But there are a lot of other great Union stories as well. Lincoln is an obvious example. The Underground Railroad provides a wealth of fascinating stories with a compelling narrative. The black regiments in the Union army are a source for good stories. Frederick Douglass, Robert Smalls, William Jackson, Alexander Thomas Augusta, and many others are all great characters.
There are interesting stories on both sides. For those arguing that the Confederate stories are more interesting, why? What specifically is more interesting about them? Don’t just identify people you think are interesting - what makes them more interesting than people on the Union side?
In my opinion, it ties back to the glorification of the South mentioned many times in this thread, and the diminishment of stories centered around blacks. The “people like villains” argument is fine when you’re talking about fiction, but people are less fond of real-life villains, unless they relate to them on some level.
Okay, UNTOLD story. We’ve had good stories about the other Union experiences.
Well, we need a Robert Smalls movie pretty badly. I think that would make a better movie than a TV show but what do I know.
But no one in this thread is glorifying villains or whitewashing the South. In fact, no one has said the villains on an individual level are more interesting. The losing side provides a narrative device that’s interesting to explore.
It’s just not true people aren’t interested in the wrong side of a real life thing. Movies about Germans in WWII have included popular and critically acclaimed films. “Letters from Iwo Jima” was a much better and more appreciated film than “Flags of Our Fathers.” People love movies and shows about real life criminals.
There is no doubt whatsoever that Lost Cause bullshit has contributed to the volume of stuff about the Confederacy, of course.
I’ve gotten into Warhammer 40,000 novels. I generally focus on Chaos vs Imperium, and almost always enjoy the Chaos-themed novels more. If both sides clash, such as a novel between Alpha Legion (traitors, nominally Chaos) and Imperial Fists (Imperium), I prefer reading the traitor side. (Usually. I found I really liked the loyal Raven Guard.)
I think the South has better PR in terms of their heroes. Not being a scholar of the Civil War, I only hear that the South had better generals, and the North destroyed large parts of the South, but was (of course) heavily outnumbered and outcompeted economically. I don’t know about the first one. General Lee was a good general, and so was Stonewall Jackson, but both had their flaws. For some odd reason the best Union generals seemed to serve in the west, while the best Southern generals served in the east… which was the more important part of the conflict. General Grant was moved east. And General Johnson, the Southern general who kept losing, served all over the place.
Focusing on the stories of daring mean a reader is not focusing on the battle for the “right” to keep slaves.
I think a lot of it is due to a handful of reasons:
Evil is compelling. Take Nazi Germany for example. What was going on there is so far outside the pale, that it piques people’s curiosity. Everyone knows how being on the side of the good guys works (in general), so the other side is fascinating.
2a. Unconventional thinkers/unconventional behavior is also compelling, especially if it’s proposed that it’s why that side is so successful. It’s why most people prefer reading about the Israelis in the Arab-Israeli wars of last century. Outnumbered, outgunned, and they managed to stomp the Arabs anyway. Same thing for the Germans in WWII- they took on multiple countries who conventional wisdom of the time said they shouldn’t be able to defeat, and did so handily and quickly. Lee is a perfect example of this- he outmaneuvered the Union forces repeatedly, and was generally good in the actual battles themselves, letting the Confederates give a better account of themselves than the numbers would indicate.
2b. Winning victories through weight of numbers, good execution and stellar logistics is very successful, but very boring. It’s basically the flip side of 2a. Grant won, but in a way that was singularly uninteresting. Same with Eisenhower, Zhukov, etc…
People like the underdog, even when they’re the bad guys. Everybody knows the Confederates (and Nazis) were far outclassed by their opponents both in sheer numbers of troops, but also in production capacity. So it’s compelling to see how they fought facing such long odds, while reading about the US/Soviet fight always has a bit of the idea that even had the Germans won a particular battle, the Allies would have just moved up 2 more units and kept the attack going. Same thing for the Union v. Confederates… by the time of the surrender, the Union armies outnumbered the Confederates between 2:1 and 3:1. Even at Gettysburg, the Union outnumbered the Confederates at about 10:7, and it was a near-run thing anyway. That’s interesting. Reading about the Union winning because they outnumbered the Confederates by a large amount isn’t interesting.
If so many people didn’t think of the Confederates as heroes fighting a worthy cause, they wouldn’t be so frequently depicted as such. Never mind the under dog or the appeal of evil. They have a great many admirers who don’t even see the evil in what they were fighting for, and the rest of us have been so poorly served by our education system that we sometimes find it difficult to articulate why ourselves.
I don’t know… there’s a tendency to gravitate to the things I mentioned above, even when you KNOW that side is the bad guys. I mean, nobody really thinks the Nazis were the good guys, but in a lot of ways, they’re interesting because they managed to keep fighting far beyond when most observers and other armies would have collapsed. And earlier in the war, they punched way above their weight, defeating other opponents very handily and quickly. And that all of it was done in service to a frankly insane and evil ideology makes it even more interesting- the question “WHY?” comes up a lot.
Meanwhile, if you look at the US war efforts, they were rarely marked by strategic or tactical brilliance (it did happen, but it wasn’t the standard), but rather by extraordinary industrial coordination and efforts and amazing logistical feats- for example, the US managed to just basically grind the German Luftwaffe into dust over Europe by using the bombers as bait to bring up their fighters, and then use our superior numbers to crush them. Not exactly a brilliant tactic, but a successful and valid one. And that sort of thing is pretty much the way the US wins wars.
Just how many movies are out there depicting Nazi-era German heroes as being good, devoted Nazis? While there may be a few prominent examples that have escaped my notice, it seems to me the hero in such movies is always a subversive, or at least someone with serious doubts about Nazi ideology. Confederates, on the other hand, are often portrayed sympathetically, having no doubts about “the southern case” (which they insist is states rights, not the perpetuation of slavery) and when they lose we’re supposed to feel sorry for them and the good they weren’t able to do, not as if they were wasting their efforts in support of an evil cause like those who died or were misused fighting for the third reich.
I do not grant either of your premises, that the Nazis were particularly brilliant on a tactical level, or that the US and its allies were or have been generally less capable tactically (during or since WWII).
Germany’s successes early in the war can be uniformly attributed to conducting preemptive strikes against peoples who didn’t want and weren’t prepared for war. Beyond that, I don’t see anything particularly brilliant about their tactics. The fact that the US has significant industrial capability that far-outpaced theirs, and that the USSR was so much more vast with so much more manpower to draw on, shows just how bankrupt Hitler’s strategy was. It says nothing about the tactical ability of US forces, and I think you’re looking back on the history of WWII through a very distorted lens. A lens which, by the way, has been every bit as subject to myth-making as the Confederate cause (see, for example, “the Rommel myth” or “the myth of the clean Wermacht”), albeit with even more baggage than the slave-holding Confederacy had.
Right. The “good Germans” in films are almost always not dedicated nazis.
No, France was totally “ready”. They even had the “phony war” to set up. They were just prepared to re-fight WW1.
The Germans did mostly invent the Blitzkrieg or real tank tactics. They also mostly invented close support by dive bombers and aircraft. Those were brilliant.
I know it’s kind of an older thread, and frankly haven’t really read the responses, but I saw a show a while ago where they talked about how, usually, the winner writes the history and the loser, basically, is screwed. This is generally the case. Except in this case. In the US Civil War, it was the losers who wove the narrative. There were a variety of reasons for this, but the bottom line is the whole lost cause narrative was manufactured by the South to make the South look better, and make the North look like the bad guy. The show I was watching was a documentary on Grant, and basically was looking at the narrative about Grant that is generally accepted verse the reality of the man, and why that is. And what struck me was how that narrative had been manipulated by the losers of the war to paint Grant as a drunk, incompetent who just threw bodies at the South until he won by sheer manpower, not by any sort of skill, just a grinder who ground down the South. As opposed to the narrative about Lee being a genius, gracious in defeat who lost because of folks like Grant, who just threw bodies at him until he finally was forced to give up.
So, the basic answer to the OP is, the fiction of the lost cause and the narrative that most Americans think of wrt the Civil War paints the South as being more interesting and captivating, and the North as being plodders who just won because they had more bodies, but that narrative itself is bullshit that was crafted specifically to make the South look better than it was and the North worse.
I’ve read that many Nazi German commanders who were involved in the Eastern Front also wrote memoirs or painted a similar post-war picture after WWII about their war against the Soviets - that the Soviets won the war in a very “crude” way - simply by hurling bodies at the Germans endlessly until they won.
To be sure, I think some of the Union/Soviet strategy can be characterized that way, but it’s a useful narrative for the losers - “we had brain, they had brawn, but we lost.”
The more interesting question to me is what this fascination says about those who have it. What is there about them that they find the Confederacy in all its glossy glorification so interesting?
The difference, however, is that the German’s weren’t able to control the narrative. Exactly the opposite. The Soviets (and the US and to an extent the UK) did actually do a lot to spin that narrative, because, frankly, they were on the winning side. And we played along with some of that for various reasons I won’t get into. In the case of the South, however, the WERE able to craft their own narrative that essentially re-wrote a lot of the story, especially the battlefield parts, and the Lee verse Grant narrative. Which, to answer your OP again, is why it seems the South is/was more interesting than the North.
Scroll up a bit and read some of the earlier replies. You may be shocked to learn that, even as I agree with you (that it’s a self-serving narrative and not necessarily representative of the reality) people in this very thread are making that very argument, even with regard to the Nazis, as if the Allies won just because they had (in the case of the US) greater industrial infrastructure, and that the Germans were unequivocally the superior fighters at the tactical level.
The Germans had the defensive position and short supply lines, which were in themselves major advantages. The Americans overcame these by manufacturing and distributing more war materiel than was ever considered possible. Whatever the relative value of the soldiers, it’s difficult to envision a way the Allies could have won were it not for the “arsenal of democracy.”
I agree with you that little brilliance was shown by forces on either side, except in certain specialized situations, but the raw Americans troops thrown into the war after the Germans had two years of a learning curve were at a distinct disadvantage until they became fighters and the officers learned what modern war meant. Of course the public perception of the war was going to be affected by that reality.
There is a fair amount of evidence the Germans were, on a tactical level, superior to Allied troops in general. Granted, in many cases this is a matter of experience.
That said, to characterize the Allied advantage as purely numerical is also not correct. Once can waste numbers, as the Soviet experience early on demonstrated. The Allies had to use their industrial advantages in an intelligent manner, and did so.
Indeed, it is clearly the case that the difference between the two sides in warmaking capacity was made even greater by poor German industrial planning; the Germans did not, until much too late in the war, have a broadly coherent approach to managing a war economy. The Allied approach was generally much smarter in every respect, and not just in producing lots of stuff; the deployment of technology was also more efficient and better oriented to realistic solutions in matters of importance. Consider how much the Germans spend on V-2s, which were scary but made little difference to anything, versus the effort the USA put into artillery computer fire control for the Army, which cost way less than the V2 but provided American forces with fire support of such remarkable superiority that German commanders were expressing their alarm even before Normandy. This is especially remarkable when you consider that just a couple of years before, US Army artillery was shitty. Building a war-wining artillery arm isn’t just a matter of having lots of guns; that won’t work. It’s a complex system, and they built and perfected it REALLY well, and really fast.
Of course, numbers mattered too - the US could build more guns and provide more ammunition, and more those guns and shells with motor transport. But they were better used, rather than just clustering up.
Sherman’s March had its horrors, like everything in war, but it was primarily directed at the property of the propertied class, with the express intent of sparing the lives of the war-fighting class (young poor men on both sides), at which it was fairly successful.
Sherman deliberately and repeatedly turned down opportunities to smash the scratch forces that hovered near his march, themselves unable to strike due to the disparity in force.
The propertied class retaliated by exaggerating the crimes of Sherman’s bummers. Even Shelby Foote, generally regarded as a South-friendly historian if not an outright Southern apologist, bemusedly recounted a tale of the Daughters of the Confederacy in…was it Charleston or Savannah, I forget…proudly displaying their ancestral antebellum (pre-war) homes, then telling him Sherman had burned everything thereabouts to the ground. Clearly both things could not be true, but this cognitive dissonance made no impression upon the good ladies.
Airborne and opposed amphibious operations too. What a lot of people miss, I think, is that the forces used by the Allies to achieve victory in some of the most significant engagements of the war, both in Europe and the Pacific, were largely untested in combat prior. And yet pre-invasion training was effective enough to allow them to go up against alerted, dug-in, and often veteran Axis troops and accomplish the mission, decisively, from the get go. For instance, the 101st Airborne Division, including the storied 506th airborne regiment and its Easy Company, had never been in combat prior to jumping into France ahead of D-Day. Similarly, the 5th Marine Division that led the assault on Iwo Jima had been assembled and put ashore under fire without prior combat action.
Yes, they were better supplied, but then being able to work out he logistics to supply sustained operations overseas is itself nothing to scoff at, and required significant ingenuity. In fact, the Navy nerd in me marvels at how the US Navy innovated the means to conduct sustained overseas operations without benefit of friendly ports to draw back on for thousands of miles in some cases prior to the war, and then put it into effect to beat back the vaunted IJN even before the USN received the benefit of its superior industrial capacity (let’s not forget, the Japanese held a numerical advantage at Midway, and could have had an even more decisive advantage if they hadn’t bungled their operational plan and sent a third of their available carriers to put on a side show in the Aleutians).
I say again, the fact that the Allies had the advantage of being better supplied after the initial Axis successes (successes they spent years building up to and, again, fought against opponents who had badly wanted to avoid a war) doesn’t say anything about the tactical ability of the allied forces that ultimately won the war (that is, it can hardly be used to smear them, the fact that they also had “more”), it only highlights just how intellectually bankrupt the Axis powers were at the strategic level.
As you said before. But which is pretty clearly not true. I think the problem here is approaching the topic from the socio-political direction so discomfort with acknowledging German (or Confederate) tendency to superior tactical ability, because it would somehow be seen as sympathetic to them in the socio-political realm.
Which is obvious in the point about ‘clean Wehrmacht’, which has nothing to do with tactical skill of the Heer (ie the army, Wehrmacht refers to the German forces as whole; the army was up to its neck in the ‘field’ aspect of the Holocaust in the East whereas the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine not as directly in general). The hard fact of life is that tendency of German infantry and armor to be tactically superior to Western Allied, and more so Soviet, units combat power for combat power, had nothing to do with who was the good guy. But it’s quite clear in a non-socio-political reading of the detailed military history of WWII.
Including very obviously in the Western Desert. Not as a function of one individual, Rommel, but German combined arms mobile warfare proficiency was clearly superior to British in that campaign, not to mention the green US forces in Tunisia. Nobody IMO can read two sided accounts of the desert campaigns in detail and fundamentally reject that judgement. The Allies won the campaign with superior material strength as a function of winning the logistics war to supply the theater.
Likewise air contests were in a part a matter of numbers. German fighter units were more effective than Allied, no denying that IMO with again two sided facts in the details. Also this tactical superiority tended to increase after 1940, so wasn’t a function of overall Allied unpreparedness. It went away in the late 43-mid 44 time frame under relentless absolute attrition of experienced German pilots, with an increasing contribution in 1944 from fuel shortages and lack of safe training areas. USAAF and RAF fighter units were clearly more effective in general than German by second half of 1944, though Soviet ones not necessarily all the way to the end, based on cases where both sides’ actual air combat losses are known, not going by claims of either side, nor top down totals wastage of a/c to all causes.
Same kind of thing with what the Confederates did overall on land battlefields per unit of combat power. I don’t think it’s really debatable as a military history topic. It was clear, and generally lasted until the CSA as a whole was collapsing. And USA in the Civil War more than WWII was scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel by 1864 so typical Union infantry manpower quality was declining, CSA too, but that made it harder for the Union to close the gap, though it did manage to get rid of a lot of the incompetent field grade and general officers it was more heavily saddled with than the Confederate armies. And Union cavalry was actually better than Confederate by the end (general organization development, better horses, and the technical innovation of breech loading and repeating carbines were notable in Union cavalry, not enough to be a significant factor infantry). Also the CSN was simply too lacking in resources to be directly compared to the USN. But it was more than anything an infantry war (artillery played a smaller role than in previous smoothbore black powder conflicts and far less than the WW’s) and Confederate infantry was more effective for most of the war. Doesn’t mean they were the goods guys, two pretty much unrelated things as other wars also show.