A great American general, whose strategy was one of the keys to our victory in the Pacific War.
Go read his bio (you can google it), and then answer me this: do you think he should have been tried for war crimes?
Yes or No answer, please.
Posted on 12/27/2005 1:58:49 AM PST by Crackingham
The Atlanta History Center has obtained Civil War field orders handwritten by Union General William T. Sherman. The history center got the field orders in a deal that was clinched with the offer of a bundle of Confederate currency that was donated to the center. Of the documents, 50 are field orders written by Sherman and two are orders written by his aides. They join another 12 orders the Atlanta History Center already had.
"Sherman surrendered," said history center president Jim Bruns, who likes the idea of Sherman's orders returning to the city the general ordered burned down.
The orders are so valuable because they "show Sherman's intentions, the deliberateness of his movements," Bruns said. "They make it clear that he wasn't going to camp here, and he wasn't going to garrison the city. So he had to destroy the city."
The documents will go on display by next September, Bruns said.
The deal for the 52 field orders was aided by the contribution of a stash of about 3,000 Confederate States of America notes that were discovered decades ago by developer Dick Myrick. Myrick, who kept the notes in a briefcase for 33 years, decided last summer to donate them to the cause of acquiring Sherman's orders.
"It really was the Confederate currency that got it started," said Seth Kaller, the historic documents dealer who had Sherman's orders. "Dick's contribution was one of the first that was significant enough for us to know the Atlanta History Center was going to be able to acquire Sherman's orders."
I hope this holds as I have commented to you before re: lurkers seeing the "HATEFUL, BILGE, BEGONE to DU!!!, LIAR!! REVSIONIST" nonsense.
I follow the threads to hopefully learn something from both sides and they usually just degrade into name calling on both sides once a certain someone gets on the threads.
Nothing good comes from this.
Please show me where I "attacked" you. My comment was that you were a Confederate romanticist, hardly an attack. You on the other hand asked me to change my screen name. I can only think that is because I challenge A Southern perception that Sherman is not worthy of note for his Military accomplishments because he was a "crimminal". The whole 'crimminal' issue is subject to debate and hangs on a very thin string. Sherman's accomplishments are fact, yet the romantic apologists seek to dimish even those.
Getting to your comments regarding Hillary, etc, If one reads enough history it cannot be helped that some of it is going to be revisionist. An intellectual mind will be able to detect it.
I personally prefer the writings of the actual combatants. Memiors, diaries, letters, etc.
The 'South' is and will rise again! As long as the likes of Kennedy, Kerry, etc. control the 'North', this battle will rage on! Damn Those Yankees!
It depends on what one considers an accomplishment - if targeting millions of innocent civilians that were unable to defend themselves, destroying their homes, crops, livestock, stealing all their valuables, destroying entire cities, enslaving the women of two towns and sending them North is to be glorified, then he deserves his laurels. I guess many would also applaud his sentiments about wiping out the Southern population, and after the war, doing the same to Native Americans.
Even today, a general could order a city to be nuked, but that doesn't make their "accomplishment" laudable nor make them a military tactician to be admired.
The whole 'crimminal' issue is subject to debate and hangs on a very thin string.
Au contraire, he admitted that he should have been tried for committing war crimes for his actions.
I personally prefer the writings of the actual combatants. Memiors, diaries, letters, etc.
I agree.
Your selective outrage has been noted for quite some time on this forum.
I'm a little curious as to how one would know that the history he reads is a revised version if that is the only version that is available?
I personally prefer the writings of the actual combatants. Memiors, diaries, letters, etc.
Have you ever read Grant's Memoirs? A quote by David Ben Gurion comes to mind: "Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs."
They were all Americans then (except, of course, for the mercs that show up for every war).
But the Civil War ended in this country and it's not going to continue on Free Republic.
Why do I suddenly hear Kum-Ba-Ya and feel an urge to hold somebody's hand?.......:~)
The new conservative values held by the South are inspiring many of us Yankees. These type of CW threads are often the cause of DUmmies to celebrate old geographic divisions.
Truth be known, the North is closer to the South than it has ever been. The Yankee hold-outs are the elitist, lib caste from NY and Boston....but they are in major decline. Take a look at some of their photos....father time is catching up.
I think WT Sherman would have loved to "visit" Boston today. Anarchy moved from the South to the Northeast and West Coast in the last 150 years. That would have really p*ssed him off!
His first march today would probably be to the NYT building, then to Boston, then to Canada for good measure.
This thread has officially moved from exaggeration and hyperbole to pure fantasy.
Bwahahahahaha! This from the person with the propensity to call sw "Tonto" and chief?
What is your suggestion for educating one's self? Apparently you find fault with everything I've suggested so I'd like to know what is your unimpeachable source for all wisdom and knowledge?
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... While Sherman’s march through Georgia was certainly harsh, it does not qualify him for butcher status. A detailed legal analysis by Emory University Law School (Atlanta) of his campaign shows that indeed many of his actions would be considered war crimes today under international law. But it also finds that under the rules of war in place in 1864 and accepted by both sides, Sherman pushed the envelop and at worst was not sufficiently diligent in enforcing general orders, but generally followed the broad outlines and would not need make significant changes in his tactics to fully comply with the law then.The mass murder and rapes that infest the popular neo-Confederate imagination are mostly myth, and while isolated incidents did occur it was not on the wholesale scope that you seem to think. One of the supreme ironies is that the civilian population that suffered the most was the thousands of run-away slaves who fell into line behind Sherman’s march. Many ended up dying of starvation or exposure, or left to the tender mercies of the local militia and slave catchers, because Sherman refused to take responsibility for them as would be required under international law today. There was no such requirement then. He went so far as burning bridges behind him to prevent these masses from following his columns. Desperate people drowned attempting to cross swollen rivers to stay with the protection of the Union troops. But considering that he was operating several hundred miles behind enemy lines and his entire strategy depended on continual and rapid movement, would any other commander at that time, North or South, shown more compassion?
Here's the conclusion from the Emory analysis.
IV. CONCLUSION
The conventions, treaties, and other international law provisions which currently apply to international armed conflicts are the product of the evolution of custom over an extended period of time. Many of the codified provisions currently in force were a reaction to events which occurred in earlier conflicts. For example, the four 1949 Geneva Conventions closely followed the end of World War II and were intended to regulate better the types of abusive actions which occurred in that conflict. If Sherman is viewed as the first commander of the modern era, his operations in the Civil War undoubtedly contributed to this evolution. Thus, while weapons of war have become more powerful and strategies have become more societal in scope, additional legal burdens have been imposed upon military commanders and political leaders to safeguard the rights and interests of both combatants and noncombatants.Although contemporary legal standards would not compel General Sherman to make major changes in the basic operational approaches he employed in his Atlanta campaign and the march to the sea, he would need to modify his tactics greatly in order to attain compliance with the current law of war. Specifically, the general should have paid greater attention to the rights of noncombatants, which include both civilians and enemy prisoners of war; he should have afforded greater respect for private property and the procedures applicable to a military force's use or seizure of such property; he should have taken appropriate, proactive steps to exercise better control of his soldiers in order to prevent them from committing unlawful acts and to prosecute those soldiers who did commit unlawful acts; and he should have seriously considered the proportionality of his actions. For example, the degree of destruction or damage to legitimate military targets must outweigh the resulting incidental damage to nonmilitary personnel and structures. Had the general considered these possibilities in 1864, his operations in Georgia and his army would enjoy a very different historical reputation.
Source: http://www.law.emory.edu/EILR/volumes/fall95/robisch.html
And if Lee had succeeded at Gettysburg, and marched on Philadelphia or New York, would anything have been much different, including the folk lore that evolved over the decades in the path of that march?
Sherman, by being among the first to recognize the harsh realities of modern war, saved many ten of thousands of lives on both sides by shortening that war by at least a year, if not more.
”War is hell”
-- William Tecumseh Sherman
82 posted on 02/08/2002 8:01:44 AM PST by Ditto
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BTW. On the "rape" stuff, see the quote I posted from Shelby Foote eariler on this thread. Now if you want to dismiss Foote as just another damn yankee revisionist historian, I suppose that's your perogative, but it surely shows that you aren't the least bit interested in historical accuracy.
Please demonstrate your consistency. Was Gen. James Doolittle also a war criminal? How about President Truman?
A great American general, whose strategy was one of the keys to our victory in the Pacific War.
Go read his bio (you can google it), and then answer me this: do you think he should have been tried for war crimes?
Yes or No answer, please.
Sherman saved tens of thousands of lives. Truman and LeMay saved hundreds of thousands.
Bombs didn't have eyes, and as such there would be "collateral" casualties, but what some fail to differentiate is that collateral killings are not war crimes, the INTENTIONAL targeting of civilians is.
From Gen. Lemay: "There are no innocent civilians, so it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders."
HIS words speak for themselves. They require no opinion from me. Do you admire Germans, Italians and Japanese that attacked civilians? Would you agree that such men targeting your mother, grandparents or children was worthy of respect? I certainly wouldn't.
Wars are terrible things, yet even during the so called "Civil" War, many hundreds of thousands of men thought enough of things like honour, bravery, civility to even practice such during the war. I Thank God for such men - men from either side, that understood that innocents - the old and infirm, the women and children - were not legitimate military targets.
Not if you are going to compare them with an American general. The Nazis were trying to conquer and enslave. Sherman was trying to keep a country together and free the slaves.
Thanks.
Sorry, I'm not your lap dog. HIS words speak for themselves. They require no opinion from me. Do you admire Germans, Italians and Japanese that attacked civilians? Do you believe that such men targeting your mother, grandparents or children are worthy of respect? If Iraq dropped a nuke on them would that be acceptable to you? Would you consider them war criminals?
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