Sherman's ghosts Soldiers, civilians, and the American way of war

Carr (journalist) analyzes William Tecumseh Sherman's Civil War march to the sea, considers its legacies for subsequent US warfare, and argues for an important, albeit often indirect, linkage between them. The author explores debates about targeting civilians in warfare, whether economically, psychologically, or physically, and asks searing questions: Are civilian populations and the infrastructure that sustains them appropriate targets in warfare? Do civilian populations hold collective responsibility for conflicts that they support? To demonstrate Sherman's legacies, Carr details food denial operations in the Philippines from 1898-1902, the WW I Allied blockade, strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities in WW II, Lieutenant General George E. Stratemeyer's blitzing of North Korea from 1950-1951, rural pacification campaigns in the Vietnam War, and counterinsurgency during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He also traces Sherman's influence on such military strategists as Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, B. H. Liddell Hart, J. F. C. Fuller, and Heinz Guderian. A lucid examination of how strategic decisions produce cascading consequences, not all of them positive. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --William Alan Taylor, Angelo State University

THIS THOUGHT-PROVOKING AND at times frustrating volume is really three books rather awkwardly spliced together. The first part, roughly half of "Sherman's Ghosts," analyzes Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's destructive marches through Georgia and the Carolinas in the last months of the American Civil War. The next part discusses the supposed impact of Sherman's actions on subsequent wars through Vietnam. In the final section, the ghosts of Sherman largely disappear as the journalist Matthew Carr leads us through a maze of conflicts from the ouster of Manuel Noriega in Panama to the continuing blood baths in the Middle East and drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The dominant theme here is America's "appetite for militaiy intervention since World War II," which "has left a trail of death, destruction and chaos and produced very few positive results." In November 1864, Sherman's army of 60,000 hardened veterans cut loose from its supply line and departed from a burning Atlanta on a 300-mile march to Savannah through the previously untouched heartland of the Confederacy - "seizing or destroying vast quantities of food and provisions, demolishing and burning public and private property, and leaving a trail of devastation 50 to 60 miles wide." Sherman's purpose was twofold: to cripple the infrastructure that supported Confederate armies and to demoralize the Southern population by demonstrating their government's powerlessness to protect them, both with the goal of bringing the war to an end. Sherman then turned north and carried out an even more devastating raid through South Carolina, where the damage was "more explicitly punitive, as his soldiers burned and looted their way through the state that they regarded as the spiritual home of secession." Was Sherman a reincarnation of Attila the Hun, and were his soldiers the demons of plunder and rapine depicted in Southern legend? Or was their devastation mainly limited to legitimate targets like railroads, factories and farms producing food for Confederate armies? Carr's answers, such as they are, will scarcely satisfy either side of this debate. Several pages of his narrative describe rampant pillage of civilian property of no militaiy value - shredded clothing, broken-up pianos, burned houses and the like, committed especially by "bummers," unofficial foraging parties operating on the fringes of the army. Thus Sherman's "March to the Sea had left a trail of misery and destruction that confirmed his reputation as the nemesis of the South." On the other hand, "this devastation was not as apocalyptic as has sometimes been depicted," Carr writes. "Most of the destruction carried out by his army was not 'wanton' but was directed at militaiy resources." What about accusations of widespread rape by Union soldiers? Sherman "left in his track hundreds of violated women and deflowered maidens," a Southern newspaper claimed. Carr describes several instances of rape or alleged rape, but then concludes that "much of this was rumor and fabrication." Sherman's forces, he argues, "remained for the most part a controlled and disciplined army, whose treatment of women was in keeping with the moral conventions of 19th-century society." The troops "generally stopped short of resorting to sexual violence either as a right of conquest or as a weapon of war." CARR ACKNOWLEDGES THAT "throughout history warring armies have burned and destroyed crops and property." Thus it is "tempting to regard Sherman's campaigns as a mere continuation of a tradition that is as old as war itself." Yet Sherman added a new wrinkle of psychological warfare that anticipated modern wars by seeking to undermine civilians' morale and their support of their government's war effort. It was this feature of Sherman's campaigns that has caused many scholars to argue that "Sherman's strategy of terror in the South paved the way for the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima, the free-fire zones of Vietnam or the My Lai massacre." These episodes are the "Sherman's ghosts" of the title that keep returning in modern wars to haunt the American conscience. "It is arguable," James Reston Jr. wrote in his 1984 book, "Sherman's March and Vietnam," that Sherman's precedent "made the severities of modern American war-making at least conceptually possible, from the saturation bombing of World War II, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972." Carr is skeptical but not dismissive of this argument. In another example of the "on the one hand, ... on the other" style some readers will find exasperating, he writes that "those who make such claims tend to imagine a direct causal link that is by no means obvious. Nevertheless, these parallels are not outlandish." Do parallels imply causation? Carr never makes his position clear. He cites several examples of subsequent military commanders who invoked Sherman. Gen. Curtis LeMay's public information representative compared the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 to "a decision like Grant's when he let Sherman try to march through Georgia." An Army journalist in Vietnam justified the destruction of villages supposedly harboring Vietcong as "an old tactic and a good one. Sherman's march to the sea." In 1974 a judge in Georgia released Second Lt. William Calley, who had been convicted of war crimes in the My Lai massacre, from house arrest in a decision that cited Sherman: "The point is that Sherman is absolutely right: not in what he did, but about the nature of war: War is hell." These and a few similar allusions are pretty thin evidence on which to indict Sherman, as Carr recognizes. "The particular hellishness of the Vietnam War owed more to the more recent innovations in U.S. counterinsurgency strategy," he writes, "than it did to Sherman's campaigns." Similarly, theorists of strategic bombing like the Italian Giulio Douhet, who predicted in the 1920s that bombing the enemy's civilian population would ensure quick victory in any future war, owed nothing to Sherman: The bummers of the Civil War destroyed much property but few civilian lives, while Allied bombers killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians in World War II. German Nazis and Japanese militarists whose soldiers murdered millions of civilians in Europe and China would have behaved exactly the same way if Sherman had never existed. Carr categorizes his book as "an anti-militarist militaiy history." In that respect, Sherman's legacy reinforces Carr's message that war is indeed "hell" and its supposed glories are "moonshine," as Sherman said after the Civil War in a speech that impugned "those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... [but] cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." Perhaps Sherman should be categorized as an anti-militarist general. JAMES M. MCPHERSON'S latest book is "The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters."

On November 15, 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman led 60,000 troops on a 700-mile march through Confederate territory. In their wake they left a trail of destruction that has since become the stuff of military legend. In assessing the influence of Sherman on 20th-century war, Carr (Fortress Europe) argues that his greatest contribution lies not in the march itself-though his tactics did inform Patton's Third Army and MacArthur's Pacific campaign-but rather in Sherman's willingness to wage war against civilians. Though he stops short of repeating the claim that Sherman ushered in the age of total war, Carr finds that Sherman's concept of "indirect warfare"-avoiding direct battle and instead disrupting the enemy's economy and communications while terrorizing civilians in order to bring about a swifter end to conflict-has become a lasting characteristic of American warfare, from the Philippine War of 1898 to Vietnam and the Gulf War. Even today's modern warfare, wherein the military claims to engage in decisive "surgical strikes," is in certain ways very similar. Yet seeing a fundamental morality and limit to Sherman's tactics, Carr believes the general himself would have condemned these later campaigns. Much has been made of Sherman's insistence that "war is hell." Time, it seems, has only proven Sherman more correct. Photos. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.