A Brief Hiatus

Life in my hobby world is slow at the moment. This is largely because I have flattened the lead pile and replacement stocks not due for another week or so. While I am not completely void of hobby tasks there is nothing of significant interest to show right now.

One thing I have been doing a bit more of in these quiet days, is reading and the work that has captured my attention is Earl J. Hess’ Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness, Louisiana State University Press, 2015.

Now my wargaming experience started with the American Civil War, my first love so to speak and you never forget your first love, right (although some times that is a memory you need to push to the back of your mind and shudder). I have been a student of the war for some 40 years and have a few other works by Hess in my collection: Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (co-written with William Shea), Pickett’s Charge: the Last Attack at Gettysburg and The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat— Reality and Myth. He is an excellent researcher and in age when historians spend most of their time apologising for things they, their parents and their grand-parents are not responsible for he does a really good job of digging up the type of detail that we wargamers like. His work on the rifled musket goes a long way to dismissing the long held theory that it was that the weapon that was a revolution in infantry tactics, an idea originally expressed by Paddy Griffith back in 1987.

In this work Hess argues quite successfully that the traditional view that linear tactics were inadequate to  meet the cluttered nature of the American battlefield was quite false. Neither did the rifled musket render the offensive obsolete. In over 400 tactical examples he shows that effective unit commanders were more than capable of overcoming obstacles, maintaining cohesion and forward movement. 

He also agrees that although the Civil War remains America’s bloodiest war per capita, battlefield casualties were no greater than losses suffered in other eighteenth and nineteenth century battles.

Things of interest to me was to see how common mixed order, line and column, was. Also how difficult a manoeuvre wheels were, especially brigade wheels and that once started an oblique movement could be difficult to control - as several regiments in Pickett’s division found at Gettysburg when their obliquing line met Pettigrew’s advancing column and were squeezed out of the line.

For any one who has a strong interest in Civil War tactics, I would suggest this is a must read.