| Abstract |
"Eric Burke's "Soldiers from Experience" examines the emergence and evolution of patterns in the tactical behavior and operational performance of Major General William T. Sherman's Fifteenth Army Corps of the US Army across its first year operating within the western theater of the American Civil War. Burke analyzes how the accrual of specific experiences and patterns of meaning-making within the ranks led to the emergence of a set of shared ideas and assumptions about combat that shaped what he characterizes as a distinctive corps-level tactical culture. That concept, introduced here for the first time, Burke defines as a collection of shared, historically derived ideas, beliefs, norms, and assumptions that played a decisive role in shaping a military command's particular collective approach on and off the battlefield. In doing so, Burke employs the research methodologies of "new military history" to inform the traditional historiography-which focuses on analyzing the war's campaigns-to frame a "new operational history." While military historians of the Civil War commonly assert that generals somehow imparted their character upon the troops they led, Burke argues instead that the reverse was often the case within Sherman's corps. Although Sherman habitually sought a direct French-style penetration of entrenched Confederate lines at the point of the bayonet, a combination of factors-most especially the heavily wooded terrain of the Mississippi Valley-repeatedly prevented his corps from executing these tactics. As a result of their perpetual failure in such attacks, those in the ranks rapidly lost confidence whenever called upon to assault enemy lines, effectively hamstringing such psychologically contingent tactics and leaving Sherman with few troops to make such assaults. In many ways, the early emergence and severity of this handicap distinguished the Fifteenth Corps from other corps, although many commands subsequently developed similar tendencies much later in the war. Instead of close-order battle lines, the chaotic battlefields upon which the Fifteenth Corps regularly found itself engaged rewarded the employment of open-order "clouds" of light infantry skirmishers. Contrary to still-lingering if challenged historiographical assumptions, Burke suggests the terrain itself played a much more influential role than rifled weapons in necessitating such tactical changes. While dispersed "clouds" of riflemen could not break through fortified Confederate lines, they could sufficiently suppress enemy fire to allow other elements time to maneuver. These tactics anticipated nearly all the essentials of the open-order infantry tactical doctrine which emerged in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century and which the US Army subsequently adopted. At the same time, Burke argues, successive experiences of interaction with southern civilians, slaves, and freedpeople in raiding operations inspired an embrace of aggressive tactics among those in the ranks still traumatized from the battlefield. By 1864, the corps reliably displayed a distinctive tactical culture borne of its past experiences, which helped shape its collective operational behavior during the campaigns for Atlanta, Savannah, and the Carolinas. An awareness and understanding of this tactical culture increasingly informed Sherman's command during all three of his most famous late war campaigns. Burke's study represents the fruits of applying interdisciplinary approaches to novel historiographical questions to bridge erstwhile divergent strains of scholarship. It sheds new light on Civil War history more broadly by suggesting a direct link between the tactical exigencies of nineteenth-century land warfare and the transformation of US wartime strategy from "conciliation" to "hard war." Surprisingly, it represents the first book-length study of any army corps operating within the western theater of the conflict. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, it introduces an entirely new theoretical construct of small unit-level tactical subcultures wholly absent from the rapidly growing interdisciplinary scholarship on the intricacies and influence of culture on military operations. For these reasons, it will attract a wide readership among Civil War scholars and enthusiasts, and students of military history and military science"-- Provided by publisher. |
