Trench Warfare Research Articles

Reviewed by: Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War by Earl J. Hess John Matsui (bio) Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War. By Earl J. Hess. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 408. Cloth, $45.00.) Near the beginning of Fighting for Atlanta, Earl Hess notes the breakdown in the supply of shovels to the Confederate Army of Tennessee by July 1864. This is a crucial development in an account of the interplay of tactics, terrain, and trenches in the campaign for Atlanta. Logistics mattered, in the ultimately unsuccessful defense of Atlanta as elsewhere, and Hess's Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation (2017) focuses on that very subject. After a brief overview of the campaign's personnel and tactics, the text follows a chronological chapter order. This book is structured in line with Hess's trilogy on Civil War trench warfare, and it will be most appealing to readers with an interest in nineteenth-century static warfare and scholars of trench warfare more generally. It is telling that the Confederacy conferred higher rank on its engineers than did the Union. Sherman's chief engineer during this campaign was a mere captain—although Orlando Poe temporarily held brigadier general rank in 1862—and as such could command little authority or respect from volunteer generals who did not know better. Joseph Johnston began the campaign with a lieutenant colonel as chief engineer. John Bell Hood had the good sense to request the transfer of the Army of Northern Virginia's chief engineer to Georgia when he took command in July. A native of New York, Major General Martin Smith graduated from West Point along with D. H. Hill and James Longstreet. Having helped plan Vicksburg's defenses, Smith was captured along with its garrison and by April 1864 was Lee's chief engineer. Smith spent May and early June preparing the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg as Grant's army lumbered forward, as Hess notes in his In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and [End Page 125] Confederate Defeat (2009). Yet by the time Smith reported to Hood, his talents were largely wasted. As with Grant's men in Virginia, Sherman's armies were accustomed to digging at least basic rifle pits whenever they halted. In line with Brian Wills's assessment of Sherman's prejudice against the Army of the Cumberland in George Henry Thomas: As True As Steel (2012), Hess notes Sherman's negative views of the main element of his force. Sherman claimed that "a fresh furrow in a ploughed field will stop the whole column, and all begin to intrench" (90). He argued that—unlike his old Army of the Tennessee—Thomas's army was so accustomed to the defensive that at all ranks it was all but impossible for Sherman to change its mindset to aggressive, offensive action. By the end of the campaign, units in Sherman's other armies were at least as adept and rapid in the digging of rifle pits as the Army of the Cumberland. Jacob Cox, commanding a division in the Army of the Ohio, noted on August 30 that in fifteen minutes flat his men dug sufficient defenses to repel an onslaught by Confederate infantry. Unlike their rebel counterparts, Sherman's men had access to large and easily replenished stocks of shovels and other entrenching tools. Historians interested in matters beyond the military naturally gravitate toward the question of African American involvement in the campaign. Scholars of Sherman's armies know that Sherman resisted the assignment of black regiments to his active field forces, relegating them to the defense of his supply line. Hess notes that for at least the first half of the campaign, enslaved laborers played little role in bolstering Confederate defenses. Only at the line of the Chattahoochee River were about one thousand African Americans impressed to construct a defensive line in early July. What remains telling is that Union soldiers assumed that the equivalent of a small army of slaves was employed to strengthen rebel fortifications. My early point about shovels raises a larger question about Confederate supply shortages, given the...

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Faulkner’s Great War Modernism: New Death in Soldiers’ Pay 1 Jay Watson For the critic alert to the economic foundations, social history, and material culture of modernity, one configuration looms especially large over William Faulkner’s formative years: the Great War of 1914–1918. The war was at once an uncanny fulfillment of the rationalizing, industrializing, urbanizing, massifying logic of modernization and a quintessential challenge to modernity’s guiding philosophical assumptions: freedom, enlightenment, progress, individuality. Even before turning to the art of fiction, Faulkner had pursued his own response, more civic than aesthetic, to the modernity of the Great War, first by attempting unsuccessfully to register for the draft in 1918 and then by masquerading as a British citizen in order to enlist in the RAF, only to have the war end on him before he had completed cadet training in Ontario.2 For the thwarted combat ace, then, Great War modernism would be at best a vicarious affair, responding to a largely imagined experience of the war’s modernity. Nonetheless, Great War modernism proved as central to Faulkner’s apprenticeship in fiction as it did to contemporaneous critical efforts to derive modernism’s aesthetic strategies from its historical circumstances—to imagine the modernity from which the modernists sprang. No less significantly, the war would also become the first face of modernity that Faulkner moved beyond in his ongoing quest for a modernism more hospitable to his experiences and talents. As John Limon cogently observes, “Faulkner began his career as a novelist on the assumption that coming to terms with the Great War was the first obligation of the modernist” (45). He made his debut as a [End Page 447] published fiction writer in 1919 with “Landing in Luck,” a largely slapstick account of a Canadian RAF cadet in training that he published in the student newspaper at the University of Mississippi. Over the next dozen years he would write no fewer than eight additional stories dealing with aspects of the war. One of them, “Thrift” (1930), became his breakthrough into the most lucrative venue for short fiction in the US literary marketplace, the Saturday Evening Post. During this period the Great War also played a major role in two of Faulkner’s first three novels, Soldiers’ Pay (1926) and Sartoris (1929, the abridged version of the 1927 manuscript Flags in the Dust). When Hollywood came calling in 1932, capitalizing on the notoriety Faulkner had gained as the author of Sanctuary (1931), his first screenwriting credit was for a war film, Today We Live (1933), that he adapted from his own story “Turnabout,” another Post success from 1932. Other war-related screenwriting projects from the period include the unproduced “War Birds” (1933) and The Road to Glory (1936). There can be no doubt that the intellectual and imaginative challenge of thinking the Great War energized Faulkner, perhaps even sustained him, during his formative years as a fiction writer. The sheer volume of material attests to that. So does its range. Faulkner wrote about trench warfare, about the emergent air war, even about naval combat in “Turnabout.” The geographic sweep of his Great War fictions encompasses not only the Western Front but England, Scotland, Germany, Canada, Mississippi, Chicago; the temporal spectrum varies from a single day (“Crevasse”) to several years (“Thrift,” “Victory”) and includes examples of brief actions recounted from an extreme temporal remove as in “Ad Astra” and “All the Dead Pilots,” both narrated in the first person from a dozen years or more after the war’s end. The generic and tonal diversity of the material is equally striking: Faulkner turns to the comic mode in “Thrift” and “Landing in Luck,” the tragic in “Victory” and his novels, and blends elements of both in “Turnabout.” “The Leg” experiments with Great War gothic, “With Caution and Dispatch” with farce, “Crevasse” with surrealism, to capture the shifty intensities of wartime and its aftermath. And he would return to the war, of course, in the 1940s and 1950s, in the agonizing labor of writing and rewriting his self-proclaimed “magnum o,” A Fable. That labor, in fact, even wrote itself into Faulkner’s built environment in the run-up to...

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Trench Warfare Research Articles

Articles published on Trench Warfare

Three Publications about Archaeology of a Segment of the First World War's Forgotten Eastern Front

Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present

Regulating cryptocurrencies checkpoints: Fighting a trench war with cavalry?

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

1479 Trench Foot: A Rare and Unusual Presentation of a World War I Disease

The forgotten Eastern Front: dealing with the social and archaeological legacies of the Battle of the Rawka and Bzura Rivers (1914–1915), central Poland

Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939

Eine »schulbildende« Wirkung des Unterrichts?

Imago proelii. La cartografia storica della Prima Guerra Mondiale dal Museo Storico della Terza Armata: spigolature per una analisi tipologica e semiologica

One War, Multiple Memories

Reduced Severity in Patients With HIV-Associated Disseminated Histoplasmosis With Deep Lymphadenopathies: A Trench War Remains Within the Lymph Nodes?

РОЗВИТОК І ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ ЗАПАЛЮВАЛЬНОЇ ЗБРОЇ У ПЕРШІЙ СВІТОВІЙ ВІЙНІ

Rien pour demain par Bruno Remaury

Getting Cold Feet in the First World War: Leaky Boots, Trench Foot and Vernacular Medicine Among British Soldiers

Post Memory Violence

‘Between-time stories’: waiting, war and the temporalities of care

Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War by Earl J. Hess

Faulkner’s Great War Modernism: New Death in Soldiers’ Pay

Bladder Pain Syndome/Interstitial Cystitis due to Pudendal Nerve Compression: Described in 1915-A Reminder for Treating Pelvic Pain a Century Later.

A német páncélosfegyvernem megteremtése

Lead the way for us

Editage

Paperpal

R Discovery

Mind the Graph

Trench Warfare Research Articles

Articles published on Trench Warfare

Three Publications about Archaeology of a Segment of the First World War's Forgotten Eastern Front

Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present

Regulating cryptocurrencies checkpoints: Fighting a trench war with cavalry?

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism

1479 Trench Foot: A Rare and Unusual Presentation of a World War I Disease

The forgotten Eastern Front: dealing with the social and archaeological legacies of the Battle of the Rawka and Bzura Rivers (1914–1915), central Poland

Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939

Eine »schulbildende« Wirkung des Unterrichts?

Imago proelii. La cartografia storica della Prima Guerra Mondiale dal Museo Storico della Terza Armata: spigolature per una analisi tipologica e semiologica

One War, Multiple Memories

Reduced Severity in Patients With HIV-Associated Disseminated Histoplasmosis With Deep Lymphadenopathies: A Trench War Remains Within the Lymph Nodes?

РОЗВИТОК І ЗАСТОСУВАННЯ ЗАПАЛЮВАЛЬНОЇ ЗБРОЇ У ПЕРШІЙ СВІТОВІЙ ВІЙНІ

Rien pour demain par Bruno Remaury

Getting Cold Feet in the First World War: Leaky Boots, Trench Foot and Vernacular Medicine Among British Soldiers

Post Memory Violence

‘Between-time stories’: waiting, war and the temporalities of care

Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War by Earl J. Hess

Faulkner’s Great War Modernism: New Death in Soldiers’ Pay

Bladder Pain Syndome/Interstitial Cystitis due to Pudendal Nerve Compression: Described in 1915-A Reminder for Treating Pelvic Pain a Century Later.

A német páncélosfegyvernem megteremtése