More hatin' on R. E. Lee...

[dutch508]

Star Member DemocratSinceBirth (92,218 posts)


If Robert E. Lee was such a great general how did he come up with a stratagem like Pickett's Charge?

 

Oh, I don't know... maybe 5,000 years of military history and something about a frontal attack.... mass... and overwhelming force... concentrated point on the battlefield?

(btw- it's tactics. Strategy is how you win the war- tactics is how you fight the battle...)

 

larwdem (341 posts)

2. you are so right he marched 12 thousand men over an open field with no cover.

June 6th 1944. The Allies attacked a beach with no cover. Lost a shit load of men. Eisenhower was the worst general ever...

Star Member CanonRay (9,450 posts)

19. Grant did the same thing at Cold Harbor

because it was the military tactic at the time.

sweetapogee (1,156 posts)

49. pick your CW general

find a full frontal infantry charge.

Pope did it at Second Bull Run, Little Mac did it at Antietam, Burnside did it at Fredricksburg, Hooker did it at Chancellorsville. Probably the worse battlefield disaster in the CW was Confederate General Hood at Franklin Tenn., I think he lost 6 Generals killed outright, 8 more wounded or captured. Most people don't know anything about this battle but the result was the end of a complete field army.

because the weapons and training of the men at the time led this tactic to be used over and over again. Why didn't they all move by bounding overwatch? Because (see last sentence)

unblock (42,194 posts)

8. Obvious it didn't work out well, but I don't think it was completely off-base

First, they tried to take out the union artillery. The charge would have gone a whole lot better had that succeeded, but it didn't.

Second, just because a tactic knowingly incurs many casualties doesn't make it stupid militarily. It's merely makes it expensive. If the prize is worth it, it could be a good tactic. D-day obviously was sure to incur many casualties, but establishing a beachhead in France was worth an enormous amount to the allied effort. Pickett's charge was no d-day, but had they succeeded in taking the hill the union armies would have been in a very bad place.

Finally, Lee's main claim to military skills really came from prior to the war, but during the war he did do a fairly skillful job of avoiding larger union armies and picking battles against smaller ones.

Until Gettysburg, of course....

In the end, I think the south was doomed as long as the union was determined to win no matter how long and bloody it was. I think lee probably was effective in making it last four years. A lesser general probably couldn't have done that.

Not that that was a good thing....

UniteFightBack (2,938 posts)

11. Don Lemon also mentioned that Lee prick was captured. So **** up rump. nt

 

Lee surrendered to Grant. Not quite the same thing as captured.

DeminPennswoods (5,719 posts)

33. And, what if Joshua Camberlain had been unable to hold

the commanding position on Little Round Top?

The entire left flank of the union army would have been up in the air. The center would have collapsed and who knows if the union command would have been able to stop the route.

Star Member demosincebirth (10,748 posts)

53. He should have been hung for Treason. Graduate of

West Point - took the Oath to defend the United States

 

[SVPete]

Looks like demosincebirth discovered the Civil War happened and read about Gettysburg. Sounds to me like the failure of the charge was a very near thing, with several execution failures immediately preceding the charge that might have tipped the outcome the other way. But, yeah mass infantry charges had been a standard military tactic for centuries, and would persist well into WW1. The Crimean War and the US Civil War should have made it abundantly clear that defensive weapons technology had made this tactic a formula for slaughter.

[fatboy]

It is perhaps easy to fault Lee's decision to order Pickets charge. Longstreet and Hood really wanted to move to the confederate right, turn the Union left flank at a more advantageous place east of Gettysburg. Lee's attitude was that he had to continue to fight where he was because he didn't have the supplies or the supply route available for a long campaign on the move. Lee was outnumber by a considerable amount and his troops were ill equipped. The forward regiments of Heaths division moved into Gettysburg to verify rumors that there were storehouses full of shoes.

All Lee really needed to do in Pennsylvania was achieve a victory, even a small one, north of the Mason Dixon line. He came very close to doing that. It was one of those times when he really should have listened to Longstreet and rolled up the Union left on the second day. The 3rd Union Corps commander General Sickles had his divisions too far forward in the peach orchard, wheat field and Devils Den which left the Union left flapping in the wind. If Longstreet had had Pickets division and Jeb Stewart horse on the second day, ready to fight and was allowed to do so I think Gettysburg would have been a confederate victory and the DUmmies, trying to re-write history, would be trying to convince us that George Mead was a sh*tty General.

[txradioguy]

Hey DUmmies...yeah you history and military challenged short bus riders...consider this:

It was only Lee's loyalty to his home state of Virginia that stopped him from using his tactical skills against the Confederate states. People forget that Lincoln signed Lee's promotion to Colonel and Lee attained the rank of Major General in the U.S. Army before leaving for the CSA.

Before the Civil War, Lee was an American hero during the Mexican/American War. 

Lee was asked by Lincoln to be the commander of the Union Army.  This is where much of the internal conflict began for Lee. Lee was actually against succession. As for Slavery, he privately counseled President Jefferson Davis often and early in the war that the slaves should be emancipated. In a letter that was written to his wife shortly after Christmas in 1856(5-years before the war) “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but will acknowledge that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.

[fatboy]

Lee graduated at the top of his class at West Point and I don't think he received any demerits during his four years as a cadet. His family was considered one of the top families in Virginia, his father was General "Light Horse Harry" Lee, a Revolutionary War hero. There are no credible accounts that Lee ever used curse words and he spoke of the Yankee soldiers as "those people".

The whole thing just goes to show that the DUmmies hate Trump so much that they cannot stand anything that he might think is good. No one studies Lee due to his politics and yet much has been written on the man.

[landofconfusion80]

Made a heck of a 68 charger...


Cue waylon...

[USA4ME]

Good comments here.

Also important to keep in mind that Lee and others viewed the country as the United States; the USA was essentially 34 separate countries who were united, the way the Constitution was written and was meant to be enforced by the founders, States who were united in their common defense and a few other issues, but that was it. The mindset of the citizens in 1860 were nothing like the collectivist concept so many have today. That explains a lot about why Lee made the decision he did.

The closest I can think of as an example today would be the European Union. In order to be consistent, the primitives would have to view France, Germany, Italy, etc... as one country rather than separate countries who have agreed to cooperate on a certain level. Do you see them do that? No. But their lack of understanding the US Constitution, and how those who were closer to when it was actually implemented viewed the USA, causes the primitives to go off the rails further than they normally would. Liberals simply never take the time to educate themselves properly.

.

[txradioguy]

We also have to remember that these are the people that think 11 Boo is a real life honest to God war hero...so their opinion of what makes a good officer and what doesn't is seriously off kilter.

[ChuckJ]

We also have to remember that these are the people that think 11 Boo is a real life honest to God war hero...so their opinion of what makes a good officer and what doesn't is seriously off kilter.

Don't forgot their fondness for that Manning dude that thinks he's a chick.

[DumbAss Tanker]

He didn't have spotter planes or satellites to tell him what was behind the ridge, ya know.  It actually wasn't a frontal attack, but a point attack.

Tactical intelligence on both sides was not a long suit in the Civil War, Lee really did not have a handle on just how much shit was stacked up in the reserve staging area and artillery park in the large bowl formed by the two ridges behind the focus of his attack.  If he'd realized the force and logistic disparity he was facing, and gone in anyway, well maybe then you could mock him but he didn't.  The Army of the Potomac outnumbered the Army of Northern Virginia by roughly 2:1, and with a massive supply and ordnance superiority and South had the burden of the initiative and the North all the advantages of the defense, the amazing thing is that Lee was able to disengage successfully without being totally destroyed.  Meade got the blame and Lincoln fired him over it, but in a mobile pursuit he would have lost all his advantages and he would have been at some disadvantages of his own as Lee fell back onto his supply base and gained strength, and Meade had no better intelligence than Lee, so it was not as foolish a decision as 20th Century armchair Napoleons seem to think.

[BadCat]

Puff on this for a while DUmmies.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/joe-biden-voted-to-give-robert-e-lee-his-us-citizenship

[YupItsMe]

   I don't deserve to comment in a thread with people who have served, but what I do know, is that from the Revolutionary War through the latest conflict in the Mideast, I've seen brave 18 -21 yr olds do things that are amazing by today's standards.   This generation needs coloring books and crayons if somebody dares speak something they disagree with.