US Army War College Considers Removing Paintings of Lee & Jackson and that is a good thing.

Right after they drop Lee’s name from Washington & Lee University. (But Lee did serve as university president after the war, so they can always say they’re honoring him just for that . . .)

His body was dug up and beheaded and hung in chains after the Restoration – but now they put up his statue.

Grant was better.

What Grant had - and it’s no mean thing - was a keen eye for what was needed to end the fucking war. Lee could outmanuver him all he wanted, but Grant had more bodies to trade and was willing to do it. Grind the south down until it couldn’t stay in the fight any more.

IMHO, the only one who saw things more clearly was Sherman. Sherman saw that the coming war was going to be terrible, long and bloody and the brutality that would follow. He march to the sea was less to punish the south than to end the damn war as fast as possible.

Mm, and you’ve studied their campaigns and battles? Grant was a good strategist but I’m not aware of him displaying tactical brilliance on par with Lee at his best, for example at Chancellorsville. What Grant had was the far better army, and if I’m running a war I’ll take the far better army over the better general almost every time.

I should note Lee was very good at battlefield tactics–not perfect though. Some who can’t see past the Lee myth aren’t able to fully accept that Lee lost at Gettysburg for the simple reason that he made several very bad decisions that lead to lots of his men dying and him losing the field. But Lee’s reputation as a brilliant tactician isn’t the stuff of Confederate obsessed Southern pride. It’s the legitimate opinion of almost all reputable military historians and experts who teach high level military strategy at the nation’s service academies and etc.

They should make a room of opponents to be studied. This could have Lee and Jackson, Rommel, and anyone else that should be studied who is not currently considered to be evil. That would make for a great room and even a course of study.

:slight_smile: Why are we only studying people who aren’t evil? What if somebody’s evil and a good general? Do you not study him?

Well - study them, but don’t hang their picture maybe.

:wink:

I like this idea. Hang them alongside other generals who fought against the United States. Put Lee in the company of Rommel, Tojo, Hindenburg and Cornwallis

Exactly. Grant said in his memoirs (quoting approximately and from memory) that if he had a force that was so superior that it could fight a battle with 95% chance of winning – then he’d rather break it up into two forces and go out and fight two battles each having a 75% chance of winning.

Now, that’s bloody-minded cold! It’s scary. And doubly scary if you’re one of the soldiers in one of those two battles.

But as far as “grand strategy” goes, it got the job done. Probably nothing else could have.

By most measures, Lee was considerable better than Grant. The ONLY way that Grant was better was in his degree of cold-bloodedness.

In any other circumstances, you wouldn’t consider a man who sustained 55,000 casualties in two months to be even marginally competent.

During the Siege of Petersburg, Lee held off a superior force for nine months without having any reserve–and that was after he had lost his most effective officers.

At the cost of losing the fighting ability of his entire army.

Grant was the better general by any rational analysis. He was certainly the better tactician, see the Vicksburg campaign, fighting and winning 5 battles in a week, while cut off from his base. He ran a multi theatre war which destroyed the Confederacy in a year. The best strategist the US has ever produced. And, the less said about Lee and logistics, the better. Grant was unmatched in that area.

I have always been amazed by the veneration the US has of Lee and his abilities. Overseas, Grant is considered the greatest general the US ever produced, the original modern commander in chief who directed a multi theatre war successfully. Nobody knows much about Lee. Wonder why the disconnect.

A former West Point Superintendent and arguably the best horse-and-musket general deserves some honoring. But before that can you tell me how there are traitors in a civil war?

I’d think civil wars lend themselves to treason more so than most wars, as the side that loses is almost inevitably traitors.

Starting, and for that matter ending, with winning. There’s a sports saying: “Scoreboard”.

If not for Eisenhower, your post would have been in German. :wink:

I think you mean “Zhukov.”

Actually Halleck was the logistic genius behind Grant, and Sherman was a better strategist than Grant. I seriously question your analysis of Civil War generalship. As I’ve said, in terms of battlefield tactics Lee was without equal at his rank. Some of the lower level generals of the Confederacy were probably more brilliant but never held as high a command so we can’t know for sure.

Winning those campaigns you are talking about is almost entirely a matter of the Union’s vastly greater resources. Previous Generals for the Union essentially pussyfooted around, Grant realized he had a sledgehammer and he beat the hell out of the Confederacy with it–and to hell with the consequences for his men or anything else really. Grant viewed his job as ending the war most rapidly and he felt the best way to do that was with overwhelming force to bring to full bear the vast resources of the Union against the South.

The South had a third the population of the North and a significant portion were enslaved, and virtually no major industrial base. Every move the South took was in desperation, every mistake the South made was irrecoverable. Every mistake the North made essentially hardly mattered.

Grant was a competent strategist and battlefield tactician, but the idea that he was the superior general to Lee because he won is like saying George Foreman is the superior boxer to Sugar Ray Leonard because in their respective primes Foreman would have won. It ignores the massive differential in resources.

With the Gettysburg campaign Lee was doing everything he could to try and prevent an imminent invasion of Virginia and also potentially draw troops away from the Vicksburg campaign. As big as Gettysburg was, it didn’t draw a single troop away from Vicksburg. The North could fight in large numbers everywhere, while the South could not. That has nothing to do with Grant being a better general than Lee.

Lee made his mistakes but probably the only thing he could have done to more effectively fight what was an unwinnable war would have been to refuse to face the Union on the field of battle and turn the Civil War into the world’s first industrial guerrilla war. But I doubt Lee would have the stomach for that, he was willing to fight a war under the norms of the time I don’t know that he was willing to do the sort of things that guerrilla insurgencies do.

The Union strategy that beat the South was neither complex nor dreamed up by men like Sherman and Grant. There is a strong argument to be made the North essentially followed Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan”, and it just took awhile for the right generals to get into place to execute it. But it wasn’t really high strategy, the strategy for beating the South was fairly obvious even to a senile aged General like Scott, it was just a matter of the right personnel to utilize the North’s vastly superior resources to execute what was the obvious strategy. Even if there had never been a Grant or a Sherman lesser Generals would have almost certainly ultimately carried the day against the South.

There’s no easy solving the fact that the war bankrupted the South, the South had far fewer soldiers, the South had a wholly unsuitable railroad network so even with a logistic guy like Halleck they never could have kept their armies in the field properly supplied, and most tellingly the North’s industrial output steadily rose throughout the war. Each year of war the North got stronger, more men, more industry, more ships, more trains etc. Each year the South got weaker, and no amount of brilliance on the battlefield ever reversed that, not in the worst year for the North or the best year for the South.

Concur. Political Correctness going stupidly wrong.

Does the War College have paintings of Napoleon and Sun Tzu?

Is this original? 'Cause I’m stealing this.

The OP should read up on the burial of Manfred von Richthofen and let us know if he disagrees with that.