Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Civil War America)
by Kent Masterson Brown
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kent Masterson BrownEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-04-04
ISBN: 0807829218
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Book Reviews of Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Civil War America)
Book Review: A great narrative of an ignored episode and a masterful study of army logistics
Summary: 5 Stars
K.M.Brown has spent 20 years collecting and exploiting historical material for this groundbreaking study of Lee's retreat from Gettysburg. His bibliography fills 30 pages, as opposed to 390 pages of text.
The result of his efforts is an excellent day by day narrative with an immense wealth of detail that keeps the reader hooked from beginning to end. He is extremely good in his description of the whole logistical operation to move Lee's endless wagon trains back from Pennsylvania, with the thousands of wounded soldiers and the huge amount of supplies and farm animals collected in enemy territory. And that with the Union army a few miles behind, an army with its own logistical nightmare to solve. He masterfully shows how the movement of the fighting troops is conditioned by that of the trains and by the capacity and condition of the road network, bridges, and the weather. He also shows how Lee executed his retreat flawlessly and managed to restore the balance of power that had been broken by the defeat in Gettysburg. Meade was unable to exploit his victory and let Lee's army escape, also because to catch up with Lee at Gettysburg on July 2, he had to leave the army's wagons far behind. The Army of the Potomac, after 3 days of fighting, was therefore famished and undersupplied, its men and animals exhausted.
Brown shows that waging war is far more than just confronting the enemy on the battlefield, it is about planning movement of troops, keeping open an adequate supply of ammunition, food for men and animals, and "spare parts" of all kinds for the whole army. The usability of roads for the movement of troops in a pre-automobile time is also a critical aspect of the story, as the Romans very well understood.
The main conclusion that K.M. Brown draws from his study is that Lee's Gettysburg campaign contained a tactical defeat, i.e he lost the main battle, but also a strategic victory, in that he escaped to fight another day and that his foraging operations allowed him to replenish his army's depleted food reserves and to replace its worn out horses and mules with fresh ones taken from the enemy. Central Virginia, where his army had been based since the beginning of the war, could no longer sustain it and by carrying the war into enemy terrory and impressing local resources, Lee managed to keep his army in fighting condition until the lower Southern states' crop could be harvested.
Brown is probably right, but it remains also true that Lee's army lost many of its best soldiers at Gettysburg, and that the South could not afford it, in the long run. Lee also failed to bring about the decisive victory that might have convinced the Northern people to stop the war.
Brown evacuates a bit quickly the quantification of the army's losses and the failure to deliver that much needed victory, and one feels that he minimizes those aspects in order to make his own argument stronger.
But this slight "problem" does not otherwise affect the outstanding quality of his work and the disproportionate contribution it makes to the study of the Gettysburg campaign. Another strength of his book are the supporting maps that actually allow the reader to follow the story.
That is not often the case with military history books.
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