least since
the Trojan War. Indeed, Zachary Taylor's
volunteers savaged civilians during his invasion of Mexico in 1847. Sherman, however, made destruction of
civilian property and its effect on morale an integral part of his overall
military strategy. Property, not lives,
was Sherman's objective.
Part Two of Carr's book attempts to deal
with Sherman's legacy in the 20th century and beyond. Here's where things get muddled. In America's first post-Sherman war (leaving
aside the genocide committed against Native Americans on the western plains) occurred in the Far East against another people of color. The Philippine War of 1898-1902, Carr posits,
"bore the direct imprint of Sherman's campaigns in terms of both strategy
and personnel." This may be true in
terms of Sherman's harsh tactics against Southern guerrillas early in the war,
but it certainly is a stretch to compare the wanton destruction of property and
torture of fighters, suspects, and sympathizers of the armed insurrectos of
Emilio Aguinaldo's Army of Liberation to Sherman's march through Georgia and
the Carolinas. It's hard for even
Sherman's harshest critics to imagine him saying (as Brigadier General Jacob H.
Smith alleged to a subordinate during "pacification" operations on Samar
and Leyte): " I want no prisoners. I
wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn, the better it will
please me." The perversion of
Sherman's dictum that "war is hell" is evident in the
statistics. In the last major military
operation of the war, 4200 American soldiers died. In contrast, 16,000 to 20,000 guerrilla
fighters died. Civilian deaths, Carr
maintains, "has been variously estimated from 200,000 to a million, either
as a direct result of military operations or from war-related hunger and
disease." This may have become
America's way of war, but it certainly wasn't Sherman's.
Carr rightly maintains that "The
particular hellishness of the Vietnam War owed more to the innovations in
U.S. counterinsurgency strategy than it did to Sherman's campaigns." There, like in the Philippines, body counts
and kill ratios were the determinants of success against an enemy fighting an
unconventional war. Even in so-called
conventional wars, Sherman's strategy of destroying an enemy's economic
infrastructure, clearly his intent in Georgia and the Carolinas, became twisted
in America's military psyche. In an
attempt to avoid the bloody stalemate on the Western Front in World War I,
military strategists sought an economic solution similar to Sherman in Georgia
and Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.
British military theorist B.H Liddell Hart, a Sherman fan, authored The
Strategy of Indirect Approach and opined that Sherman was the first modern
general to fully grasp this strategy.
Sherman equated his campaigns in 1864-65
as great raids, emphasizing movement and the capture of strategic economic and
command-and-control positions over the destruction of enemy armies. Sherman's model was Confederate General
Nathan Bedford Forrest. Carr describes
how Sherman became the model for World War II tank commanders Erwin Rommel for
Germany and George S. Patton for the U.S.
But Sherman's goal of breaking civilian morale translated into wholesale civilian
slaughter at the hands of World War II's air marshals, such as Sir Arthur
"Bomber" Harris in Great Britain and General Curtis LeMay in the
U.S. Their legacy became Dresden and
Tokyo where tens of thousands of civilians died under their high explosives and
napalm. Again, not Sherman's way of war.
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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org). His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.
