Like Curtis LeMay and Arthur Harris. I wanted Sherman in command in Afghanistan. We wouldn’t have been there so long, spent as much money, or cost as many American lives.
War is not some sort of chivalrous adventure. It naturally begets a progressive cycle of increasing brutality.
henkster: "Like Curtis LeMay and Arthur Harris. I wanted Sherman in command in Afghanistan."
Iraq, Afrhanistan & Vietnam?
Those are wars we lost, right?
So how about wars we won, let's say, WWII.
Sherman's men were ordered to take or destroy civilian property.
They were not authorized to harm unresisting civilians, and there are no legitimate reports of massacres.
In WWII, by contrast, allied bombings killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians, and on D-Day in France alone, as many of our allied French civilians died as allied troops combined.
According to this source, 15,000 to 20,000 French civilians died in the battle for Normandy.
This source says 2,000 French civilians died in Caen alone.
So, despite our Lost Causers' best efforts to exaggerate Sherman's brutality up to Hitlerian or Stalinistic levels, in fact, by comparison, WT Sherman was a Sunday-school teacher, out for an afternoon's picnic.